Anti-Intellectualism among Animal Rights Advocates?
Tibor R. Machan
It is only a small sample but it comes from a significant corner of the academic community, a law school where I was invited to give a talk on the debate about animal rights. I did deliver such a talk at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, law school on October 21, 2010, and I was surprised how few supporters of animal rights showed up for my talk even though several of them were invited and there was even talk of a formal debate.
I mentioned this at the dinner that followed and was told that there had been a concerted effort by local animal rights advocates to boycott my lecture. Word had gone out to members of the community of animal rights advocates, via email and such, about how I have written critical papers and a book on the subject and how no one ought to show up for my talk.
I am, after 40 years of teaching, still a bit naive about the nature of academic life so I was somewhat taken aback because my understanding had always been that it is at universities and colleges that debates and discussions about controversial issues are carried out, usually in an atmosphere of civility. Alas, I must not really be as aware about how universities and colleges work as I would like to be.
The reality seems to be that in many such communities discussions aren’t all that welcome. Instead the attitude is combative: Let’s show those with whom we disagree that we are against them, solidly, that we have no respect for the idea of a philosophical debate on the topic but want to silence, boycott, or exclude those who don’t already fall in line with our position.
It is this attitude that was in evidence here, or so my hosts informed me. I had written papers and a book on the topic of animal rights and environmental ethics in general over the last 20 years. I wrote on animal rights first because I had been working on natural rights theory for a good bit of my career, starting with my doctoral dissertation. When I first heard that there are those who believe that animals have the sort of rights we human beings are said to have, as per the Declaration of Independence and the philosopher John Locke, I wanted to see whether the ground for making this claim exists. If the underlying facts are not there, then no such rights could be supported, I figured, and indeed that is how it turned out when I looked at the matter closely.
Having natural human rights depends on the fact that human beings are moral agents and in human communities they require a sphere of personal moral authority--or what the late Robert Nozick called “moral space.” Natural rights are what circumscribe this sphere, spell out where it is that a person is in charge of what happens and where other people must not enter without being invited to do so. In this “space” people do as they choose and get judged or evaluated based on standards of morality. Unless they enjoy the liberty or freedom to act as they choose, their conduct lacks moral significance. Their moral agency would then be undermined. So their basic rights are necessary conditions for acting in morally significant ways in the company of other people. (Others are free to interfere or refrain from doing so, whereas non-human agents aren’t free to do so.)
Well, this is a controversial position and I have had my critics over the years and have been giving some talks and writing a few papers around college and university communities in America and abroad laying out the case as I see it. In most cases I have met with civil opposition. I did, however, notice that although I discuss them in some detail, neither of the prominent animal rights--or animal liberation--defenders, Professors Tom Regan and Peter Singer--have bothered to acknowledge by arguments (even when we have been invited to contribute to the very same book of collected papers on the topic). I have puzzled over this but thought that perhaps it is due only to these folks being quite busy with various tasks and having no time to deal with what I have written (although they both know me personally).
The experience at Madison was an eye opener. It appears that the lack of attention to my arguments from these prominent figures may be quite deliberate, a kind of boycott instead of an oversight. And that suggests a measure of anti-intellectualism, a refusal to engage on the topic at hand. But why? Is it to marginalize criticism of their views? Is it to play a certain kind of strategy whereby the refusal to take account of criticisms is meant to exclude the criticisms from the discussions? I am not sure--I haven’t asked. But it is an interesting phenomenon for sure.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Why Obama Doesn’t Seem to Relate--emotionally
Tibor R. Machan
Most of the time when I hear about how President Obama lacks
the emotional disposition that most Americans would like to see him
demonstrate, I am disinclined to make much of the point. What I want
from someone in the role of the presidency is good thinking and not
sensitivity.
Nonetheless I have been paying a bit more attention to this
criticism of the President because as I have been following his
efforts to bolster the chances of Democrats to remain in power in
Washington, DC, I have noticed that there is something amiss with how
he comes over emotionally.
As a start, Mr. Obama is always glib, as if nothing on earth
could phase him, as if it is all old hat to him, he is way ahead of
everyone. This comes through, for instance, in his repeated dismissal
of anything that members of the Tea Party complain about. And that’s
just the beginning.
One related steady emotional theme in the president’s talks is
the effort to be accommodating toward critics and enemies of America.
Indeed, the very idea that Mr. Obama would identify anyone as an enemy
of the United States of America seems off base. This is because it
looks like he is mostly interested in building bridges between us and
them, however barbaric they may be.
Mr. Obama is one of those American intellectuals who appears to
be stopped from criticizing anyone abroad because, well, this country
has had slavery and segregation and poverty so how could it justify
being critical of anyone. It shows a spirit of perpetual
self-criticism and mea culpa, attitudes that appear to dominate the
president’s conscience (and we are here talking about appearances).
There is no black and white for the man--no one, not even a vicious
terrorist and a leader of a country in which women are systematically
and barbarically oppressed, justifies for him any sort of firm moral
condemnation. Like those ever-permissive parents who always have an
excuse for what their offspring are doing, no matter how mischievous
or outright evil it manages to be, for Mr. Obama those who attack
America, actually attack innocents everywhere, just could not be all
bad, unworthy of understanding.
This mentality of turning the other cheek, no matter what,
appears to underlie the widespread distrust people have of Mr. Obama’s
emotional makeup. Emotions, although they are ultimately unreliable
guidelines to action, are pretty good clues to what system of values
someone has internalized. If one has to force oneself disapprove of
or condemn vicious conduct and people and it doesn’t arise naturally,
people who do have a sense of just how bad some others can be will
become suspicious.
President Obama and his cheerleaders must realize that
eloquence is no substitute for emotional balance, for being in tune
emotionally with what those deserve who comport themselves
villainously. Being well spoken is not enough. One must also have a
sense of what needs to be said, have substance to communicate, a sense
of justice, if you will.
Or perhaps Mr. Obama just despises being disliked by people,
even by vicious rulers abroad. But that, too, reveals his emotional
priorities. Mr. Obama needs to open himself up to the possibility
that some people should really be hated, that they are evil and not
merely misguided, sick, or deranged.
Human life is distinctive in the world precisely because human
beings have a moral nature and they can act irresponsibly, morally
deplorably, contemptibly, as well as admirably, demonstrating moral
excellence. And while that idea has always had its detractors, the
moral skeptics, they simply cannot sustain their denial that people
are moral agents and capable of doing vile things for which they ought
to be condemned. They do not deserve sympathy but contempt.
And this is evident from the fact that the one exception to the
skeptics’ ambivalence about morality is their own utter contempt for
those who do take morality seriously. They tend to be dismissed, even
derided, as fundamentalists or moralizers, which is clearly and
paradoxically something (morally?) contemptible to the skeptics!
Moral skeptics usually are hoisted on their own petard. Their
amoral stance isn’t philosophically sustainable because human beings
are indeed moral beings, unlike the rest the members of the living
world. And one result of having a moral nature and admitting to it is
that one will openly cope with moral evil as well as moral excellent.
If one denies this, as it seems President Obama does when it comes to
America’s enemies, it will eventually stand in the way of reaching out
to ordinary people.
Tibor R. Machan
Most of the time when I hear about how President Obama lacks
the emotional disposition that most Americans would like to see him
demonstrate, I am disinclined to make much of the point. What I want
from someone in the role of the presidency is good thinking and not
sensitivity.
Nonetheless I have been paying a bit more attention to this
criticism of the President because as I have been following his
efforts to bolster the chances of Democrats to remain in power in
Washington, DC, I have noticed that there is something amiss with how
he comes over emotionally.
As a start, Mr. Obama is always glib, as if nothing on earth
could phase him, as if it is all old hat to him, he is way ahead of
everyone. This comes through, for instance, in his repeated dismissal
of anything that members of the Tea Party complain about. And that’s
just the beginning.
One related steady emotional theme in the president’s talks is
the effort to be accommodating toward critics and enemies of America.
Indeed, the very idea that Mr. Obama would identify anyone as an enemy
of the United States of America seems off base. This is because it
looks like he is mostly interested in building bridges between us and
them, however barbaric they may be.
Mr. Obama is one of those American intellectuals who appears to
be stopped from criticizing anyone abroad because, well, this country
has had slavery and segregation and poverty so how could it justify
being critical of anyone. It shows a spirit of perpetual
self-criticism and mea culpa, attitudes that appear to dominate the
president’s conscience (and we are here talking about appearances).
There is no black and white for the man--no one, not even a vicious
terrorist and a leader of a country in which women are systematically
and barbarically oppressed, justifies for him any sort of firm moral
condemnation. Like those ever-permissive parents who always have an
excuse for what their offspring are doing, no matter how mischievous
or outright evil it manages to be, for Mr. Obama those who attack
America, actually attack innocents everywhere, just could not be all
bad, unworthy of understanding.
This mentality of turning the other cheek, no matter what,
appears to underlie the widespread distrust people have of Mr. Obama’s
emotional makeup. Emotions, although they are ultimately unreliable
guidelines to action, are pretty good clues to what system of values
someone has internalized. If one has to force oneself disapprove of
or condemn vicious conduct and people and it doesn’t arise naturally,
people who do have a sense of just how bad some others can be will
become suspicious.
President Obama and his cheerleaders must realize that
eloquence is no substitute for emotional balance, for being in tune
emotionally with what those deserve who comport themselves
villainously. Being well spoken is not enough. One must also have a
sense of what needs to be said, have substance to communicate, a sense
of justice, if you will.
Or perhaps Mr. Obama just despises being disliked by people,
even by vicious rulers abroad. But that, too, reveals his emotional
priorities. Mr. Obama needs to open himself up to the possibility
that some people should really be hated, that they are evil and not
merely misguided, sick, or deranged.
Human life is distinctive in the world precisely because human
beings have a moral nature and they can act irresponsibly, morally
deplorably, contemptibly, as well as admirably, demonstrating moral
excellence. And while that idea has always had its detractors, the
moral skeptics, they simply cannot sustain their denial that people
are moral agents and capable of doing vile things for which they ought
to be condemned. They do not deserve sympathy but contempt.
And this is evident from the fact that the one exception to the
skeptics’ ambivalence about morality is their own utter contempt for
those who do take morality seriously. They tend to be dismissed, even
derided, as fundamentalists or moralizers, which is clearly and
paradoxically something (morally?) contemptible to the skeptics!
Moral skeptics usually are hoisted on their own petard. Their
amoral stance isn’t philosophically sustainable because human beings
are indeed moral beings, unlike the rest the members of the living
world. And one result of having a moral nature and admitting to it is
that one will openly cope with moral evil as well as moral excellent.
If one denies this, as it seems President Obama does when it comes to
America’s enemies, it will eventually stand in the way of reaching out
to ordinary people.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
The Amorality of Macroeconomics
Tibor R. Machan
In a surprisingly sensible essay in The New York Times, on Sunday October 17, 2010, David Segal gives a pretty good explanation of why macroeconomics is so unsuccessful. It’s human nature, stupid. People just aren’t predictable--will they do this or that when provided with easy money from the government? Is soaking the rich really a good idea--suppose they would do much more good with their money than would government? Do the poor really deserve a break in tax policy or are some quite irresponsible and thus not good candidates for giving them tax breaks?
As Segal concludes his piece, “But the economy is a hugely complex problem. So we either simplify the problem and offer a solution, or embrace the complexity and do nothing.” Yes indeed, and it is the second alternative that makes the best sense. Why?
Because while “we”--which is to say, governments--may do nothing, that is by no means the end of the story. While governments do nothing, the rest of us may very well do a great deal. Indeed, it is probably in large measure because the government does nothing that most of us do something, something with the funds the government does not extort from us. If we can keep those funds, they will not usually be put under our mattresses but spent on various projects that we want to get done and which then will create jobs that are actually achieving something that is wanted by people instead of the allegedly “shovel ready” jobs no one needs and government merely invents (like all that road work in my neighborhood that involves repairing what does not by any reasonable assessment require being repaired).
One thing that Mr. Segal’s essay brings to light is just how unprincipled is much of macroeconomic theory, the type that fancies itself capable of managing a country’s economy. In one of his passages Segal relates Harvard econ professor N. Gregory Mankiw’s thought experiment from his book Principles of Economics (Thomson/South-Western, 2004), in which “a town must maintain a well. Peter, who earns $100,000, is taxed $10,000, or 10 percent of his income, while Paula, who earns $20,000, hands over $4,000, or 20 per cent of her income.” Never mind that being taxed isn’t exactly “handing over” a portion of one’s income (although such language does show just how thoughtless is a lot of macroeconomic thinking). Notice, instead, that in the thought experiment, which is, all in all, a pretty realistic one, it is taken as given that the town must maintain a well.
But towns are not people. They are not even corporations--they are populated by people, some of whom may not want or need a well at all, some of whom do, and some of whom may find a well useful up to a point, after which they might elect to pay for water brought in from somewhere else. The kind of thinking that treats the people of the town as some kind of beehive or ant colony is way off.
A town--and, of course, a country like the USA which the government macro-economists embark upon managing--is made up of a lot of very different individuals, with very different goals, abilities, virtues and vices, and so forth, and to lump them together is utterly misguided and must produce bad policies. And once the economic issues are treated not as those faced by towns but by various individual human beings in the various groupings of their own choice, the situation presents itself quite differently. For one, ethics enters the picture. And in nearly any ethical code human beings have identified as guidelines to how they ought to conduct themselves, it is unacceptable to confiscate funds from Peter and use it to support Paula unless the two of them reach an agreement to enter some such arrangement. It is not to be dictated from above, as is macroeconomic policy, with no regard for the niceties of ethics or morality. (Which is what’s so bad about centrally planned economies.)
One reason the human race has come up with certain general ethical principles--contained in, for example, Aristotle’s list of virtues, the Ten Commandments, Kant’s categorical imperative, or the various school of morality--is that these are thought to be sound clues to what kind of actions people may take and what they ought to avoid taking. Not everyone will follow the advice but it is no surprise that if they do not, mayhem is produced.
And that is just what happens in interventionist macroeconomic policy. So not doing anything--given the real complexity of human affairs and the broad ethical guidelines that actually prohibit doing what macro-economists propose doing--is a good alternative to simplistic meddling.
Tibor R. Machan
In a surprisingly sensible essay in The New York Times, on Sunday October 17, 2010, David Segal gives a pretty good explanation of why macroeconomics is so unsuccessful. It’s human nature, stupid. People just aren’t predictable--will they do this or that when provided with easy money from the government? Is soaking the rich really a good idea--suppose they would do much more good with their money than would government? Do the poor really deserve a break in tax policy or are some quite irresponsible and thus not good candidates for giving them tax breaks?
As Segal concludes his piece, “But the economy is a hugely complex problem. So we either simplify the problem and offer a solution, or embrace the complexity and do nothing.” Yes indeed, and it is the second alternative that makes the best sense. Why?
Because while “we”--which is to say, governments--may do nothing, that is by no means the end of the story. While governments do nothing, the rest of us may very well do a great deal. Indeed, it is probably in large measure because the government does nothing that most of us do something, something with the funds the government does not extort from us. If we can keep those funds, they will not usually be put under our mattresses but spent on various projects that we want to get done and which then will create jobs that are actually achieving something that is wanted by people instead of the allegedly “shovel ready” jobs no one needs and government merely invents (like all that road work in my neighborhood that involves repairing what does not by any reasonable assessment require being repaired).
One thing that Mr. Segal’s essay brings to light is just how unprincipled is much of macroeconomic theory, the type that fancies itself capable of managing a country’s economy. In one of his passages Segal relates Harvard econ professor N. Gregory Mankiw’s thought experiment from his book Principles of Economics (Thomson/South-Western, 2004), in which “a town must maintain a well. Peter, who earns $100,000, is taxed $10,000, or 10 percent of his income, while Paula, who earns $20,000, hands over $4,000, or 20 per cent of her income.” Never mind that being taxed isn’t exactly “handing over” a portion of one’s income (although such language does show just how thoughtless is a lot of macroeconomic thinking). Notice, instead, that in the thought experiment, which is, all in all, a pretty realistic one, it is taken as given that the town must maintain a well.
But towns are not people. They are not even corporations--they are populated by people, some of whom may not want or need a well at all, some of whom do, and some of whom may find a well useful up to a point, after which they might elect to pay for water brought in from somewhere else. The kind of thinking that treats the people of the town as some kind of beehive or ant colony is way off.
A town--and, of course, a country like the USA which the government macro-economists embark upon managing--is made up of a lot of very different individuals, with very different goals, abilities, virtues and vices, and so forth, and to lump them together is utterly misguided and must produce bad policies. And once the economic issues are treated not as those faced by towns but by various individual human beings in the various groupings of their own choice, the situation presents itself quite differently. For one, ethics enters the picture. And in nearly any ethical code human beings have identified as guidelines to how they ought to conduct themselves, it is unacceptable to confiscate funds from Peter and use it to support Paula unless the two of them reach an agreement to enter some such arrangement. It is not to be dictated from above, as is macroeconomic policy, with no regard for the niceties of ethics or morality. (Which is what’s so bad about centrally planned economies.)
One reason the human race has come up with certain general ethical principles--contained in, for example, Aristotle’s list of virtues, the Ten Commandments, Kant’s categorical imperative, or the various school of morality--is that these are thought to be sound clues to what kind of actions people may take and what they ought to avoid taking. Not everyone will follow the advice but it is no surprise that if they do not, mayhem is produced.
And that is just what happens in interventionist macroeconomic policy. So not doing anything--given the real complexity of human affairs and the broad ethical guidelines that actually prohibit doing what macro-economists propose doing--is a good alternative to simplistic meddling.
Friday, October 15, 2010
In Defense of the Adversarial System
Tibor R. Machan
Every once in a while I get sucked into defending the way the legal system aims to secure justice in the criminal law. In particular, why do the accused or suspected criminals get to be defended so vigorously, as if they were always victims of perpetuation rather than pretty much guilty as charged. Defense attorneys, especially, get a lot of flack if they accept as clients people everyone “knows” are guilty as sin. How could they do such a thing? Isn’t that immoral? Does it not in fact make the profession corrupt?
I keep insisting that this normally isn’t so at all. Defense attorneys are committed, professionally, to provide the best defense to anyone who hires them because the system is supposed to work as an adversarial one, whereby justice is supposed to emerge from a debate as to what is the truth of the matter, who did what and was it a crime and how responsible is the defendant if at all. It resembles the Socratic method of inquiry, study or research whereby questions are raised and answers proposed, then criticized, on and on until one reaches the answer that can withstand all reasonable objections for the time being! In the end, given the available context of information and analysis, the result is as good as it gets. Wanting more is unreasonable, even irrational!
So no one can have a rational position on the issues that gave rise to the trial prior to its taking place (and the assorted associated procedures). Sure, people can speculate, even bet on the result that’s likely to be reached once the entire process has played itself out. But before that no one is supposed to know whether the accused defendant is guilty or not, not as far as the law is concerned. The way the system works is supposedly a very effective one for purposes of reaching a sound conclusion. The jury, for example, will have heard pros and cons and all the evidence and arguments for both sides and then can take it upon itself to render a just verdict.
Nor is the justice to be achieved perfect, incontrovertible. That’s what appeals are about. Only once the whole processes has been deployed is there a best result available and that result is not to be regarded as timelessly unassailable, forever the best. No results of human inquiry, be it in ethics, law, science or philosophy can promise a final resolution, not until time has come to an end! That is the human condition and unless someone has the word of an omniscient God to consult about it all, no one can reasonably want anything better.
More generally, human knowledge ought not to be expected to produce the last word on any subject. That’s not knowledge but omniscience! We live in an unfolding universe and whatever knowledge we manage to gain of it must accommodate that fact and not aim for more. Otherwise skepticism and cynicism arise, the belief that no one can know anything and that all human efforts are useless and futile.
Some people would delight in spreading such an idea around since then they might get the chance to convince us that they do have special abilities, mystical insight and such, that entitles them to lord it over the rest of us “mere” humans. But it is ruse since no one has such abilities. Knowledge, the proper kind, needs to be earned through hard work and there will always be room for updating it as time unfolds and new information comes to light.
Here as in many other areas of human affairs it is once again best to remember that the perfect or ideal is the enemy of the good! Wishing for the impossible dream will prevent one from obtaining the very best that’s humanly possible. And that should be all counts be enough.
Tibor R. Machan
Every once in a while I get sucked into defending the way the legal system aims to secure justice in the criminal law. In particular, why do the accused or suspected criminals get to be defended so vigorously, as if they were always victims of perpetuation rather than pretty much guilty as charged. Defense attorneys, especially, get a lot of flack if they accept as clients people everyone “knows” are guilty as sin. How could they do such a thing? Isn’t that immoral? Does it not in fact make the profession corrupt?
I keep insisting that this normally isn’t so at all. Defense attorneys are committed, professionally, to provide the best defense to anyone who hires them because the system is supposed to work as an adversarial one, whereby justice is supposed to emerge from a debate as to what is the truth of the matter, who did what and was it a crime and how responsible is the defendant if at all. It resembles the Socratic method of inquiry, study or research whereby questions are raised and answers proposed, then criticized, on and on until one reaches the answer that can withstand all reasonable objections for the time being! In the end, given the available context of information and analysis, the result is as good as it gets. Wanting more is unreasonable, even irrational!
So no one can have a rational position on the issues that gave rise to the trial prior to its taking place (and the assorted associated procedures). Sure, people can speculate, even bet on the result that’s likely to be reached once the entire process has played itself out. But before that no one is supposed to know whether the accused defendant is guilty or not, not as far as the law is concerned. The way the system works is supposedly a very effective one for purposes of reaching a sound conclusion. The jury, for example, will have heard pros and cons and all the evidence and arguments for both sides and then can take it upon itself to render a just verdict.
Nor is the justice to be achieved perfect, incontrovertible. That’s what appeals are about. Only once the whole processes has been deployed is there a best result available and that result is not to be regarded as timelessly unassailable, forever the best. No results of human inquiry, be it in ethics, law, science or philosophy can promise a final resolution, not until time has come to an end! That is the human condition and unless someone has the word of an omniscient God to consult about it all, no one can reasonably want anything better.
More generally, human knowledge ought not to be expected to produce the last word on any subject. That’s not knowledge but omniscience! We live in an unfolding universe and whatever knowledge we manage to gain of it must accommodate that fact and not aim for more. Otherwise skepticism and cynicism arise, the belief that no one can know anything and that all human efforts are useless and futile.
Some people would delight in spreading such an idea around since then they might get the chance to convince us that they do have special abilities, mystical insight and such, that entitles them to lord it over the rest of us “mere” humans. But it is ruse since no one has such abilities. Knowledge, the proper kind, needs to be earned through hard work and there will always be room for updating it as time unfolds and new information comes to light.
Here as in many other areas of human affairs it is once again best to remember that the perfect or ideal is the enemy of the good! Wishing for the impossible dream will prevent one from obtaining the very best that’s humanly possible. And that should be all counts be enough.
In Defense of the Adversarial System
Tibor R. Machan
Every once in a while I get sucked into defending the way the legal system aims to secure justice in the criminal law. In particular, why do the accused or suspected criminals get to be defended so vigorously, as if they were always victims of perpetuation rather than pretty much guilty as charged. Defense attorneys, especially, get a lot of flack if they accept as clients people everyone “knows” are guilty as sin. How could they do such a thing? Isn’t that immoral? Does it not in fact make the profession corrupt?
I keep insisting that this normally isn’t so at all. Defense attorneys are committed, professionally, to provide the best defense to anyone who hires them because the system is supposed to work as an adversarial one, whereby justice is supposed to emerge from a debate as to what is the truth of the matter, who did what and was it a crime and how responsible is the defendant if at all. It resembles the Socratic method of inquiry, study or research whereby questions are raised and answers proposed, then criticized, on and on until one reaches the answer that can withstand all reasonable objections for the time being! In the end, given the available context of information and analysis, the result is as good as it gets. Wanting more is unreasonable, even irrational!
So no one can have a rational position on the issues that gave rise to the trial prior to its taking place (and the assorted associated procedures). Sure, people can speculate, even bet on the result that’s likely to be reached once the entire process has played itself out. But before that no one is supposed to know whether the accused defendant is guilty or not, not as far as the law is concerned. The way the system works is supposedly a very effective one for purposes of reaching a sound conclusion. The jury, for example, will have heard pros and cons and all the evidence and arguments for both sides and then can take it upon itself to render a just verdict.
Nor is the justice to be achieved perfect, incontrovertible. That’s what appeals are about. Only once the whole processes has been deployed is there a best result available and that result is not to be regarded as timelessly unassailable, forever the best. No results of human inquiry, be it in ethics, law, science or philosophy can promise a final resolution, not until time has come to an end! That is the human condition and unless someone has the word of an omniscient God to consult about it all, no one can reasonably want anything better.
More generally, human knowledge ought not to be expected to produce the last word on any subject. That’s not knowledge but omniscience! We live in an unfolding universe and whatever knowledge we manage to gain of it must accommodate that fact and not aim for more. Otherwise skepticism and cynicism arise, the belief that no one can know anything and that all human efforts are useless and futile.
Some people would delight in spreading such an idea around since then they might get the chance to convince us that they do have special abilities, mystical insight and such, that entitles them to lord it over the rest of us “mere” humans. But it is ruse since no one has such abilities. Knowledge, the proper kind, needs to be earned through hard work and there will always be room for updating it as time unfolds and new information comes to light.
Here as in many other areas of human affairs it is once again best to remember that the perfect or ideal is the enemy of the good! Wishing for the impossible dream will prevent one from obtaining the very best that’s humanly possible. And that should be all counts be enough.
Tibor R. Machan
Every once in a while I get sucked into defending the way the legal system aims to secure justice in the criminal law. In particular, why do the accused or suspected criminals get to be defended so vigorously, as if they were always victims of perpetuation rather than pretty much guilty as charged. Defense attorneys, especially, get a lot of flack if they accept as clients people everyone “knows” are guilty as sin. How could they do such a thing? Isn’t that immoral? Does it not in fact make the profession corrupt?
I keep insisting that this normally isn’t so at all. Defense attorneys are committed, professionally, to provide the best defense to anyone who hires them because the system is supposed to work as an adversarial one, whereby justice is supposed to emerge from a debate as to what is the truth of the matter, who did what and was it a crime and how responsible is the defendant if at all. It resembles the Socratic method of inquiry, study or research whereby questions are raised and answers proposed, then criticized, on and on until one reaches the answer that can withstand all reasonable objections for the time being! In the end, given the available context of information and analysis, the result is as good as it gets. Wanting more is unreasonable, even irrational!
So no one can have a rational position on the issues that gave rise to the trial prior to its taking place (and the assorted associated procedures). Sure, people can speculate, even bet on the result that’s likely to be reached once the entire process has played itself out. But before that no one is supposed to know whether the accused defendant is guilty or not, not as far as the law is concerned. The way the system works is supposedly a very effective one for purposes of reaching a sound conclusion. The jury, for example, will have heard pros and cons and all the evidence and arguments for both sides and then can take it upon itself to render a just verdict.
Nor is the justice to be achieved perfect, incontrovertible. That’s what appeals are about. Only once the whole processes has been deployed is there a best result available and that result is not to be regarded as timelessly unassailable, forever the best. No results of human inquiry, be it in ethics, law, science or philosophy can promise a final resolution, not until time has come to an end! That is the human condition and unless someone has the word of an omniscient God to consult about it all, no one can reasonably want anything better.
More generally, human knowledge ought not to be expected to produce the last word on any subject. That’s not knowledge but omniscience! We live in an unfolding universe and whatever knowledge we manage to gain of it must accommodate that fact and not aim for more. Otherwise skepticism and cynicism arise, the belief that no one can know anything and that all human efforts are useless and futile.
Some people would delight in spreading such an idea around since then they might get the chance to convince us that they do have special abilities, mystical insight and such, that entitles them to lord it over the rest of us “mere” humans. But it is ruse since no one has such abilities. Knowledge, the proper kind, needs to be earned through hard work and there will always be room for updating it as time unfolds and new information comes to light.
Here as in many other areas of human affairs it is once again best to remember that the perfect or ideal is the enemy of the good! Wishing for the impossible dream will prevent one from obtaining the very best that’s humanly possible. And that should be all counts be enough.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Rights and the Self
Tibor R. Machan
The human self gets all kinds of abuse from intellectuals, poets, artists and entertainers. Hubris and selfishness are roundly condemned whereas selflessness and unselfishness are widely praised. This rank misanthropy is fatal to the assertion of human rights!
Even as the Nobel Prize goes to the jailed Chinese champion of individual rights in opposition of the Communist Chinese government’s unabashed affirmation of its placing such a person in jail for more than a decade and even as the more pragmatic Western commentators lament the fact, the connection between altruism and the violation of individual rights is rarely being made. Yet it is a major source of the age long abuse of human beings and their liberty since, of course, free men and women are not bound to always overlook themselves as they pursue their various tasks in their lives.
What is the source of this awful paradox? How come so many demean human beings while also champion their liberty to do as they judge fit when the latter clearly runs the risk that they will look out for themselves first and foremost in numerous realms of their lives?
One main reason is that over the centuries very often human nature has either been completely annihilated or utterly derided as nasty and brutish and anti-social. Not only did some versions of Christianity—although by no means all—affirm and vigorously defend the doctrine of original sin, such that every person is born laden with evil from which he or she needs to be saved by baptism and other rituals. But secular philosophies, such as that of the very influential English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, declared people to be fundamentally ill-willed, brutal to their fellows and rapacious in all manner of human endeavors, especially the economic. This idea that we are all ruthless, amoral profit maximizers is very fashionable, especially in Hollywood where Oliver Stone makes millions depicting economic agents as nothing but vicious cads.
Why did this view become so credible even while people, especially those in the business world, are routinely pursuing a course of conduct that advances not just their but everyone else’s profit with whom they trade? Why will the silly zero sum game vision of human economic life not go away even while nearly all trade actually advances the economic interest of all the traders?
A source of this very hostile view of humanity comes from the belief that we are automatically driven to charge ahead with no regard for anything else but power and wealth. Where this vision gained its plausibility is in classical physics which Hobbes used as his model for explaining everything, including human life and politics. All of us are like atoms, like matter-in-motion moving forward blindly, ineluctably and whoever we meet we are inclined to mow down mercilessly, just as are the physical bits and pieces of which the material world is made crush anything in their path that's weak. And for those who championed original sin what stands out about us is our animal nature, the element of us that places us at home in the wilds or the jungle. Only when we focus on the spiritual are we saved from being insufferably mean and nasty.
None of this makes much sense of our actual lives in which the great majority of us are focused on both, our own flourishing and on the well being of those close to us and even quite far! Only a small portion of humanity fits the picture that depicts us as heartless brutes. Even when we are indeed selfish—or as the ancient thinkers would have it, properly prudent—we are by no means anti-social. Mostly we realize that the company of our fellows is a great plus in our lives whether we cooperate or compete with them.
Unless people wish to give up on fighting for their rights not to be oppressed and tyrannized by the worst among us, they will need to stop denigrating themselves and assert their own value. That way, also, lies their full acknowledgement of the value of other human beings and their basic rights.
Tibor R. Machan
The human self gets all kinds of abuse from intellectuals, poets, artists and entertainers. Hubris and selfishness are roundly condemned whereas selflessness and unselfishness are widely praised. This rank misanthropy is fatal to the assertion of human rights!
Even as the Nobel Prize goes to the jailed Chinese champion of individual rights in opposition of the Communist Chinese government’s unabashed affirmation of its placing such a person in jail for more than a decade and even as the more pragmatic Western commentators lament the fact, the connection between altruism and the violation of individual rights is rarely being made. Yet it is a major source of the age long abuse of human beings and their liberty since, of course, free men and women are not bound to always overlook themselves as they pursue their various tasks in their lives.
What is the source of this awful paradox? How come so many demean human beings while also champion their liberty to do as they judge fit when the latter clearly runs the risk that they will look out for themselves first and foremost in numerous realms of their lives?
One main reason is that over the centuries very often human nature has either been completely annihilated or utterly derided as nasty and brutish and anti-social. Not only did some versions of Christianity—although by no means all—affirm and vigorously defend the doctrine of original sin, such that every person is born laden with evil from which he or she needs to be saved by baptism and other rituals. But secular philosophies, such as that of the very influential English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, declared people to be fundamentally ill-willed, brutal to their fellows and rapacious in all manner of human endeavors, especially the economic. This idea that we are all ruthless, amoral profit maximizers is very fashionable, especially in Hollywood where Oliver Stone makes millions depicting economic agents as nothing but vicious cads.
Why did this view become so credible even while people, especially those in the business world, are routinely pursuing a course of conduct that advances not just their but everyone else’s profit with whom they trade? Why will the silly zero sum game vision of human economic life not go away even while nearly all trade actually advances the economic interest of all the traders?
A source of this very hostile view of humanity comes from the belief that we are automatically driven to charge ahead with no regard for anything else but power and wealth. Where this vision gained its plausibility is in classical physics which Hobbes used as his model for explaining everything, including human life and politics. All of us are like atoms, like matter-in-motion moving forward blindly, ineluctably and whoever we meet we are inclined to mow down mercilessly, just as are the physical bits and pieces of which the material world is made crush anything in their path that's weak. And for those who championed original sin what stands out about us is our animal nature, the element of us that places us at home in the wilds or the jungle. Only when we focus on the spiritual are we saved from being insufferably mean and nasty.
None of this makes much sense of our actual lives in which the great majority of us are focused on both, our own flourishing and on the well being of those close to us and even quite far! Only a small portion of humanity fits the picture that depicts us as heartless brutes. Even when we are indeed selfish—or as the ancient thinkers would have it, properly prudent—we are by no means anti-social. Mostly we realize that the company of our fellows is a great plus in our lives whether we cooperate or compete with them.
Unless people wish to give up on fighting for their rights not to be oppressed and tyrannized by the worst among us, they will need to stop denigrating themselves and assert their own value. That way, also, lies their full acknowledgement of the value of other human beings and their basic rights.
Thursday, October 07, 2010
The Times’ Phony Integrity
Tibor R. Machan
In its October 6, 2010, editorial, “Lamentable Speech,” The New York Times stood up for a hard line stance on the right to free speech. As the editors wrote, “To the American Nazi Party, Hustler Magazine, and other odious figures in Supreme Court history, add the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. and the members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. Their antigay protests at the funeral of a soldier slain in Iraq were deeply repugnant but protected by the First Amendment. All of the sympathy in the case of Snyder v. Phelps, which was argued on Wednesday at the Supreme Court, goes to the family of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, the fallen Marine. But as the appeals court in the case observed, using words of Justice Felix Frankfurter, ‘It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have often been forged in controversies involving not very nice people’.”
OK, so far so good except, as one comment on the editorial pointed out, where has The New York Times been when hate speech laws were being passed? Why didn’t it defend the right of those uttering hateful opinions about blacks? Well, one can only suppose that those folks do not deserve the same protection that was provided to the American Nazi Party or, in this case, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. and the members of the Westboro Baptists Church. It would have been politically incorrect or, to use the old fashioned term, impolitic to argue for that.
Even more obvious is The Time’s very partial support of constitutional integrity when one thinks where it stands on the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment which suffered a major blow from the U. S. Supreme Court back in July of 2005, in the case of Kelo v. City of New London Connecticut, when it supported the confiscation of private property for the purpose of bolstering the City’s tax based by approving its taking of private property to be given to a private firm that was to develop it and then pay big bucks to the city in taxes. (BTW, to this day the property hasn’t been developed!) So while it is OK for the court to insist on the full protection of the free speech rights of a group of nasty bigots, it isn’t OK for it to insist on the full protection of the equally vital constitutional principle private property rights against the intrusiveness of city governments. Not a sign of true integrity, me thinks; more a matter of the philosophy of “a living constitution”!
So what is it with The Times and others who appear to hold that the right of freedom of speech is vital--well, except when hate speech is involved--but the right to private property, which actually supports the former right (because, after all, unless property rights are secure, freedom of speech or religion isn’t either), can be dispensed with? I hazard to guess that the cherry picking of rights is in the spirit of The Times’ pragmatic philosophy, one that actually has no respect for basic principles in any sphere of reality. To pragmatists everything is negotiable. And that doesn’t preclude posturing as defenders of principle now and then, when some agenda one is favoring may benefit from it.
What agenda might be served by insisting on upholding the principle of the right to freedom of speech in this case? Well, what pops to mind is that perhaps those soldiers and their families who are being harangued by Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. and the members of the Westboro Baptists Church aren’t fighting in a war that The Times approves of. Another might be that The Times is not very fond of the US Military in general. Yet another might be that freedom of speech is only of special interest to The Times--after all, it mostly operates under the protection of the First Amendment as it editorializes and opines about innumerable subjects. (But to come out and defend hate speech would be too much--The Times is too committed to the special interests of certain groups at which such speech is often aimed.)
No, I do not for a moment believe that The New York Times has come to see the significance of principled adherence to the Bill of Rights no matter how readily its editorial quotes Justice Felix Frankfurter. Pragmatism does not forbid making use of principles when it serves the special purpose to which a pragmatist is devoted, just as Communists and Nazis have no trouble making use of the US Constitution as they defend those principles that make it possible for them to attack the very political system that’s founded on them.
One needs to be careful not to be taken in by the phony parading of principles by those who really, in the end, care not a whit for principles, for whom integrity is deep down but a sign of naive fundamentalism--consider how defending free market capitalism is ridiculed as “market fundamentalism” by one of the favorite columnists of The Times even though most who stand up for that system do so as a matter of their commitment to principle!
Tibor R. Machan
In its October 6, 2010, editorial, “Lamentable Speech,” The New York Times stood up for a hard line stance on the right to free speech. As the editors wrote, “To the American Nazi Party, Hustler Magazine, and other odious figures in Supreme Court history, add the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. and the members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. Their antigay protests at the funeral of a soldier slain in Iraq were deeply repugnant but protected by the First Amendment. All of the sympathy in the case of Snyder v. Phelps, which was argued on Wednesday at the Supreme Court, goes to the family of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, the fallen Marine. But as the appeals court in the case observed, using words of Justice Felix Frankfurter, ‘It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have often been forged in controversies involving not very nice people’.”
OK, so far so good except, as one comment on the editorial pointed out, where has The New York Times been when hate speech laws were being passed? Why didn’t it defend the right of those uttering hateful opinions about blacks? Well, one can only suppose that those folks do not deserve the same protection that was provided to the American Nazi Party or, in this case, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. and the members of the Westboro Baptists Church. It would have been politically incorrect or, to use the old fashioned term, impolitic to argue for that.
Even more obvious is The Time’s very partial support of constitutional integrity when one thinks where it stands on the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment which suffered a major blow from the U. S. Supreme Court back in July of 2005, in the case of Kelo v. City of New London Connecticut, when it supported the confiscation of private property for the purpose of bolstering the City’s tax based by approving its taking of private property to be given to a private firm that was to develop it and then pay big bucks to the city in taxes. (BTW, to this day the property hasn’t been developed!) So while it is OK for the court to insist on the full protection of the free speech rights of a group of nasty bigots, it isn’t OK for it to insist on the full protection of the equally vital constitutional principle private property rights against the intrusiveness of city governments. Not a sign of true integrity, me thinks; more a matter of the philosophy of “a living constitution”!
So what is it with The Times and others who appear to hold that the right of freedom of speech is vital--well, except when hate speech is involved--but the right to private property, which actually supports the former right (because, after all, unless property rights are secure, freedom of speech or religion isn’t either), can be dispensed with? I hazard to guess that the cherry picking of rights is in the spirit of The Times’ pragmatic philosophy, one that actually has no respect for basic principles in any sphere of reality. To pragmatists everything is negotiable. And that doesn’t preclude posturing as defenders of principle now and then, when some agenda one is favoring may benefit from it.
What agenda might be served by insisting on upholding the principle of the right to freedom of speech in this case? Well, what pops to mind is that perhaps those soldiers and their families who are being harangued by Rev. Fred Phelps Sr. and the members of the Westboro Baptists Church aren’t fighting in a war that The Times approves of. Another might be that The Times is not very fond of the US Military in general. Yet another might be that freedom of speech is only of special interest to The Times--after all, it mostly operates under the protection of the First Amendment as it editorializes and opines about innumerable subjects. (But to come out and defend hate speech would be too much--The Times is too committed to the special interests of certain groups at which such speech is often aimed.)
No, I do not for a moment believe that The New York Times has come to see the significance of principled adherence to the Bill of Rights no matter how readily its editorial quotes Justice Felix Frankfurter. Pragmatism does not forbid making use of principles when it serves the special purpose to which a pragmatist is devoted, just as Communists and Nazis have no trouble making use of the US Constitution as they defend those principles that make it possible for them to attack the very political system that’s founded on them.
One needs to be careful not to be taken in by the phony parading of principles by those who really, in the end, care not a whit for principles, for whom integrity is deep down but a sign of naive fundamentalism--consider how defending free market capitalism is ridiculed as “market fundamentalism” by one of the favorite columnists of The Times even though most who stand up for that system do so as a matter of their commitment to principle!
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
The Cost of Lack of Trust
Tibor R. Machan
Over the last couple of days a bunch of announcements came from our government, including warning about travel to Europe where terror plans are said to be afoot by Al-Qaeda. Another warning came from the man convicted of trying to blow up Times Square--he said after he was sentenced to life in prison that Americans will be victims of terror big time. And I could go on but my point can be made with just these cases. I do not trust the warnings from our government although neither do I know them to be unjustified.
The government of the United States of America is on a power crusade, taking every opportunity it can to deprive its citizens of their resources and control over their own lives and seem to be intent on imposing on them endless rules and regulations. These are, I am convinced, true believers in state fundamentalism: Every problems must be solved by means of expanded government, both in size and, especially, in scope. So how can I believe it when the government declares that there is increasing danger around us, all of which seems routinely to require that government gain greater and greater power over us?
I am no conspiracy buff and don’t have the idea that what these folks do is done deliberately simply so as to gain raw power over others--most people need some kind of tall tale to tell themselves in order to rationalize such power--but I do believe firmly that their sincere convictions lead them in that direction, whether these be about how the economy needs more of their regulation or how they must have greater access to our lives (including it appears to all our electronic communication capabilities), or how without them we would all be left helpless in the world, or how some other problems faced by us all requires exactly their expertise and good will and, most of all, legal power over us. I am eager to be disproved about their basic political corruption, in part because of my belief that human beings in all walks of life can do well or badly or somewhere on the continuum in between and I do not see politicians to be fundamentally evil.
Not being an anarchist, I do not hold that all who work for governments must be vicious--judges, the police, soldiers, bailiffs, border guards, or whoever. But those in government--especially in offices that have no business existing in the first place since they have nothing to do with protecting our basic rights--do seem to me to be much more tempted to seek power over other people than are the rest of us. And they do very often yield to this temptation, with long stories about why what they are doing is no vice but a virtue! They have mostly convinced themselves that all the more or less coercive meddling in our lives is a good thing for them to carry out--regulators, however much they fumble around trying to figure out what on earth their efforts could do to improve matters, are probably quite proud of what they do in their jobs. Maybe even IRS employees consider their work honorable!
I recall an associate of mine at the Reason Foundation had gotten a post in one regulatory office of the federal government and she came back to report on just how impressed she was with all the hard work she witnessed by the people who worked where she became one of the officials, despite the fact that she never gave up her idea that government regulations are ultimately more harmful than helpful! Pretty amazing.
The seductiveness of government work appears to be very powerful, even with those who are sworn to uphold principles that fly in the face of what the officials are called upon to do. Perhaps this is in part because many people hold to the belief in life that it is “the thought that counts,” never mind how destructive the results over which they believe we have little control. (This, by the way, is the common sense version of the famous doctrine of the highly influential 17th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant who taught that there is only one absolutely good thing in the universe, namely, the good will, i.e., the sincere intention to do the right thing whatever it may be.)
With all the misconduct that emanates from seats of political power, all the BS produced by politicians and their apologists, all the out and out corruption evident throughout the land by politicians and bureaucrats, it is awfully difficult to suddenly become trusting when these same people tell us that there is danger lurking from terrorists. And frankly even if there is, is it more severe than the danger we face from fellow drivers on the roads where we would be spending time if instead of traveling abroad we stayed home? (Why, BTW, are there no studies publicized about that? Back during the brief scare from Libyan terrorism in Europe in Spring of 1986 I believe it was, after the US had an altercation with that country, an economist calculated the probability of death or injury from terrorism to American tourists traveling in Europe versus from road crashes here at home where they would be spending their time instead and it appeared that the latter posed a great threat than the former!)
When government is as big, corrupt, and unruly as America’s is these days, how can you trust anything said by government officials?
Tibor R. Machan
Over the last couple of days a bunch of announcements came from our government, including warning about travel to Europe where terror plans are said to be afoot by Al-Qaeda. Another warning came from the man convicted of trying to blow up Times Square--he said after he was sentenced to life in prison that Americans will be victims of terror big time. And I could go on but my point can be made with just these cases. I do not trust the warnings from our government although neither do I know them to be unjustified.
The government of the United States of America is on a power crusade, taking every opportunity it can to deprive its citizens of their resources and control over their own lives and seem to be intent on imposing on them endless rules and regulations. These are, I am convinced, true believers in state fundamentalism: Every problems must be solved by means of expanded government, both in size and, especially, in scope. So how can I believe it when the government declares that there is increasing danger around us, all of which seems routinely to require that government gain greater and greater power over us?
I am no conspiracy buff and don’t have the idea that what these folks do is done deliberately simply so as to gain raw power over others--most people need some kind of tall tale to tell themselves in order to rationalize such power--but I do believe firmly that their sincere convictions lead them in that direction, whether these be about how the economy needs more of their regulation or how they must have greater access to our lives (including it appears to all our electronic communication capabilities), or how without them we would all be left helpless in the world, or how some other problems faced by us all requires exactly their expertise and good will and, most of all, legal power over us. I am eager to be disproved about their basic political corruption, in part because of my belief that human beings in all walks of life can do well or badly or somewhere on the continuum in between and I do not see politicians to be fundamentally evil.
Not being an anarchist, I do not hold that all who work for governments must be vicious--judges, the police, soldiers, bailiffs, border guards, or whoever. But those in government--especially in offices that have no business existing in the first place since they have nothing to do with protecting our basic rights--do seem to me to be much more tempted to seek power over other people than are the rest of us. And they do very often yield to this temptation, with long stories about why what they are doing is no vice but a virtue! They have mostly convinced themselves that all the more or less coercive meddling in our lives is a good thing for them to carry out--regulators, however much they fumble around trying to figure out what on earth their efforts could do to improve matters, are probably quite proud of what they do in their jobs. Maybe even IRS employees consider their work honorable!
I recall an associate of mine at the Reason Foundation had gotten a post in one regulatory office of the federal government and she came back to report on just how impressed she was with all the hard work she witnessed by the people who worked where she became one of the officials, despite the fact that she never gave up her idea that government regulations are ultimately more harmful than helpful! Pretty amazing.
The seductiveness of government work appears to be very powerful, even with those who are sworn to uphold principles that fly in the face of what the officials are called upon to do. Perhaps this is in part because many people hold to the belief in life that it is “the thought that counts,” never mind how destructive the results over which they believe we have little control. (This, by the way, is the common sense version of the famous doctrine of the highly influential 17th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant who taught that there is only one absolutely good thing in the universe, namely, the good will, i.e., the sincere intention to do the right thing whatever it may be.)
With all the misconduct that emanates from seats of political power, all the BS produced by politicians and their apologists, all the out and out corruption evident throughout the land by politicians and bureaucrats, it is awfully difficult to suddenly become trusting when these same people tell us that there is danger lurking from terrorists. And frankly even if there is, is it more severe than the danger we face from fellow drivers on the roads where we would be spending time if instead of traveling abroad we stayed home? (Why, BTW, are there no studies publicized about that? Back during the brief scare from Libyan terrorism in Europe in Spring of 1986 I believe it was, after the US had an altercation with that country, an economist calculated the probability of death or injury from terrorism to American tourists traveling in Europe versus from road crashes here at home where they would be spending their time instead and it appeared that the latter posed a great threat than the former!)
When government is as big, corrupt, and unruly as America’s is these days, how can you trust anything said by government officials?
Saturday, October 02, 2010
Kate Zernike’s Stupid Outrage
Tibor R. Machan
In a news report on October 2nd, 2010, titled “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts,” New York Times reporter Kate Zernike tells us that books like Frederick Bastiat’s The Law, from 1850, and F. A Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom from 1944, are selling like hotcakes among Tea Party members. OMG! How awful. Next we will be told that some people are studying Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Locke, Marx and other authors of “long-ago” texts in order to learn about political economy, ethics, social philosophy and such.
I suppose the hip thing to do would be to burn all these long-ago texts and focus only on the blogs, especially from the Left, in our efforts to gain an understanding of how the world works. Zernike writes as if most of our university curricula ought to be dismissed as useless, irrelevant, even destructive of human knowledge because, after all, in many courses one is advised to read other than the latest texts.
This is truly ignorant. Where does she think the Obamas and Krugmans and other champions of vast government powers gain their approach to political economy and public policy? How about Thomas Hobbes? Or Rousseau? Or Hegel or Marx or Keynes? All of these and their fellow statists produced works way back when.
It was in fact Keynes who made the observation that might have helped Ms. Zernike to get a grip on how ideas function in this world. As he wrote in 1936, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” (The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money [Harcourt, Brace, 1936], p. 383.)
And it is, after all, Keynes’ views on the modern economy that’s pretty much guiding the thinking and policies of the Obama administration and the columns of Krugman (who makes no secret of this fact as he pushes for more and more government stimuli to solve our problems). Who thought up the idea of top down management of a country’s economy? It was the long ago champions of mercantilism whom Adam Smith criticized so severely for constantly meddling in the economy. And before that it was Thomas Hobbes who promoted absolute statism which clearly implied just the sort of policies that today’s Leftists favor and which pretty much guide their thinking today.
It is actually refreshing that Tea Party members are studying classic texts in the fields of economics and social philosophy to offset the mostly statist political education they have very likely received in their own contemporary education, an education surely biased in favor of government control of nearly everything in our lives given how that education itself is nearly uniformly government funded and administered. This certainly could use some balance from some of these long-ago thinkers the Tea Party is dipping into for some advice.
Instead of attempting to belittle Tea Party folks because they read some classic works critical of the huge scope of government--the Leviathan Hobbes was advocating --Zernike might have reported on some of the arguments they are absorbing from these thinkers and what replies might be offered them in defense of those other long-ago authors who loved government and are today influencing most politicians and bureaucrats with their statist teachings.
Tea Party folks may or may not be reading the best books to gain their grasp of the right way to approach today’s American political economy but for certain the task they face isn’t impeded at all by a bit of reading of the long-ago texts of their choice. Maybe when they end up on the Jaywalking segment of NBC-TV’s The Tonight Show with Mr. Leno, they will actually demonstrate a bit of education instead of the blatant ignorance that most of those being featured exhibit.
Tibor R. Machan
In a news report on October 2nd, 2010, titled “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts,” New York Times reporter Kate Zernike tells us that books like Frederick Bastiat’s The Law, from 1850, and F. A Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom from 1944, are selling like hotcakes among Tea Party members. OMG! How awful. Next we will be told that some people are studying Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Locke, Marx and other authors of “long-ago” texts in order to learn about political economy, ethics, social philosophy and such.
I suppose the hip thing to do would be to burn all these long-ago texts and focus only on the blogs, especially from the Left, in our efforts to gain an understanding of how the world works. Zernike writes as if most of our university curricula ought to be dismissed as useless, irrelevant, even destructive of human knowledge because, after all, in many courses one is advised to read other than the latest texts.
This is truly ignorant. Where does she think the Obamas and Krugmans and other champions of vast government powers gain their approach to political economy and public policy? How about Thomas Hobbes? Or Rousseau? Or Hegel or Marx or Keynes? All of these and their fellow statists produced works way back when.
It was in fact Keynes who made the observation that might have helped Ms. Zernike to get a grip on how ideas function in this world. As he wrote in 1936, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” (The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money [Harcourt, Brace, 1936], p. 383.)
And it is, after all, Keynes’ views on the modern economy that’s pretty much guiding the thinking and policies of the Obama administration and the columns of Krugman (who makes no secret of this fact as he pushes for more and more government stimuli to solve our problems). Who thought up the idea of top down management of a country’s economy? It was the long ago champions of mercantilism whom Adam Smith criticized so severely for constantly meddling in the economy. And before that it was Thomas Hobbes who promoted absolute statism which clearly implied just the sort of policies that today’s Leftists favor and which pretty much guide their thinking today.
It is actually refreshing that Tea Party members are studying classic texts in the fields of economics and social philosophy to offset the mostly statist political education they have very likely received in their own contemporary education, an education surely biased in favor of government control of nearly everything in our lives given how that education itself is nearly uniformly government funded and administered. This certainly could use some balance from some of these long-ago thinkers the Tea Party is dipping into for some advice.
Instead of attempting to belittle Tea Party folks because they read some classic works critical of the huge scope of government--the Leviathan Hobbes was advocating --Zernike might have reported on some of the arguments they are absorbing from these thinkers and what replies might be offered them in defense of those other long-ago authors who loved government and are today influencing most politicians and bureaucrats with their statist teachings.
Tea Party folks may or may not be reading the best books to gain their grasp of the right way to approach today’s American political economy but for certain the task they face isn’t impeded at all by a bit of reading of the long-ago texts of their choice. Maybe when they end up on the Jaywalking segment of NBC-TV’s The Tonight Show with Mr. Leno, they will actually demonstrate a bit of education instead of the blatant ignorance that most of those being featured exhibit.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
A Misguided Distinction--or Not?
Tibor R. Machan
When working out what should guide public institutions and policies in our lives and human communities, those who chime in from ancient to contemporary times have advanced various proposals and they have often been divided into two groups. Members of one of these advance certain basic principles that ought to ground the institutions and policies, while those of the other suggest that the way to decide is by focusing on the anticipated consequences, never mind any purportedly firm principles (which tend, in any case, to become obsolete or misapplied).
In the United States and in other developed countries the former group is called deontologists while the latter consequentialists. (In the history of political ideas Immanuel Kant is deemed to be the quintessential deontologist while John Stuart Mill the most prominent consequentialist.) Deontologists try to identify principles by which we ought to live and guide our public affairs--for example, a set of basic rights everyone supposedly has and which may never be violated; this will, argues the deontologist, insure justice and other good things in community affairs. For the consequentialist the idea that should govern is whether some policy most effectively promotes what is desirable--for example, spend whatever is necessary so as to eliminate poverty and sickness, never mind if anyone’s rights are violated in the process since those rights mostly tend to be obstacles to what needs to be done.
Is this a good, useful distinction? I have my doubts. For one, no one can tell for sure what the result or consequence of a course of action or public policy will be down the line, not certainly in any detail. And when it is possible to tell, it is because we have discovered that following some principle is likely to bring forth a given result. The actual actions or policies are not available for inspection until after they have been tried. So if we are to be guided by anything, it cannot be the results, which lie in the future and are mostly speculative. It would have to be certain rules or principles that we have found to be helpful in the past when we deployed them.
On the other hand, principles are always limited by the fact that they were discovered during the past that may not quite be like the present and future or, even more likely, the scopes of which are limited by what we know so far. Thus, for example, take the U. S. Constitution that contains a set of principles (especially in the Bill of Rights). It is subject to amendments in part so as to update these principles in light of new knowledge and new issues in need of being addressed. Once amendments are seen as possible, even necessary, strict reliance on the principles is admittedly hopeless.
So then what about the two kind of approaches, deontological versus consquentialist? Neither is really adequate to what human beings need to guide their lives. Yes, they will have to identify certain ethical, political, legal and other principles--e.g., in medicine, engineering, or automobile driving--but once they have done so they will still need to keep vigilant so as to make sure they aren’t missing some good reason for updating these. However, focusing entirely on the consequences of their actions and policies will not do the job either since those are not yet here to deal with. They will have to ease up to them with the help of the principles, more or less complete, that they have found to be soundly based on their knowledge of the past.
Fortunately, although our knowledge is rarely complete--and never final--about anything that surrounds us in the world, the world itself tends to be fairly steady and predictable (once one has studied it carefully, without bias or prejudice such as wishful thinking). It is not possible to escape the need to balance reasonably well established principles and expected consequences. With these in hand, many of our tasks and challenges are likely to be managed pretty well although we need also to be prepared for surprises. There is no substitute for paying close attention.
Tibor R. Machan
When working out what should guide public institutions and policies in our lives and human communities, those who chime in from ancient to contemporary times have advanced various proposals and they have often been divided into two groups. Members of one of these advance certain basic principles that ought to ground the institutions and policies, while those of the other suggest that the way to decide is by focusing on the anticipated consequences, never mind any purportedly firm principles (which tend, in any case, to become obsolete or misapplied).
In the United States and in other developed countries the former group is called deontologists while the latter consequentialists. (In the history of political ideas Immanuel Kant is deemed to be the quintessential deontologist while John Stuart Mill the most prominent consequentialist.) Deontologists try to identify principles by which we ought to live and guide our public affairs--for example, a set of basic rights everyone supposedly has and which may never be violated; this will, argues the deontologist, insure justice and other good things in community affairs. For the consequentialist the idea that should govern is whether some policy most effectively promotes what is desirable--for example, spend whatever is necessary so as to eliminate poverty and sickness, never mind if anyone’s rights are violated in the process since those rights mostly tend to be obstacles to what needs to be done.
Is this a good, useful distinction? I have my doubts. For one, no one can tell for sure what the result or consequence of a course of action or public policy will be down the line, not certainly in any detail. And when it is possible to tell, it is because we have discovered that following some principle is likely to bring forth a given result. The actual actions or policies are not available for inspection until after they have been tried. So if we are to be guided by anything, it cannot be the results, which lie in the future and are mostly speculative. It would have to be certain rules or principles that we have found to be helpful in the past when we deployed them.
On the other hand, principles are always limited by the fact that they were discovered during the past that may not quite be like the present and future or, even more likely, the scopes of which are limited by what we know so far. Thus, for example, take the U. S. Constitution that contains a set of principles (especially in the Bill of Rights). It is subject to amendments in part so as to update these principles in light of new knowledge and new issues in need of being addressed. Once amendments are seen as possible, even necessary, strict reliance on the principles is admittedly hopeless.
So then what about the two kind of approaches, deontological versus consquentialist? Neither is really adequate to what human beings need to guide their lives. Yes, they will have to identify certain ethical, political, legal and other principles--e.g., in medicine, engineering, or automobile driving--but once they have done so they will still need to keep vigilant so as to make sure they aren’t missing some good reason for updating these. However, focusing entirely on the consequences of their actions and policies will not do the job either since those are not yet here to deal with. They will have to ease up to them with the help of the principles, more or less complete, that they have found to be soundly based on their knowledge of the past.
Fortunately, although our knowledge is rarely complete--and never final--about anything that surrounds us in the world, the world itself tends to be fairly steady and predictable (once one has studied it carefully, without bias or prejudice such as wishful thinking). It is not possible to escape the need to balance reasonably well established principles and expected consequences. With these in hand, many of our tasks and challenges are likely to be managed pretty well although we need also to be prepared for surprises. There is no substitute for paying close attention.
Rejecting Anti-Natural Rights
Tibor R. Machan
President Obama’s friend and former colleague Cass Sunstein, now apparently on leave from Harvard Law School, would have us believe that our rights are granted to us by government. Sunstein and his co-author Stephen Holmes have argued in their book, The Cost of Rights (W. W. Norton, 1999) that human beings have no rights until government grants them some. As they put it, “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” (p. 14) and “Statelessness means rightlessness” (p. 19).
This is just the opposite of what classical liberal natural rights theorists think and what the American Founders thought. In the Declaration they stated, albeit rather succinctly, that we have rights because our very creation as human beings has endowed us with them. And they held that these were unalienable and government is instituted so as to secure them. Clearly, this implies the basic individual human rights come before the government instituted to secure them for us. The two scholars are mounting a major assault on what is perhaps most significant in the American political tradition. They have attempted to undercut this tradition’s most revolutionary and significant features, namely, the demotion of government from its pretense of being the sovereign and the substitution of individual human beings as the true sovereign agents in a just human community.
There are other challenges, some even more deep seated, that have been and still are being levelled at the American style political regime. The late Leo Strauss and many of his followers have been arguing that the entire drift of modern political liberalism, with John Locke at its head, is wrongheaded and we must return to the paternalistic politics that came out of a certain interpretation of Plato’s famous dialogue Republic. Still, the Sunstein-Holmes attack is what is getting serious consideration in our day so I wish to revisit the topic and once more offer a line of defense that seems to be decisive.
But perhaps Holmes and Sunstein are right and the American Founders had it backwards. What can we say, in just a few words, in support of the Founder’s idea? Without rehashing John Locke’s and his followers’ defense of the character of our rights—as derivable from our human nature and the requirements for human community life—there are some simple matters that point to the fact that Holmes and Sunstein have it wrong.
Consider a thought experiment that isn’t at all far fetched: An adult human being is stranded in the wild where there is no law, no police, no courts, nothing. Someone else comes upon him and turns out to be quite aggressive. He is attacked, physically, and all of what he has made for himself out there to survive is under the threat of being taken away from him.
It seems pretty clear that such a person would do the right thing to defend himself, if he could, against the aggressor who is threatening his life, his prospects for a future, maybe his family and friends as well (if we build up the case in more detail). And if he were to be challenged afterwards why he resisted being attacked and robbed, he could well say, “This fellow wasn’t peaceful toward me, didn’t respect my rights as a fellow human being, so I had to resist him, physically, so he couldn’t succeed in his threats,” or something simpler along these lines.
Yet, if our rights depended upon government granting them to us, such a line of argument, justifying self-defense, wouldn’t hold up. Those who challenged the victim of the attack for resisting the aggressor might say, “But, listen here, since government grants people their rights and there is no government out here you have no rights. Not to your life, not to your liberty, not to your property and not to self-defense, certainly. Not, at least, until a government is established and grants you these rights. Until then it is a free for all and no complaints make sense against our actions that you consider aggressive.” (Indeed, that is pretty much how Hobbes, but not Locke, would have understood the situation in the state of nature.
Surely this would be absurd. Yet that is just what would follow if the prominent analysis of individual rights, advanced by the likes of Holmes and Sunstein, would be sound. No one would have any justification putting up any resistance against attackers--including rogue governments--unless some government issued a grant of rights. Given, however, that there are not just imaginable but real circumstances in which human beings interact with no government having been established or in operation (for the time being, at least), and given that some of these people can act violently toward others, there is need for some idea that makes sense of the situation and gives guidance to conduct on the part of those who are victims of the violence. These ideas may not be expressed entirely in the familiar terms of individual rights but that is what they would be intimating, even if somewhat unclearly and undeveloped.
Tibor R. Machan
President Obama’s friend and former colleague Cass Sunstein, now apparently on leave from Harvard Law School, would have us believe that our rights are granted to us by government. Sunstein and his co-author Stephen Holmes have argued in their book, The Cost of Rights (W. W. Norton, 1999) that human beings have no rights until government grants them some. As they put it, “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” (p. 14) and “Statelessness means rightlessness” (p. 19).
This is just the opposite of what classical liberal natural rights theorists think and what the American Founders thought. In the Declaration they stated, albeit rather succinctly, that we have rights because our very creation as human beings has endowed us with them. And they held that these were unalienable and government is instituted so as to secure them. Clearly, this implies the basic individual human rights come before the government instituted to secure them for us. The two scholars are mounting a major assault on what is perhaps most significant in the American political tradition. They have attempted to undercut this tradition’s most revolutionary and significant features, namely, the demotion of government from its pretense of being the sovereign and the substitution of individual human beings as the true sovereign agents in a just human community.
There are other challenges, some even more deep seated, that have been and still are being levelled at the American style political regime. The late Leo Strauss and many of his followers have been arguing that the entire drift of modern political liberalism, with John Locke at its head, is wrongheaded and we must return to the paternalistic politics that came out of a certain interpretation of Plato’s famous dialogue Republic. Still, the Sunstein-Holmes attack is what is getting serious consideration in our day so I wish to revisit the topic and once more offer a line of defense that seems to be decisive.
But perhaps Holmes and Sunstein are right and the American Founders had it backwards. What can we say, in just a few words, in support of the Founder’s idea? Without rehashing John Locke’s and his followers’ defense of the character of our rights—as derivable from our human nature and the requirements for human community life—there are some simple matters that point to the fact that Holmes and Sunstein have it wrong.
Consider a thought experiment that isn’t at all far fetched: An adult human being is stranded in the wild where there is no law, no police, no courts, nothing. Someone else comes upon him and turns out to be quite aggressive. He is attacked, physically, and all of what he has made for himself out there to survive is under the threat of being taken away from him.
It seems pretty clear that such a person would do the right thing to defend himself, if he could, against the aggressor who is threatening his life, his prospects for a future, maybe his family and friends as well (if we build up the case in more detail). And if he were to be challenged afterwards why he resisted being attacked and robbed, he could well say, “This fellow wasn’t peaceful toward me, didn’t respect my rights as a fellow human being, so I had to resist him, physically, so he couldn’t succeed in his threats,” or something simpler along these lines.
Yet, if our rights depended upon government granting them to us, such a line of argument, justifying self-defense, wouldn’t hold up. Those who challenged the victim of the attack for resisting the aggressor might say, “But, listen here, since government grants people their rights and there is no government out here you have no rights. Not to your life, not to your liberty, not to your property and not to self-defense, certainly. Not, at least, until a government is established and grants you these rights. Until then it is a free for all and no complaints make sense against our actions that you consider aggressive.” (Indeed, that is pretty much how Hobbes, but not Locke, would have understood the situation in the state of nature.
Surely this would be absurd. Yet that is just what would follow if the prominent analysis of individual rights, advanced by the likes of Holmes and Sunstein, would be sound. No one would have any justification putting up any resistance against attackers--including rogue governments--unless some government issued a grant of rights. Given, however, that there are not just imaginable but real circumstances in which human beings interact with no government having been established or in operation (for the time being, at least), and given that some of these people can act violently toward others, there is need for some idea that makes sense of the situation and gives guidance to conduct on the part of those who are victims of the violence. These ideas may not be expressed entirely in the familiar terms of individual rights but that is what they would be intimating, even if somewhat unclearly and undeveloped.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Why Rip Off The Rich?
Tibor R. Machan
This fracas about letting the Bush tax cut expire for those making more than the arbitrary amount of $250K per year is bizarre. Never mind for now that the entire system of taxation in a bona fide free country is criminal--not different, in principle, from a system of serfdom or involuntary servitude. (Taxation had its place in the same systems that were home to these other types of bondage!) But this unrestrained hatred for those who earn more than $250K is rank bigotry, not different from racial, gender and ethnic prejudice at heart.
Well, yes there is a difference, since when men and women become wealthy, this isn’t unavoidable as when they are black or women or from a given background into which they were born. But neither is becoming wealthy something for which anyone ought to be blamed and punished.
It is, after all, no longer the case that behind every great fortune there must be a great crime. That used to be generally true enough when wealth was obtained primarily via conquest, looting, and robbery perpetrated by armies and navies. One of the great discoveries of Adam Smith, the father of modern economic science, is that wealth is much more efficiently created without such methods, by protecting the equal liberty of everyone to produce and trade. Because we are often so radically different from one another, we can easily find opportunities to gain from others while they are also gaining from us. This is one of the benefits of specialization. Understanding this much should be sufficient to reject the notion that anyone needs to be put in servitude to other people so that these others can find what they need and want. A genuine, unbriddled free market place makes that possible, one in which the government with its monopoly on physical force does not try to cherry pick who gets what and how much and when.
Apart, however, of the irrationality of interfering in people’s freedom of production and exchange, there is in this debate about extending the Bush tax cuts to those who make more than $250K a viciousness that should be entirely unwelcome among civilized men and women. This enviousness that many people harbor and which is then taken advantage of by so many politicians--and fueled by their academic instigators such as The New York Times columnist and Princeton University economist Paul Krugman--is neanderthal, barbaric, totally unbecoming of people who live in a complex society and who have only the faintest idea of how others earn their resources. To have cultivated this envy toward those who are economically better off is really no different from cultivating it toward those who have superior talents or other assets in their lives, such as good health and good looks. To pick on such people is totally unjust and pointless.
Some, of course, try to peddle the notion that the very rich really owe it all to society--which is to say, to politicians and law enforcement--as if it were the referees at a game who scored points! But that is a fabrication and rationalization aimed to sooth one’s guilty conscience for harboring the envy of those who happen to be better off. Nothing good can come from it and a lot of ill will and needless acrimony is fostered by it all.
We have a very fine model for understanding economic differences among people in the field of competitive athletics. Sportsmanship is part of it, whereby competitors at all the different levels of achievement and skill live in harmony instead of hating one another and insisting on placing extra burdens on the successful. (Where there is a policy of handicapping it usually serves the purpose of making the sport more appealing to spectators and has nothing to do with equalization!)
I suggest we get rid of this attitude of rich bashing once and for all and shame those who refuse to do so instead of exploiting their attitude for political purposes.
Tibor R. Machan
This fracas about letting the Bush tax cut expire for those making more than the arbitrary amount of $250K per year is bizarre. Never mind for now that the entire system of taxation in a bona fide free country is criminal--not different, in principle, from a system of serfdom or involuntary servitude. (Taxation had its place in the same systems that were home to these other types of bondage!) But this unrestrained hatred for those who earn more than $250K is rank bigotry, not different from racial, gender and ethnic prejudice at heart.
Well, yes there is a difference, since when men and women become wealthy, this isn’t unavoidable as when they are black or women or from a given background into which they were born. But neither is becoming wealthy something for which anyone ought to be blamed and punished.
It is, after all, no longer the case that behind every great fortune there must be a great crime. That used to be generally true enough when wealth was obtained primarily via conquest, looting, and robbery perpetrated by armies and navies. One of the great discoveries of Adam Smith, the father of modern economic science, is that wealth is much more efficiently created without such methods, by protecting the equal liberty of everyone to produce and trade. Because we are often so radically different from one another, we can easily find opportunities to gain from others while they are also gaining from us. This is one of the benefits of specialization. Understanding this much should be sufficient to reject the notion that anyone needs to be put in servitude to other people so that these others can find what they need and want. A genuine, unbriddled free market place makes that possible, one in which the government with its monopoly on physical force does not try to cherry pick who gets what and how much and when.
Apart, however, of the irrationality of interfering in people’s freedom of production and exchange, there is in this debate about extending the Bush tax cuts to those who make more than $250K a viciousness that should be entirely unwelcome among civilized men and women. This enviousness that many people harbor and which is then taken advantage of by so many politicians--and fueled by their academic instigators such as The New York Times columnist and Princeton University economist Paul Krugman--is neanderthal, barbaric, totally unbecoming of people who live in a complex society and who have only the faintest idea of how others earn their resources. To have cultivated this envy toward those who are economically better off is really no different from cultivating it toward those who have superior talents or other assets in their lives, such as good health and good looks. To pick on such people is totally unjust and pointless.
Some, of course, try to peddle the notion that the very rich really owe it all to society--which is to say, to politicians and law enforcement--as if it were the referees at a game who scored points! But that is a fabrication and rationalization aimed to sooth one’s guilty conscience for harboring the envy of those who happen to be better off. Nothing good can come from it and a lot of ill will and needless acrimony is fostered by it all.
We have a very fine model for understanding economic differences among people in the field of competitive athletics. Sportsmanship is part of it, whereby competitors at all the different levels of achievement and skill live in harmony instead of hating one another and insisting on placing extra burdens on the successful. (Where there is a policy of handicapping it usually serves the purpose of making the sport more appealing to spectators and has nothing to do with equalization!)
I suggest we get rid of this attitude of rich bashing once and for all and shame those who refuse to do so instead of exploiting their attitude for political purposes.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
State Fundamentalism
Tibor R. Machan
True, the idea came to me after having read many of Paul Krugman’s missives, both his columns in The New York Times and essays in such magazines as The New York Review of Books. In his often very polemical writings--for a Nobel Laureate he does seem to indulge in polemics more than do most other academics--he nearly always makes reference to market fundamentalism or market fundamentalists, alleging in the process that here in these United States free market capitalism is widely preferred among those thinking about economics and public policy. And that the free market is the status quot! It is all a crock but everyone has the right to speak his or her mind and that’s so even if one has but a small one.
In point of fact, in American there is probably much more a state fundamentalism afoot than any respect for the free market system. From labor to business, from farming to the sciences, from the arts to nearly every level of education professionals are always clamoring for the state, for government, to step in a fix and even run things. Yes, this is very true of business--major corporations are the country’s most eager welfare clients. Subsidies for this and that, protectionism here, price supports there; there simply is no end to how readily all these elements of our society rush to Congress or the President--or some political body at the local and state levels--so as to bring about health (or at least security) for their industry or firm.
Now, of course, this is just the nature of a mixed economy, which America is, as are all the Western developed countries. Except that no one ever makes the claim that Germany, France, Great Britain, or Australia is in the grip of market fundamentalism, which they are definitely not; but neither is the U. S. Yet the claim is made in many corners, including especially in the American academy. And the motivation for this transparent enough.
Although America’s economy is far from capitalist and American academics, even quite a few economists, are far from convinced that capitalism is a sound political economic system, the foes of capitalism are always worried that capitalism could break out all over in America, especially when the mixed economy has been the massive failure no one can reasonably deny. Under such circumstances foes of capitalism, people who love a controlled economy and would gladly do the controlling themselves, must find some way to make sure no one actually blames the mixed system for the failures, let alone those elements of the mixture that are anything but capitalist--e.g., the federal reserve system, the massive regulatory apparatus, the innumerable government officials charged to mange the economy (often actually called "czars"!). So why not do the old fashioned thing and mount a defense of statism by leading an attack on capitalism, the only innocent party to the fiasco.
These folks, let’s be clear about it, are state fundamentalists. They love government being in charge of the economy, and they are clearly hoping for a hand in this assignment. The more control the government has over the system, the more their Keynesian plans can be put into effect. As Keynes himself made clear, under a system of central planning, Keynesian measure are easy to implement: "[T]he theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [einestotalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire." So why not nudge American toward totalitarianism and then implement the policies recommended by such Keynesians as Professor Krugman? Seems like it is reasonable to assume that this is a game plan of the state fundamentalists.
Bottom line: No market fundamentalism anywhere in sight here but plenty of state fundamentalism is in evidence. And unless the state fundamentalists’ fraudulent attacks on free market capitalism are promptly refuted, they may indeed pull off their scam and use the current problems which are the result of the mixed economy to advance their radical statist objectives. (BTW, Keynes himself was not a committed statist--he promoted statist measures only for the short run, unlike many of his epigone.)
Tibor R. Machan
True, the idea came to me after having read many of Paul Krugman’s missives, both his columns in The New York Times and essays in such magazines as The New York Review of Books. In his often very polemical writings--for a Nobel Laureate he does seem to indulge in polemics more than do most other academics--he nearly always makes reference to market fundamentalism or market fundamentalists, alleging in the process that here in these United States free market capitalism is widely preferred among those thinking about economics and public policy. And that the free market is the status quot! It is all a crock but everyone has the right to speak his or her mind and that’s so even if one has but a small one.
In point of fact, in American there is probably much more a state fundamentalism afoot than any respect for the free market system. From labor to business, from farming to the sciences, from the arts to nearly every level of education professionals are always clamoring for the state, for government, to step in a fix and even run things. Yes, this is very true of business--major corporations are the country’s most eager welfare clients. Subsidies for this and that, protectionism here, price supports there; there simply is no end to how readily all these elements of our society rush to Congress or the President--or some political body at the local and state levels--so as to bring about health (or at least security) for their industry or firm.
Now, of course, this is just the nature of a mixed economy, which America is, as are all the Western developed countries. Except that no one ever makes the claim that Germany, France, Great Britain, or Australia is in the grip of market fundamentalism, which they are definitely not; but neither is the U. S. Yet the claim is made in many corners, including especially in the American academy. And the motivation for this transparent enough.
Although America’s economy is far from capitalist and American academics, even quite a few economists, are far from convinced that capitalism is a sound political economic system, the foes of capitalism are always worried that capitalism could break out all over in America, especially when the mixed economy has been the massive failure no one can reasonably deny. Under such circumstances foes of capitalism, people who love a controlled economy and would gladly do the controlling themselves, must find some way to make sure no one actually blames the mixed system for the failures, let alone those elements of the mixture that are anything but capitalist--e.g., the federal reserve system, the massive regulatory apparatus, the innumerable government officials charged to mange the economy (often actually called "czars"!). So why not do the old fashioned thing and mount a defense of statism by leading an attack on capitalism, the only innocent party to the fiasco.
These folks, let’s be clear about it, are state fundamentalists. They love government being in charge of the economy, and they are clearly hoping for a hand in this assignment. The more control the government has over the system, the more their Keynesian plans can be put into effect. As Keynes himself made clear, under a system of central planning, Keynesian measure are easy to implement: "[T]he theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [einestotalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire." So why not nudge American toward totalitarianism and then implement the policies recommended by such Keynesians as Professor Krugman? Seems like it is reasonable to assume that this is a game plan of the state fundamentalists.
Bottom line: No market fundamentalism anywhere in sight here but plenty of state fundamentalism is in evidence. And unless the state fundamentalists’ fraudulent attacks on free market capitalism are promptly refuted, they may indeed pull off their scam and use the current problems which are the result of the mixed economy to advance their radical statist objectives. (BTW, Keynes himself was not a committed statist--he promoted statist measures only for the short run, unlike many of his epigone.)
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Politicians’ Criminal Minds
Tibor R. Machan
It may have been either Will Rogers or Mark Twain, I cannot now recall which of the two great American humorists it was, who said all politicians are criminals. But it makes no difference because when something is true, its source is not the main issue. Fact is, politicians are extortionists at heart since their forte is that they will allow you and me to live and work provided we fork out nearly half of what we earn or otherwise obtain honestly so they can then dispose of it as they see fit.
In our time, not entirely unlike in others, the main appeal politicians hold out for millions is that they join them in their resentful bashing of the rich. This is a successful ploy because in the past, of course, most riches came from conquest, from governments and their favorite minions sending out thugs to confiscate whatever they desired from those who had some. As the saying has it, behind every great fortune lies a great crime, including extortion via taxation! This is why Robin Hood became a hero to so many: he went out and recovered what the tax takers took by force and returned it to the rightful owners. (No, Robin Hood didn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor; he repossessed from the ruler and his vicious taxers!)
How can politicians live with the knowledge that they are what they are, confiscators, extortionists? Because they tell themselves the story so many tell themselves when they do the wrong thing--”The intended end justifies the means!” Nearly every criminal thinks this way and so do nearly all who perpetrate evil upon others. Some higher goal than what the victim seems to be pursuing motivates them. They are serving the public interest or God or the common good or the environment or science or culture--you name it, there are hundreds of candidates that make the politician feel at ease.
Criminals also have great goals that will be served by their loot and since their victims are well enough off, they have nothing to complain about. After all, isn’t it selfish to insist on trying to hold on to your own resources, your own time, indeed your own life? Prominent university professors spell this out for us--we are all selfish bastards if we hold on to our own and allocate it was we judge fit. No, they will determine to what end my and your life should be devoted and if we disagree, they will send the politician into the arena who will make laws that compel us all to comply with their noble vision. As Professor Peter Unger wrote in one of his “ethics” books, “On pain of living a life that's seriously immoral, a typical well-off person, like you and me, must give away most of her financially valuable assets, and much of her income, directing the funds to lessen efficiently the serious suffering of others.”
I personally know numerous such apologists for actions and politics that involve taking from people what is theirs so as to devote it to objectives the takers have failed to convince their victims to contribute to voluntarily. Never mind that--just like criminals, who cares about the rights of these victims when my noble goals are at stake?! And because there are at least some whose wealth was acquired through some shady dealings, one can rest easy in one’s conscience by telling oneself, well they are all guilty of graft and theft, why shouldn’t we then go after them in the same vein? With the likes of the famous French poet Charles Baudelair, who said that "Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and vilest form of egoism. The spirit of every businessman is completely depraved" providing them the clear conscience they crave as they rob and steal and extort from us, why would politicians think any differently from criminals? In our day the leader of the citizenry has no hesitation about bashing the wealthy, insisting that robbing them of their lives and resources and liberty to dispose of these as they judge proper is perfectly honorable.
Until this attitude about people and their wealth--reminiscent of the days of serfdom and involuntary servitude--seriously abates, the dream of a genuine free country will remain, well, but a dream. The idea that when one is successful, or even simply lucky so far as amassing resources is concerned, others become authorized to forcibly remove one’s wealth and use it without one’s permission for their however desirable ends, is plainly barbaric. It amounts to subjugating others, actually enslaving them. And that has no place in civilized societies.
Tibor R. Machan
It may have been either Will Rogers or Mark Twain, I cannot now recall which of the two great American humorists it was, who said all politicians are criminals. But it makes no difference because when something is true, its source is not the main issue. Fact is, politicians are extortionists at heart since their forte is that they will allow you and me to live and work provided we fork out nearly half of what we earn or otherwise obtain honestly so they can then dispose of it as they see fit.
In our time, not entirely unlike in others, the main appeal politicians hold out for millions is that they join them in their resentful bashing of the rich. This is a successful ploy because in the past, of course, most riches came from conquest, from governments and their favorite minions sending out thugs to confiscate whatever they desired from those who had some. As the saying has it, behind every great fortune lies a great crime, including extortion via taxation! This is why Robin Hood became a hero to so many: he went out and recovered what the tax takers took by force and returned it to the rightful owners. (No, Robin Hood didn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor; he repossessed from the ruler and his vicious taxers!)
How can politicians live with the knowledge that they are what they are, confiscators, extortionists? Because they tell themselves the story so many tell themselves when they do the wrong thing--”The intended end justifies the means!” Nearly every criminal thinks this way and so do nearly all who perpetrate evil upon others. Some higher goal than what the victim seems to be pursuing motivates them. They are serving the public interest or God or the common good or the environment or science or culture--you name it, there are hundreds of candidates that make the politician feel at ease.
Criminals also have great goals that will be served by their loot and since their victims are well enough off, they have nothing to complain about. After all, isn’t it selfish to insist on trying to hold on to your own resources, your own time, indeed your own life? Prominent university professors spell this out for us--we are all selfish bastards if we hold on to our own and allocate it was we judge fit. No, they will determine to what end my and your life should be devoted and if we disagree, they will send the politician into the arena who will make laws that compel us all to comply with their noble vision. As Professor Peter Unger wrote in one of his “ethics” books, “On pain of living a life that's seriously immoral, a typical well-off person, like you and me, must give away most of her financially valuable assets, and much of her income, directing the funds to lessen efficiently the serious suffering of others.”
I personally know numerous such apologists for actions and politics that involve taking from people what is theirs so as to devote it to objectives the takers have failed to convince their victims to contribute to voluntarily. Never mind that--just like criminals, who cares about the rights of these victims when my noble goals are at stake?! And because there are at least some whose wealth was acquired through some shady dealings, one can rest easy in one’s conscience by telling oneself, well they are all guilty of graft and theft, why shouldn’t we then go after them in the same vein? With the likes of the famous French poet Charles Baudelair, who said that "Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and vilest form of egoism. The spirit of every businessman is completely depraved" providing them the clear conscience they crave as they rob and steal and extort from us, why would politicians think any differently from criminals? In our day the leader of the citizenry has no hesitation about bashing the wealthy, insisting that robbing them of their lives and resources and liberty to dispose of these as they judge proper is perfectly honorable.
Until this attitude about people and their wealth--reminiscent of the days of serfdom and involuntary servitude--seriously abates, the dream of a genuine free country will remain, well, but a dream. The idea that when one is successful, or even simply lucky so far as amassing resources is concerned, others become authorized to forcibly remove one’s wealth and use it without one’s permission for their however desirable ends, is plainly barbaric. It amounts to subjugating others, actually enslaving them. And that has no place in civilized societies.
No Way Could I Support Republicans
Tibor R. Machan
Now and then I am subject to serious consternation about not being able to address concrete political issues, ones that occupy the attention of some many politicians and pundits. Do I hold a political position that is irrelevant to what is happening in the world?
Well, maybe I do at times. At least if we are talking about immediate relevance then my unwavering support for the fully free society isn’t helping very much, I admit. I wish that issues I am passionate about, some of which I have learned are absolutely vital to human community life, came up for decision in the body politic--issues such as whether government may regulate the professions, whether interstate commerce should be subject to government meddling, whether the war on drugs should continue and so forth and so on.
At times I have the impression that maybe there are practicing political allies out there somewhere, ones who are involved with current affairs, and at times it looks like these would be Republicans and especially conservative ones. That’s because strictly speaking if one were a bona fide American conservative, what one would be working hard to conserve is the principles of the American Founders, those laid out so well in the Declaration of Independence. After all, liberal democrats, so called, have mostly abandoned any loyalty to the ideals of the Declaration and they are only champions of the American political tradition when it helps to promote their populist agenda of forcible wealth redistribution (i.e., when they invoke the 16th Amendment which legalizes income extortion). The ACLU is a joke since it cherry picks whose constitutional rights it stands up for.
But no sooner to do I hold out just a bit of hope for the Republicans and conservatives, I am reminded of just what they love more than anything else, which is to coerce everyone to follow their moral prejudices.
Consider what they did about the U. S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy the other day. Finally there was chance to purge the legal system of this unjust policy, of making gays jump through all kinds of hoops so they may serve in the Army, Navy and Air Force of a supposedly free country. As it was reported at Newsmax.com, “With the 56-43 vote, Democrats fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the legislation [to repeal don’t ask, don’t tell].... Senate Democrats attached the repeal provision to the defense bill in the hopes that Republicans would hesitate to vote against legislation that included popular defense programs. But GOP legislators opposed the bill anyway, thwarting a key part of the Democrats' legislative agenda.”
I don’t give a hoot about the Democrats’ legislative agenda because it is mostly bent on robbing Peter to give out gifts to Paul. But I do consider it grossly unjust to bar gays from serving in the military, just as it would be to bar bakers, Catholics, tall people, or opera singers from doing so. What on earth does being gay have to do with military service? (In fact in ancient Greece it was widely believed that gays would make the finest soldiers!) What kind of Neanderthal mentality must these people have for making it their huge objective to stand in the way of gays who want to volunteer?
When this kind of news comes to my attention I have to hold my nose and just hope that in time there will be an opposition political party that will not be linked to such nonsense. Will that ever happen? I don’t know but I am not giving up working to that end. For when we reflect seriously on the principles American conservatives are supposed to be conserving, preserving, they are clearly such that they do not give the slightest support to gay bashing of any kind, any more than they support female or short people or farmer bashing.
We are all human beings with basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of our happiness. And while there are some neo-conservatives who do take issue with these ideals, thinking them to be pedestrian and shallow, any genuine American must consider them central to a just human community. In such a community no official discrimination against gays is tolerable, nor against anyone else who lives peacefully!
Tibor R. Machan
Now and then I am subject to serious consternation about not being able to address concrete political issues, ones that occupy the attention of some many politicians and pundits. Do I hold a political position that is irrelevant to what is happening in the world?
Well, maybe I do at times. At least if we are talking about immediate relevance then my unwavering support for the fully free society isn’t helping very much, I admit. I wish that issues I am passionate about, some of which I have learned are absolutely vital to human community life, came up for decision in the body politic--issues such as whether government may regulate the professions, whether interstate commerce should be subject to government meddling, whether the war on drugs should continue and so forth and so on.
At times I have the impression that maybe there are practicing political allies out there somewhere, ones who are involved with current affairs, and at times it looks like these would be Republicans and especially conservative ones. That’s because strictly speaking if one were a bona fide American conservative, what one would be working hard to conserve is the principles of the American Founders, those laid out so well in the Declaration of Independence. After all, liberal democrats, so called, have mostly abandoned any loyalty to the ideals of the Declaration and they are only champions of the American political tradition when it helps to promote their populist agenda of forcible wealth redistribution (i.e., when they invoke the 16th Amendment which legalizes income extortion). The ACLU is a joke since it cherry picks whose constitutional rights it stands up for.
But no sooner to do I hold out just a bit of hope for the Republicans and conservatives, I am reminded of just what they love more than anything else, which is to coerce everyone to follow their moral prejudices.
Consider what they did about the U. S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy the other day. Finally there was chance to purge the legal system of this unjust policy, of making gays jump through all kinds of hoops so they may serve in the Army, Navy and Air Force of a supposedly free country. As it was reported at Newsmax.com, “With the 56-43 vote, Democrats fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance the legislation [to repeal don’t ask, don’t tell].... Senate Democrats attached the repeal provision to the defense bill in the hopes that Republicans would hesitate to vote against legislation that included popular defense programs. But GOP legislators opposed the bill anyway, thwarting a key part of the Democrats' legislative agenda.”
I don’t give a hoot about the Democrats’ legislative agenda because it is mostly bent on robbing Peter to give out gifts to Paul. But I do consider it grossly unjust to bar gays from serving in the military, just as it would be to bar bakers, Catholics, tall people, or opera singers from doing so. What on earth does being gay have to do with military service? (In fact in ancient Greece it was widely believed that gays would make the finest soldiers!) What kind of Neanderthal mentality must these people have for making it their huge objective to stand in the way of gays who want to volunteer?
When this kind of news comes to my attention I have to hold my nose and just hope that in time there will be an opposition political party that will not be linked to such nonsense. Will that ever happen? I don’t know but I am not giving up working to that end. For when we reflect seriously on the principles American conservatives are supposed to be conserving, preserving, they are clearly such that they do not give the slightest support to gay bashing of any kind, any more than they support female or short people or farmer bashing.
We are all human beings with basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of our happiness. And while there are some neo-conservatives who do take issue with these ideals, thinking them to be pedestrian and shallow, any genuine American must consider them central to a just human community. In such a community no official discrimination against gays is tolerable, nor against anyone else who lives peacefully!
Monday, September 20, 2010
Property Rights and Law
Tibor R. Machan
Some have been demeaning the right to private property--which is very closely linked to America’s political tradition and if sufficiently discredited would also help destroy the country--because such a right is supposedly created by a legal system. If so, then of course, this right has no foundation apart from a decision by lawmakers. It rests on quicksand, in short!
As Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein have argued in their book The Cost of Rights, Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (W. W. Norton, 1999), “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” and “Statelessness means rightlessness.” Without government, without a state, without laws they insist that individual human rights do not exist. This is just what feudal systems and their kin rested on--monarchs granted privileges or rights. None exist apart from what the monarch grants--statelessness means being without rights. Natural rights, ones that supposedly rest on human nature and are independent of the will of any king, czar or legislature, are then a fabrication, just as Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel maintain about property rights in their book The Myth of Ownership (Oxfor UP, 2002).
Now there is a little bit of truth here. A legal system that rests on individual-- including private property--rights does need to protect as well as to elaborate and refine our natural rights. That is how having rights manages to be applied in a legal order. One’s right to life, for example, exists independently of the law but the law develops that right to have application in a great variety of contexts throughout a country, such as the airwaves, land, consumer goods, labor and so forth. It does this by way of a vigorously legal process--arguments at court, etc.
Yet it’s vital to keep in mind that human beings really to have a right to their lives--no one is authorized to kill them, to kidnap them, etc. And this is so also with their having a right to private property, which is to say to their liberty to acquire and hold valued items either through working on nature or dealing with fellow human beings.
This is somewhat analogous to engineering where principles underlie the plans and building processes that are, of course, detailed applications of those principles. These principles, not unlike principles of political economy, aren’t invented by the engineers, although they do develop and apply them in practice. They depend, in part, on the nature of the materials being used in the engineering process, on the terrain where building occurs, etc. That process is firmly guided by the nature of these materials, not invented by people as the rules of games like chess tend to be (although even there some relationship to an independent reality exists--the rules must be consistent).
Why would people argue against the natural ground for our human rights? Well, some may just find the idea of the nature of something problematic and if that idea is derived from Plato instead of, say, Aristotle, there are indeed problems with it. But apart from such esoteric philosophical issues, there really is nothing very mysterious about things having a nature. It is what they must be to be the kind of thing they are--happiness, truth, justice, apples, dogs, or whatever else, they all have their nature, what they must be to be what they are. In contrast to such accidental or incidental matters as their age or color or name, human beings as such must be capable of thinking, to be basically rational. That’s their nature and it is from this that we can derive their rights--being rational animals, human beings require a community in which they are free to think, to act on their thinking, etc. And their natural rights are what secures for them this requirement, this sphere of personal authority or sovereignty.
I do not wish to delve into this in detail--my book Individuals and Their Rights (Open Court, 1989) has done this--but it is important to remind people that their rights aren’t the inventions of politicians, not even majorities, but come from their human nature. That way we can check the power of governments, insist that they stick to the job of securing these rights instead of becoming unrestrained seats of sheer power from which “rights” may be granted or withheld willy-nilly!
Tibor R. Machan
Some have been demeaning the right to private property--which is very closely linked to America’s political tradition and if sufficiently discredited would also help destroy the country--because such a right is supposedly created by a legal system. If so, then of course, this right has no foundation apart from a decision by lawmakers. It rests on quicksand, in short!
As Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein have argued in their book The Cost of Rights, Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (W. W. Norton, 1999), “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” and “Statelessness means rightlessness.” Without government, without a state, without laws they insist that individual human rights do not exist. This is just what feudal systems and their kin rested on--monarchs granted privileges or rights. None exist apart from what the monarch grants--statelessness means being without rights. Natural rights, ones that supposedly rest on human nature and are independent of the will of any king, czar or legislature, are then a fabrication, just as Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel maintain about property rights in their book The Myth of Ownership (Oxfor UP, 2002).
Now there is a little bit of truth here. A legal system that rests on individual-- including private property--rights does need to protect as well as to elaborate and refine our natural rights. That is how having rights manages to be applied in a legal order. One’s right to life, for example, exists independently of the law but the law develops that right to have application in a great variety of contexts throughout a country, such as the airwaves, land, consumer goods, labor and so forth. It does this by way of a vigorously legal process--arguments at court, etc.
Yet it’s vital to keep in mind that human beings really to have a right to their lives--no one is authorized to kill them, to kidnap them, etc. And this is so also with their having a right to private property, which is to say to their liberty to acquire and hold valued items either through working on nature or dealing with fellow human beings.
This is somewhat analogous to engineering where principles underlie the plans and building processes that are, of course, detailed applications of those principles. These principles, not unlike principles of political economy, aren’t invented by the engineers, although they do develop and apply them in practice. They depend, in part, on the nature of the materials being used in the engineering process, on the terrain where building occurs, etc. That process is firmly guided by the nature of these materials, not invented by people as the rules of games like chess tend to be (although even there some relationship to an independent reality exists--the rules must be consistent).
Why would people argue against the natural ground for our human rights? Well, some may just find the idea of the nature of something problematic and if that idea is derived from Plato instead of, say, Aristotle, there are indeed problems with it. But apart from such esoteric philosophical issues, there really is nothing very mysterious about things having a nature. It is what they must be to be the kind of thing they are--happiness, truth, justice, apples, dogs, or whatever else, they all have their nature, what they must be to be what they are. In contrast to such accidental or incidental matters as their age or color or name, human beings as such must be capable of thinking, to be basically rational. That’s their nature and it is from this that we can derive their rights--being rational animals, human beings require a community in which they are free to think, to act on their thinking, etc. And their natural rights are what secures for them this requirement, this sphere of personal authority or sovereignty.
I do not wish to delve into this in detail--my book Individuals and Their Rights (Open Court, 1989) has done this--but it is important to remind people that their rights aren’t the inventions of politicians, not even majorities, but come from their human nature. That way we can check the power of governments, insist that they stick to the job of securing these rights instead of becoming unrestrained seats of sheer power from which “rights” may be granted or withheld willy-nilly!
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Sharron Angle & the Right to be Armed
Tibor R. Machan
It is not an unfamiliar ploy--if you have no arguments, try to ridicule or just be snide, belittle your adversary. This is what has been going on with the messages sent by the Tea Party.
I follow write ups in The New Republic and elsewhere and to this date I have found no arguments advanced against what the Tea Party is saying--for example, that the United States federal government has an impermissibly wide scope; that the government’s debt is a huge burden on future generations which cannot even vote on what they are getting into; that the Second Amendment was included in the U. S. Constitution in part so as to enable citizens to resist tyranny should it come to their having to do so; that coercing people to buy anything, health insurance of sandals, is unconstitutional and certainly immoral; that forcing citizens to pay for policies such as federally funded abortions which they object to as a matter of their religious convictions is also abhorrent, etc., etc. All these snooty people seem to be able to do nothing more about their dislike of the Tea Party is to assassinate the character of the membership and leadership.
I am no great fan of the Tea Party’s style, fancying myself to be more cosmopolitan than nearly all those I associate with it, yet that is irrelevant when it comes to considering political alternatives. We aren’t talking fashion or erudition here but public policy and last I checked members of the Tea Party, like I and most everyone I know in this country, are a significant portion of the public.
Even if you are an unprincipled politician or merely a cheerleader of your candidates and representatives, you must at least pay attention to the fact that Tea Party members are part of the democratic electorate. So in this substantially democratic polity they are entitled to be included in the discussion of the issues even if their message strikes all the sophisticated, snooty bunch at The New York Review of Books and the The New York Times as way off base.
It is interesting to me how morally righteous these people can be when it comes to racial or gender prejudice but how little they care about dismissing a very sizable segment of the American public such as those who are part of the Tea Party. Don’t they even sense how hypocritical it is for them to champion “the people” but then drop almost half of those people from the ranks of those who should matter politically, whose input must be taken seriously? I guess not!
A good case in point is the flack Sharron Angle of Nevada has received for reminding us all that the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution had something to do with empowering citizens to resist tyranny, should their government go completely corrupt. As she said on a talk show, “You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.” Never mind the pedigree--The Washington Post and a host of other “liberal” media and politicians tried to discredit the lady for saying what is quite true and not at all weird, except if you think like compliant government subjects across the globe.
Yes, the idea is an utterly respectable one, put forth by the likes of English political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and it even makes an appearance in the Declaration of Independence. As the document puts it, “But when a long train abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” Although in terms deployed by nearly all the people across the globe the American federal government may appear to be but a pussycat, in terms of the American political tradition today’s American government is very nearly despotic. (What else would one consider its brutal prosecution of the war on drugs, for example?)
But never mind, perhaps Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle of Nevada is misguided to think that mentioning this feature of the Second Amendment is relevant today. So then argue it out and do not treat it as if it were the ravings of a lunatic. Cannot the Tea Party opponents mount a good case against the idea instead of pretending it is nonsense? Perhaps not, so they must resort to ridicule and belittlement.
That, in turn, should inform the rest of the electorate just how impoverished are the views of those who wish to hold on to the status quo, who want the federal government to continue moving in the direction typified by Obamacare, massive government bailouts, and the war on drugs! If so, then I say all the more reason to get in line with the Tea Party and “throw off such government”!
Tibor R. Machan
It is not an unfamiliar ploy--if you have no arguments, try to ridicule or just be snide, belittle your adversary. This is what has been going on with the messages sent by the Tea Party.
I follow write ups in The New Republic and elsewhere and to this date I have found no arguments advanced against what the Tea Party is saying--for example, that the United States federal government has an impermissibly wide scope; that the government’s debt is a huge burden on future generations which cannot even vote on what they are getting into; that the Second Amendment was included in the U. S. Constitution in part so as to enable citizens to resist tyranny should it come to their having to do so; that coercing people to buy anything, health insurance of sandals, is unconstitutional and certainly immoral; that forcing citizens to pay for policies such as federally funded abortions which they object to as a matter of their religious convictions is also abhorrent, etc., etc. All these snooty people seem to be able to do nothing more about their dislike of the Tea Party is to assassinate the character of the membership and leadership.
I am no great fan of the Tea Party’s style, fancying myself to be more cosmopolitan than nearly all those I associate with it, yet that is irrelevant when it comes to considering political alternatives. We aren’t talking fashion or erudition here but public policy and last I checked members of the Tea Party, like I and most everyone I know in this country, are a significant portion of the public.
Even if you are an unprincipled politician or merely a cheerleader of your candidates and representatives, you must at least pay attention to the fact that Tea Party members are part of the democratic electorate. So in this substantially democratic polity they are entitled to be included in the discussion of the issues even if their message strikes all the sophisticated, snooty bunch at The New York Review of Books and the The New York Times as way off base.
It is interesting to me how morally righteous these people can be when it comes to racial or gender prejudice but how little they care about dismissing a very sizable segment of the American public such as those who are part of the Tea Party. Don’t they even sense how hypocritical it is for them to champion “the people” but then drop almost half of those people from the ranks of those who should matter politically, whose input must be taken seriously? I guess not!
A good case in point is the flack Sharron Angle of Nevada has received for reminding us all that the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution had something to do with empowering citizens to resist tyranny, should their government go completely corrupt. As she said on a talk show, “You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years.” Never mind the pedigree--The Washington Post and a host of other “liberal” media and politicians tried to discredit the lady for saying what is quite true and not at all weird, except if you think like compliant government subjects across the globe.
Yes, the idea is an utterly respectable one, put forth by the likes of English political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and it even makes an appearance in the Declaration of Independence. As the document puts it, “But when a long train abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” Although in terms deployed by nearly all the people across the globe the American federal government may appear to be but a pussycat, in terms of the American political tradition today’s American government is very nearly despotic. (What else would one consider its brutal prosecution of the war on drugs, for example?)
But never mind, perhaps Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle of Nevada is misguided to think that mentioning this feature of the Second Amendment is relevant today. So then argue it out and do not treat it as if it were the ravings of a lunatic. Cannot the Tea Party opponents mount a good case against the idea instead of pretending it is nonsense? Perhaps not, so they must resort to ridicule and belittlement.
That, in turn, should inform the rest of the electorate just how impoverished are the views of those who wish to hold on to the status quo, who want the federal government to continue moving in the direction typified by Obamacare, massive government bailouts, and the war on drugs! If so, then I say all the more reason to get in line with the Tea Party and “throw off such government”!
Tony Judt’s Last Prevarications
Tibor R. Machan
As a loyal though reluctant reader of The New York Review of Books--too masochistic an experience at times but in my line of work unavoidable--I have read a lot of essays by the recently deceased public intellectual and NYU professor Tony Judt. A skilled and erudite writer, with some subtlety to his viewpoint, Judt has been trying to juggle his social democratic stance with his recognition that socialism itself is no answer to our socio-economic wows. But his hostility to free market capitalism has shown through in most of his political writings. (You really cannot be a writer for TNYRB if you show even a minimal appreciation for that economic system, what with Paul Krugman at the helm of their team of economic pundits!)
In what is likely to prove to be his final piece for the magazine, published posthumously in the September 30, 2010, issue, Judt once again lashes out against all those who find the free market system a promising way to arrange a communty’s economic affairs. In the piece, titled “Captive Minds”--recalling Czeslaw Milosz 1950s book by the same title--Judt engages in some character assassination directed at anyone who disagrees with his assessment of capitalism. As he writes, “But ‘the market’--like ‘dialectical materialism’--is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers--mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers--who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.”
To this Judt adds his demeaning, belittling, and snide comment about how those who find the free market superior to other systems of political economy suffer from a “collective inability to imagine alternatives,” and similar unsubstantiated throwaway lines. Just like so many who complain about how you and I are stuck in a box we must escape, Judt ultimately wants us all to climb into his box mostly as a show of his version of compassion and kindness. (He even brings up Margaret Thatcher, quoting her saying about the free market that “there is no alternative,” missing entirely the instructive fact that the late John Kenneth Galbraith, who shared Judt’s politics, said exactly the same thing in an interview he gave to Alitalia’s in-flight magazine back in the late 1980s.)
For Judt the respectable thing to do is to be “debating genuine competitive social models--whether social democratic, social market, or regulated market variants of liberal capitalism.” Of course. The sole alternative that is verboten is one that spells complete freedom from government intrusion! Where would he and his ilk be if they didn’t have a chance to whisper their instructions to politicians and bureaucrats?
Judt then lashes out, once again recklessly and indiscriminately, at all Americans, by quote Milosz saying “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” What bunk! The man of the East has nothing over the man of the West or North or South--what kind of geopolitical prejudice are we supposed swallow here?
Professor Judt (RIP) had some fine qualities, mostly a knack for observing and artfully recording elements of the ebb and flow of contemporary culture East and West, but as to political economy he was no more than a sophisticated sentimentalist (and someone whose elitist thinking fit perfectly with the editorial stance of The New York Review of Books).
Let me end with a personal note about Judt’s slam against those who favor the free society, namely, that they suffer from a “collective inability to imagine alternatives.” Not only have a lot of us who favor the fully free market system managed to imagine alternatives but we also experienced several of them, including Soviet style socialism, market socialism, and, of course, the regulated market.
Most of us have spent a career studying these as well as the free market so as to figure out what would suit human community life best, what would be the most fitting order for men and women embarking upon a successful (economic and related) life. And only after we have done our work reasonably thoroughly did most of us end up championing the system Judt held in such contempt. Nothing dogmatic here and to charge otherwise betrays intellectual laziness, the disinclination to argue things through.
Tibor R. Machan
As a loyal though reluctant reader of The New York Review of Books--too masochistic an experience at times but in my line of work unavoidable--I have read a lot of essays by the recently deceased public intellectual and NYU professor Tony Judt. A skilled and erudite writer, with some subtlety to his viewpoint, Judt has been trying to juggle his social democratic stance with his recognition that socialism itself is no answer to our socio-economic wows. But his hostility to free market capitalism has shown through in most of his political writings. (You really cannot be a writer for TNYRB if you show even a minimal appreciation for that economic system, what with Paul Krugman at the helm of their team of economic pundits!)
In what is likely to prove to be his final piece for the magazine, published posthumously in the September 30, 2010, issue, Judt once again lashes out against all those who find the free market system a promising way to arrange a communty’s economic affairs. In the piece, titled “Captive Minds”--recalling Czeslaw Milosz 1950s book by the same title--Judt engages in some character assassination directed at anyone who disagrees with his assessment of capitalism. As he writes, “But ‘the market’--like ‘dialectical materialism’--is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers--mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers--who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.”
To this Judt adds his demeaning, belittling, and snide comment about how those who find the free market superior to other systems of political economy suffer from a “collective inability to imagine alternatives,” and similar unsubstantiated throwaway lines. Just like so many who complain about how you and I are stuck in a box we must escape, Judt ultimately wants us all to climb into his box mostly as a show of his version of compassion and kindness. (He even brings up Margaret Thatcher, quoting her saying about the free market that “there is no alternative,” missing entirely the instructive fact that the late John Kenneth Galbraith, who shared Judt’s politics, said exactly the same thing in an interview he gave to Alitalia’s in-flight magazine back in the late 1980s.)
For Judt the respectable thing to do is to be “debating genuine competitive social models--whether social democratic, social market, or regulated market variants of liberal capitalism.” Of course. The sole alternative that is verboten is one that spells complete freedom from government intrusion! Where would he and his ilk be if they didn’t have a chance to whisper their instructions to politicians and bureaucrats?
Judt then lashes out, once again recklessly and indiscriminately, at all Americans, by quote Milosz saying “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” What bunk! The man of the East has nothing over the man of the West or North or South--what kind of geopolitical prejudice are we supposed swallow here?
Professor Judt (RIP) had some fine qualities, mostly a knack for observing and artfully recording elements of the ebb and flow of contemporary culture East and West, but as to political economy he was no more than a sophisticated sentimentalist (and someone whose elitist thinking fit perfectly with the editorial stance of The New York Review of Books).
Let me end with a personal note about Judt’s slam against those who favor the free society, namely, that they suffer from a “collective inability to imagine alternatives.” Not only have a lot of us who favor the fully free market system managed to imagine alternatives but we also experienced several of them, including Soviet style socialism, market socialism, and, of course, the regulated market.
Most of us have spent a career studying these as well as the free market so as to figure out what would suit human community life best, what would be the most fitting order for men and women embarking upon a successful (economic and related) life. And only after we have done our work reasonably thoroughly did most of us end up championing the system Judt held in such contempt. Nothing dogmatic here and to charge otherwise betrays intellectual laziness, the disinclination to argue things through.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Tea Party Strategy Anyone?
Tibor R. Machan
My involvement in Tea Party matters is virtually nil. I follow the movement’s doings by reading both pro and con comments on its candidates and leaders, as well as listening to what some of the active members say in public forums. (Let me tell you the snooty Left is scared stiff of the Tea Party and rolling out its heavy guns to demean it, with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin serving as convenient targets whose lack of academic erudition is held against them in massive articles in prominent magazines like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books!)
As far as I can determine, the Tea Party is a kind of Right Wing populist assembly of people who have disparate ideas and objectives but are united in being disgusted with the leadership in Washington. There is among them room for nearly anyone who shows a positive attitude about main street America. Social conservatives, especially, seem to be welcome, what with pretty heavy moralizing as their central pitch; free market champions, too, tend to be accepted but not if they are also committed civil libertarians who might stand up for illegal immigrants and oppose the vicious War and Drugs; certainly members of the religious Right are not only welcome but often take leadership roles; and there are others, including those loyal to the American Founders and their central documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. (Sometimes they express themselves in questionable terms, such as swearing loyalty to the U. S. Constitution; but that document is now so watered down, so far from the principles stated in the Declaration, that it scarcely says anything about what the country’s political system and public policies ought to be all about.)
I am no spin doctor and do not have my finger on the pulse of the electorate, although I do try to keep abreast. It occurs to me that if the Tea Party is to have a solid chance at influencing American politics and public policy it will have to pare down its message to certain fundamentals and express this publicly in palatable ways.
The one principle that is truly representative of America as the Founders conceived of it is limited government, limited by the principle of individual liberty. Perhaps turning to this message with a clear emphasis on not trying to impose anything else on the country could be successful. If a Tea Party candidate or leader is pressed for views on matters other than the proper scope of government, the answer should be: “No comment on that since it isn’t a part of politics proper, not in a free country!” Yes, it is judicious, prudent to simply refuse to get caught up in all the issues that people may bring to the political table by teaching the lesson that they really aren’t political, even if they are on the minds of millions of people.
Tea Party members, leaders, candidates and the like may well succeed by adhering to this strategy of not allowing their detractors to involve them in everything. They could point out that this country isn’t supposed to be a totalitarian system in which politics takes over everything, addresses all issues on the minds of the citizenry. No, one need not have an opinion on creationism, intelligent design, child reading, drug use, and yes, even abortion. Let most of these topics be part of our social discourse, not our political thinking. That way the central Tea Party theme of reigning in the scope of government is kept in focus and the pluralism of the movement can also continue to flourish but within its proper domain, namely, the variety of social positions the huge tent of those who love liberty makes possible.
Yes, this way of going about things might link the Tea Party too closely with its libertarian faction but that could be a political asset if intelligently put (during interviews, press conferences, etc.). Do not permit the detractors to draw Tea Party people into discussions about matters that are not the proper concern of politics and public affairs. Therein might lie a way to victory, especially now that suspicion with governmental meddling is rife throughout the citizenry.
And this attitude can easily be linked to the central, crucial tenets of the American political tradition, the founding documents and the thinking of the Founders. That they may not all be entirely palatable in our age will not matter if discussions and proposals are kept to essentials. What is exceptional about America is its limited government tradition and moving away from this is wrong, inefficient, and, yes, un-American.
Tibor R. Machan
My involvement in Tea Party matters is virtually nil. I follow the movement’s doings by reading both pro and con comments on its candidates and leaders, as well as listening to what some of the active members say in public forums. (Let me tell you the snooty Left is scared stiff of the Tea Party and rolling out its heavy guns to demean it, with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin serving as convenient targets whose lack of academic erudition is held against them in massive articles in prominent magazines like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books!)
As far as I can determine, the Tea Party is a kind of Right Wing populist assembly of people who have disparate ideas and objectives but are united in being disgusted with the leadership in Washington. There is among them room for nearly anyone who shows a positive attitude about main street America. Social conservatives, especially, seem to be welcome, what with pretty heavy moralizing as their central pitch; free market champions, too, tend to be accepted but not if they are also committed civil libertarians who might stand up for illegal immigrants and oppose the vicious War and Drugs; certainly members of the religious Right are not only welcome but often take leadership roles; and there are others, including those loyal to the American Founders and their central documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. (Sometimes they express themselves in questionable terms, such as swearing loyalty to the U. S. Constitution; but that document is now so watered down, so far from the principles stated in the Declaration, that it scarcely says anything about what the country’s political system and public policies ought to be all about.)
I am no spin doctor and do not have my finger on the pulse of the electorate, although I do try to keep abreast. It occurs to me that if the Tea Party is to have a solid chance at influencing American politics and public policy it will have to pare down its message to certain fundamentals and express this publicly in palatable ways.
The one principle that is truly representative of America as the Founders conceived of it is limited government, limited by the principle of individual liberty. Perhaps turning to this message with a clear emphasis on not trying to impose anything else on the country could be successful. If a Tea Party candidate or leader is pressed for views on matters other than the proper scope of government, the answer should be: “No comment on that since it isn’t a part of politics proper, not in a free country!” Yes, it is judicious, prudent to simply refuse to get caught up in all the issues that people may bring to the political table by teaching the lesson that they really aren’t political, even if they are on the minds of millions of people.
Tea Party members, leaders, candidates and the like may well succeed by adhering to this strategy of not allowing their detractors to involve them in everything. They could point out that this country isn’t supposed to be a totalitarian system in which politics takes over everything, addresses all issues on the minds of the citizenry. No, one need not have an opinion on creationism, intelligent design, child reading, drug use, and yes, even abortion. Let most of these topics be part of our social discourse, not our political thinking. That way the central Tea Party theme of reigning in the scope of government is kept in focus and the pluralism of the movement can also continue to flourish but within its proper domain, namely, the variety of social positions the huge tent of those who love liberty makes possible.
Yes, this way of going about things might link the Tea Party too closely with its libertarian faction but that could be a political asset if intelligently put (during interviews, press conferences, etc.). Do not permit the detractors to draw Tea Party people into discussions about matters that are not the proper concern of politics and public affairs. Therein might lie a way to victory, especially now that suspicion with governmental meddling is rife throughout the citizenry.
And this attitude can easily be linked to the central, crucial tenets of the American political tradition, the founding documents and the thinking of the Founders. That they may not all be entirely palatable in our age will not matter if discussions and proposals are kept to essentials. What is exceptional about America is its limited government tradition and moving away from this is wrong, inefficient, and, yes, un-American.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Does the General Understand Freedom?
Tibor R. Machan
Here is the relevant exchange:
“[ABC News'] Martha Raddatz: Is this [the public and widely publicized possible burning of the Koran] something that could have a long-lasting effect on soldiers here?
General Petraeus: We fear it could. This could provide indelible images, images that in an Internet age will be non-biodegradable. They will always be in cyberspace and available for extremists to use to incite and inflame public opinion against our troopers and civilians.
“My job as a commander is to be concerned about the safety and security of our troopers. I think it’s important to provide an assessment of an incident that could jeopardize that safety, I think that’s very important. I think I have a moral obligation in fact to speak out on an issue like that....”
So this reminds me of how, in contrast to the general’s words, many sensible people reacted to the Danish cartoon episode: They thought it was perhaps unwise, unnecessarily provocative to publish them but once published, the issue became whether the newspapers had the right to do so. They did and this right needs to be defended, even while its particular exercise could be judged ill advised, even outright offensive.
Why not the same attitude about the prospect of burning the Koran? The fact that certain people may respond to it by violently lashing out against innocent individuals is lamentable. When one deals with people with a tribal mentality who lump everyone in a country or those of a certain religion or nationality or ethnic background together, never considering that these are different individuals whose deeds are their own, not those of the others in the group, one must realize that such reactions are possible even if totally irrational. Yet not by any means excusable. Muslims who join in are guilty of violence against innocent people, even if some other people who look like those innocent people have insulted them by burning the Koran.
Indeed, while it is an affront to burn what some billions of people regard as a holy book (to those people), it is not an attack on them but on their beliefs. Well, get used to it.
In a pluralistic world millions of people constantly denounce millions of other people, including by way of insulting the books they deem important. Millions of people have denounced the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence, various examples of important literature, and so forth. Books by Karl Marx, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin), Ayn Rand and by thousands of others have gotten condemned as well as praised. But, as that wise saying has it, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Indeed, denouncing people is something acrimonious but peaceful, as is offending them, and in a civilized world one is free to do what is peaceful however offensive it may be.
This, unfortunately, has been overlooked, even implicitly denied, in many regions of the world, including in the West where politically incorrect language is often deemed to be legally actionable. When the thought someone has while committing a crime, a so called hate crime, is punishable, then it is difficult to reject the thinking about offensive albeit peaceful language and deeds in evidence among many, many Muslims. It is wrong, but so is the thinking that supports punishing more severely a crime deemed to be motivated by hate than the crime without that motivation or motivated by something else. Such is the result of faulty thinking--one cannot cherry pick what inconsistencies one will accept and which are those one will reject. They must all go!
General Petraeus sadly got it wrong when he wants to shut down the Koran burning on the grounds that some will react to it irrationally. Sure, the burning should not happen because it is a needlessly provocative deed but no one should be forcibly stopped from uttering even the most provocative, blasphemous words or carrying out even the most insulting but peaceful deeds. One has a right to be wrong in a free society and public officials may have to cope with the results, including the perpetration of irrational reactions from people who don’t get it, who don’t understand what freedom entails.
Tibor R. Machan
Here is the relevant exchange:
“[ABC News'] Martha Raddatz: Is this [the public and widely publicized possible burning of the Koran] something that could have a long-lasting effect on soldiers here?
General Petraeus: We fear it could. This could provide indelible images, images that in an Internet age will be non-biodegradable. They will always be in cyberspace and available for extremists to use to incite and inflame public opinion against our troopers and civilians.
“My job as a commander is to be concerned about the safety and security of our troopers. I think it’s important to provide an assessment of an incident that could jeopardize that safety, I think that’s very important. I think I have a moral obligation in fact to speak out on an issue like that....”
So this reminds me of how, in contrast to the general’s words, many sensible people reacted to the Danish cartoon episode: They thought it was perhaps unwise, unnecessarily provocative to publish them but once published, the issue became whether the newspapers had the right to do so. They did and this right needs to be defended, even while its particular exercise could be judged ill advised, even outright offensive.
Why not the same attitude about the prospect of burning the Koran? The fact that certain people may respond to it by violently lashing out against innocent individuals is lamentable. When one deals with people with a tribal mentality who lump everyone in a country or those of a certain religion or nationality or ethnic background together, never considering that these are different individuals whose deeds are their own, not those of the others in the group, one must realize that such reactions are possible even if totally irrational. Yet not by any means excusable. Muslims who join in are guilty of violence against innocent people, even if some other people who look like those innocent people have insulted them by burning the Koran.
Indeed, while it is an affront to burn what some billions of people regard as a holy book (to those people), it is not an attack on them but on their beliefs. Well, get used to it.
In a pluralistic world millions of people constantly denounce millions of other people, including by way of insulting the books they deem important. Millions of people have denounced the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence, various examples of important literature, and so forth. Books by Karl Marx, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin), Ayn Rand and by thousands of others have gotten condemned as well as praised. But, as that wise saying has it, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Indeed, denouncing people is something acrimonious but peaceful, as is offending them, and in a civilized world one is free to do what is peaceful however offensive it may be.
This, unfortunately, has been overlooked, even implicitly denied, in many regions of the world, including in the West where politically incorrect language is often deemed to be legally actionable. When the thought someone has while committing a crime, a so called hate crime, is punishable, then it is difficult to reject the thinking about offensive albeit peaceful language and deeds in evidence among many, many Muslims. It is wrong, but so is the thinking that supports punishing more severely a crime deemed to be motivated by hate than the crime without that motivation or motivated by something else. Such is the result of faulty thinking--one cannot cherry pick what inconsistencies one will accept and which are those one will reject. They must all go!
General Petraeus sadly got it wrong when he wants to shut down the Koran burning on the grounds that some will react to it irrationally. Sure, the burning should not happen because it is a needlessly provocative deed but no one should be forcibly stopped from uttering even the most provocative, blasphemous words or carrying out even the most insulting but peaceful deeds. One has a right to be wrong in a free society and public officials may have to cope with the results, including the perpetration of irrational reactions from people who don’t get it, who don’t understand what freedom entails.
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