Mandated Insurance

Tibor R. Machan

Is the just signed federal health care legislation constitutional? Is it consistent with the principles of a free society? Is it what President Obama claims, consistent with the principles of this country? No. The bill is a straightforward advance--progress???--toward socialism, akin to that familiar to us in the former Soviet colonies and some other societies that believe in the top down regimentation of everyones' life.

The central claim of socialists is that only society exists, not individuals who make it up. They are like cells in the body of the collective whole. We as individuals do not exist and claiming that we have the right to run our own lives is akin to one's finger or foot claiming it needs to be left free to do its own thing. Seriously--this is the real meat of socialism.

But there is less Draconian socialist measures being proposed, including in the recently signed bill. A favorite retort to criticism of the mandate for us to purchase health insurance is that, "What's the problem, we already have this with auto insurance in many states of the union." Indeed, there may well be some serious legal challenges forthcoming to the just signed health care legislation arguing that it is outright unconstitutional to force citizens to purchase insurance. It is as if there were a law require one to by apples to sandals or cars. That would really be a drastic violation of our right to liberty.

But don't states already do this when they require vehicle drivers to purchase insurance before they get on the road? So is there not a precedence to the new mandate?

In plain language, no. The reason is relatively simple. Most of the roads throughout the USA are government owned and administered. The government, in other words, owns the roads--or the citizens do with governments doing the managing, kind of like apartments are managed by other than the owners but with the latter's authorization. So, then, presumably the roads around the country belong to the citizenry and are managed, with their authorization, by the government (e.g., the Department of Motor Vehicles and such).

But as with apartments, so with roads: only the renters (drivers) are under the jurisdiction of management, not everyone. Only those who choose to drive on public roads are subject to the government's mandate that they carry car insurance (and whatever else, such as having their cars equipped with mirrors and bumpers). In short, only those using the roads must have the requisite insurance, not those who ride bicycles or walk or ride a horse on private property.

But that's not what's in store for Americans with the new socialist health care legislation. It forces them all to have insurance approved by the federal government, even if they would rather take different measures to deal with the prospects of ill health. Some may want to stash away some of their earnings and rely on this when they get sick. Some may choose to make sure they don't get sick too often, at least not very sick, by taking exceptionally good care of themselves. Some may not mind getting sick and dying from it, given how much they prefer their hazardous life style (rightly or wrongly, as free men and women should be able to). Some may even believe that relying on physicians violates their religions liberty and is immoral--some Christian Scientists, I am told, hold this view--so they ought not to buy, let alone made to buy, health insurance as a matter of the religious freedom.

Bottom line is that the idea of coercing people to insure themselves is anything but compassionate, anything but humane, anything but constitutional in a free country. It amounts, plainly said, to involuntary servitude to some other people's vision of how one ought to live. That is not what a free society is all about.

Not that most Americans aren't already being coerced into supporting various measures of which they morally disapprove--like wars, like abortion for some, like funding other people's welfare and education. So the outrage with the current advance toward socialism is phony in a great many instances. But there is no justification for believing that requiring drivers to carry insurance serves as a precedence for forcing them to buy health insurance. Apples versus oranges.

Political Crime

Tibor R. Machan

Despite all efforts to deny it, by philosophers, natural scientists, and psychologists, there is little doubt that human beings have free will. That is one way they are so different from the rest of the world.

The impetus to deny free will is not difficult to appreciate. For many people nothing would be more convenient than to reduce everything in the world to just one kind of stuff. It used to be atoms; then it was matter-in-motion; later some more complicated subatomic stuff took front and center; today the candidate that is getting some traction is strings. But the basic message is always the same: the world is made of just one kind of stuff (like we are all made up of dust).

This idea has its advantages. If it is true, then one need but learn just one science, that of the stuff of which the world is made. No need for different disciplines like chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, ethics and such. Just one principle of motion will do the trick since everything is the same. Differences among things are an illusion. And the same causal principle drives it all, so no need to figure what makes different things tick in, say, chemistry or biology, as if there were different kinds of things making up reality.

The evidence doesn't support this view. Just check around and see if everything is the same. Major differences are observable between, say, rocks and fish, birds and lions, people and donkeys and so on and so forth. Lumping them all together seems to me the lazy way to study them.

Now if there are genuine, bona fide differences among things in the world, it would not be odd at all that human beings are different in the important respect that they can exercise a unique capacity of free will, to direct their own conduct by their own initiative. Apart from the fact that this is very difficult to deny even as we discuss the issue--how would one explain all the different ways people behave, believe, hope, wish, etc?--it also makes sense of how differently we see the free will issue. What other plant or animal has such a wide variety of opinions, religions, politics, and so on, on some topic? This is best explained by the postulation of human freedom of thought.

Now why is this important just now? Because our free will also makes it understandable that people are able to be good and bad and move along the continuum between those two opposites. And this applies to their politics, not only ethics. We are witnessing it every day as we learn of crimes being committed all around the globe, throughout human history, with no progress in stemming it in any significant measure. Both immorality and illegality testify to the basic human capacity to choose between doing what is right versus what is wrong, whatever the details.

Not only that but this capacity needs to be kept in mind as we understand political ups and downs in various societies.

As a case in point, take socialism. It is a vile political system, a grand one-side-fits all regime, with a few "leaders"--would be tyrants--running the show for all the great variety of individuals who really need to be free to direct their own lives for better or worse. But now, socialists, one group of political criminals, keep attempting to ride rough shod over everyone. (They aren't the only ones but one of the most active current crop, ruining Greece, France, as well as much of Latin and North America.) They will make some headway, just as often criminals will succeed in violating victims and getting away with it with impunity. In Eastern Europe these criminals lorded it over millions, with catastrophic results, for the better part of the 20th century--both the national and international socialist varieties. Today we have some of them still in full power, in North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, but elsewhere their failure at doing any good at all has become evident. Still, as with criminals, they keep trying again and again.

In the U.S.A. they have not had much success nor, however, have they disappeared, no more so than have ordinary criminals vanished. For now the socialists are back with a vengeance, taking over a larger and larger portion of American culture. And one needs to remember that even criminals are not uniformly evil--some love dogs, some may even be decent parents or fine bowlers, you name it. But in essence they are corrupt human beings and so are socialists, when it comes to political ideas and ideals.

The only remedy is that old standby of eternal vigilance. The human spirit isn't going to permanently conquer political crime, any more than the other kind. But it may make progress toward justice and liberty in a sort of roller coaster fashion. I am ready for the next upward swing, big time.

Sad Times in America

Tibor R. Machan

Graig Furgeson, the late late-night host on CBS-TV, makes a little remark each weekday night to the effect, "It's a great day for America." I don't really get it, I confess, since if it were a great day for America each day, regardless of the details, it would be pretty meaningless to say so. But these days it is especially ridiculous to make such a claim. (I have taken the show off my automatic record instructions on my TiVo because of this, actually, and because I really don't much like TV these days other than for a few shows and movies.)

As someone who immigrated here from a communist country where health care was deemed a free good, and a free entitlement and where the system went bankrupt eventually so no one had anything to show for all the promises made, I find it scandalous that this myth of health care as a right--as if health care professionals could all be drafted harmlessly into involuntary servitude to us all--has managed to survive and even grow. Yes, it might be a swell thing if what we want in life could be obtained free of charge, if everyone could work to produce all the goods and services wanted from them at no cost to anyone, if dreams and fantasies were reality but, come to think of it, I am not sure this is even a desirable fantasy. It has certainly been a horrible reality wherever it has been attempted since it means, in practice, that both goods and services promised at no charge to the vast numbers who apparently actually believe it could happen will in time run out for everyone except the most clever of us, the ones who can game the system for a little while.

Many moons ago, when I was going to graduate school in California, a new welfare measure was instituted with the announced intention of wanting to help out the poor and disadvantaged who wish to get a graduate degree. No sooner was the program announced and set into motion, it became evident that only the smart and already reasonably well healed will gain from it--means testing had been declared illegal, so there was no way to tell who really might need the help and could make good use of it versus all those who would just try to cash in on a new entitlement that they could obtain at other people's expense. It was a clear case of socialism at work--promise to benefit all who had a need but put up with the fact that the resources will be squandered in a classic instance of the tragedy of the commons.

Of course, complaining about the forthcoming health care-health insurance entitlement system as if it were the first step on the way to socialism--which is how Utah's Republican Senator Orin Hatch characterized it--is absurd. From its beginning America had various welfare measures which, however, hadn't done immediate damage other than establish the precedence so objections to such measures could not be made on principle any longer. But the trend has been on the rise all along.

The realistic promise that America initially offered, in the terms sketched in the Declaration of Independence--namely, that everyone would be free to work hard for the values that make life possible and flourish--seems to be dying and along with it the optimistic outlook on the world's future, which is slowly disappearing except in some spots where the principles America was founded upon are beginning to be taken seriously. Frankly, it won't matter much to me directly now--I am getting a tad old--but my children and grandchildren will have to cope with the misery of it all.

What I am hoping is that they will be clever and prudent enough to deal with the mess that's coming down the pike until things turn around again sometime but certainly many will not be able to do so and that's going to be what all this phony socialist, "progressive" politicking will have wrought.

Is the U. S. Self-Interested?

Tibor R. Machan

It baffles me why so many people are apologetic about the U. S. having a self-interested foreign policy. When President Obama recently declared that the U. S. "is not a self-interested empire," the part about being self-interested, pace Obama, sounded just right to me. (It is the "empire" portion that would be disturbing since an empire is a country that aims needlessly to lord it over other countries.) Being self-interested could mean no more than being vigilant in the defense of one's country, making sure it is safe from invasion or attack.

Who can dispute that self-defense is self-interested? Of course, with the prominence of altruism among intellectuals and public figures, it is probably no great surprise that Mr. Obama would reject characterizing American foreign policy as self-interested. "Selfish" has this bad odor about it and has had that since when philosophers, theologians and psychologists have decided that the human self is something malign.

At one time, of course, it used to be a good thing for one to be self-interested. I am thinking of ancient Greece where both Socrates, as presented by his pupil Plato, and later Aristotle defended self-interest and self-love, respectively. That's because the ancient Greeks tended to view human nature favorably, not as innately tending toward evil, something that became more in vogue later in the history of Western thought. Both religious and secular thinking veered off in this misanthropic direction in part through the doctrine of original sin and then with Thomas Hobbes' idea that everyone is basically motivated by a fierce passion for power, including, especially, power over other persons. If that is indeed what the human self aims for, then no wonder it doesn't have a sterling reputation and selfishness or being self-interested no longer amounts to something honorable as Socrates thought it was.

Yet even in our time something of the ancient Greek attitude remains in play. Just notice how often people say "You take care now" or "Take care of yourself" as their parting words to each other. I have been noticing this for many years and just a few days ago it was in evidence again as I watched some saying farewell. No hesitation at all: Go and make sure you do well for yourself! So self-interest, prudence, taking care of oneself cannot be taken to be all that bad by most of us, even though the sentiment isn't given much support among those who write on morality and public policy, including American foreign affairs.

For some it is just a matter of cynical realism to accept that a country's foreign policy will be dictated by its international interests. But is this something one must apologize for or even deny, as Mr. Obama apparently feels necessary to do?

Only if self-interested conduct, including in matters of diplomacy and military policy, must be reckless. But must it be? Does one's country really benefit from a reckless, loose cannon foreign or military policy? No. Properly conceived and undertaken self-interested foreign and military policy, just as personal conduct, needs to be decent, guided by virtues or moral principles. Indeed, as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others have maintained--but recently with only a few such as Ayn Rand and quite a few psychotherapists joining them--the virtues are necessary to advance one's proper self-interest. Morality for these thinkers is about making it possible to succeed in one's human life, doing well at living as a human individual. It includes the virtues of prudence, honesty, moderation, temperance, courage, and such but also generosity, compassion, and even charity when it is needed. Only with these virtues in full display in one's life will someone accomplish that most vital task in of being morally good, being a good person.

The same, it can be argued, applies to foreign and, especially, military affairs. A country's foreign policy must not aim for martyrdom, for self-sacrifice. Thus, putting this into practice, General George C. Patton Jr. is supposed to have told his troop, "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.

Democracy and Liberty

Tibor R. Machan

The point deserves to be made over and over: majorities have no just authority to trump individual rights! That old dependable standby of the lynch mob is a perfect illustration of this. Just because the whole town wants to hang the suspect, it doesn't follow that it would be right to do so. The sheriff will defend the process due the accused because justice demands it. Why? Because no one may be punished or indeed imposed upon without it first having been demonstrated that the punishment or imposition is justified, deserved, or warranted.

Of course, this line of thinking takes it as a fact that individuals and their basic rights matter most than the popular will. Yet that should not be very difficult to grasp. So another old saying has it wrong--50 millions frenchmen can indeed be wrong! Millions of Nazis and communists and people around the globe with all kinds of superstitions can be and are wrong.

However, if one is wrong within one's own sphere of authority, on one's own property for example, or in one's own religious or philosophical convictions, that's no one else's business to fix except perhaps one's best friend or a family member who cares and would nudge one in the right direction. But being wrong is an individual right! The US Constitution attests to this with its First Amendment which certainly protects everyone who may be wrong about religion or other matters of belief.

Individual rights apply to all, including, especially, to those in the minority. In a bona fide free country one is free to be and do what one choses provided this doesn't impose on others something they do not deserve coming to them. So when someone doesn't want to carry health insurance, that is something he or she has a perfect right to do. (The example of car insurance is a bad one since the roads are government run, so the government may make the rules for who may or may not use them. One's body and health doesn't belong to the government!)

A few years ago the journalist and Newsweek International's editor Fareed Zakaria published a book, The Future of Freedom in which he worked out a pretty good set of criteria for which countries are liberal and which are illiberal democracies. I think he was too easy on some topics so he allowed for a lot more democratic meddling in people's lives than is justified, morally or politically. Nonetheless, the distinction Zakaria worked with is a very instructive one. When democracy intrudes on individual liberty, it is wrong--it amounts to mob rule, period, however civilized it may appear to be. But when democracy operates without such intrusiveness, it is a permissible method (though not always the soundest) for making decisions in small or large groups.

The American Founders identified every human being as equal in respect of having certain unalienable rights, among them to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This pretty much amounts to the best guide as to what may not be done to the citizens of a country--their lives, liberty and their choice of what is important to them may not be voted on. It is for them to decide and no one else, other than as advisors or consultants or teachers. Certainly not as daddies or nannies, even if they are in the majority. As the US Supreme Court once ruled, "One’s right to life, liberty, and property . . . and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections." (U. S. Supreme Court 319 U. S. 62, 638)

It is in fact a quintessential feature of the American political tradition, this insistence on individual rights, something that irks so many rulers and their apologists across the globe and even here in the U.S.A. The fact that everyone has these rights is clearly the greatest bulwark against tyranny. Sadly, this element of the American political tradition has never been fully accepted even in America, let alone elsewhere, so one must constantly be vigilant in opposition to those who would ignore it, from the Right or the Left or indeed any circle of enthusiasts who want to ride roughshod over us.

The Free Market of Ideas

Tibor R. Machan

As my career in academia winds down, hopefully not too rapidly, I reflect on just how odd it is that in the United States of America, the leaders of which often boast of being the freest country in human political history, most of education is the province of government. It is like it is in too many other countries across the globe which, however, do not claim to be leaders of the free world. And certainly it is a shame that in the U. S. A. such a vital element of culture as education is mostly directed, ultimately, by politicians and their appointees. Thus we have the scandalous spectacle of the textbook fights in Texas, the various battles about creationism or ID versus the theory or theories of natural selection, prayers versus secularism in the public schools, etc., and so forth.

Consider, in contrast, a sphere of culture in the country that is mostly free of government interference, magazine (or book and newspaper) publishing. (There are some others, such as religion and the production of various, though by no means all, consumer goods.) When one walks by a magazine rack in a book or drug store or a kiosk, one witnesses genuine freedom on display. Hundreds of different, often competing, publications in innumerable areas such as science, art, politics, culture and the rest are available to us. One can select from these what one finds most appealing, most instructive, most sound, most entertaining and no one from the government is authorized to force one to pay for or subscribe to any of them. Nor, and this is most important, are there any government bodies debating what should be the content in these publications, what editorial policies they ought to have, what writers they must feature or exclude. It is all--or mostly all, except when it concerns public libraries--a matter of how it comes out from the free market process. Unlike it was in the Soviet Union and its colonies, in the United States and many other countries when it comes to ideas, the free market is where decisions are made, independent of what the government might prefer.

A few weeks ago, as an example of how this works, I decided not to renew my subscription to a magazine I have been reading regularly for several decades. It is concerned with reporting the latest developments in the hard sciences and written accessibly to lay readers like me. However, over time I have noticed that the editors have included more and more political commentary, pushing a certain agenda for the government to pursue in science-funding and even in which theory is the best on in some fields of science. I found this unwelcome, so I stopped getting the magazine and subscribed, instead, to a different one that has a similar mission, namely, of informing readers about developments in the natural sciences. There are several such publications on the market and others are free to select ones for themselves different from what I have.

This is also what is possible in the realm of religious worship--one may join a church or leave one with no one from government telling one what one must do. But not so with education, not at the primary, secondary or higher education levels, although with somewhat different types of interference in place. But in all cases, citizens are legally required to support the government run institutions, be they elementary schools, high schools, colleges or universities administered by the various governments across the land. Even the federal government is involved, what with various military schools it runs and the huge sums of monies it hands out in research grants and scholarships, all paid for by citizens who have no choice but to fund what the government decides should be funded.

It may be pretty early in America's experiment with a reasonably free country, given that throughout human history in most regions of the globe governments have run nearly everything, extorting the funds needed for this from citizens (subjects!) who have only very limited powers to give them direction. It would seem, however, that part of that experiment should by now extend to education, just as it is so clearly manifest in the publishing sphere. Here is a part of culture that addresses the human mind and if there is anywhere that government ought to have zero influence it is precisely here. Coercion and thought to do mix at all. A free mind is essential to a flourishing, humane society and government run and administered education is anathema to this, just as would be government run and administered magazine, newspaper or book publishing, or religious worship.

Texas Textbook Troubles

Tibor R. Machan

In my own field of work, university education, there are a great many who scoff at the idea of privatization, something that is exactly how a free society should handle all education from primary to post graduate schools. There is no excuse for government to be responsible for educating young people or anyone else for that matter. Not only is it destructive of educational impartiality to entrust schools to governments--only if there is variety can impartiality be at least approximated--but the threat of out and out indoctrination is most real when one monolithic agency, with the power to coercively collect funds for its operations and conscript its students, runs "education."

Yes, thousands of professor and teachers want the government to be in charge but after this has been accomplished, as it has for a couple of centuries throughout America and elsewhere, there is no escaping the turf fight that takes over educational policy, especially when it comes to such courses as history, civics, and even biology and the textbooks teachers are required to use in them.

In a free and open society there will be a great variety of ways that people, even the most highly educated ones, will see the country's history, especially when it comes to politics and economics, as well as whatever other disciplines study. Few Americans could miss the current fracas about whether, for example, the New Deal was a valuable or destructive policy of the federal government. Yes, even Prohibition, with its bloody history, has its defenders. A good many scholars and citizens in general find themselves in different camps about the civil war, so much so that there is much controversy even about whether it should have as its name "Civil War" or "The War between the States." Innumerable other topics covered in various elementary, high school and college courses are fraught with controversies among sincere minded citizens and scholars--no one could miss the battles fought over the nature of biological evolution.

The idea that one can simply override all this with some kind of governmental policy--as it is being tried right now in Texas where there is a fight brewing among those who have their agendas concerning what should be taught to students in all sorts of subjects--is absurd. One need not be a subscriber to post-modernism--with its claim that there is no objective reality at all and the world as all in the eye of the beholder (be this in history, English literature, philosophy, or government studies)--in order to admit that there are many seriously divergent educated opinions and beliefs in what is the truth of the matter in a discipline. And in a free society the way this is supposed to be dealt with and acknowledged is by making it possible for all of them to compete in the marketplace of ideas without even a whiff of government intrusion (i.e., censorship).

No such marketplace can exist, however, if government education dominates, as it does everywhere in the country. The United States of America is practically not much different from the old Soviet Union or the current North Korea when it comes to how young people are being educated--they basically get some politically palatable stories, some banal compromises reached within the halls of government, instead of the outcome of scholarly and academic conferences where the different sides of the various controversies are presented and from which scholars return to their classrooms throughout the academic landscape and proceed to teach what they earnestly believe students should learn. What some of them will teach will dismay, even outrage, certain others; although often teachers know well and good how to give different sides a fair presentation and thus make it possible for their pupils to arrive at answers of their own.

But this cannot go on with government ordering what is to be taught and what the textbooks must contain. The wielding of political power in the field of education is no less insidious than it would be for government to run the profession of journalism, the publication of books and magazines, and so forth. None of that is acceptable in a genuine free country. Nor should government-run schools be.

Is Quality Health Care a Fundamental Right?

Tibor R. Machan

In a famous essay, published in the July 27 2009, issue of Newsweek magazine, the late Senator Ted Kennedy reiterated a message with which he has come to be very closely associated. As he wrote in that essay, "This is the cause of my life. It is a key reason that I defied my illness last summer to speak at the Democratic convention in Denver—to support Barack Obama, but also to make sure, as I said, 'that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American…will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not just a privilege.' For four decades I have carried this cause—from the floor of the United States Senate to every part of this country. It has never been merely a question of policy; it goes to the heart of my belief in a just society. Now the issue has more meaning for me—and more urgency—than ever before. But it's always been deeply personal, because the importance of health care has been a recurrent lesson throughout most of my 77 years."

The idea that health care and other welfare measures are fundamental rights everyone has goes back a couple of centuries. I believe it was the English philosopher T. H. Green who first articulated it (in his "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract"):

"We shall probably all agree that freedom, rightly understood, is the greatest of blessings; that its attainment is the true end of all our efforts as citizens. But when we thus speak of freedom, we should consider carefully what we mean by it. We do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion. We do not mean merely freedom to do as we like irrespective of what it is that we like. We do not mean a freedom that can be enjoyed by one man or one set of men at the cost of a loss of freedom to others. When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others. We mean by it a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them. When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the members of the society to be endowed; in short, by the greater power on the part of the citizens as a body to make the most and best of themselves."

The position Green lays out in this passage is the foundation underlying the late senator's view on health care as a fundamental right. Green himself was what came to be referred to as a right wing Hegelian, although this particular passage is actually more aligned with left wing political theory. In that theory human beings are viewed as prisoners of their circumstances. The poor are unable to rise from poverty unless they are liberated by the government or state, unless they are supplied with the tools by which they can escape their poverty, and the supplier of those tools are seen as governments because they are in possession of the power to make things happen. Certainly civilians, too, can help with this but unless they are forced to make the required provisions, the freedom to which the poor are entitled will be a matter merely of privilege based on generosity or philanthropy.

The crucial premise in all this is that unless people are moved by powerful agents out of their unfavorable circumstances, they will remain there, period. The poor, disadvantaged, sick, underprivileged, and so forth have no power of their own. Protecting their right to liberty as envisioned in classical liberal or libertarian political theory, as laid out by John Locke and the American founders, just won't help them at all. They need provisions, support, from other people. Since that is their only means of escape, they must receive it from the only source capable of securing it for them, namely, the government.

When the American founders spoke of government's task to secure the rights of the citizens, they had in mind the negative rights, rights not to be interfered with, the rights Green finds inadequate to the task at hand. As Green put it, by the right to freedom or liberty "We [meaning he and his allies] do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion." No, "We mean by it a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them."

Yet not even this tells the full story because it suggests that such power may be given to those who require it, as a matter of the free choice of those who can give it. No, if it is a proper fundamental right, it must be secured from those who can secure it as a matter of a legal mandate, just as the right to negative liberty must be. It isn't a matter of other people's generosity or kindness that they must respect one's right to one's life, liberty and property and neither is this so concerning their right to such provisions as health care, not at least in Green's political thought. So, then, it isn't optional but mandatory that positive rights be protected; so governments or whatever agency is responsible for upholding the laws of the land may use force to make sure that these rights are secure. And for Green and his followers, including the late Senator Ted Kennedy and President Barrack Obama the same thing holds true about positive rights such as the supposed right to health care.

Now the big problem with this is that while respect for another's right to life or liberty requires nothing more from someone than to abstain from killing (or assaulting or kidnapping) that individual while respecting the right to, say, health care requires actual work from health care professionals or those who will be required to pay their salaries. And that amounts to placing these providers into involuntary servitude.

However valuable it is for those who need it to receive health care or insurance, it is impermissible to treat those who can provide such care and insurance to be coerced into doing so. The protection of positive rights, so called, amounts to nothing less than a policy of forced labor--not different from slavery, actually--something that is completely wrong, entirely impermissible, regardless of how much others may benefit from it, how urgent their need is for it. And it also misunderstands human nature since it denies that the poor can escape poverty on their own initiative. That is plainly false.

Big Lie Theory Flourishes

Tibor R. Machan

The theory of the big (but good) lie goes back to a certain reading of Plato's most famous dialogue, the Republic. There are more or less crude versions of it but the gist of the theory is that for reasons of state--that is, so as to secure the chance of the ruler to rule smoothly--telling lies can be justified and may even be necessary. Indeed, the big lie could well have been the very idea of the perfect political system itself that Socrates sketched in that dialogue, one that really amounts to a utopia, an impossible blueprint for a human community and its basic principles. Some have concluded from this that Plato (Socrates) never meant to advocate what the dialogue depicts as the perfect regime but merely presented it as a kind of model, the way that the gorgeous women on the covers of Vogue or other fashion magazines function, just reminders of what to pay attention to as women dress up.

But ever since Plato appeared to make the big lie respectable in politics, quite a few regimes have made use of it. And in our era no less seems to be the tactic, at least for the cheerleaders of more government planning who routinely appear on the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. As a case in point, check out the article by Alan Tonelson and Kevin L. Kearns "Trading Away Productivity" (March 6, 2010). The gist of the piece is nothing less than the defense of international economic protectionism, a policy thoroughly discredited by now except for diehards desperate to keep their establishment and industry intact at the expense of domestic consumers and foreign competitors. Nothing new here--every politician is tempted to offer to square the circle; just watch how in Washington nearly everyone believes that one can indeed get blood out of a turnip and pay for goodies with, well, nothing.

What is far more egregious than the advocacy of defunct theories, defunct at least since the time of Adam Smith, is the premise with which these authors begin their discussion. What they say is, well, a big lie, although for The Times it is routine by now, what with the leadership of hyper-Keynesian Paul Krugman on their pages when it comes to political economy. They state, clearly without any hesitation, that "For a quarter-century, American economic policy has assumed that the keys to durable national prosperity are deregulation, free trade and a swift transition to a post-industrial, services-dominated future." There is no truth to this claim at all.

American economic policy--and it pains me to even refer to such a thing, since a government isn't supposed to mess with its citizen's economic (any more than their religious) lives, not to mention make policy for them all--has been protectionist in nearly every age. Indeed, such protectionism is often held to explain some of the anger of the Japanese at America that precipitated the invasion at Pearl Harbor and the ensuing bloody war in the Pacific. Administration after administration has tried to boost the fortunes of American businesses and labor by way of imposing duties on foreign imports, be this is steel, cars, shoes, textiles, and innumerable other goods. The means by which obstacles to honest trade were implemented are various--sometimes outright tariffs or duties, sometimes phony requirements that manufacturers needed to meet before their product would qualify for importation, thus making it very expensive to import and to buy the products.

I recall that back in the 1980s I was teaching for a while in Switzerland and I ran across the nifty used vehicle I naively considered purchasing and bringing back with me to drive in the US. When I inquired about how to do this, it was made clear to me that no such deal was possible since cars built for European roads by European manufacturers lack the kind of "safety" features the US government insists cars built in the US must include. Why? No reason except that this makes it simple to kept those European cars out of the American market and gave Detroit a leg up in the effort to stay in business, never mind the demand for its products by American consumers. (You can see now how well this worked in the long run!)

This same story could be repeated several thousand times. They all put the lie to the claim made by Tonalson and Kearns about American economic policy having favored free trade. But there is more.

As to government regulations, the increase of these for American businesses over the years as been stupendous. This and many of the claims of these authors can be seen as big lies in a very informative essay written a while back by David Boaz of the Cato Institute, titled "The Truth of Milton Friedman" (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/04/21/the-truth-about-milton-friedman/). The essay exposes Tonalson and Kearns' lies and the many others circulating these days about how America has been in the grips of market fundamentalism, of an economic policy of laissez-faire and free trade, successfully promoted by the late Dr. Friedman. What bunk.

America has always, from its beginning, been a mixed economy and the mixture is now markedly lopsided toward government interference, including thousands and thousands of pages of government regulations which keep increasing year by year. (And, no, Ronald Reagan didn't reverse this trend!) But the big lie and the big liars will not hear of any of this and keep cheering on as the American government moves farther and farther away from even a semblance of a free market system.

Property Rights and Gun Rights

Tibor R. Machan

Over the years the distinction between public and private spaces has become obscured. Which is why Starbucks is finding it so difficult to insist that customers do not carry weapons while in their establishment. It is because over the last several decades a doctrine of public accommodation has developed in the law such that when some area is adjacent to a public sphere—a street or road or park—it no longer enjoys private property rights, the authority to determine what happens there.

It all came about because of the impatience with racially discriminatory merchants and costumers. If they were understood as having firm private property rights, they would have to have their racist practices protected by law, which the courts were unwilling to sanction (unlike the protection of porn!). In particular, in a decision by the United States Supreme Court, handed down invalidating a law enacted by referendum in California pertaining to the right of people to sell their property to whomever they choose, Justice Byron White explained that the California law (Art. I, Sec. 26) enacted via Proposition 14 (in 1964) "authorized private discrimination," even though, he added dubiously, only "encouraging, rather than commanding" it. (Actually it only tolerated it!) He added:

The right to discriminate, including the right to discriminate on racial grounds, was now embodied in the state's basic charter, immune from legislative, executive, or judicial regulation at any level of the state government.

And for him, a loyal modern liberal justice, that was unacceptable! Yet that is exactly what is entailed in the notion of a right—its exercise, wisely or unwisely, is shielded from others' interference. Justice White himself made this evident, albeit disapprovingly, when he observed: “Those practicing racial discrimination need no longer rely solely on their personal choice. They could now invoke express constitutional authority, free from censure or interference of any kind from official source". And what's wrong with that? Its the same with everything else objectionable the constitution protects, such a flag burning.

Notice that by prohibiting racial discrimination as a matter of legal mandate, the court removed the issue from the realm of morality or ethics. How could one freely make a personal choice to discriminate (or not) if government has the legitimate power to stop one from discriminating not as a government official but as a private citizen, within one's private domain? If I want to restrict the potential buyers of my home to only Mormons or White Protestants or Hungarian refugees, that ought to be my business, no one else's. But no, the Supreme Court of the supposedly freest country of the world chose to prohibit bad choices by its citizens. That is exactly like censorship by the government, plain and simple. And recall how so many American commentators were appalled at how Muslims reacted to the Danish cartoons that made fun of Islam! For Muslims what the cartoonists and the papers that published them did was every bit as awful as racial discrimination was to Justice White and his colleagues on the Supreme Court.

Now back to Starbucks and gun rights. Turns out that because the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects individual Americans who want to own and carry firearms, this now means Starbucks isn't free to decided about whether its costumers may do so in its coffee shops. Why? Because these shops are "affected with the public interest," because they are located on streets which are public spheres and because government regulates them. Here are proprietors who want to apply their own, possibly sound standards of safety within the establishment they own and aren't permitted to do so because, well, the property is no longer deemed to be really theirs at all but part of the public sphere (square).

Slowly and surely everything in the country will come under public—that is, government—jurisdiction, treated as if it were a courthouse or some other sphere where public administration goes on. The logic of the slippery slope is inescapable here. Moreover, if public officials make bad decisions, they will drag the entire country down since there will not be any private sphere left where those like the owners of Starbucks could institute practices that could well make better sense than what the public officials insist everyone must adopt.

One of the ways a free society deals with dubious practices by private citizens is to protect the liberty of those who find fault with such practices to protest, including by refusing to allow them in their own private spheres such as their places of business. But because this principled approach does not immediately do away with some of the despicable practices of the citizenry, such as racism in commerce, the eager beavers have now thrown the baby out with the bathwater, sacrificed individual liberty for the sake of coerced decency. This is exactly like when others abandon liberty for the sake of security. Plague on them both

AGW Science and due process

Tibor R. Machan

A powerful and vital aspect of the fully free society would be that only those burdens may be imposed on citizens that they have been convincingly shown, via due process of law, to deserve. This is roughly how the criminal law works. This is why the prosecution carries the onus of proof and not the defense--all the defense (the skeptic!) needs to do is point out serious holes in the case being mounted by the prosecution and the jury will acquit.

In contrast, when in the old Soviet Union a police officer suspected someone of criminal activity, this would pretty much close the case and the accused would have to try to do something awfully difficult, namely, prove a negative: "I am not guilty."

The New York Times reports in a recent issue that AGW--anthropogenic global warming--scientists are beginning to mount a defense of their work in light of the growing skepticism that follows some of the recent (more or less serious) malpractice by some of them. As The Times presents the story, some of the scientists are pretty much baffled by the persistent skepticism. They appear to believe that their education, research, and academic credentials should suffice to make the case for what they earnestly believe.

This suggests that the protesting scientists share the attitude with the police officers of the former Soviet Union--a suspect is guilty until proven innocent. These--though by no means all--scientists appear to want the skeptics to conclusively disprove AGW.

But in a debate about the AGW hypothesis it isn't the doubters who owe the proof, just as in a court of criminal law (as noted above) it is not the defense that owes the proof but the prosecution. And this is quite sensible: the assertion that someone has done the crime is provable if true since there is a reality corresponding to it; the assertion that someone hasn't done the crime is not except for showing that the case in support of guilt is weak, not true beyond a reasonable doubt. (Proving negatives is only possible once the argument for the positive is in place, otherwise on is shooting in the dark!)

What the scientists need to realize is that a sizable portion of the public holds to the idea: the onus of proof is on those asserting the AGW theory. And it needs to be a solid proof at that since the consequences of accepting it imply Draconian burdens to be imposed on the public, burdens no one ought to suffer unless there is powerful proof that it is deserved.

Al Gore & Co. are very enthusiastic about imposing these burdens not just on Americans and other citizens of developed countries but on virtually everyone across the globe, even those whose chances to finally emerging out of poverty will be severely undermined by them. Given the prospect of such public policy consequence, the pro-AGW scientists simply must realize that many of us don't want a plausible theory, not even a probably true one. What we want is something that nails the case firmly, without any reasonable doubt left. But this of course the scientists haven't managed to produce and there is evidence that among them there are quite a few skeptics--e.g., reportedly among physicists. In other words the pro-AGW scientists need to realize that they don't run the show and cannot expect to lord it over the rest of us merely because they have a strong suspicion about AGW. That will not suffice for free men and women, not by a long shot.

Perhaps it is a sign of the waning influence of the classical liberal political and legal tradition that we are witnessing with these scientists insisting that their current case alone should suffice and we need all comply, never mind reasonable doubt. That would be a devastating development for it could establish a precedent that is completely antithetical to how a government in a free country must treat the citizenry. It would, in short, begin to usher in dictatorship. I doubt even scientists confident of their belief in AGW want something like that to happen.

What is the Public Interest?

Tibor R. Machan

In the midst of the current orgy of capitalism-bashing, unleashed by those who earnestly believe that they should be directing the buying and selling activities of the public, there is once again a good deal of talk about how we must all serve the public interest and forget about our own selfish goals. Just a few days ago Al Gore went on a demagogical frenzy, denouncing "market triumphalism" and lamenting the perfectly sensible concern that "Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carr[y] a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated" (i.e., Soviet socialism). He even asserted, without a scintilla of proof, that the Cold War victory of democratic capitalism--which means, the mixed economy over a dictatorially planned one--"led, in the United States, to a hubristic 'bubble' of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere."

Of course, no such thing happened at all. Ever since its inception the United States has been a mixed system. One need but remember that even among the Founders there was a vehement debate about how centralized the U. S. government should be, with Alexander Hamilton leading the statist faction and Thomas Jefferson those who favored less concentration of power.

In other words, to quote Ronald Reagan, "Here we go again." The cheerleaders of statism try to gain advantage by distorting history. In the last fifty or more years there has not been any effective move away from the "democratic sphere." (Just consider as a case in point, the U. S. Supreme Court's 2005 ruling that eminent domain law can be used to transfer ownership from less to more taxable private use, a distortion of the market friendly Fifth Amendment if there ever was one.) The Congress has moved steadily toward populism, away from a system restrained by the Bill of Rights, by principles of classical liberal justice. Al Gore simply wants to move faster with all this, more power to his crowd, period.

The moral system these avid fans of statism are peddling is the doctrine of service to the public interest. You know, "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" and similar calls to have us all abandon the Declaration's ideals in favor of those of communitarianism, even out and out socialism. The public interest is back with a vengeance. But what exactly is it?

In the history of political thought the public interest or common good has been identified in a variety of ways but perhaps the most provocative and influential has been Jean Jacques Rousseau's idea of the general will--in more recent lingo, "the will of the people." No, this is not some democratic consensus of a majority of the citizenry. It is, instead, a belief in some overarching universal purpose that the citizenry of a country must serve. But then what is that purpose? Yes, that is indeed the rub.

That purpose is exactly what those who peddle the idea say it is. It is in fact the purpose of the likes of Al Gore or anyone else who invokes the idea. The public interest or general will is nothing definite apart from what those who make reference to it want it to be. It is the promoters of the idea that all of us must serve the public interest who, frankly, establish what it is. It is their own agenda, what they take to be important, never mind the rest of the public!

It was in fact the American Founders, who learned a good deal from John Locke, who advanced a pretty sensible and workable idea of the public interest, even while they had some disagreements about it. They believed, and laid this out in the Declaration of Independence, that government promotes the public interest when it secures the individual human rights of all citizens. All of them, not some special group's with its subjective agenda. Their brilliant solution to the problem of just what is the public interest is that it is the protection of everyone's liberty to live as he or she chooses, provided it doesn't thwart the same liberty of others.

Such a minimalist conception of the public interest does full justice to our human nature! We are all in need of liberty and we are also very different from one another which this liberty then fully accommodates. One size does not fit all except for one thing--everyone must be free. And that is the only sensible, morally sound idea of the public interest. Trouble is that this idea doesn't accommodate the goals of those who want to impose their agenda on the rest of us. It is those folks who give rise to the scandalous special interest politics of Mr. Gore's democratic sphere. (And he isn't being up front about that either since if the democratic sphere fails to include the agenda of the AGW crowd, it loses legitimacy for him.)

Al Gore & Co. don't like market fundamentalism because what that amounts to is individual liberty for everyone and functions as a bulwark against regimenting us all to fall in line behind Mr. Gore. For my money, I take market fundamentalism any day over the kind of fundamentalism that gives Mr. Gore & Co. power over all of us.

How about them Philosophical Differences?

Tibor R. Machan

President Obama and others at the summit Thursday (2/25/10) kept talking about philosophical difference between his team and the Republicans but what did they have in mind?

By "philosophical" most mean "basic," or "fundamental." Possibly "systemic" could also be meant. Bottom line is that believing in an extensive role of the federal government in determining the health care requirements of American citizens differs from believing in an extensive role by individuals and their providers doing so. The president is right, however, to point out that it is now too late for any Republican to beef about heavy federal involvement in medical care and insurance, given that the Food and Drug Administration has been around for many decades and Medicare is also a near fixture on the American scene, not to mention the vast amount of government regulations, federal, state, municipal, we have in our mixed economy. So any Republican who complains about extensive federal involvement is way too late--we already have it in place, now it is just about how much more of such involvement should be accepted.

There is another philosophical issue that's hovering around the debates and that is about whether everyone in American must have nearly equal coverage and care. Republicans keep trying to resist this objective for a variety of reasons, including the enormous expense it is projected to involve; the huge differences between different (groups of) American citizens for whom no one-size-fits-all health care and insurance approach will work; the differential burdens such a system will create for Americans, with the young carrying the bulk of it and the old the benefits, and so forth. So it doesn't look like Obama's full egalitarian agenda has a chance, not if practical considerations matter in the decisions that will be reached.

On the other hand, the rhetoric of equal provisions for everyone--whether with or without pre-existing conditions, whether prudent or imprudent in their health management, whether fortunate or not as to vulnerability to ailments--is difficult if not impossible for Republicans to rebut. They have no philosophical equipment with which to respond to this egalitarian pitch, so they just have to swallow when the president's team brings up how unacceptable it is when an insurance company considers pre-existing conditions as disqualifying someone for insurance. Of course any responsible insurance company management would take that into consideration! It may be lamentable but there is nothing unjust or morally objectionable about this. To maintain otherwise is to deny the insurers their basic right to choose with whom they want to do business and to pursue a profitable enterprise rather than a losing one, etc.

But in order to present this kind of point, one must drop all the hand wringing about what is admittedly lamentable but cannot be helped. People who have been sick, especially with chronic ailments, are not a good risk to insure and those who want to make a living by selling insurance will tend to avoid doing business with them. And that is, really, their basic right in a free society unless they present themselves in the market place as not concerned with the issue, as open for anyone's business regardless of pre-existing conditions. But to force the insurers to do business with anyone, never mind their own terms of prudence, is wrong and should not be proposed in a free country however nice it would be to help everyone.

But Republicans are philosophically disarmed from making this point, especially from making it insistently, emphatically, because the Obama team is ready to pounce on them as being mean and nasty if they do. And Republicans are ill equipped, philosophically--that is to way, when it comes to their basic principles--to keep insisting. For them to do so they would have to return to the founding principles of the American republic, to mentioning individual rights and so forth. But then, of course, Obama and his team could point fingers at them for being inconsistent, for lacking integrity, seeing how they have accepted a great many egalitarian government edicts, regulations, policies over the the decades.

The little commitment to individual liberty and free market transactions left within the ranks of Republicans just isn't going to give them intellectual--philosophical--leverage against a clever bunch of egalitarians.

Peddling the Corruption of Liberty

Tibor R. Machan

Ever since the idea of individual liberty has achieved some measure of credibility over the world, those who would be unseated by its limited triumph had to find some way to discredit it or trump it somehow. One way was to re-christen servitude, to make it appear like an even more important kind of liberty than what individual liberty, properly understood, amounts to.

When a human being is free in the most important, political sense, he or she is sovereign. This means that one governs one’s own life—others must refrain from intruding on this life, plain and simple. That life may be fortunate or not, rich or not, beautiful or not, and many other things or not, but what matters is that that life is no one else’s to mess with. One gets to run it, no one else does.

Now this is a very uncomfortable idea for all those folks who see all kinds of benefits from running other people’s lives. But they cannot champion this now in so many words, what with individual liberty having gained solid enough standing, so the only way to remedy matters for them is to claim that their oppression brings even greater freedom to people than the respect and protection of individual liberty.

So, we have the kind of “freedoms” propounded by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the freedoms now dubbed “positive.” These freedoms do not get rid of those who would use you, interfere with you, invade your life, rob, kill, or assault you but promise, to the contrary, to take good care of you without your having to do much by invading others, by violating their individual liberties. These are the entitlement rights offered up by proponents of the welfare state, all those who claim that government is best when it is generous, when it becomes the Nanny State—meaning, when it enslaves Peter to serve Paul.

I am not sure about what exactly motivates this ruse—some of it is surely the thirst for power. When you want to enslave people, promise them a special kind of liberty. Castro managed to win over millions of Cubans this way, as did other Marxists in Eastern Europe and in Latin America.

Maybe a few folks actually honestly believed that this kind of political alternative is best for us all, but it is difficult to imagine what would persuade them of such a fraudulent notion. Giving people this positive freedom must always involve depriving other people of their individual liberty, their “negative” freedom, which is to say, their sovereignty and their freedom from having others interfere with their lives, from depriving them of their resources and labor and regulating them to the hilt.

Now, there is little that can be done about this in the short run—when people put their minds to such deceptions, the only ultimate defense is clear thinking and vigilance, which is unfortunately always in short supply and needs to be slowly cultivated. Too many people are tempted by the promise of effortless living, of getting all their problems solved at the point of a gun turned on others who will be coerced to come up with the solutions. This is such a sweet notion to those who are lazy, who feel left out, or who believe that they are entitled to everything all those who are better off already have going for them, so the power-hungry have a good marketing ploy here. Envy, maybe, or the bogus political ideologies promoted by those who just must step in to govern the world as they see fit—as I say, I am not sure what kind of mental acrobatics manages to allow people to live with themselves in peace who perpetrate such fraud.

I do know of one prominent one, namely, that those who want to wield control over others believe they are on the side of goodness, virtue and justice. Making people “good” is their goal, they proclaim. Yet this just cannot be since people are only good, morally and ethically, if they choose to be. Otherwise they at most simply behave well, like robots or puppets.

Despite the fact that there is little one can do in response, other than to keep spelling out just how misguided it all is, perhaps now and then institutional barriers can also be built. Yet, since they too depend upon ideas, ideas that are so easily corrupted, the only real answer is the old one about eternal vigilance. I say, it’s worth it, so let’s go for it.

Is There Progress in Philosophy?

Tibor R. Machan

Often those who study the history of philosophy and compare it to the history of other, especially scientific, disciplines, complain that in philosophy no progress is made, that philosophers keep talking about the same thing in each age, that nothing ever gets resolved, etc., and so forth. (Articles on this topic are available in many forums, e.g., Todd C. Moody, "Progress in Philosophy," American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 23 [January 1986]:34-46) and the entry "Philosophical Progress," in the on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia [at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_progress]).

Here I am taking it as true that there is no progress in philosophy, not comparably to what is evident in, say, chemistry or physics or anthropology. It appears clear that in each age most of the same philosophical issues are debated, theorized about or reflected upon as are explored in others, albeit in somewhat different terms. Thus the topic of free will may get rechristened "human agency" yet the basic problem in focus is the same--are people free to determine or cause some of what they do? Ancient, modern, and contemporary philosopher all address it, with only a few exceptions and opposite positions are defended in every age. Whether God exists, does the universe have a beginning, what is the nature of moral goodness and evil--all these issues keep getting revisited and though answers are defended, they do not seem to have lasting power but seem to need renewed support again and again.

I want to suggest a reason why this is how it is with philosophy and why that fact doesn't diminish the discipline's importance, nor its capacity to arrive at true conclusions. It isn't a very complicated explanation, actually. It is modeled somewhat loosely on individual developmental psychology. To whit, it is well recognized that teens tend to resist explicitly stated advice from elders. Arguably they do accept, at least subconsciously, leadership if it comes in the way of examples set for them by intimates. Becoming financially responsible, for example, may involve encountering one's parents' or guardians' repeated responsible conduct--if they routinely pay their bills, keep their promises, etc., so the teens can witness this without however preaching the practice at them, this is quite likely to carry influence.

One reason may be that teens are in the process of taking over the management of their lives and want to learn about this from their very own experience and practice rather than from explicit instructions. They need to know directly that they are doing what they choose to do, not merely blindly following other people's advice. Even the more complex matters of accepting their family's values, religious or political, seem to follow this process. If the teens are not being badgered about what they should believe, about the convictions that their parents want for them to embrace, they are more likely than not to follow their parents. Teens are about to assume the governance of their affairs and to do this they would naturally want to start thinking for themselves. So they, or at least the bright ones among them, are likely to resist just being told everything.

It is quite probable that human beings confront their most important and basic issues, ones treated within philosophy, similarly. A new generation will not take kindly to just accepting, without question and personal involvement, the vital ideas from past generations even if these ideas turn out to be right. It seems more likely that they will want to reconsider the basics on their own, with just some help from those who dealt with them earlier. And philosophy is where the basics are studied, examined, criticized, accepted or rejected.

Philosophy is also a discipline in which discussions are not thoroughly fraught with specialized jargon but are conducted in fairly ordinary terms. Everyone can, with a bit of effort, access these ideas, in other words, instead of submitting to the authority of experts as one would normally do in the case of most of the sciences, even when these bear directly on one's life, such as medicine, nutrition, biology, psychology, or sociology (although in some of its special areas philosophy can get quite complex and even convoluted, just as do the sciences). Thus most who have an interest in philosophy will want to and are likely to be able to explore its topics directly or through participation in the work of contemporaries, not by reading up on the topics as dealt with in the past.

This, then, places into the hands of a certain group of people in every new generation the task of revisiting the topics of the field. These would include, as already noted, "Is there a God?" "Is there free will?" "Can we know the world?" "Is it possible to be objective?" "Are principles of conduct made up or discovered?" "What exactly is justice or equality or liberty?" And so forth and so on.

No new generation will want such matters to be simply handed down from earlier ones. Sure, help from those who have addressed them will be welcome but not decisive. So there is not going to be rapid progress in the field, if any progress at all. Refinements of well travelled solutions are more likely to be the products of philosophical inquiry and reflection and, significantly, there is not going to be any "at the end of the day" about them. The day of such investigations never ends. And that is just as it must be--anything else would go contrary to human nature!

Tiger Woods Dishonored Himself

Tibor R. Machan

So Tiger Woods apologized for his "selfish behavior." Of course, what he did was to dishonor himself, his human self that is, not benefit it at all. Indeed, this allegedly selfish conduct of Mr. Woods has produced a few hours of sensual pleasure at the expense of his very own happiness at home, millions of dollars, a stellar reputation, etc., and so froth. Nothing really selfish about it, if you think it over responsibly.

Dr. Nathaniel Branden, the well known psychologist and reported father of the self-esteem movement in his discipline--he wrote The Psychology of Self-Esteem back in 1969 (Nash Publishing)--wrote a wonderful book in which this stuff about the alleged selfishness of cads like Woods is ably cleared up once and for all. The very apt title of this work is Honoring the Self (Bantam 1985). It discusses extensively and brilliantly just how the concept of the human self became debased in modern intellectual history.

Consider, for example, what the world famous ancient Greek philosopher Socrates told his pupil Crito (in his dialogue Phadeo) about the way his students could best please him--meaning live up to his ethical expectations--namely: "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." The reason Socrates believed that following one's self-interest is morally proper is that he held a view of the human self that included honorable attributes, traits the development of which would make for someone who is practicing the highest virtues. Human nature, for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many early thinkers--some of them those detested "dead white males"--amounted to having the potential for excellence, even greatness. While this did include generosity and liberality as praiseworthy ways to be, it was, first and foremost, a matter of being rational, of thinking about one's life and acting by the guidance of that thinking rather than haphazardly, recklessly. That's the way to living a successful human life!

It all changed with the very influential English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, not to mention the Italian Niccolo Machiavelli. For these thinkers people were mostly potentially bad, power-seeking, driving by untamed passions like brutal animals in the wilds. Even the influence of Christianity enhanced a lowly view of the human self, what with the stress on original sin, on how once Adam and Eve tasted the apple of the tree of knowledge, they became sinners and we have all inherited their sin and need to be purged of it (e.g., by being baptized).

Then came, a bit later, Sigmund Freud, the notorious father of psychoanalysis for whom deep down we are all driven by a death wish and by other unsavory motives. No wonder the human self acquired a lousy reputation. How could something so constituted act for oneself and exhibit any virtues at all? By such a conception of the human self Tiger Woods and members of the Mafia and all the other vicious people are indeed selfish. They are servicing, after all, something loathsome. This modern idea breads one of the most prominent views in our time, namely, rank misanthrope, hatred for humanity, including oneself.

But is this idea right? Are people by their basic nature evil and loathsome? No. They have to become either good or evil but have no predilection toward either to start with although at first they are mostly innocent, gentle and lovable--just recall most any baby you have met! And if they are taught to acquire pleasant attributes rather than detestable ones, these babies are very likely to grow up pretty nice, if not out and out admirable.

Sadly, the dogma of the mean and nasty human self is widespread. Among other things, it aids and abets those among us who are eager to rule others, who spread the lie that it is only with their intervention that people can be made likable. (Politicians and the clergy love this idea!) In fact, however, Tiger Woods was anything but properly selfish. He caused himself immense harm, as well as those who loved or even just liked him. Shame on him.

From Health Care to Tyranny

Tibor R. Machan

Once government takes over the health care and health insurance provision system in a country, it is very easy to move on toward a regime of practically total micromanagement of the citizenry's life.

Do you remember when helmet laws began to be enacted and there were those motorcyclists who protested? Their pitch was simply, "We love to feel the wind in our faces and our hair; we associate it with freedom. Do not rob us of this feeling."

"Ah," came back the quite predictable answer, "but you are driving on public roads where government is the boss. Moreover, any mishap on public roads leads to some county hospital where the government usually picks up the bill for the medical care you receive. So don't whine to us about your freedom when we, the government, pay the bills for your indulgences."

Now since there are very few private roads and highways available to people where they might pay an extra premium to cover the risk of a traffic mishap, this argument has initial plausibility. Also, if you take seriously the connection between property ownership and responsibility, then so long as governments own the roads, they will have to be responsible for how these roads are managed, for keeping down costs, etc., etc. How then could you defend the liberty of some wild motorcyclists to abstain from taking care to be as safe as possible?

Well, once government takes over the total health care system, as the current administration would like it to--always, of course, out of a sense of public service, doing good to everyone, never out of a desire to wield power over anyone--the idea that you ought to be free to eat as you choose, to exercise or not, to dress warmly or not so warmly winter or summer--all this will no longer plausibly be something that must be up to the citizenry. Their near total dependence on government will have rendered them children of the state who need to answer to their politicians and bureaucrats on all matters that could relate to their health.

I can already see us all being herded out on various parade grounds and sports fields, like those millions of North Koreans in their blue pajamas in our day and those millions of Germans under the rule of the Third Reich or Young Pioneers under the Soviets, so that we keep as fit as we can and avoid imposing the cost of any possible health problems on the public that is footing the bill for the care and insurance. Any protests that this may well be a massive extension of governmental power over the citizenry will readily be met with the retort, "Well, but you asked for it when you accepted government's provision for your physical well being." Similar retorts are being made already to complaints about bans on smoking--"Just consider who will be paying your medical bills when smoking will have taken its toll on your health! We cannot let this be. He who pays the piper...." Well, you know the rest.

There are numerous lies involved in such retorts, starting with the one about having asked for it. Maybe some folks are asking to have their medical care be handled by government but a whole lot of them are being threatened with being pressed into such a system, like it or not. Then there is the issue of not everyone being better of by being supervised about health care and insurance matters--they are managing it just fine themselves. But the most important lie is that using public facilities like roads and highways implies having given up one's liberty.

Certainly not everyone is choosing to make use of those facilities; they were imposed on us by ancient habits of thought and practices that took it for granted that government is the sole possible provider of roads and highways. And even if it were, there was no package deal involved--"You provide the roads and highways and now you get to rule us to your heart's content!" The idea of limited government, so much a part of the American political tradition, was meant precisely to rebuff such package deals. Yes, some government, a little bit of it, but by no means total rule! This is not some benign dictatorship we have here in these United States of America, no paternalistic monarchy, no nanny state, even! Some few matters have been left to government to manage, maybe not wisely but only from the governmental habit that hasn't quite been given up. Maybe it is also a huge confusion between government as the protector of our rights and government as dictator of our way of life!

But mark my words--soon we will have more and more, even Draconian, intrusion, shortly after the health care and insurance systems have been appropriated by those people. One may well wonder, with the young Anne Frank, "I wonder how they let people like them grow so powerful?"

On Sandel's Misguided Thinking

Tibor R. Machan

In 2004--not that long before he got to be a TV star on PBS-- Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University professor of political philosophy got the enviable job of presenting his views on justice via the support of PBS television to a great number of viewers, made the following observation: "Today, in the thrall of markets and market-oriented thinking, we are all too tempted to think of democracy in economic terms alone. That is why it is worth asking whether we are a commonwealth still. To put that question at the center of our public debate, we need to remind ourselves of the civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy."

All this sounds very kind and gentle--who, after all, could object to civic goods? Who could find anything wrong with the idea of a commonwealth? These are the marks of civilized society where instead of the rule of force, we have the rule of law. But don't be fooled. If you have listened to Professor Sandel's PBS lectures on justice you have by now realized that what the very prominently placed educator actually favors is a highly regimented society, one in which the idea of the consent of the governed is royally demeaned. Instead of choice and freedom, what Sandel champions is order and lock step pursuit of some kind of one size fits all public good that the market allegedly doesn’t sell.

It is scandalous how this man, using a good bit of taxpayer funds, gets to preach his message of collectivism and show his contempt for American values of individualism and liberty all in the middle of the country he seems to dislike and which he seems to enjoy misrepresenting in the middle of his so called educational endeavors.

Just consider the above claim that America is "in the thrall of markets and market-oriented thinking." If so, how come the majority of Americans elected Barack Obama their president, a man who has been quite up front in his dislike of markets and what he likes to dub the ideology of free markets, not any kind of “market-oriented thinking”? How cam Americans, on the whole, embrace public--government administered and conducted--education from the fist grade all the way to graduate school? How come their only passenger train service is provided by a government funded (and pretty much bankrupt) rail system, Amtrak? And why are they completely complacent about having a government postal service that prohibits anyone else from providing first class mail service? And how come these Americans who are "in the thrall of markets and market-oriented thinking" did not rise up in protest against the federal governments purchase of General Motors Corporation and bailout of banks and other enterprises that are by no stretch of the imagination market institutions?

What kind of a highly honored educator engages in this kind of rank distortion? Market-oriented thinking my foot! Most Americans, including especially the educated ones and those doing the education of America's youth, do not like the free market. (I have been in the midst of American higher education since 1965 and have found nearly uniform disdain toward the free market except by some economists who defend it mainly because they focus on which system manages to be more productive, more consumer friendly. As some Russians who came to visit American universities after the fall of the Soviet Union pointed out, there are far more Marxists and near Marxists in American higher education than there have ever been in the Soviet bloc!)

Now, of course, professor Sandel has the basic human right to be wrong about what Americans are in thrall of, a right he seems very eager to exercise. In a free society one doesn't get punished for misguided thinking except by the reality that is likely to bite one in the butt in consequence of it.

But while Sandel is free to be wrong, the rest of us don't have to sit at his feet and complacently accept his misinformation, even if it has the prestige of Harvard University and PBS television supporting it. No, we are still free to protest what Sandel is peddling. And we are also still free to point out the specious manner in which he does his peddling, namely wrapping it in the vocabulary of civility and democracy.

Let us, please, not let the man fool us. Freedom and democracy do go hand in hand--it takes freedom for the people to be involved in politics! And freedom is not divisible--you cannot have freedom of religion, speech, and thought without free markets in which books, educational equipment, buildings for churches and newspapers, printing presses, and the labor of educators are available to be purchased instead of conscripted as in the collectivist paradise—a warped commonwealth--that Sandel wishes to impose on us all.

What Sandel has convinced himself of is that he is for the good, the public good, while those who tend to favor the American political tradition are only for human liberty, almost license. But this is bunk.

There can be no human good without human liberty for doing what is good requires the freedom to choose it. Otherwise the good is being pursued at the point of a gun and not as a matter of one's own convictions, the only way it means anything.

Are our "Leaders" Superior?

Tibor R. Machan

When people talk about how market agents need to be regulated because, well, without it they could do bad things, it never fails to amaze me how narrow-minded is this line of reasoning. When human beings are fit for regulation by others, they are usually children and the others are their parents or guardians. So it has to do with who is an adult, who is not. Makes sense.

But when it is about adult citizens allegedly requiring regulation by other adult citizens, it is simply baffling. It used to be, back in the really old days (and in some regions of the globe even now), that societies were segmented into separate classes, upper, middle, lower and such, but that is all nonsense. While we may not all be equal in our intelligence, beauty, health, and the like, it is pretty clear now that as far as our rights to our lives and liberties are concerned, we are indeed equal. That means no one gets to rule someone else, not any other adult, not unless there has been someone who is to be ruled has done something criminal, violated another's rights in the first place or consent has been given as we give it to our surgeon. But barring this, no one is supposed to rule anyone else. Equal liberty all around, that is the principle of a free society.

So then where does all this government regulation come from? Does our mutual equality disappear simply because a lot of people may wish to intrude on a bunch of others? Does democracy trump our mutual rights to equal liberty? How could it, when democracy itself is based on such rights--that why we all have the right to participate in public affairs, because we all have equal rights and no one is superior to another in the matter of having rights or authority. Self-rule is the name of the game, not a bigger group ruling a smaller one.

So bigger numbers do not justify greater, unequal authority. Nor does expertise. One's doctor or dentist or butcher or plumber is an expert at something one may know nothing about or only very little but that doesn't support the doctor's or dentist's or butcher's rule over others who lack their skills. They still require full consent from those they guide, their patients or customers. Consent is central to the way civilized adult people interact. You must gain another's permission to give him or her orders, to have them comply with your orders. That is the way of a free society.

But this bothers many people who think that we are all beholden to others, especially past generations, and thus we have obligations to fulfill. And it is indeed plausible to hold that many people owe much to their elders, both intimates and strangers. Surely the inventions and creations from past generations have produced enormous benefits to members of the current one and maybe this creates some obligations, duties, that the current population needs to fulfill.

What is not true is that this entitles anyone to enforce those obligations. Adult human beings must come to see that they owe something to others. That's the origin of contract law. We enter into binding agreements with others. No third party gets to determine these obligations without our consent. And certainly no one gets to force us to comply with obligations we haven't freely assumed except when we are children and cannot be expected to fend for ourselves.

Well then what about all this government regulation being imposed on innumerable professionals, regulation that a great many haven't ever been asked to accept let alone given their consent to? Notice, the government regulations are pre-emptive--those being regulated haven't done anything wrong, so they haven't deserved the regulation, the impositions, the burdens the regulators meet out. (In the criminal law no one gets to be punished or penalized unless it is shown, in line with due process, that they have done something to deserve punishment or penalties. Why not with government regulation?)

How come the regulators--or rather rulers--get to tell people what to do? Never mind that they haven't the moral authority to do this, nor some kind of special status--more naturally virtuous than the rest of us, perhaps--that would justify their intrusions into other people's lives. Never mind that they are all just as capable of making mistakes as are market agents and, indeed, more so because they have power over people which, as Lord Acton noted, tends to corrupt.

So you think free men and women are susceptible to making mistakes? Well, their rulers are far more susceptible to do so, something that is borne out by even a cursory study of human history.

PBS & NPR, America's Pravda and Izvestia

Tibor R. Machan

It is a feature of American culture that's most upsetting though hardly anyone makes much of it at all. Indeed, I know several avid defenders of the free society who make regularly and eager appearances on National Public Radio and I have to confess that I myself have appeared on one or two Public Broadcast Service programs when allowed to make a pitch for a society that would have no such things, partly government funded TV or radio network.

When I first left Hungary, in 1953, and came to live in the West, I settled for a while in Munich where my father and stepmother worked for Radio Free Europe. This outfit was partly American government--CIA--funded, beaming programs into Eastern European, Soviet bloc countries and supposedly countering communists propaganda. But at heart the idea of the American government doing this turned out to be a paradox since what is wrong with communist countries is precisely that they place everything in society under state control, including broadcasting the news, educating the young, doing science, entertainment or athletics. That is just what is supposed to be so different between communism and capitalism; yet here was RFE doing just what the communists were doing, entrusting government with broadcasting. (I recall how eager I was at one point shortly after I came West to have the American government give massive funding to Olympic hopefuls so they would defeat Soviet athletes and show how much better American athletes can be than Soviet ones, not realizing for a good while how paradoxical this was--sports should not be the purview of government in a genuine free country.)

Yet, what we have had in America and many Western countries for decades on end is, you guessed it, virtually the same thing as they had in the Soviet Union and its colonies, namely, government run radio and TV, just like the two government published and managed "newspapers" in the USSR, Pravda and Izvestia, not to mention all their other media. Instead of showing a confidence in the institutions that emerge spontaneously in a free country, from the initiative of free men and women, Americans abandoned the principles of their system to mount a counter-offensive. Let's defeat communism by becoming, well, partly communist! What a self-defeating policy that is.

These days a good example is PBS's broadcast of Professor Michael Sandel's lectures on justice from Harvard University. Sandel is smart and erudite but at heart a propagandist for a planned society, only in degrees different from what the most earnest of the Soviets had hoped for (but, of course, couldn't bring off because of how it contradicts human nature). There is, of course, nothing objectionable about Harvard broadcasting Sandel's lectures at its own expense but there is decidedly something wrong with Sandel getting even partial government funding for his partisan lectures. He is not a teacher who gives an fair and accurate representation of different ideas of justice but someone who subtly nudges his students and audience in a particular ideological direction.

Am I exaggerating in considering Sandel a propagandist, albeit a subtle one? Well, here is how he handled Aristotle's political philosophy.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle defended a fairly intrusive type of political system in which the government or state--although some dispute this interpretation--aimed at making people good. OK, this is a pretty standard rendition of Aristotle but in laying it out one needs to make note of the fact that it may well miss something vital about justice. This is that very likely no one can really make people good--that task needs to be everyone's own (other than those crucial impeded). Human goodness is arguably something every individual has to bring about for himself or herself. Otherwise it is nothing but regimentation and what we get is perhaps good behavior but clearly not morally virtuous conduct. Aristotle, probably somewhat influenced by the experience of the extreme tyranny of the city state of Sparta, accepted the idea that people can be forced to be good. This is what the classical liberal ethos has corrected about ancient political philosophy--human beings need to choose and cannot be forced to be good!

Now Sandel gave no mention of this problem with Aristotle. He made it appear (by failing to discuss the point) that whereas Aristotle had a noble concern with human goodness, the more recent tendency in (especially American libertarian) political philosophy to restrict the power of government and leave citizens to their own resources when it comes to living a morally good life was inferior to it. But it isn't. Classical liberals pay plenty of attention to human goodness but they realize it cannot be engineered! Communitarians and welfare state liberals to the contrary notwithstanding, people cannot be forced to be good! It is a distinctive element of human life that people's goodness must be their own doing not that of behavior modifiers, brain-washers or the bureaucrats.

To make it appear that this approach to politics fails to promote human goodness is a distortion. That is why I call Sandel's lectures propaganda. If they were fair-minded, by presenting this kind of critique of Aristotle and others who want to force us to be good, it would be educational. And by being put on PBS, a partly government funded TV network, the lectures come very close to resembling what the citizens of the Soviet Union and its colonies received from Pravda and Izvestia.