Revisiting Anti-Americanism
Tibor R. Machan
From the time I was a kid and read a lot of American fiction in Hungarian translations, I had a great fondness for what I took to be the American spirit of individualism and love for life. Zane Grey was my favorite, but I was also very fond of Erle Stanley Gardner’s numerous Perry Mason novels. Then there was Mark Twain, Max Brand, and a host of others, although I was also an avid reader of the German tax evader, Karl May, who wrote numerous novels about the American West as well as the Arab world.
When in time I finally reached these shores, I had no illusions that American was just what these fictitious works depicted. But inspired by the fictional renditions I certainly started out with a favorable attitude toward this country. Not that I was unaware of problems, including some very dark patches of history. But all in all, compared to the places I was familiar with, such as communist Hungary, Nazi Germany, the Soviet bloc in general, what America had to offer both actually and in its promise--by means of the crux of its political and legal systems--certainly very much appealed to me.
I came here when Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was president and followed his 1956 contest with Adlai Stevenson and while my sophistication left much to be desired, I liked Ike more than his rival, mainly because even then I noticed that those supporting Stevenson had a good deal of underlying hostility toward what I took to be central to America, namely its essential individualism and largely free socio-economic system. Compared to other places with which I was familiar America seemed to me to be quite a humane, just, and free society.
Ever since then I had my eyes and ears on those Americans who seemed to me to dislike the country precisely for the reasons I saw so much promise in it. When I entered college and, later, the world of university education, I noticed to my dismay that a great many educators were rather avidly opposed to the country that I found so basically sound, though by no means perfect. Over the years that I have mingled with the higher education crowd I found more and more evidence of a steady hostility among people teaching college and university students, doing research in the humanities, and in the social sciences. To them one could add many journalists and entertainers, I began to realize, and I have dedicated part of my life to studying whether they had a case against America that I was missing and to refuting their allegations which I saw to be essentially groundless.
Just the other day I was perusing the Sunday, April 27, 2008, New York Times and ran across a very typical example of the attitude that I have found so distressing. In an essay titled “The Short End of the Longer Life,” penned by one Kevin Sack in the Week in Review section, reporting on various life expectancy and longevity statistics, I ran across the following opening sentence: “Throughout the 20th century, it was an American birthright that each generations would live longer than the last.” This very same point was then used as a blurb later in the piece, indicating that not only the writer but the editor found the idea valid. But is it?
Are Americans really thinking of a growing life expectancy as a birthright? Do they believe that just because they are born, they have a right to expect to live long? The piece gave no evidence of this at all. The numbers had nothing to do with such a finding. No, this was merely a snide little put down of Americans, contending that they are stupid enough to have come to see a statistical trend as a natural necessity, even a right! If that were true, it would, in fact, indicate that Americans are silly. But nothing in the piece serves to demonstrate it and the only explanation I can think of is that both writer and editor simply wanted to demean Americans.
Why? Why is there this need by so many elite organizations, individuals, institutions to put down a country that is not only comparatively the best for its citizenry but is in fact best for the very people making such snide unfounded observations? Go figure!
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Obama, A Plus & A Minus
Tibor R. Machan
In his hour long interview with Chris Wallace, on Fox TV (4/27), one I managed to sit through all the way--yes, it was a chore, given how much of it was empty rhetoric--Senator Obama advanced one promising idea and also revealed a rather disturbing tendency.
At one point Mr. Wallace asked whether if he became president Senator Obama could forge any kind of link between himself and Republicans in Congress. To my mild gratification the Senator responded by noting that what he has learned from Republicans over the years is that government regulation of the economy isn’t the desirable policy that many liberal democrats have taken it to be over several decades.
This is not only a hopeful sign but also differentiates the Senator from his rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been promoting the idea of “a commander in chief of the American economy.” This idea, which suggests a heavily micromanaged economic system that entails nothing but trouble in its ancient and recent history, would pretty much doom America’s relatively productive, innovative, and flexible economy. It is just that idea that brought the Soviet Union’s economy to its knees and is a great threat to all those countries that are only escaping the destructive results by the temporary availability of cheap oil. Without that windfall these countries, like Venezuela, would be extremely impoverished. (And even with oil they aren’t soaring!)
So it is a good sign that at least one of the Democratic candidates who may ascend to the U. S. presidency isn’t hell bent on turning America into a command economy. Of course, this could be nothing more than a ploy, as so many promises of politicians turn out to be. But it is something.
On the other hand, Senator Obama exhibited a tendency to speak in the manner of a monarch. He was constantly using the royal “we” in his answers to Mr. Wallace, as if he spoke not for himself, reported not his own thoughts and conduct, but represented some group or club or family. I couldn’t hear him say one “I did this,” or “I believe that.” It was always, “We went there,” “We want to do this,” etc. What does this suggest?
For one, it seems that Senator Obama does not prefer taking responsibility for anything, either in his campaign for the nomination or as a possible winner of either the Democratic nomination or the general election. Or does it mean that he is trying to appear very humble, not seeming to take credit for anything? But this is pretty much the same thing. Refusing to take credit also implies the refusal to accept responsibility.
The constant use of “we” could also signal a more fundamental stance by Senator Obama. It could mean that he rejects even the slightest association with American individualism, that he is an ideologically committed communitarian who has in his own mind merged himself with whatever variety of communities he belongs to.
If I am asked about a project I am involved in and I always answer with a “we,” this could be appropriate if the project is actually that of a group, say a band or orchestra or corporation, of which I am a part. Such voluntary associations often pursue goals that all of the members share and nearly everything done could well be a cooperative effort. Except why one has joined the group in the first place.
But there was nothing of this in Senator Obama’s replies to Chris Wallace, quite the contrary. Instead he was being asked about his views, his comments on the campaign trail, his plans for the future, his opinions on various geopolitical matters and every single time what came back was “We think,” “We did,” etc. I was getting more and more eager to learn who was being included in “we,” so that when the Senator uses the term one could identify who all is behind the thoughts and actions being discussed. But, sadly, Mr. Wallace didn’t seem to want to go there, to ask, “Who is the ‘we’, Senator, you keep referring to?”
Whatever the ultimate explanation for Senator Obama’s constant use of “we,” it isn’t a comforting sign from anyone, including a politician. Anyone aspiring to high office ought at least to accept the fact that he or she will be in charge of some important decisions and policies and cannot escape accountability by some kind of verbal subterfuge.
Tibor R. Machan
In his hour long interview with Chris Wallace, on Fox TV (4/27), one I managed to sit through all the way--yes, it was a chore, given how much of it was empty rhetoric--Senator Obama advanced one promising idea and also revealed a rather disturbing tendency.
At one point Mr. Wallace asked whether if he became president Senator Obama could forge any kind of link between himself and Republicans in Congress. To my mild gratification the Senator responded by noting that what he has learned from Republicans over the years is that government regulation of the economy isn’t the desirable policy that many liberal democrats have taken it to be over several decades.
This is not only a hopeful sign but also differentiates the Senator from his rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has been promoting the idea of “a commander in chief of the American economy.” This idea, which suggests a heavily micromanaged economic system that entails nothing but trouble in its ancient and recent history, would pretty much doom America’s relatively productive, innovative, and flexible economy. It is just that idea that brought the Soviet Union’s economy to its knees and is a great threat to all those countries that are only escaping the destructive results by the temporary availability of cheap oil. Without that windfall these countries, like Venezuela, would be extremely impoverished. (And even with oil they aren’t soaring!)
So it is a good sign that at least one of the Democratic candidates who may ascend to the U. S. presidency isn’t hell bent on turning America into a command economy. Of course, this could be nothing more than a ploy, as so many promises of politicians turn out to be. But it is something.
On the other hand, Senator Obama exhibited a tendency to speak in the manner of a monarch. He was constantly using the royal “we” in his answers to Mr. Wallace, as if he spoke not for himself, reported not his own thoughts and conduct, but represented some group or club or family. I couldn’t hear him say one “I did this,” or “I believe that.” It was always, “We went there,” “We want to do this,” etc. What does this suggest?
For one, it seems that Senator Obama does not prefer taking responsibility for anything, either in his campaign for the nomination or as a possible winner of either the Democratic nomination or the general election. Or does it mean that he is trying to appear very humble, not seeming to take credit for anything? But this is pretty much the same thing. Refusing to take credit also implies the refusal to accept responsibility.
The constant use of “we” could also signal a more fundamental stance by Senator Obama. It could mean that he rejects even the slightest association with American individualism, that he is an ideologically committed communitarian who has in his own mind merged himself with whatever variety of communities he belongs to.
If I am asked about a project I am involved in and I always answer with a “we,” this could be appropriate if the project is actually that of a group, say a band or orchestra or corporation, of which I am a part. Such voluntary associations often pursue goals that all of the members share and nearly everything done could well be a cooperative effort. Except why one has joined the group in the first place.
But there was nothing of this in Senator Obama’s replies to Chris Wallace, quite the contrary. Instead he was being asked about his views, his comments on the campaign trail, his plans for the future, his opinions on various geopolitical matters and every single time what came back was “We think,” “We did,” etc. I was getting more and more eager to learn who was being included in “we,” so that when the Senator uses the term one could identify who all is behind the thoughts and actions being discussed. But, sadly, Mr. Wallace didn’t seem to want to go there, to ask, “Who is the ‘we’, Senator, you keep referring to?”
Whatever the ultimate explanation for Senator Obama’s constant use of “we,” it isn’t a comforting sign from anyone, including a politician. Anyone aspiring to high office ought at least to accept the fact that he or she will be in charge of some important decisions and policies and cannot escape accountability by some kind of verbal subterfuge.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Multicultural Nonsense
Tibor R. Machan
As an avid reader of Science News magazine I never miss anything offered up by the editors. I often purchase a book they recommend and peruse the letters of the editor routinely. (I’ve had several of my own published over the years.)
In the April 12, 2008, issue a letter appears that puzzled me quite a bit, both for its content and because it was published. Here is what it said:
“I feel that Rachel Ehrenberg was entirely too glib in ‘Digging that Maya blue” (SN:3/1/08, p. 134). The description of an ancient Mayan religious ritual as ‘plucking the hearts from humans and tossing the bodies into the sacred cenote’ is disrespectful. I am sure that Science News would never describe any contemporary religious ritual in this manner. Here is hoping that the editors and writers adopt a more dispassionate eye.”
So now human sacrifices are supposed to be dealt with respectfully! Give me a break. Next we will read from some multicultural fanatic that slavery, female circumcision and other atrocities from the past, and perhaps even the gassing of the Jews by the German authorities just a few decades ago, need to be handled respectfully. Or perhaps just because the Mayan atrocity was at the behest of a religious sect it deserves our respect. Why? Can religions not manifest gross evil just as ideologies often do?
Not all matters from the past can easily be evaluated, that is true. Sometimes the context and circumstances are complicated and the behavior being examined may not fit clearly within moral categories. But human sacrifice? Come on, surely here we can say, with sufficient confidence, that those folks back there did something utterly contemptible. If not, then I suppose the multicultural thesis would imply that we must not pass judgment on anything, including the practice of chattel slavery in the not so far off past of the United States of America.
The irrationality of this viewpoint is obvious just from the fact that advocates of the multicultural viewpoint endlessly moralize about those who refuse to accept their position. Just consider the Science News letter writer who freely chided the editors instead of regarding their stance, well, an alternative cultural stance, one that freely condemns various religious practices of the past. If these editors can be criticized for what they did, so can the Mayans, otherwise what is being done is actually insulting to the latter. Mayans and others in the past were human beings, ever bit as we are, and various moral standards are applicable to understanding how they conduct themselves, just as such standards apply to the editors and writers of Science News.
The intellectually fascinating feature of multiculturalism is just how incoherent it quickly becomes. If one fails to accept multiculturalism, well then one is acting badly; but if one accepts multiculturalism, then no one can be blamed for anything at all since from some, however obtuse, cultural standpoint any conduct can be “justified.”
It would be far more enlightened to figure out some basic standards of human morality and then apply them to any society and culture carefully. The nihilism of refusing to judge is simply unavoidable to us--even that refusal is a judgment and in need of rational support.
The multicultural stance exhibited by the Science News letter writer is not the only one that has the problem of incoherence, of course. All relativist positions face it, as do subjectivist ones. Implicit in all such purportedly tolerant and nonpartisan ethical positions is an intolerance of making moral judgments. Yet for some reason those who advocate these doctrines do not seem to realize it or hope that others won’t notice the problem.
I agree with one thing in the letter from Science News. Being glib can be dangerous when it comes to judging people. But it is also understandable that journalists would toy with glibness--after all they need to make their copy a good read, not simply accurate and relevant.
Tibor R. Machan
As an avid reader of Science News magazine I never miss anything offered up by the editors. I often purchase a book they recommend and peruse the letters of the editor routinely. (I’ve had several of my own published over the years.)
In the April 12, 2008, issue a letter appears that puzzled me quite a bit, both for its content and because it was published. Here is what it said:
“I feel that Rachel Ehrenberg was entirely too glib in ‘Digging that Maya blue” (SN:3/1/08, p. 134). The description of an ancient Mayan religious ritual as ‘plucking the hearts from humans and tossing the bodies into the sacred cenote’ is disrespectful. I am sure that Science News would never describe any contemporary religious ritual in this manner. Here is hoping that the editors and writers adopt a more dispassionate eye.”
So now human sacrifices are supposed to be dealt with respectfully! Give me a break. Next we will read from some multicultural fanatic that slavery, female circumcision and other atrocities from the past, and perhaps even the gassing of the Jews by the German authorities just a few decades ago, need to be handled respectfully. Or perhaps just because the Mayan atrocity was at the behest of a religious sect it deserves our respect. Why? Can religions not manifest gross evil just as ideologies often do?
Not all matters from the past can easily be evaluated, that is true. Sometimes the context and circumstances are complicated and the behavior being examined may not fit clearly within moral categories. But human sacrifice? Come on, surely here we can say, with sufficient confidence, that those folks back there did something utterly contemptible. If not, then I suppose the multicultural thesis would imply that we must not pass judgment on anything, including the practice of chattel slavery in the not so far off past of the United States of America.
The irrationality of this viewpoint is obvious just from the fact that advocates of the multicultural viewpoint endlessly moralize about those who refuse to accept their position. Just consider the Science News letter writer who freely chided the editors instead of regarding their stance, well, an alternative cultural stance, one that freely condemns various religious practices of the past. If these editors can be criticized for what they did, so can the Mayans, otherwise what is being done is actually insulting to the latter. Mayans and others in the past were human beings, ever bit as we are, and various moral standards are applicable to understanding how they conduct themselves, just as such standards apply to the editors and writers of Science News.
The intellectually fascinating feature of multiculturalism is just how incoherent it quickly becomes. If one fails to accept multiculturalism, well then one is acting badly; but if one accepts multiculturalism, then no one can be blamed for anything at all since from some, however obtuse, cultural standpoint any conduct can be “justified.”
It would be far more enlightened to figure out some basic standards of human morality and then apply them to any society and culture carefully. The nihilism of refusing to judge is simply unavoidable to us--even that refusal is a judgment and in need of rational support.
The multicultural stance exhibited by the Science News letter writer is not the only one that has the problem of incoherence, of course. All relativist positions face it, as do subjectivist ones. Implicit in all such purportedly tolerant and nonpartisan ethical positions is an intolerance of making moral judgments. Yet for some reason those who advocate these doctrines do not seem to realize it or hope that others won’t notice the problem.
I agree with one thing in the letter from Science News. Being glib can be dangerous when it comes to judging people. But it is also understandable that journalists would toy with glibness--after all they need to make their copy a good read, not simply accurate and relevant.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Wesley Snipes, A Victim
Tibor R. Machan
The actor Wesley Snipes, known mostly for so called “action pictures,” was reportedly sentenced to three years in prison, on tax evasion charges, on Thursday, April 24th. This was deemed to be victory for prosecutors by some in the media--so much for objective reporting--because prosecutors “sought to make an example of the action star by aggressively pursuing the maximum penalty.”
And there are those who argue that taxation is voluntary! Bah. It’s extortion and Snipes’ case demonstrates this quite clearly. “If you don’t pay us some of what you earn, we will destroy you.” That’s how extortionists announce themselves as does the tax man.
Of course Snipe is guilty of something. That is being naïve and imprudent. No one who isn’t it dire straits ought to go up against the government blindly, given how powerful it is (mainly because it can arm itself easily with all that money it has extorted from us). If you oppose taxes you are especially misguided to fail to pay up since you are likely to be watched. (Some of us of course don’t matter since we earn too little. Snipes obviously isn’t among those.)
The sentence handed down wasn’t anything related to justice, needless to say. It was a warning by the extortionist to all those who might be considering resisting the extortion. And this is clear from the prosecution’s reported intention to “make an example of the action star.”
Justice isn’t about making examples of the guilty but about punishing them for their crimes. If Snipes were really a criminal--if he were guilty of having violated the rights of some innocent people--there would be no concern about making an example of him. Genuine crimes need to be punished, lesson or no lesson. The role of criminal prosecutors isn’t to make examples of anyone but to convict people who are bona fide criminals. That is the end of it. Snipe’s case goes to show how arrogant are these folks who have the power and legal rationale backing their mendacious conduct.
My advice to the likes of Mr. Snipes is to keep paying but also start supporting all efforts to abolish taxation. As I have been pointing out for a long time, that public policy is akin to serfdom and belongs, with serfdom, in the age of feudalism where kings, queens, tsars, and other thugs lay claim to a country and everyone who lived there. Taxes were collected as payment for the “generous” privilege of living and working in these regions ruled by the thugs.
What has changed is that now the narrative laid out in support of governments extorting us is that we are paying it voluntarily, to ourselves (the government is, you see, us!). Sheer sophistry! In fact nothing but the form of rule has changed. Now it is “democratic,” meaning the majority gets to extort from anyone they want to. (If the majority were only interested in paying its way, there would be no need for taxation--those in the majority are plenty and could easily pay what they think they should.)
Every revolution is costly. Abolishing serfdom was, as was abolishing slavery. These all involved some people confiscating the lives and earnings of others too weak to defend against the thugs. Abolishing taxation will also take some sacrifices. And just as the lords of the serfs and the masters of slaves had to find some other way to get the work done that their victims were made to perform for them, so all of what taxes go to fund will need to be funded in proper, peaceful ways, without resort to extortion. Are there such ways? Well, when serfdom and slavery got abolished it was quickly discovered that paying people got the job done. Free labor amounted to paid labor. And productivity improved, too.
Taxation supports some functions of governments that are proper, even though paid for in criminal ways. Those functions can be funded without those criminal ways. Fees and such can cover the cost, as I have argued in several places (see my “No Taxation With or Without Representation, Completing the Revolutionary Break With Feudalist Practices” in Robert McGee, ed., Taxation and Public Finance in Transition and Developing Economies [New York: Springer, 2005]).
If a way to do something important is a moral abomination, a new way that’s not must be found. Sorry Mr. Snipes that you got caught up with all this. Most of the rest of us haven’t escaped either.
Tibor R. Machan
The actor Wesley Snipes, known mostly for so called “action pictures,” was reportedly sentenced to three years in prison, on tax evasion charges, on Thursday, April 24th. This was deemed to be victory for prosecutors by some in the media--so much for objective reporting--because prosecutors “sought to make an example of the action star by aggressively pursuing the maximum penalty.”
And there are those who argue that taxation is voluntary! Bah. It’s extortion and Snipes’ case demonstrates this quite clearly. “If you don’t pay us some of what you earn, we will destroy you.” That’s how extortionists announce themselves as does the tax man.
Of course Snipe is guilty of something. That is being naïve and imprudent. No one who isn’t it dire straits ought to go up against the government blindly, given how powerful it is (mainly because it can arm itself easily with all that money it has extorted from us). If you oppose taxes you are especially misguided to fail to pay up since you are likely to be watched. (Some of us of course don’t matter since we earn too little. Snipes obviously isn’t among those.)
The sentence handed down wasn’t anything related to justice, needless to say. It was a warning by the extortionist to all those who might be considering resisting the extortion. And this is clear from the prosecution’s reported intention to “make an example of the action star.”
Justice isn’t about making examples of the guilty but about punishing them for their crimes. If Snipes were really a criminal--if he were guilty of having violated the rights of some innocent people--there would be no concern about making an example of him. Genuine crimes need to be punished, lesson or no lesson. The role of criminal prosecutors isn’t to make examples of anyone but to convict people who are bona fide criminals. That is the end of it. Snipe’s case goes to show how arrogant are these folks who have the power and legal rationale backing their mendacious conduct.
My advice to the likes of Mr. Snipes is to keep paying but also start supporting all efforts to abolish taxation. As I have been pointing out for a long time, that public policy is akin to serfdom and belongs, with serfdom, in the age of feudalism where kings, queens, tsars, and other thugs lay claim to a country and everyone who lived there. Taxes were collected as payment for the “generous” privilege of living and working in these regions ruled by the thugs.
What has changed is that now the narrative laid out in support of governments extorting us is that we are paying it voluntarily, to ourselves (the government is, you see, us!). Sheer sophistry! In fact nothing but the form of rule has changed. Now it is “democratic,” meaning the majority gets to extort from anyone they want to. (If the majority were only interested in paying its way, there would be no need for taxation--those in the majority are plenty and could easily pay what they think they should.)
Every revolution is costly. Abolishing serfdom was, as was abolishing slavery. These all involved some people confiscating the lives and earnings of others too weak to defend against the thugs. Abolishing taxation will also take some sacrifices. And just as the lords of the serfs and the masters of slaves had to find some other way to get the work done that their victims were made to perform for them, so all of what taxes go to fund will need to be funded in proper, peaceful ways, without resort to extortion. Are there such ways? Well, when serfdom and slavery got abolished it was quickly discovered that paying people got the job done. Free labor amounted to paid labor. And productivity improved, too.
Taxation supports some functions of governments that are proper, even though paid for in criminal ways. Those functions can be funded without those criminal ways. Fees and such can cover the cost, as I have argued in several places (see my “No Taxation With or Without Representation, Completing the Revolutionary Break With Feudalist Practices” in Robert McGee, ed., Taxation and Public Finance in Transition and Developing Economies [New York: Springer, 2005]).
If a way to do something important is a moral abomination, a new way that’s not must be found. Sorry Mr. Snipes that you got caught up with all this. Most of the rest of us haven’t escaped either.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Wandering About the East Village
Tibor R. Machan
It was a very mild, pleasant Sunday afternoon and my older daughter and I were spending a couple of hours walking about in her New York City East Village neighborhood. After a bite of lunch we took in some of the shops, not so much to spend the required $20 I heard everyone is likely to part with once leaving home in this part of the world but to do what I like to call museum cruising. Yes, even when I have no interest in shopping, I do enjoy checking out all the goodies offered for sale in the hundreds of places that feature thousands of items that come from the commercial motives of people. Not just commercial motives, of course. A goodly portion of what's for sale is probably born out of a sense of creativity, with the idea of selling following as more of an afterthought. Like all those paintings and sculptures in Soho. Or the jewelry on display in the umpteen boutiques.
While I have no objection to malls and often use them, as I do other places of commerce, for purposes of spying on the creative genius of humanity, these little neighborhood market places in New York's innumerable corners are especially user friendly. I once lived in the City, back in the winter of 1965, when the great black-out occurred and I had to walk nearly a hundred blocks to attend classes at NYU every day of the week. Ever since then I have realized that New York's alleged tough guy reputation was a crock. Yes, when riding the subways few people smile at one another. Who has time and emotional energy for spreading oneself thin among the mass of humanity rushing about on the subway system?!
But when you visited small stores next to your apartment house in the West 80s or East 70s, a distinctive atmosphere of village life emerged and still does. Folks talk to each other easily, pleasantries are by no means shallow but specific to the interests of those who encounter each other while breakfasting, lunching, dining, shopping, looking for knickknacks or necessities.
At a plant store we entered, for example, the man who was helping my daughter find some herbs spotted the wristwatch I was wearing, a huge, black face/white hands Chottovellie e Figu number, made in Torino , so he brought out to show me his $18,000.00 diamond studded wristwatch he received from his girlfriend recently. We, total strangers, chatted it up a good bit and then said a friendly good bye.
One of the main objections to commerce, voiced by the likes of Karl Marx and his contemporary fans is that commerce is vile, or as Baudelaire says, "satanic," because it is egoistic, because it is motivate from self-interest. Commerce is also supposed to involve exploitation, alienation, fraud, trickery, and such, lacking in anything ennobling. What a crock all that is!
Instead, of course, even at its most ferocious commerce is mostly peaceful, civilized, and even friendly, albeit focused more on fulfilling one's own rather than other people's interests. Sure we all want to make a deal. But just as in competitive sports everyone would like to win even as most parties are good natured--"sportsmanlike"--so in the market place, unlike in politics and diplomacy, folks tend to keep in mind they are engaged with others human beings who share their own concern for getting ahead in life, for making a decent living. And this does not usually lead to resentment but to empathy.
On our walk about the East Village I just found it very encouraging that while Senators Obama and Clinton were showing the nasty fallout of even the most democratic of national politics, the commerce being conducted seems to have nothing of that kind of acrimony about it, quite the contrary. Not that there aren't people who can undermine the utter humanity of the free market place. No human institution is free of villains. But contrary to how the literati among us depict it, commerce does not seem to be filled with the least appealing of human tendencies, quite the contrary.
Tibor R. Machan
It was a very mild, pleasant Sunday afternoon and my older daughter and I were spending a couple of hours walking about in her New York City East Village neighborhood. After a bite of lunch we took in some of the shops, not so much to spend the required $20 I heard everyone is likely to part with once leaving home in this part of the world but to do what I like to call museum cruising. Yes, even when I have no interest in shopping, I do enjoy checking out all the goodies offered for sale in the hundreds of places that feature thousands of items that come from the commercial motives of people. Not just commercial motives, of course. A goodly portion of what's for sale is probably born out of a sense of creativity, with the idea of selling following as more of an afterthought. Like all those paintings and sculptures in Soho. Or the jewelry on display in the umpteen boutiques.
While I have no objection to malls and often use them, as I do other places of commerce, for purposes of spying on the creative genius of humanity, these little neighborhood market places in New York's innumerable corners are especially user friendly. I once lived in the City, back in the winter of 1965, when the great black-out occurred and I had to walk nearly a hundred blocks to attend classes at NYU every day of the week. Ever since then I have realized that New York's alleged tough guy reputation was a crock. Yes, when riding the subways few people smile at one another. Who has time and emotional energy for spreading oneself thin among the mass of humanity rushing about on the subway system?!
But when you visited small stores next to your apartment house in the West 80s or East 70s, a distinctive atmosphere of village life emerged and still does. Folks talk to each other easily, pleasantries are by no means shallow but specific to the interests of those who encounter each other while breakfasting, lunching, dining, shopping, looking for knickknacks or necessities.
At a plant store we entered, for example, the man who was helping my daughter find some herbs spotted the wristwatch I was wearing, a huge, black face/white hands Chottovellie e Figu number, made in Torino , so he brought out to show me his $18,000.00 diamond studded wristwatch he received from his girlfriend recently. We, total strangers, chatted it up a good bit and then said a friendly good bye.
One of the main objections to commerce, voiced by the likes of Karl Marx and his contemporary fans is that commerce is vile, or as Baudelaire says, "satanic," because it is egoistic, because it is motivate from self-interest. Commerce is also supposed to involve exploitation, alienation, fraud, trickery, and such, lacking in anything ennobling. What a crock all that is!
Instead, of course, even at its most ferocious commerce is mostly peaceful, civilized, and even friendly, albeit focused more on fulfilling one's own rather than other people's interests. Sure we all want to make a deal. But just as in competitive sports everyone would like to win even as most parties are good natured--"sportsmanlike"--so in the market place, unlike in politics and diplomacy, folks tend to keep in mind they are engaged with others human beings who share their own concern for getting ahead in life, for making a decent living. And this does not usually lead to resentment but to empathy.
On our walk about the East Village I just found it very encouraging that while Senators Obama and Clinton were showing the nasty fallout of even the most democratic of national politics, the commerce being conducted seems to have nothing of that kind of acrimony about it, quite the contrary. Not that there aren't people who can undermine the utter humanity of the free market place. No human institution is free of villains. But contrary to how the literati among us depict it, commerce does not seem to be filled with the least appealing of human tendencies, quite the contrary.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
What Are Taxes?
Tibor R. Machan
In the April 15th edition of The New York Times Richard Conniff suggests that what the government collects from us each year on or about this date be called "dues" instead of "taxes" ("Abolish All 'Taxes'”). As he puts it, "we need language to remind us that this is our government, and that we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other services that exist only because we have joined together."
Nice try but it won’t fly. First, many of those services would easily exist without government and in fact do. But, unlike with government’s “services,” they aren’t paid for by means of extortion. You know about extortion, at least from the movies, no? It is when someone promises you that unless you pay him or his organization a certain sum, you will be killed or maimed or your property will be burned down. And this was called by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “the price of civilization”!
Second, government tends to establish monopolies, so one reason it is difficult to get its “services” elsewhere is that it makes sure no one can provide them. Take first class mail! Only the US Postal Service may provide this! Or the issuance of passports.
Third, when one pays dues to, say, Costco, Sams, the health club or the gym, one may exercise the exit option--that is, stop going and paying--anytime one so decides. There may be some provision one needs to fulfill but only because one has agreed to do so in the first place. Taxes must be paid with no consent involved, with no exit option. One is born in a country and unless one stops being its citizen and leaves it, one must pay taxes. In fact, one must pay if one merely visits to do some business there.
Fourth, consider how taxes came to be in the first place. The ruler of the realm--king, tsar, Caesar, whoever--imposed it on those under his or her command in payment for the privilege of living and working what that ruler owned, namely, the country! “You live and work here, so you pay me!” That was when it was widely but mistakenly believed that the powerful who conquer a place are its rightful owners. But what the American revolution was about is the abolition of this ridiculous myth, that the government owns the country. Instead, it is private citizens who do--they have the right to private property (just as it is clearly implied in the U. S. Constitution). Government, in turn, is supposed to protect this among some other of the citizenry’s rights. Government is like a hired body guard, not a ruler, not in a free country at any rate.
In times when monarchies were the political norm--which is still the case in many places around the globe--ordinary people (“subjects”) lived by permission of the government! They had no right to their lives, liberty, pursuit of happiness, property or freedom of speech. Serfdom was widespread, meaning people were legally tied to the lands where they lived--they belonged to the ruler.
Renaming taxes “dues” isn’t going to change its nature as a form of legalized extortion. Mr. Conniff should know that a rose by any other name is still a rose and taxes by whatever euphemistic label one were to attach to them would still be taxes, the expropriation of resources by the rulers of the realm.
What other means could the few legitimate services of government be paid for? By the voluntary system of contract fees! All contracts, which are backed by law, would have a fee attached. But no one would be forced to get this backing, only it would be unwise not to do it. So there could be plenty to fund the strictly limited government that a free society should have. Not, of course, the bloated leviathan that we now have, one that has departed from the American Founders’ idea that governments are instituted to protect our rights!
What renaming taxes “dues” would accomplish is to prolong the time it will take to finally abolish this brutal feudal device from what is supposed to be a free country. The price of civilization my foot!
Tibor R. Machan
In the April 15th edition of The New York Times Richard Conniff suggests that what the government collects from us each year on or about this date be called "dues" instead of "taxes" ("Abolish All 'Taxes'”). As he puts it, "we need language to remind us that this is our government, and that we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other services that exist only because we have joined together."
Nice try but it won’t fly. First, many of those services would easily exist without government and in fact do. But, unlike with government’s “services,” they aren’t paid for by means of extortion. You know about extortion, at least from the movies, no? It is when someone promises you that unless you pay him or his organization a certain sum, you will be killed or maimed or your property will be burned down. And this was called by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “the price of civilization”!
Second, government tends to establish monopolies, so one reason it is difficult to get its “services” elsewhere is that it makes sure no one can provide them. Take first class mail! Only the US Postal Service may provide this! Or the issuance of passports.
Third, when one pays dues to, say, Costco, Sams, the health club or the gym, one may exercise the exit option--that is, stop going and paying--anytime one so decides. There may be some provision one needs to fulfill but only because one has agreed to do so in the first place. Taxes must be paid with no consent involved, with no exit option. One is born in a country and unless one stops being its citizen and leaves it, one must pay taxes. In fact, one must pay if one merely visits to do some business there.
Fourth, consider how taxes came to be in the first place. The ruler of the realm--king, tsar, Caesar, whoever--imposed it on those under his or her command in payment for the privilege of living and working what that ruler owned, namely, the country! “You live and work here, so you pay me!” That was when it was widely but mistakenly believed that the powerful who conquer a place are its rightful owners. But what the American revolution was about is the abolition of this ridiculous myth, that the government owns the country. Instead, it is private citizens who do--they have the right to private property (just as it is clearly implied in the U. S. Constitution). Government, in turn, is supposed to protect this among some other of the citizenry’s rights. Government is like a hired body guard, not a ruler, not in a free country at any rate.
In times when monarchies were the political norm--which is still the case in many places around the globe--ordinary people (“subjects”) lived by permission of the government! They had no right to their lives, liberty, pursuit of happiness, property or freedom of speech. Serfdom was widespread, meaning people were legally tied to the lands where they lived--they belonged to the ruler.
Renaming taxes “dues” isn’t going to change its nature as a form of legalized extortion. Mr. Conniff should know that a rose by any other name is still a rose and taxes by whatever euphemistic label one were to attach to them would still be taxes, the expropriation of resources by the rulers of the realm.
What other means could the few legitimate services of government be paid for? By the voluntary system of contract fees! All contracts, which are backed by law, would have a fee attached. But no one would be forced to get this backing, only it would be unwise not to do it. So there could be plenty to fund the strictly limited government that a free society should have. Not, of course, the bloated leviathan that we now have, one that has departed from the American Founders’ idea that governments are instituted to protect our rights!
What renaming taxes “dues” would accomplish is to prolong the time it will take to finally abolish this brutal feudal device from what is supposed to be a free country. The price of civilization my foot!
Monday, April 14, 2008
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?
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?
Sunday, April 13, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, April 11, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, April 04, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, March 24, 2008
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.
-------------------
*Machan is the author of, among other works, Human Rights and Human Liberties, A Radical Reconsideration of the American Political Tradition (1975).
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.
-------------------
*Machan is the author of, among other works, Human Rights and Human Liberties, A Radical Reconsideration of the American Political Tradition (1975).
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