Two Stupid Ideas

Tibor R. Machan

Time for morning exercises! One will involve repairing some bad thinking on Barack Obama’s part, another trying to fix the mental mess on the part of a columnist for the New York Times who wants to fix the housing mess with a $25K federal grant to first time home buyers.

As to Senator Obama, he told a Pittsburgh audience that when he gets to be president, he will not be working for special interests and lobbyists but for the people. Talk about confused elitism--are those special interests, like farmers, union members, doctors, patients, students, professors, truck driver and such not among the people? Are they frogs or geese or what? For the umpteenth time: the people are made up of all those who belong to the special interest groups, period.

Now it is not entirely Senator Obama’s fault that he gets away with this kind of doubletalk. His audience gave no sign of protest, no criticism of his silly ideas but just sat in awe of him, never mind what he said. With that kind of constituency why should a candidate work hard at making any sense at all? Just babble on, without rhyme or reason, in a tone of know-it-all, and they’ll gobble it all up, the gullible bunch that they are. They may even elect you precisely because you sound so bright as you befuddle them all with your nonsense. Maybe that’s what the people believe we need for the presidency.

Now as to the suggestion that the feds provide a $25K grant to first time home buyers, how about making it clear that the feds do not have any funds to give out. No, they must first extort the funds from citizens, take a good chunk of it for themselves--do folks even have a clue now many perks those guys in Washington get--and then hand a bit of it back to some of the people. The feds have no funds they do not first take, or that they borrow against the work of members of future generations. None!

But columnists and journalists across the country keep writing and talking as if the federal government were some kind of productive and rich person or organization that made lots of money and now has the option to give some of it away, like Bill Gates. All that is a fraud. The feds confiscate that money and keep some and then give it to people who they hope will keep them in office.

Are these notions too difficult to grasp? I cannot believe that. Many of my college and university students over the last four decades have been able to understand this take on how government works--it is one among several that we cover in the political philosophy course I teach. And they know well enough that this is one interesting, probably even correct, way to see politics in our day. But then why do they become blinded when they read the apologists for reckless federal largesse?

Similarly, I have had many students who understand that there is no such entity as “the people” but only a bunch of individuals and groups of individuals with various agendas they’d like politicians to support at other people’s expense. Yet maybe after they learn that idea in college they become afflicted by stupidity, by the crazy hope that they are both part of “the people” as well as members of the evil special interest groups, carrying on some endless fight between the two parts of themselves.

Of course, there are many ideas students encounter during their higher education, including the post-modernist notion that logic and reason are obsolete methods by which to figure out the problems people face and that it is best to just embrace some form of magical thinking. Yes, you can be both “the people” and a member of one of those nasty special interest groups. You can both be and not be, all at once, all the same way.

Nonsensical thinking is ancient--folks like Heraclitus and Cratylus promoted it in ancient times and today it’s certain European and American pseudo-philosophers who peddle it fast and furious. So is it any wonder that our leading politicians get away with laying such stuff out for the voting public?

Blaming Freedom Again

Tibor R. Machan

It happened, of course, with the Great Depression. Instead of seeing it as a result of government intervention and mismanagement, that calamity was supposed to have occurred because of the free market. Free adult men and women in America and in time elsewhere supposedly produced a colossal downturn in various economies--massive unemployment, bank failures, fall in productivity, you name it. All the fault of freedom, none that of government meddling.

We are back to this once again. Peter S. Goodman wrote, on Sunday, April 13, in that great journal of economic history, The New York Times, that our current “downward spiral of the economy is challenging a notion that has underpinned American economic policy for a quarter-century--the idea that prosperity springs from markets left free of government interference.” So it is freedom, people working for other people who want them to work for them, earning incomes they can then use to buy goods and services as they judge fit, that’s responsible for the downward spiral. This is then what makes Hillary Rodham Clinton’s call for an economic tsar--“a commander-in-chief of the economy”--so attractive and even necessary. Yes, it is freedom that must be stopped, at all cost, and in its place what is needed is more government, with all of those wise and virtuous politicians and bureaucrats who of course know so much better and will force--or as two academics at the University of Chicago would have it, "nudge"--us all to do better.

But it is all a ruse. Sadly, however, neither Democrats and Republicans will straighten out this story.

Democrats love government meddling--they tend all to believe that once they are in power, they will whip us into shape in no time. Their ideal, going back to the economic philosophy of the New Deal and its hero John Maynard Keynes, is the command economy. (Keynes himself said, in his preface to the German edition of his famous book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money [1936], that the Third Reich was best positioned to put his ideas into play!)

Republicans like top-down economic management no less than Democrats, only they tend to favor business more than their political opponents, but not with policies of freedom but protectionism, subsidies, bailouts, and other approaches that are anything but what the late Milton Friedman--the ostensible subject of Mr. Goodman’s essay--and other libertarian political economists advocated. So do not hold your breath waiting for a letter to The Times from John McCain denouncing the smear of the free market by Mr. Goodman!

With the silence of the Republicans and the distortions in the attacks of the Democrats, the victim in all this is human liberty! The myth that we have had a free market system in place over the last 25 years is being spread indefatigably by the likes of Goodman and, especially, Paul Krugman who promotes it in his regular column for The Times.

As Allan H. Meltzer, the free market economist at Carnegie Mellon University (quoted in Mr. Goodman’s piece) put the point, “Now we’ve come into a crisis that has dampened enthusiasm for those [free market] policies, and we’re headed back into a period of more regulations that will do the same bad things as in the past.” The only mistake in this remarks is its implicit acceptance of the idea that Professor Friedman’s free market philosophy did in fact guide the American government’s economic policy for the last quarter century. Greenberg claims, for example, that when “Ronald Reagan entered the White House” he commenced “elevating Mr. Friedman’s laissez-faire ideals into a veritable set of commandments.” Not so. Reagan didn’t really implement too many free market policies and he barely managed to cut back some government economic regulations. Moreover, with the massive borrowing he perpetrated in order to help end the Cold War, Reagan didn’t achieve turning American economic policy toward freedom. (Of course, he was working with a Democratic Congress much of his time in office, so he alone cannot be blamed for that.)

But none of this will be pointed out in The Times since that newspaper is eagerly supporting returning to Keynesian economic top-down management, never mind that this ideas has been discredited far more than have Friedman’s free market views. The faith of the editors of The Times and Mr. Goodman in handing people’s economic lives over to a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats is blind. And it seems to induce them toward rewriting economic history as well.

A Fallacy of Collectivism



Tibor R. Machan



Be it the gargantuan or minuscule kind, collectives face an insurmountable obstacle in their governance. There simply is no way for everyone in the collective to get proper representation.



Communitarians, for example, who are today’s version of people who believe the tribe is the most fitting group for people, always show their inability to provide all members with proper representation when their leaders and spokesmen keep using the pronoun “we” as they talk of their system and the policies they recommend for it. Even though “we” refers to everyone on the community, the people making use of it are clearly not all but just the self-anointed leaders. “We will pursue peaceful lives,” said by one or two people who have decided to speak for everyone just will not count as a promise from all to do so. “We will take care of everyone” similarly fails to be convincing since only the defenders of communitarianism give voice to the sentiment.



Individualism is unavoidable because when sentences are spoken, they are spoken by individuals not choruses. Sure, now and then the mob is forced to shout out slogan together but these aren’t at all convincing. I recall when I was about 12 years old, all the school children in Budapest had to gather almost every Saturday at a huge place called Heroes’ Plaza where Stalin used to show up on his visits to Hungary. And we are all forced to shout together, “Our dear father Stalin.” But no one believed this nonsense, if was a farce and the only reason we stuck it out for the duration of the parade is that if we bolted, our teachers would dock our grades.



Even in North Korea, where they still force people to come together in these humongous parades, it only appears they are all together, one! The clothing they wear appear the same, all blue denim, but in fact those in charge get to wear silk blue pajamas while the garb of the rest is made of progressively less fancy fabric!



Still, there are people who keep up the propaganda in favor of “the community” and against the individual, spreading the lie that individualism means some kind of isolationism or, as one world famous Canadian critic calls it, “atomism.” (This critic is Charles Taylor, a philosopher from McGill University who quite bizarrely received the highly coveted and hefty Templeton Prize a few months ago!)



Now if communitarianism is so obviously false to the facts of human community life, why is to promoted to avidly by some pretty high level academics in philosophy and politics? Well, I don’t know most of these folks personally but the few I do know seem clearly to be intent upon becoming leaders of the community. In short, they see communitarianism as a means to furthering their own ends, ends that may not be so awful but are, nonetheless, just their ends and few others in the community share them.



Indeed, whenever the public or common or community interest of good is being promoted, one can be reasonably certain that what is really being advocated is that members of the community accept the agenda being pushed by one or two blokes. “The community supports” or “We pursue” means that these leaders support or pursue, nothing more. Yes, they will usually have a few others on their team but hardly ever all those who make up the community. But pretending that they speak for the community can intimidate the rest and remove effective resistance to the alleged will of the group or collective.



Plain fact is human beings are individuals, first and foremost, once they reach adulthood. They have minds of their own and unless these minds are shut down by force or its threat, they tend to think up different goals for them to pursue. A just human community is one in which the goals of all the members can be pursued provided they are peaceful, non-aggressive. All this talk of the community, the public, we and so forth amounts to some people’s efforts to obscure that fact and secure for themselves control over others. Maybe the intent behind it is benign but the outcome is a disaster.

Did '96 Bill Force People to Work?

Tibor R. Machan

As The New York Times would put it, when in 1996 “President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to ‘end welfare as we know it’...he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.” Back then this supposedly cruel deed was one “Hillary Rodham Clinton supported.” The Times says that “some accused the Clintons of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.”

Now just consider the way The Times words all this. By ending parts of the welfare state, the bill amounted to “forcing recipients to work, etc.” That is like claiming that when one no longer provides support to certain people who become accustomed to getting it, one is “forcing them to fend for themselves.” In fact, of course, it was the government that was forcing all those it taxes to support the recipients in the first place and with the bill in 1996 it finally lessened the load on them. Taxation is what amounts to deploying force against people. Welfare is a form of coercive support. But support should never be coerced but provided only voluntarily by fellow citizens to those who are in need of it.

But for The New York Times--and this is in a news report, not an editorial opinion--withdrawing some of this forced transfer counts as forcing people to work! But nothing forces anyone to work other than the fact that one needs to earn a living, needs to feed and clothe oneself. It is, to put it bluntly, reality that applies the force. It wasn’t Bill Clinton, Congress, or the supportive First Lady.

Here is a good case of journalistic bias which is disguised within a so called straight news report. By wording the “report” as The New York Times did, the newspaper’s editors and writers tried to make it appear that those who aimed for the contraction of the massive welfare system were perpetrating some kind of oppressive action against welfare recipients. But just isn't so.

In the welfare system it is politicians and bureaucrats who are forcibly confiscating funds from citizens, by means of taxation, in behalf of prospective welfare recipients. It may well be true that these welfare recipients are in need of help but what they ought to do is solicit the help, not take part in extorting it, from other people. It is not charity or generosity when government agents zoom down upon us every year on April 15th or so, and forcibly take from us what is no one else’s resource but our own.
If we decide to send some of these resources to needy people, that’s charity, that’s generosity, that’s kindness. But if Congress and the President of the United States hand over the loot they have taken, to welfare recipients, that’s something entirely different--forcible confiscation and redistribution, that what.

Some people tend to think of Robin Hood when they consider the nature of the welfare state but they are mistaken in doing so. What Robin Hood did was to retake resources confiscated in taxes from those who took them and return these to the victims. That part of the legend is rarely acknowledged.

Thus, the government is anything but akin to Robin Hood, quite the opposite--it is the culprit or villain in the legend.

This is something The New York Times might have reported instead of insisting on making it appear that in 1996 Bill Clinton & Co., including the supportive Hillary Rodham Clinton, set out to oppress welfare recipients. Granted, the entire policy may have been a scam to gain Bill Clinton support from American voters who believed that the welfare state needs to be cut back, perhaps even abolished. Given Mrs. Clinton’s belief in “a commander-in-chief of the economy,” I have little doubt that she has no principled objection to such a state and is probably bent on expanding it now that she believes most Americans no longer find much wrong with coercive wealth redistribution.

What The Times ought to have done is gone on record, on the editorial page, arguing that such coercive redistribution is just fine so far as it is concerned, not try to hoodwink readers in a news story into thinking that the force is applied by those who want to cut back welfare rather than those who support it.

What’s Self-Interest Anyway?

Tibor R. Machan

There was a quote from one Donna Wall, a Roanoke Rapids, N. C. teacher, in The New York Times the other day which went like this "I'm glad they're interested in something other than their own self-interest and partying." The paper reported that Ms. Wall was commenting “on the rising interest in politics among young people.”

Isn’t it odd that concern for politics is classified as something “other than their own self-interest” by this teacher? One would think, would one not, that politics for citizens in a free country clearly concern one’s self-interest. Would it not be in one’s self-interest to live in a country that promotes justice, protects one’s rights, is governed by people who are competent, indeed enthusiastic, about these matters?

I bet that Ms. Wall misspoke herself. She probably meant to say that she is glad her students aren’t interested in trivial pursuits rather than important issues that in fact matter to them far more than partying. Yet by divorcing the political from what is in one’s self-interest, she is betraying a warped conception of both, politics and self-interest.

Socrates once said to Crito, very wisely, that "Just follow my old recipe, my friend: do yourselves concern yourselves with your own true self-interest; then you will oblige me, and mine and yourself too." What might Socrates, as rendered by his pupil Plato, have meant when he recommended “true self-interest”? It certainly looks like he didn’t think badly of the idea.

Trouble is that in modern intellectual history the human self in the interest of which Socrates advised on should labor is not viewed as it was in ancient Greece. For Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the human self was something honorable, something that had the potential to be morally excellent. So serving the interest of such a being would itself amount to doing something valuable, even admirable.

One important way to serve a human being’s self-interest is, at least for the ancient Greek thinkers, to make sure that the community in which one lives is a just community, a good one, a community that’s fitting for human survival and flourishing. Accordingly, it is very definitely to one’s self-interest to be involved in politics, the discipline by way of which the justice of a community, its institutions, would be secured.

When under the influence of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes the human self became thought of as a collection of impulses or desires, driven by the passions rather than by reason, things changed dramatically. Desires were seen as short sighted, imprudent, and concerned only with achieving short lived satisfaction. Or, at best, desires aimed only for raw pleasure. So self-interest itself became something unreasonable, something focused on short term satisfaction.

So Ms. Hall was using the concept of self-interest in its modern and highly impoverished sense. Concern for politics for her amounts to something unselfish, not related to one’s best interest but to something else entirely, the public interest.

But the public interest is very difficult to identify. Does it refer to everyone’s benefit in society, the self-interest of all of the citizenry? Is it something more or less? Arguably millions see the public interest to be their own, so they send lobbyists to centers of political power so they induce politicians and bureaucrats to “bring home the bacon.”

The American founders solved the confusion by identifying a limited task of government that amounted to the public interest, namely, the protection if every citizen’s basic, unalienable rights. But surely that public interest is at the same time the interest of each and every citizen, his or her self-interest, actually. So for the Founders there cannot be any conflict between self and public interest—just exactly how Socrates taught.

Ms. Hall needs to learn a bit so her teaching become more sensible and not confuse her students.

The Nudging Illusion

Tibor R. Machan

No sooner does one line of defense of statism fall into disrepute, another is invented by people who insist that they and others with special virtues and qualities have the moral and should have the legal authority to meddle with other people’s lives. Socialism and fascism have pretty much been discredited, so outright top down management of people’s lives, whether economic or spiritual, is now out of fashion. Except for some dyed in the wool enthusiast for running people’s lives by means of coercive force, most meddlers are now urging the deployment of less Draconian measures by which to carry out their interventions. (Such folks like to point to China's communist rulers who are far from Stalinist thugs.)

Richard H. Thaler, who is a Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics, and Cass R. Sunstein, a Professor of Law--both of them at the University of Chicago--are two indefatigable academic champions of meddling. But they know that this is not a goal that too many people find attractive as public policy. (Of course there are innumerable measures of intervention in play in this and most other societies but the intellectual support for them is not coming off as very credible these days.) So instead of promoting even the less harsh versions of the command system--e. g., market socialism--these authors are pushing libertarian paternalism or what they call nudging in their book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Wealth, Health, and Happiness (Yale UP, 2008). The idea is pretty elementary: don’t try to make people act better by threats of--or actual--physical force; nudge them by subtle mandatory adjustments in their environment. An example they use to illustrate the method involves placing an image of a fly in an airport urinal which tends to incline men to aim at it and thus prevents spillage by 80 per cent. How clever and gentle! So why not have governments follow this approach as they try to make men and women behave better?

One simple answer is that it is insidious to have governments manipulate the citizenry with various tricks. Airport urinal designers operate without a captive clientele. One need not go there but could have gone at a gas station or back home before getting on the road. And, in any case, the urinals belong to the airport, so they have the authority to design it any way they want to.

But more importantly, there is that famous saying from the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, that one swallow does not a springtime make! Just because there is one example of useful manipulation of people--and we use such nudging techniques all the time in our personal lives, of course, in our voluntary associations with people--it doesn’t follow that they are all clever and wise.

It is sad that Thaler and Sunstein do not fully appreciate the work of public choice theorists who have taught some very useful lessons about entrusting government bureaucrats with the task of guiding the rest of us in how we should live our lives. While now and then these bureaucrats--lead by legislatures and consultants--may hit upon a fruitful, sensible measure that we all ought to adopt in our lives, there is absolutely no reason to think that they will do this routinely. Public choice theorists note, very helpfully, that people in power have their own agendas and while now and then they may act as bona fide public servants--though not even then as necessarily skillful ones--in time most of them become simple promoters of their own goals. And they will always be subject to the very same foibles that the rest of us are subject to and which Thaler and Sunstein believe justifies their intruding upon us in typical Nanny-like fashion. In short, who will nudge those doing the nudging to nudge the right way?

This fantasy that there are among us some few folks who just know so much better how we ought to live--how we ought to care for our wealth, health and happiness--is a grave threat to us all. Thaler and Sunstein complain that we need the nudging because “there are limits on the number of items to which we can pay attention at one time.” Yet that very same thing is true about all those who would do the nudging, so their propensity to mess things up is just as great as ours. Moreover, because they are powerful, able to impose their will on others, the probability of their going astray is greater than that of us doing so--in the spirit of Lord Acton’s famous saying, “Power tends to corrupt, absolutely power corrupts absolutely.”

Nudging has its uses but not as public policy, not by a long shot.

Welfare Corrupts

Tibor R. Machan

Before anything else it needs to be noted that most of the welfare recipients are not unwed mothers but people doing business as major corporations. They receive subsidies, bailouts, protection from competition and so forth, all undeserved, all unjust, all lacking any legitimacy in a genuine free country. American firms, as thousands of others around the globe, have managed to persuade politicians to provide them with benefits at the expense of people who haven’t consented to any of the takings that provide the funds that make all this possible.

A very early essay I wrote on the topic--published in the philosophy journal The Personalist--was called “Justice and the Welfare State.” In it I argued, way back in 1970, that the welfare state breaks the connection between cause and effect and thus promotes widespread injustice. People who earn a living don’t get to keep their earnings as people who don’t earn a living get away with having those in government looting resources for them.

Of course, there can be some of this without any injustice, when people voluntarily contribute portions of their wealth so others can be helped out, usually temporarily. Such voluntary generosity, charity, philanthropy, and so forth is quite proper among human beings. What isn’t is the daisy chain of rip offs that constitutes the welfare state where politicians and bureaucrats extort funds from innocent citizens so as to support unsuccessful business enterprises and people who create huge families they are unable to support on their own.

Another result of the welfare state is the corruption of personal responsibility. Millions of people are being taught by the system that they can get away with not being responsible, without having to practice the moral virtue of prudence. All the safety nets placed under them become routine in welfare states whereas they should only be provided on a temporary basis, by willing contributors, so that the message does not spread that millions of citizens may live off the backs of others.

Let’s not even worry for now about the ripping off that’s involved. That is unjust and cruel, of course. But another equally insidious aspect of the welfare system is that from the time they are infants millions of people are told, in effect, that they don’t need to work, to produce goods and services for the market place, in order to support themselves. All they need is to back some politicians who will help them loot productive people. This will create the clear impression that life can be lived without having to do much to sustain it other than join a political pressure group.

Of course, the welfare state does not involve generosity, compassion or charity--all those require free choice. The welfare state involves organized crime, extortion, transferring wealth from unwilling citizens to those with political clout. How can such a system not fail to communicate corrupt principles of human community life to those who gain from it? Do you need to have foresight in running your business? No, since when you fail you will not experience the natural consequences of failure. Do you need to do vigorous and smart marketing of your goods and services? No, since if you don’t sell these you will not experience adverse results--instead the government will make sure you can carry on in your inept ways. Do you need to plan your family, adjust your aspirations to your means? Not at all--you’ll get a free ride from the government’s extortion of innocent people.

Again, when people experience temporary setbacks they are usually helped out by family, friends, neighbors, and various service organizations, but not with blank checks that misinform them about the requirements of life.

And then there is the question of why so many people are wringing their hands about people going into debt way over their capacity to carry the debt? Why are so many caught unawares about their fellows taking on mortgages they are unable to pay? Why do millions of young people keep maxing out their credit cards? Why do businesses start up without adequate capitalization? Why do they hold on to outmoded practices that lead them to fail?

Maybe an important element of what leads to all this and more is how the welfare state educates everyone to believe that one can get along quite well without having to think about the future. One can get by in it without learning how the world works when it is not distorted by the system.

So aside from the injustice of the welfare state there is also the fact that it leads to massive corruption throughout a society, severe misconceptions about what it really takes to make a reasonably prosperous life for oneself, both in personal and business affairs.

Funding Rand Courses

Tibor R. Machan

Throughout the American Southeast, where BB&T bank conducts most of its business, the company’s foundation has been doling out some big bucks to support the study of the work of Russian born American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. The grants are made to various colleges and universities--among them Duke and Marshall--to set up various centers or professorships and sometimes the condition for receiving the funds includes putting Rand’s blockbuster and huge novel, Atlas Shrugged, on a course reading list.

In most cases the funds are welcome, especially--and not surprisingly--by college or university administrators. In a few instances, however, there has been some protest from folks who claim they are worried about academic freedom. Both proponents and opponents have invoked the idea of academic freedom. And with some justification. If you give money to an educational institution, often it is the institution itself that determines how it should be used. But by no means always. People contribute huge sums to have libraries or interfaith centers built with their names attached. Donors often establish endowed chairs--I myself hold one at Chapman University--with the aim of giving the teaching of certain subjects a boost. Although there is no directive to use the money contributed in any specific way, it is most often well understood that a donor’s agenda will carry influence.

For example, the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently received a $10 million contribution from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation so as to establish a new national program on "the law and neuroscience." The website that describes this states that “The effort will seek to integrate new developments in neuroscience into the U.S. legal system. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is the honorary chair of the Law and Neuroscience Project, which will be directed by Michael S. Gazzaniga, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.”

Now there is a definite agenda involved here, laid out in, for example, a recent Op Ed column in The New York Times. The idea is to influence the reform of the criminal law system so it takes into consideration findings of neuroscience that challenge certain of the assumptions of our legal system. Among these assumptions is the view that defendants facing criminal charges have free will, can decide what they will do for themselves, etc. The program will promote the idea that in fact people’s minds are determined to function in certain ways and no one is really free and, therefore, guilty.

There are innumerable programs with various agendas throughout the academy. Various schools of the sciences, the arts, and the humanities receive support from wealthy donors who have been convinced of the merits of one or another way of understanding some subject matter being discussed in the halls of the academy.

And this is just what the BB&T grant is trying to do: influence the culture through the scholarship of those at colleges and universities doing work in some field along lines the donors regard important. Because colleges and universities have many different departments addressing innumerable issues, and these departments would (properly) have highly diverse faculties, with a great variety of perspectives, there is supposed to be no danger of turning the faculty into some kind of one-sided, biased advocacy group. One can be sure, for example, that wherever Ayn Rand’s works will be studied, there will be many other novelists who are also examined in depth, depending on the professional judgment of teachers and scholars.

The hoopla surrounding the BB&T effort to support the serious study of Rand is mostly a turf fight, not unusual in higher education. People who go into teaching usually have strong convictions in their discipline, many with public policy implications. Just consider the controversies surrounding intelligent design or creationism. Publicly run and funded educational institutions will naturally be subjected to these controversies--many desire and believe have the right to have an input so as to influence the culture to promote what they deem to be worthy ideas.

Of course, in our time most of the disciplines that involve moral and political components tend to be taught by people with convictions that lean leftward. This is no secret. And when other viewpoints gain a bit of inroad, there are efforts to resist it. Again, not very surprisingly. And this resistance is usually expressed in terms that make it sound very noble--“We are defending academic freedom”--instead of what it really is, namely, an effort to keep or gain dominance.

No university or college is forced to accept grants from anyone but most of them do toe the line favored by the government that funds them. It is certainly a welcome development that the private sector’s values are gaining some support here and there.

Liberty: Both Radical & Traditional

Tibor R. Machan

At times libertarian or classical liberal--or, in yet other words, pure laissez faire capitalist--ideas are dismissed as part of a misguided modernity that’s lacking proper pedigree. But this is all wrong. Already back in circa 600 B.C.E. the Chinese sage Lao Tzu had weighed in with libertarian ideas, writing

"Why are people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.
Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious...."

And in ancient Greece, Xenophon records an exchange between Pericles and Alcibiades in which the latter dismisses all government edicts that are coercive as plainly unlawful. As he put it, “It would seem to follow that if a tyrant, without persuading the citizens, drives them by enactment to do certain things--that is lawlessness.”

Of course, merely because a good idea has seen the light of day at some point in time, it doesn’t mean it actually carried the day. Ideas of individual liberty did not begin to animate actual political affairs until rather late in the day, starting around the 11th century A. D. A good example of some such ideas beginning to make an impact is the Magna Carta. And then, in time, came the American Founders, with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. They managed, finally, to use the libertarian position, which they absorbed through their reading of history and philosophers such as John Locke, for practical, legal purposes. Why so late with the emergence of practical legal measures that support individual liberty?

One reason is that in much of human history what carried the day was unmitigated, unabashed physical coercion, the powerful and well armed running roughshod over the rest. Conquering thugs, armed to the teeth by monarchs and tribal chiefs, would not let up on their brutal subjugation of the population so they could extort from them their labor and whatever meager resources they have accumulated. There had been slave and peasant revolts but not until a substantial middle class emerged, with the capacity to create wealth, did those not in the ruling class manage to be able to mount a resistance to the rulers. And while some knew about the ideas that supported individualism and libertarianism, many were hoodwinked by stories of the divine rights of monarchs and the widely promulgated myth of class privilege.

In the modern era what stood in the way of the liberation of individuals, the overturning of class rule, is the idea that individualism had been invented to serve the economically lucky and powerful. This was a ruse, of course, perpetrated by the cheerleaders of modern rulers, the likes of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, who had no patience for individual rights and liberation but believed in a collectivism that included the entire globe! They appealed to the myth of tribalism which they managed to sell to millions of people who, in turn, signed up for a unity of the workers but, of course, under the leadership--read: brutal rule--of the likes of Lenin and Stalin. Or they gave up their chance for freedom to national socialists or fascists like Hitler and Mussolini.

Even today the ideas and ideals of individual liberty fare badly because of the many excuses people use to keep others oppressed. The idea of class warfare that even American politicians deploy, for example, undercuts individualism. Ethnicity, racism, gender politics, and the like are all obstacles to making headway for bona fide individualism, with its politics of everyone’s equal unalienable natural rights as the foundation of the legal system, even as their proponents sometimes invoke individualist ideas to excuse the special political privileges they seek.

The Marxists dismissed individualism as an ideology that supposedly served the capitalist, thereby aiming to destroy the most efficient social engine of productivity, the one that unleashed the enormous energy of individual initiative and entrepreneurship. We are, sadly, still in the grips of the big lie that individualism is some kind of insidious ideology.

What’s the remedy? Relentless, vigilant education in the history and philosophy of individualism and libertarianism. That’s the greatest hope for human liberation.

Victimless Crimes

Tibor R. Machan

When I go to movies I sometimes experiment. I decide to see some because of what I call education in cultural anthropology. Not all of these are enjoyable, even interesting but some suggest insights it would be useful to pay attention to.

Trees Lounge is a movie, from some time back, in which probably none of the characters is likable, most of the events are kind of disgusting, and only here and there can a viewer empathize with how problems are managed. Yet, this is not a movie about criminals, nor are there car chases; instead it is a guys version of a chick flick. The bulk of the people, some of them not especially mediocre, do dope on a regular basis and show how that isn’t really all that great for them. There is plenty of drinking, too, which also manages to bring a few people down. But some aren't put out by their habit.

However, one can tell right away that there is no difference at all in the damage done to some buy drinking versus doing dope. Some aren’t harmed by either, others are. Just like in real life--this is nothing if not a naturalist film, with everything just as it is likely to be for quite a few people in real life.

Yet there is a big difference. The drinking done is legal while the dope consumption is not. Of both one could say exactly the same thing, just as the late William F. Buckley, Jr. put it some time ago:

"Drug prohibition has accomplished none of its intended goals. Just like alcohol prohibition, it has created a multi-billion dollar black market, and despite the expenditure of billions of dollars in the prosecution of this war, drugs are available in every city and town in this country, and they’re cheaper than they were just ten or twenty years ago."

But that is not the worse of it. It is patently unjust to treat adult human beings as if they were children or invalids instead of responsible persons, capable--although not always willing--to guide themselves through the maze of temptations life has to offer. Abusing alcohol, gambling, dope, and even such normally healthful pursuits as exercise, adventure, and so forth is avoidable, even when one is addicted--how else do addicts get themselves to clinics? To entrust the government with banning what people need to resist of their own free will is not becoming of a free society.

No one needs maintain that there are no collateral “victims” where people act self-abusively. Yes, no one has to be influenced but many will be. Yet, that too must be handled in a free and just society without violating the sovereignty of abusers. People have to learn to resist bad influences and if governments do not pretend to deal with the matter in their typical paternalistic, nanny like fashion, they have good reason to. They will not be lured into the false security the war on drugs promises. They will make sufficient effort to deal with the matter, given that no one is really coercing anyone to use or abuse dope, just as none is coerced to use or abuse alcohol.

But here is the problem. Once the principle of sovereignty is affirmed in the case of alcohol or drug use and abuse, as a principle it must be applied to all non-aggressive human conduct. How would that square with the thousands of government regulations, professional licensing rules--I hate to call these “laws”? Of course, the implication of the rights to freedom of religion and free speech are no less clear but somehow the sophistry that the latter apply to special activities that need to be kept free serves for many as an excuse to evade that fact.

It is my contention that principled opposition to the war an drugs is now difficult for several reason, one of which is that such opposition would leave no governmental interventions unscathed. But there is also the general disdain today for principles--it is dismissed as ideology (unless it has to do with a politically incorrect evil such as racism or sexism).

At any rate, however, the movie Trees Lounge shows clearly that criminalizing drug abuse is plainly unjust, as well as unfair, especially wherever alcohol abuse is deemed legally untouchable. One can only hope that such lessons from fiction are not lost on the citizenry.

Hillary, Stalinist?

Tibor R. Machan

Ok, so you think I am way over the top claiming that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Stalinist. Well, then what do you make of the fact that on March 27th, in a speech she gave in North Carolina, she said as plainly and clearly as one can say such a thing that what America needs is “a commander-in-chief of the economy.”

Now what is the economy? It is people going about doing business, engaging in commerce, earning a living, selling and buying and so forth. To recommend that such a massive sphere of human activities requires a commander-in-chief is scandalous, especially in what is supposed to be a free country.

Can you imagine a commander-in-chief of the arts? The sciences? Of sports? Of religion? Clearly those would amount to offices for which only an out and out dictatorship has any legitimate room. Yet one of the most likely aspirants to the American presidency is advocating just such an office, one she herself wants to hold.

Does this woman not think about what she says? Does she not consider the implications of the words she uses? Everyone keeps saying how smart she is, how well she did in school. Well, so much for what passes for smart these days and what our schools consider doing well.

What else is there to say? Only, perhaps, that word needs to get out immediately, before it is too late, about what kind of political economic ideas this candidate for the American presidency embraces. A commander-in-chief is the top officer in the military, an organization that must act is a fully coordinated, disciplined fashion, with very specific objectives, such as winning battles and wars.

That is not what economics is about. Economics is about people choosing, freely, spontaneously, to interact, on their own initiative and on terms they set among themselves and not ones dictated to them by some tsar!

Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have absolutely no clue about this, judging by this absurd idea she permitted herself to give voice to in her North Carolina campaign speech. She has no notion, apparently, that a successful human economic system has no room of a Stalin at the helm, a commander-in-chief ordering everyone about. Not even a deity could accomplish such a feat and countries that have tried, such as Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Third Reich, and Stalin’s Soviet Union paid a very dear price for doing so.

If this remark by Mrs. Clinton does not receive extensive scrutiny from all the pundits and commentators in the media, I don’t know what to conclude about this country. Will she get a pass for advocating a command economy? Not even John Maynard Keynes, the architect of 20th century welfare statism, advocating such a thing. Actually, come to think of it, not even Karl Marx did since his idea was that socialism would emerge spontaneously from the revolution by workers.

Nor do contemporary socialists advocate the command economic system, having learned, finally, that it destroys economies everywhere. Instead, contemporary socialists advocate what they dub "market socialism," a system in which most economic activities are left to the choices of the economic agents and just a few political matters are kept as the province of the state.

Just look at Communist China, what with its extensive free market that is the wise, though by no means trouble free, preference of its rulers! The Chinese commies have learned what our American presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton hasn’t managed to learn. So have the rulers of Dubai and Singapore and other regions where there is exists oppressive political rule. Leave the economy alone because if you don’t, there will be havoc.

But Mrs. Clinton hasn’t even acquired the elementary economic knowledge that today’s socialists and communists have. She is still in the fantasy land where some omniscient, omnipotent ruler can direct the affairs of an entire economy, to everyone’s great benefit. What a scandal. What must those in foreign lands who know so much better where such a system leads think of this woman and all the millions of Americans who want her to be president.

It is a truly obscene spectacle.

Libertarianism and Americanism

Tibor R. Machan

Given that in the main the American political system is still the closest to protecting varieties of individual liberty—regarding speech, commerce, religion, due process, etc.—most of those who peddle political ideas want to hitch their wagon to the ideas of the American Founders. Socialists, conservatives, populists, agrarians, and even some communists have laid claim to being the proper carriers of the American political flag. Libertarians, of course, are no different. They hold that it is their political philosophy that most fully realizes the vision first put into practice by the American Founders and Framers.

Why would a socialist think the same thing? Or a conservative or populist, let alone a communist?

Socialists tend to believe that the American Founders advocated egalitarianism, first and foremost. They focus on the paramount idea in that document that “all men are created equal.” Conservatives, in turn, consider their position to be validated by the Founders and Framers in light of how the latter derived their political theory from a study of history and the thoughts of numerous influential political philosophers and theorists. This confirms the conservative notion that to do nation building properly, one must consult tradition, history, and custom, not concoct ideas and ideals de novo. Populists, of course, focus on the democratic elements of the American political tradition, those that relate to how every citizen has a right to influence public policy. Never mind the limits imposed by, say, the Bill of Rights. What counts is mass participation, the “will of the people.” Agrarians will insist that Jefferson & Co. were mostly promoting the special but proper interest of the landed gentry. And communists will argue that the American system is simply a historical precursor to the ideal community in which a nation becomes a family of equals.

Libertarians, like me, insist that the Founders had a more realistic but also optimistic view of human community life than these other advocates do. They hold that listing the basic unalienable rights of every human being serves as a clear reminder of the radical true insight that no one has the proper authority to impose his or her agenda upon others however much these others may mismanage their lives, even threaten to influence some desirable features of culture. The political task is to secure the basic rights of all citizens. Everything else must be achieved without resort to the main instrument of public policy, namely, force. As the libertarian insists, initiating force against others even for purposes that are quite admirable just cannot be reconciled with a proper standard of justice. That standard, which is actually the first ingredient of civilized life, is to interact with one’s fellows voluntarily and rationally, even when one disagrees with them, even if they are recalcitrant, even if they act indecently themselves but they remain peaceful, respectful of the rights of others.

The idea that reference to all human beings being equal should usher in socialism is countered by the recognition that the equality referred to in the Declaration is about the equal possession of the unalienable rights all of us have, not about the equality of our health, welfare, good looks, and such admittedly widely valued matters. And only libertarianism acknowledges this constraint the Founders’ and Framers’ placed on “egalitarianism.”

Some features of the original American political ideas and ideals are clearly improved upon in libertarianism; abolition of any form of involuntary servitude, for example, including slavery, serfdom, taxation, the military draft, or other types of compulsion citizens may supposedly have imposed upon them as they do when they are taken to be subjects of a monarchy. As the libertarian sees it, some of these elements of the original American system are the unfortunate reactionary residue from pre-revolutionary times and not consistent with the fundamental principles laid out in the Declaration, especially the idea of everyone’s unalienable individual rights.

So, I submit, libertarians are indeed the faithful students of the American political tradition, one’s who learned well from their elders and went on to improve on what they have so learned.

Taxation Again

Tibor R. Machan

Instead of all the mud slinging between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama, wouldn’t it be refreshing to have them engage in some serious political discussion? Since April 15 is nearly upon us, many American citizens might appreciate some in-depth exploration of the nature of taxation. The federal income tax, in particular, would deserve thoughtful examination. Senator John McCain could also enter the fray, me thinks.

Why don’t these politicians, who are aspiring to the U. S. presidency--the presidency of a supposedly free country--spend a bit of their energy and time discussing with voters how a robust system of confiscatory taxation can be reconciled with the basic principles of the country laid out in the Declaration of Independence. In this revolutionary statement of a radical political philosophy--wherein we learn that human beings are equal in having unalienable rights to, among others, their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness--it seems pretty clear that a government’s confiscation of one’s resources would amount to a violation of several of these rights.

Take life, for example. What does one’s life consist of? Much of it is spent, of course, trying to earn a living so as to support one’s various needs and wants, including the housing, feeding, clothing, and education of one’s offspring. Having an unalienable right to one’s life means, unless I am utterly amiss in my grasp of the English language and of how the American founders used it, that one may not lose one’s life and its fruits to other people unless one freely gives them away. Confiscatory taxation is not a case of having one’s resources contributed freely, not by even the most post-modern interpretation of the words in play.

Then again, take liberty. What is this liberty? It has to do with one’s not having anyone else, including government, dictate to one what one will do, how one will act, what course of conduct one will undertake. None, since the right to liberty, too, is unalienable, that is to say incapable of being lost unless one’s humanity has vanished somehow. Confiscatory taxation once again cannot be made consistent with the principle that one has this unalienable right to one’s liberty for such taxation coerces one to hand over a goodly part of one’s earnings to people one hasn’t freely chosen to receive them. (And let’s leave aside the sophistry of claiming that taxation is ultimately voluntary or that majority vote may void one’s unalienable rights!)

As to the pursuit of happiness, that too is supposed to be one’s unalienable right, yet when some get the legal power to force one to devote resources to goals one has not chosen to pursue, that right, too, is very evidently violated.

It bears remembering, also, that these are just a few among the “certain unalienable rights.” Indeed, human beings have unalienable rights to do anything that’s peaceful, that does not violate someone else’s rights. Even the Bill of Rights attests to this, in its inclusion of the Ninth Amendment among the principles it lists. It clearly refers to rights we all have that are not enumerated in the Constitution. So, to use some simple examples, we all have the right to laugh, sing, have parties in our back yards, and so forth, even though these rights are no listed--since they would take volumes to list--in the Constitution.

Yes, reference is made in the Constitution to taxation but that is an unfortunate mistake, inconsistency actually, since taxation is not part of a free country properly understood, any more than serfdom is, or involuntary servitude. One might wonder, well then how are the proper functions of government to be funded, if not by means of the extortionist scheme of taxation? Actually, there can be valid alternatives to taxation, ones no involving coercion, confiscation, extortion, although these are not studied now because so many people accept taxation is legitimate. That used to be the case with slavery, too, for centuries--alternatives to it were not studied in ancient Egypt and Greece or elsewhere because influential people complacently accepted the practice. As they now accept taxation. But that does not make it right!

As a very brief hint, the legal services governments provide can be funded by a contract fee--anyone who enters into a contract would need to pay a fee so it would gain legal backing. Given the enormous popularity of freely entered into contracts, and given that one need not make use of them if one can get by with a handshake, the method would provide ample resources to fund government’s proper functions.

Wouldn’t it be just swell if those pursuing the presidency of a supposedly free country would raise issues like this one? No, instead they dwell on whether one’s crazy minister speaks for one in matters of race or whether one has actually encounter sniper fire when landing in some foreign land (where one probably shouldn’t have landed in the first place)?

It is shameful how the right topics are evaded and trivial ones substituted during this and most other political campaigns.

John Adams, the HBO Series

Tibor R. Machan*

The HBO program, John Adams, is proving to be a much needed antidote to how most Americans are educated about the beginning of their country. It is to all appearances a meticulously crafted docudrama. The acting sizzles, the design is riveting, and the direction must have been superb.

It is also nice to know, from a short program, “The Making of John Adams,” that HBO is also running now, that the author of the novel on which the program is based, David Willis McCullough, fully approves of the result. It is more usual to find authors whose works Hollywood translates into film complaining of how the work was butchered in the process. Readers of the book also appear to find the filmed version very satisfactory.

My own interests lead me to be very attentive to the segment titled “Independence,” where the founders hashed out just what they wanted to communicate to the domestic and world population concerning what they were embarking upon and why. It was gratifying to hear some of the characters make it abundantly clear that the Declaration of Independence they forged, mostly at the hands of Thomas Jefferson, is indeed a thoroughly revolutionary statement about the nature of human community life, the relationship between government and the citizenry. (To hear Abigail Adams read out laud these ideas to the Adams children served as a reminder of how home schooling, recently targeted by California for near abolition, can be far superior to what government “school” provide to children.)

And the issue of the abomination of slavery was introduced with no hesitation, showing that for many of the founders the creation of a nation that could withstand attacks from around the globe was a priority despite the fact that they found slavery morally intolerable and had they found a way, they would probably have abolished it. But the newly formed Southern states would hear none of that and without them the venture would appear to have failed.

For me the only lapse involved the failure to feature one of the most essential elements of the Declaration, namely, its theory of government. Immediately after the very famous statement, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” this theory of the nature of government is given a nice succinct statement: “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”

Clearly, the producers could not include the entire Declaration of Independence in the program and had to be selective but to omit this part and the discussions surrounding it is not easily excused. It is in this sentence that we find one of the most radical elements of the American revolution, namely, the confinement of the scope of governmental power to specific and limited tasks and no more. “To secure these rights” is the only just purpose of government, period. Only that which contributes to the achievement of this purposes is justifiable. That is what makes sense of the idea that follows, namely, “that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it….”

In a cynical, dark moment while watching this segment of John Adams, I gave some credibility to my fear that perhaps the producers realized that this idea of the limited scope of governmental responsibilities may have rubbed many in Hollywood and elsewhere the wrong way. After all, many in tinsel town are great friends of the growth of governmental power, of the expansion of the scope of what government is supposed to do in human communities, at the hands of the likes of Hillary Rodham Clinton, et al. So perhaps they deliberately meant to exclude this theory of strictly limited government!

But, of course, I am not privy to the thinking of those who fashioned the program and, in fact, many other aspects of limited government theory, for example, the unalienability of our basic rights, clearly imply what these lines of the Declaration make explicit.

In any case, for one like me, a refugee to America who has always found the Declaration to be the most inspiring of the original documents, more so even than the Bill of Rights, HBO’s John Adams is a breath of badly needed fresh air. I hope it is shown over and over in the schools across the country so a most neglected aspect of early education might gain center stage for millions of young Americans.
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*Machan is the author of, among other works, Human Rights and Human Liberties, A Radical Reconsideration of the American Political Tradition (1975).

Bin Laden is Still Wrong

Tibor R. Machan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too Much Love for Royalty

Tibor R. Machan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why don’t they get it?

Tibor R. Machan

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

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

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

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

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

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

NAFTA Blues

Tibor R. Machan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Buckley, RIP

Tibor R. Machan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unabashed Prejudice at The Times

Tibor R. Machan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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