The Free Society & Democracy
Tibor R. Machan
Around the world democracy is often thought to be the system of liberty. A free country is often thought to be identical with a democratic one. And while this is wrong, the mistake is understandable. For too many millions of people progress toward liberty begins with gaining the vote, with managing to have some, however small, measure of influence on public policy as opposed to having public affairs dictated by some unelected chief of state or some unelected group of thugs. So to get at least a bit of influence—to gain the right to vote—is a step in the right direction toward becoming free.
But in a truly free society democracy has to be strictly limited. For starters, it cannot involved voting on how non-consenting citizens should act and use their labor and property. Democracy can involve no more than the selection of the administrators of the legal system and such as system must be strictly limited to the protection of everyone’s basic individual rights. In short, people may vote for who the sheriff will be but not on whether the sheriff may rob Peter to help out Paul. The sheriff may only act in the capacity of a peace officer, as a crime fighter, as the defender of the citizenry from domestic and foreign aggressors.
Now this shows very clearly and plainly that we do not live in a truly free society anywhere on the globe, not even in the United States of America. That’s not to say America is a full blow tyranny or that we do not enjoy far more liberty than do citizens—“subjects”—of most other nations around the globe. Just as is implicit in the way some organizations such as Freedom House rank countries, there are more or less free societies around the world. And compared to most eras in human history, there are societies these days that enjoy institutions and laws that come near to making them free, considering how brutal and Draconian tyrannies and despotisms had been in the past and were not all that long ago. Yet even today many societies are ruled top-down in more or less totalitarian fashion and things could get worse—there is no automatic progress toward freedom in the world.
The original statement of the way America was supposed to differ from other societies, laid out in the Declaration, made it abundantly plain that democracy may not trump individual rights. That is what is meant by calling the rights of all human beings unalienable—nothing and no one may strip individuals of these rights; nothing and no one may justifiably act to violate those rights.
Unfortunately the urgency involved in building a new country, despite all the good ideas most of the Founders had about how to devise it, made it very difficult to stick to the basic ideas of the Declaration. So the Constitution didn’t do justice to its principles, just as Lincoln explained when he invoked the Declaration’s ideals to try to remedy the Constitution. (Sadly, even Lincoln didn’t quite stick to those excellent ideas.)
For those who appreciate how vital liberty is to the maintenance of a just system of law, it is difficult in our day to tell just what one is to do, especially when the available selections during elections nearly all betray the principles of liberty. Will voting for a Hillary Clinton make American a freer society than it is now? How about voting for Rudy Giuliani? We don’t even have the kind of system, as many countries do, where many candidates can run for office in the final race so that citizens can at least register a sizable preference for other than the winner. It is certainly very frustrating to have to choose between two candidates who have no serious concern for what a free society requires.
But in some ways it may still be possible for some people to vote so as to guide the country in the direction of a truly free society. Just what that involves can vary a great deal from one region of the country to another, from what’s at stake in one election versus in another. Voters are intelligent enough to figure out what will get the country closer to a free society, although they do not often use their intelligence for that purpose. As it stands now, most often, sadly, they use it to figure how many goodies they can get at others’ expense by means of casting their votes. (That’s just what Alexis de Tocqueville warned us against in his famous Democracy in America!)
The original idea that what American should be is free, first and foremost, is getting hardly any attention in our democracy.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Revolutionaries and Reality
Tibor R. Machan
Those who are loyal to the political values of the American Founders are revolutionaries, far more so than any other type (like the Marxists or radical Muslims). This is because the American Founders identified something brand new and radical when they declared that individuals have unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
This idea overturned thousands of years of official doctrine according to which people belong to the government—the idea that they are subjects, not citizens. Such a notion is fundamentally alien to what the Founders proclaimed and believed is in fact the case, namely, that each intact adult human being is sovereign, a self-governor, and not someone’s slave, serf, or subject.
Sadly although the gist of the Founders’ idea has gained a good deal of influence in many cultures—legal systems and public policies certain give some lip service to it—there is still a great deal of habitual statism in vogue. Many politicians, intellectuals, educators, pundits, and such cling to the notion that you and I and the rest of us belong to some group—the race, nation, tribe, what have you—and so can be conscripted to do service to these never mind whether we consent. Both conservatives and liberals—and indeed nearly all the rest of the political factions—insist that your life isn’t really yours but you owe it to something or somebody else.
This was, of course, the essential teaching of socialists of all stripes, including Karl Marx. It is also the teaching of some of today’s leading political and social thinkers, such as Cass Sunstein, Charles Taylor, Thomas Nagel, Amitai Etzioni, and many others. They all deride individualism, the idea that you and the rest of us are sovereign and to gain our cooperation for any project we need to give our consent, we must be asked and only if we agree may such cooperation be obtained form us.
In the current election year this collectivist idea is especially prominent. It is taken for granted, not even argued for, by most liberal democrats and even by American conservatives, those in the country who claim to be conserving the ideas and ideals of the American Founders but have, in fact, become totally disloyal to them.
So what are the bona fide loyalists to do? What are those to do who insist that the original American position is sound and ought to be the governing set of ideas in this country and, indeed, in any civilized society? There is no one to vote for who embraces these notions except Ron Paul whose numbers aren’t very impressive, even if those who support him have made news with their enthusiasm and willingness to put their money behind their man. Even Dr. Paul isn’t quite the champion of the Founders’ ideas this country needs—someone who stands four squares by the Declaration of Independence rather than, as Paul does, by the much more ambiguous and constantly changing U. S. Constitution.
What the revolutionaries among us need to grasp is just how radical their position really is and how long it takes to make such radical ideas gain currency. Human beings can live by good judgment, their rational thought, but they also live, mostly, by habit. And many of the habits of the human race are flawed and tend to misguide people toward neglecting their sovereignty. Just as some women who have every right to insist on their independence in fact acquiesce to being subjugated by some men, so a great many people, even in America, are embracing the old, reactionary notion that people belong to the government, the king or whoever, not themselves. They do not protest at all when politicians make arbitrary, unjustified claims on their lives and labors, as if these didn’t belong to them at all but could be used and disposed of by the government.
John Locke made clear that “absolute monarchs are but men,” meaning, essentially, that government is simply other people and since no human being has rightful dominion over another—slavery is a vile institution, as is serfdom—the continued belief in government’s authority to expropriate what belongs to us, to conscript our labor against our will, is unjust. But, sadly, it is understandable because old habits are hard to overcome. (Just think of a habit you have which you have learned is destructive to, say, your health. It is often very hard for us to change it.)
So in this election year when our leaders want to continue to govern according to the tenets of the reactionary doctrine that government is our ruler, not our hired professional duty-bound to protect our rights, those who are loyal to the American revolution must continue vigilantly to promote their ideas however hopeless it seems to do so. That is a matter of integrity and in the long run it will also bear fruit.
Tibor R. Machan
Those who are loyal to the political values of the American Founders are revolutionaries, far more so than any other type (like the Marxists or radical Muslims). This is because the American Founders identified something brand new and radical when they declared that individuals have unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
This idea overturned thousands of years of official doctrine according to which people belong to the government—the idea that they are subjects, not citizens. Such a notion is fundamentally alien to what the Founders proclaimed and believed is in fact the case, namely, that each intact adult human being is sovereign, a self-governor, and not someone’s slave, serf, or subject.
Sadly although the gist of the Founders’ idea has gained a good deal of influence in many cultures—legal systems and public policies certain give some lip service to it—there is still a great deal of habitual statism in vogue. Many politicians, intellectuals, educators, pundits, and such cling to the notion that you and I and the rest of us belong to some group—the race, nation, tribe, what have you—and so can be conscripted to do service to these never mind whether we consent. Both conservatives and liberals—and indeed nearly all the rest of the political factions—insist that your life isn’t really yours but you owe it to something or somebody else.
This was, of course, the essential teaching of socialists of all stripes, including Karl Marx. It is also the teaching of some of today’s leading political and social thinkers, such as Cass Sunstein, Charles Taylor, Thomas Nagel, Amitai Etzioni, and many others. They all deride individualism, the idea that you and the rest of us are sovereign and to gain our cooperation for any project we need to give our consent, we must be asked and only if we agree may such cooperation be obtained form us.
In the current election year this collectivist idea is especially prominent. It is taken for granted, not even argued for, by most liberal democrats and even by American conservatives, those in the country who claim to be conserving the ideas and ideals of the American Founders but have, in fact, become totally disloyal to them.
So what are the bona fide loyalists to do? What are those to do who insist that the original American position is sound and ought to be the governing set of ideas in this country and, indeed, in any civilized society? There is no one to vote for who embraces these notions except Ron Paul whose numbers aren’t very impressive, even if those who support him have made news with their enthusiasm and willingness to put their money behind their man. Even Dr. Paul isn’t quite the champion of the Founders’ ideas this country needs—someone who stands four squares by the Declaration of Independence rather than, as Paul does, by the much more ambiguous and constantly changing U. S. Constitution.
What the revolutionaries among us need to grasp is just how radical their position really is and how long it takes to make such radical ideas gain currency. Human beings can live by good judgment, their rational thought, but they also live, mostly, by habit. And many of the habits of the human race are flawed and tend to misguide people toward neglecting their sovereignty. Just as some women who have every right to insist on their independence in fact acquiesce to being subjugated by some men, so a great many people, even in America, are embracing the old, reactionary notion that people belong to the government, the king or whoever, not themselves. They do not protest at all when politicians make arbitrary, unjustified claims on their lives and labors, as if these didn’t belong to them at all but could be used and disposed of by the government.
John Locke made clear that “absolute monarchs are but men,” meaning, essentially, that government is simply other people and since no human being has rightful dominion over another—slavery is a vile institution, as is serfdom—the continued belief in government’s authority to expropriate what belongs to us, to conscript our labor against our will, is unjust. But, sadly, it is understandable because old habits are hard to overcome. (Just think of a habit you have which you have learned is destructive to, say, your health. It is often very hard for us to change it.)
So in this election year when our leaders want to continue to govern according to the tenets of the reactionary doctrine that government is our ruler, not our hired professional duty-bound to protect our rights, those who are loyal to the American revolution must continue vigilantly to promote their ideas however hopeless it seems to do so. That is a matter of integrity and in the long run it will also bear fruit.
Monday, January 21, 2008
Ethics and the Writers’ Strike
Tibor R. Machan
In the field of business ethics there is a very influential movement called stakeholder theory or, alternatively, corporate social responsibility. The gist of the idea is that when corporations are being managed, the managers have a fundamental obligation to serve those who have an interest in how the company is doing. So, in contrast to the idea that management ought to seek to advance the best interest of those who own or have invested in the company, this view holds that management ought to look out for the best interest of those who have a stake in the company, who could be helped by it, such as employees, customers, subcontractors, neighbors near plants and office buildings, and so on.
The target of this movement is the idea of the right to private property and that when one owns something, one may determine what should happen with it (within the limits of everyone’s rights). Shareholders own the company and together ought to be free to provide its direction. Instead, stakeholder theorists claim, it should be politicians, bureaucrats, pundits, preachers, and others in the population who should give company’s their direction, their purpose.
At the foundation of this movement lies the idea that people owe their lives, their labor, their property to others, first and foremost. This is the ethics of altruism, a favorite of many moralists but also an ethical doctrine that is ultimately impossible to practice consistently. As W. H. Auden so cleverly put the point, “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.”
The people who advocate this altruistic ethics, especially as it influences the way businesses are being managed, are those on the political Left. And the political Left in American includes, more than most professions, those who write the scripts for Hollywood movies and television dramas. If you check out the moral orientation of most Hollywood fare, it is plain to see that it promotes the idea that businesses shouldn’t seek to make profit but aim to help those in need.
The heroes in Hollywood aren’t the suits who bring in the dollars (and create the jobs), not by a long shot. The heroes are the actors and actresses who gallivant around the globe offering help to the needy and put down concern with the box office and commercial success. The fact is largely ignored that they couldn’t do their philanthropic work without the profits that the suits make possible for all these actors and actresses. As with Mother Teresa versus Bill Gates, never mind that the former could barely help a few people while the latter has created decent jobs for millions and useful tools for the rest of us. Looking good, in terms of the altruists, seems to trump actually doing real good!
Yet, there is a glitch here, as the writers’ strike reveals. Suddenly the fact that this strike has virtually crippled the entertainment industry cuts no ice. Never mind all the stakeholders who are losing work and cannot pay their bills because the writers are insisting on pursuing what they perceive to be their own economic interests. In short, where is the “social responsibility” of the writers, their unions, in this current strike? Why is it OK for them all to focus on their own economic well being, their economic future, on what benefits them and their loved ones? Why, if corporate managers are acting badly in advancing the economic interest of those who own and invest in their companies, aren’t the writers and their union leaders acting badly by trying, with this prolonged work stoppage, to advance their own economic interest?
Why are the writers and their union leaders not renouncing self-interest and profit and going back to work for the benefit of all the stakeholders? Is it, perhaps, that they aren’t actually very serious about their altruism? Is it perhaps that when it comes close to home they agree with W. H. Auden’s point that altruism is an impossible guide to human conduct. It is one thing to give lip service to it and to denounce those who seek to make a profit from their work; it is another thing entirely to walk the talk and abandon the pursuit of profit by, for example, stopping the writers’ strike.
Of course, the writers have every right to strike--although with the oddities of mandatory unionization their strike has a good many perverse elements. But it would be cool if they admitted that when it comes to their own economic well being, altruism isn’t their ethical guide and egoism is and they are doing exactly what those “greedy” suits are doing whom they are always putting down in their writings.
Tibor R. Machan
In the field of business ethics there is a very influential movement called stakeholder theory or, alternatively, corporate social responsibility. The gist of the idea is that when corporations are being managed, the managers have a fundamental obligation to serve those who have an interest in how the company is doing. So, in contrast to the idea that management ought to seek to advance the best interest of those who own or have invested in the company, this view holds that management ought to look out for the best interest of those who have a stake in the company, who could be helped by it, such as employees, customers, subcontractors, neighbors near plants and office buildings, and so on.
The target of this movement is the idea of the right to private property and that when one owns something, one may determine what should happen with it (within the limits of everyone’s rights). Shareholders own the company and together ought to be free to provide its direction. Instead, stakeholder theorists claim, it should be politicians, bureaucrats, pundits, preachers, and others in the population who should give company’s their direction, their purpose.
At the foundation of this movement lies the idea that people owe their lives, their labor, their property to others, first and foremost. This is the ethics of altruism, a favorite of many moralists but also an ethical doctrine that is ultimately impossible to practice consistently. As W. H. Auden so cleverly put the point, “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.”
The people who advocate this altruistic ethics, especially as it influences the way businesses are being managed, are those on the political Left. And the political Left in American includes, more than most professions, those who write the scripts for Hollywood movies and television dramas. If you check out the moral orientation of most Hollywood fare, it is plain to see that it promotes the idea that businesses shouldn’t seek to make profit but aim to help those in need.
The heroes in Hollywood aren’t the suits who bring in the dollars (and create the jobs), not by a long shot. The heroes are the actors and actresses who gallivant around the globe offering help to the needy and put down concern with the box office and commercial success. The fact is largely ignored that they couldn’t do their philanthropic work without the profits that the suits make possible for all these actors and actresses. As with Mother Teresa versus Bill Gates, never mind that the former could barely help a few people while the latter has created decent jobs for millions and useful tools for the rest of us. Looking good, in terms of the altruists, seems to trump actually doing real good!
Yet, there is a glitch here, as the writers’ strike reveals. Suddenly the fact that this strike has virtually crippled the entertainment industry cuts no ice. Never mind all the stakeholders who are losing work and cannot pay their bills because the writers are insisting on pursuing what they perceive to be their own economic interests. In short, where is the “social responsibility” of the writers, their unions, in this current strike? Why is it OK for them all to focus on their own economic well being, their economic future, on what benefits them and their loved ones? Why, if corporate managers are acting badly in advancing the economic interest of those who own and invest in their companies, aren’t the writers and their union leaders acting badly by trying, with this prolonged work stoppage, to advance their own economic interest?
Why are the writers and their union leaders not renouncing self-interest and profit and going back to work for the benefit of all the stakeholders? Is it, perhaps, that they aren’t actually very serious about their altruism? Is it perhaps that when it comes close to home they agree with W. H. Auden’s point that altruism is an impossible guide to human conduct. It is one thing to give lip service to it and to denounce those who seek to make a profit from their work; it is another thing entirely to walk the talk and abandon the pursuit of profit by, for example, stopping the writers’ strike.
Of course, the writers have every right to strike--although with the oddities of mandatory unionization their strike has a good many perverse elements. But it would be cool if they admitted that when it comes to their own economic well being, altruism isn’t their ethical guide and egoism is and they are doing exactly what those “greedy” suits are doing whom they are always putting down in their writings.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Economic ups and downs
Tibor R. Machan
Those who study a country’s economic conditions, mostly macro-economists, track general trends--is inflation or unemployment, how about productivity, comparative strength of the currency, etc., and so forth. But the basics of all these are mostly local matters, all about what happens to you, me, our neighbors, all about what we decide to do with our income and other liquid assets.
At times I myself feel very much inclined to go shopping for stuff I would like, to replace some old things with newer ones, to take advantage of some innovative items I became aware of, or to simply stock up on things I like a lot, like novels to read, food to eat, and so on. Now and then I may go overboard with all the buying, get some big items as when I recently bought one of those mini-hot tubs I have been dreaming about to relax my aching back or a VCR to DVD converter to preserve some recordings for the future. And it was Christmas recently and I may have overdone it with gifts for my children and myself.
After I do some of this over the top shopping for a while I tend to get a scared and tighten my belt a bit, maybe even a lot. Instead of eating out I’ll just cook up something at home for several days; instead of taking trips to see friends up and down the coast of California, I decide to stick to those novels I bought and read and read and just read some more. And no more purchases of big items, nor home improvements for a while, certainly no new shoes or clothing. In short, I am inclined on such occasions to get out of the market except for services and goods that I need on a regular basis--but even these I may cut back so as to recover economically!
When last summer a large chunk of cash was stolen from me in Europe, as well as quite a lot of stuff I had carried with me because I was going to attend a wedding and bought gifts to bring home, I did experience some panic and stopped buying. I did replace the gifts but waiting a while before I got a new suit (when I was invited to another wedding). But to make the replacements less of a burden, I gave up other stuff. But I also went on a search for new sources of income--I lined up some speaking gigs and conferences I hadn’t planned to do beforehand. (This brought to mind the Laffer Curve! I assume if I were robbed weekly, I would just give up trying to recover.)
When I was robbed, I felt very nearly as I feel around April 15th every year. But that is a bit more predictable, within a certain amount of what will be extorted from me, so I can prepare for it better. But I usually react to having to come up with the funds (so as to avoid prison) by cutting back, saying no to purchases I’d normally make.
Now what if most people in the American, even the world, economy decide to cut back on their purchases? What if they all become terribly cautious about committing to spending? Millions of people stay away from the malls. Millions cut back on driving, going to movies, even visiting their dentist. What then? Well, I suspect this is when a recession is likely to commence. Add to this all the wasteful spending of the taxes extorted from us all, and the corresponding increases of our tax bills, hidden or overt, and this is likely to reduce economic activity and, therefore, income and savings.
To this, of course, politicians respond by promising to perform magic. They talk of stimulus packages--but where are the resources support to come from? Usually from printing more money, going into more government debt, or robbing Peter to make things a bit easier for a while for Paul. But, of course, one cannot get blood out of a turnip and none of this makes up for the reduced economic activity, the pause in consumption, and so forth.
Politicians have no bona fide magic--they only pretend to have it. So they will wave their hands about uselessly, maybe fooling a bunch of people with schemes of getting something from nothing. In the last analysis, however, the phenomenon of reduced economic activity is not something anyone can avoid. It happens. Most often it happens sporadically, not all at once across the country or the world, but at times the withdrawals tends to be nearly universal and then they will show up in the macro-economic statistics as somewhat sizable dips, a recession, even a depression at times. Trying to pretend that this cannot happen or can easily be avoided merely makes things worse.
Tibor R. Machan
Those who study a country’s economic conditions, mostly macro-economists, track general trends--is inflation or unemployment, how about productivity, comparative strength of the currency, etc., and so forth. But the basics of all these are mostly local matters, all about what happens to you, me, our neighbors, all about what we decide to do with our income and other liquid assets.
At times I myself feel very much inclined to go shopping for stuff I would like, to replace some old things with newer ones, to take advantage of some innovative items I became aware of, or to simply stock up on things I like a lot, like novels to read, food to eat, and so on. Now and then I may go overboard with all the buying, get some big items as when I recently bought one of those mini-hot tubs I have been dreaming about to relax my aching back or a VCR to DVD converter to preserve some recordings for the future. And it was Christmas recently and I may have overdone it with gifts for my children and myself.
After I do some of this over the top shopping for a while I tend to get a scared and tighten my belt a bit, maybe even a lot. Instead of eating out I’ll just cook up something at home for several days; instead of taking trips to see friends up and down the coast of California, I decide to stick to those novels I bought and read and read and just read some more. And no more purchases of big items, nor home improvements for a while, certainly no new shoes or clothing. In short, I am inclined on such occasions to get out of the market except for services and goods that I need on a regular basis--but even these I may cut back so as to recover economically!
When last summer a large chunk of cash was stolen from me in Europe, as well as quite a lot of stuff I had carried with me because I was going to attend a wedding and bought gifts to bring home, I did experience some panic and stopped buying. I did replace the gifts but waiting a while before I got a new suit (when I was invited to another wedding). But to make the replacements less of a burden, I gave up other stuff. But I also went on a search for new sources of income--I lined up some speaking gigs and conferences I hadn’t planned to do beforehand. (This brought to mind the Laffer Curve! I assume if I were robbed weekly, I would just give up trying to recover.)
When I was robbed, I felt very nearly as I feel around April 15th every year. But that is a bit more predictable, within a certain amount of what will be extorted from me, so I can prepare for it better. But I usually react to having to come up with the funds (so as to avoid prison) by cutting back, saying no to purchases I’d normally make.
Now what if most people in the American, even the world, economy decide to cut back on their purchases? What if they all become terribly cautious about committing to spending? Millions of people stay away from the malls. Millions cut back on driving, going to movies, even visiting their dentist. What then? Well, I suspect this is when a recession is likely to commence. Add to this all the wasteful spending of the taxes extorted from us all, and the corresponding increases of our tax bills, hidden or overt, and this is likely to reduce economic activity and, therefore, income and savings.
To this, of course, politicians respond by promising to perform magic. They talk of stimulus packages--but where are the resources support to come from? Usually from printing more money, going into more government debt, or robbing Peter to make things a bit easier for a while for Paul. But, of course, one cannot get blood out of a turnip and none of this makes up for the reduced economic activity, the pause in consumption, and so forth.
Politicians have no bona fide magic--they only pretend to have it. So they will wave their hands about uselessly, maybe fooling a bunch of people with schemes of getting something from nothing. In the last analysis, however, the phenomenon of reduced economic activity is not something anyone can avoid. It happens. Most often it happens sporadically, not all at once across the country or the world, but at times the withdrawals tends to be nearly universal and then they will show up in the macro-economic statistics as somewhat sizable dips, a recession, even a depression at times. Trying to pretend that this cannot happen or can easily be avoided merely makes things worse.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Another Distortion at the Movies, etc.
Tibor R. Machan
American Rhapsody is a movie about a family that gets smuggled out of Hungary in the early 1960s and all the various complications this gives rise to. Since I went through this ordeal myself when I was 14, not with my family but several perfect strangers and a paid guide, I thought I’d check out the movie.
Expecting to see something familiar I’d witness, instead a very distorted picture of the escape emerged right from the start. And I have met up with this distortion before, when in 1981 TIME magazine carried a lengthy story about what TIME called flesh peddlers, the who people hired out their skills of leading people across the dangerous Iron Curtain. Just as TIME did, so American Rhapsody depicted the people smugglers not as heroes, not as folks doing an important piece of work for which hundreds of refugees would forever be grateful. No. Both TIME and American Rhapsody depicted the smugglers as rapacious, greedy, heartless brutes who had no concern for their clients at all, especially not the young children who accompanied them.
My experience was completely different. From the start, when my guide came to our apartment in Budapest and introduced himself to my mother and me, he was not only competent but very helpful. First he established his credentials so that we’d be at ease about the possibility that he might be some government agent setting a trap. This consisted of showing my mother letters I had written to my father, already in the West, ones only someone who had the trust of my father could have on him. Sure enough, this served its purpose--we relaxed and continued our preparations without nagging suspicions that very naturally infest such transactions.
I was allowed a day by the guide and my mother to decide whether this is something I wanted to undertake. It wasn’t a journey without serious risks, mind you. Several people we knew had tried to escape and were caught by vigilant border guards and immediately incarcerated and later sent to labor camps. (You see the communists were serious about the idea, one that attracts some Western communitarians, like the highly respected Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, that each of us belongs to our societies!)
Of course, I decided to make the trip--for me it was more of an adventure than a hazardous escape and I had always dreamt about coming West. (Young people probably do not fully appreciate the dangers of such undertakings so for them they tend to be exciting adventures, mostly.) My guide then helped me to get ready by instructing me to send my bicycle to the city, Gyor, where we would disembark from our bus and begin in earnest the more complicated portion of the trip during the night, on our bikes, sleeping during the day in hey stacks on the way toward the border, after which we would have to walk.
All of us, the four adults and I, were provided with phony documents that would at least temporarily fend of authorities who might ask what we are doing wandering about near the Austro-Hungarian border. Then we started our 20 miles or so walk, mostly at the edge of freshly tilled farmland. Our feet took a violent beating from this--I eventually had to toss all the stuff I brought along and even go barefoot for good spells.
All along our heartless flesh peddler gave us all the help he could, kept reminding us what reward lies ahead, once we crossed into Austria and reached the American sector there. At the border he skillfully cut the barbwires and made sure that we would not trip the hairline wires wrapped around it. We were also carefully led though the 25 feet soft dirt just before the barbwires since it was booby trapped and we would have been blown to smithereens without his guidance.
Once we successfully crossed into Austria, we still had some 10 kilometers to walk to reach the railway station where we were to catch the train to Vienna. And after some hassle we did, only to find the train filled with Russian soldiers. Fortunately they were all drunk and our strategy of going through the compartments talking loudly in German turned out the be quite superfluous.
But I have told this story elsewhere already--my memoir The Man Without A Hobby (2006). The only reason I tell it again here is to show how this supposedly rapacious, heartless smuggler was, in fact, a completely decent, as well as highly competent, individual whom Hollywood and TIME really should have represented more honestly.
Tibor R. Machan
American Rhapsody is a movie about a family that gets smuggled out of Hungary in the early 1960s and all the various complications this gives rise to. Since I went through this ordeal myself when I was 14, not with my family but several perfect strangers and a paid guide, I thought I’d check out the movie.
Expecting to see something familiar I’d witness, instead a very distorted picture of the escape emerged right from the start. And I have met up with this distortion before, when in 1981 TIME magazine carried a lengthy story about what TIME called flesh peddlers, the who people hired out their skills of leading people across the dangerous Iron Curtain. Just as TIME did, so American Rhapsody depicted the people smugglers not as heroes, not as folks doing an important piece of work for which hundreds of refugees would forever be grateful. No. Both TIME and American Rhapsody depicted the smugglers as rapacious, greedy, heartless brutes who had no concern for their clients at all, especially not the young children who accompanied them.
My experience was completely different. From the start, when my guide came to our apartment in Budapest and introduced himself to my mother and me, he was not only competent but very helpful. First he established his credentials so that we’d be at ease about the possibility that he might be some government agent setting a trap. This consisted of showing my mother letters I had written to my father, already in the West, ones only someone who had the trust of my father could have on him. Sure enough, this served its purpose--we relaxed and continued our preparations without nagging suspicions that very naturally infest such transactions.
I was allowed a day by the guide and my mother to decide whether this is something I wanted to undertake. It wasn’t a journey without serious risks, mind you. Several people we knew had tried to escape and were caught by vigilant border guards and immediately incarcerated and later sent to labor camps. (You see the communists were serious about the idea, one that attracts some Western communitarians, like the highly respected Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, that each of us belongs to our societies!)
Of course, I decided to make the trip--for me it was more of an adventure than a hazardous escape and I had always dreamt about coming West. (Young people probably do not fully appreciate the dangers of such undertakings so for them they tend to be exciting adventures, mostly.) My guide then helped me to get ready by instructing me to send my bicycle to the city, Gyor, where we would disembark from our bus and begin in earnest the more complicated portion of the trip during the night, on our bikes, sleeping during the day in hey stacks on the way toward the border, after which we would have to walk.
All of us, the four adults and I, were provided with phony documents that would at least temporarily fend of authorities who might ask what we are doing wandering about near the Austro-Hungarian border. Then we started our 20 miles or so walk, mostly at the edge of freshly tilled farmland. Our feet took a violent beating from this--I eventually had to toss all the stuff I brought along and even go barefoot for good spells.
All along our heartless flesh peddler gave us all the help he could, kept reminding us what reward lies ahead, once we crossed into Austria and reached the American sector there. At the border he skillfully cut the barbwires and made sure that we would not trip the hairline wires wrapped around it. We were also carefully led though the 25 feet soft dirt just before the barbwires since it was booby trapped and we would have been blown to smithereens without his guidance.
Once we successfully crossed into Austria, we still had some 10 kilometers to walk to reach the railway station where we were to catch the train to Vienna. And after some hassle we did, only to find the train filled with Russian soldiers. Fortunately they were all drunk and our strategy of going through the compartments talking loudly in German turned out the be quite superfluous.
But I have told this story elsewhere already--my memoir The Man Without A Hobby (2006). The only reason I tell it again here is to show how this supposedly rapacious, heartless smuggler was, in fact, a completely decent, as well as highly competent, individual whom Hollywood and TIME really should have represented more honestly.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Individualism, the Collectivists’ Nemesis
Tibor R. Machan
It is individualism that the American Founders elevated into political prominence and it is individualism that most politicians and governments, including America’s, find most annoying because it is the bulwark against arbitrary power.
If, as the Declaration of Independence states, individual human beings have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no one may violate these rights. Every adult individual is sovereign, a self-ruler and not subject to the rule of others. (This is why Americans are referred to as citizens, not as subjects, like so many around the globe.)
Karl Marx was among the many political theorists--like Hegel and Comte--who realized that if individualism becomes prominent, their dream of ruling others in the name of whatever “higher goal or power” is over and done with. So they worked tirelessly to discredit individualism, to establish that no one is sovereign and we all belong to some group--the nation, the tribe, the race, the class, the ethnic group, whatever.
Today some of America’s most powerful mainstream politicians have gone on record denouncing individualism and they are joined by a great many academicians, even some scientists in trying to besmirch the idea. Instead of each person having the free will to guide him or herself in life, each of us is said to be but a cell in the larger organism that is humanity. There have been many who laid out this idea in forceful ways--just read what the French “father of sociology” said about this: “All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.” Marx put it even more succinctly: “The Human essence is the true collectivity of Man,” and referred to human beings as “specie beings,” meaning they are part of the larger organism or body of humanity. The book, by Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell, defended the idea in the mid-20th century!
Most recently the highly honored Canadian philosopher, a recent recipient of the prestigious Templeton Prize, has argued for “a principle of belonging or obligation, that is a principle which states our obligation as men to belong to or sustain society, or society of a certain type, or to obey authority or an authority of a certain type” in contrast to John Locke’s idea, those laid out in the Declaration, that there are unalienable rights every individual possesses simply by virtue of his or her humanity. These rights are definitive claims against anyone who would intrude upon one’s life, who would rob one of one’s liberty and moral autonomy, who would deny one’s freedom to choose and to pursue happiness.
In our current political climate it is the philosophy of entitlement that undermines the Lockean idea, which is the philosophy of the Declaration, by insisting that people have a right to take from others what they need or badly want--be this health care, retirement funds, opportunities for purchasing goods and services at lower cost than what some favorite group wants, land on which to build important shops, etc. And the idea of such entitlements, namely, that they are to be legally mandated, enforced, is backed by the philosophy of communitarianism, one that takes us all to belong to society, belong to a larger and more important entity than ourselves.
Yet, of course, it is always some individuals who make these claims and insist that they be the ones to decide what everyone’s obligation is to others, to the country, the nation, or the racial group. It is these individuals, after all, who try to secure power for themselves with the phony claim that we all belong to society and thus must be made to pay up what they decide with our lives and labors.
This anti-individualism or communitarianism then comes to no more than the special privilege of certain individuals to run the lives of other individuals, to live off the lives of others who may very well have perfectly justified goals of their own that could be supported with their lives if they were left free to decide about such matters.
Whenever you hear or read attacks on individualism, these attacks are nothing more than efforts to wrest power from people so that only a few select individuals can legally enforce their will on the rest of us, the will of those with whom they disagree.
Communitarianism--or collectivism--is false. Individualism is true. And even communitarians know this perfectly well.
Tibor R. Machan
It is individualism that the American Founders elevated into political prominence and it is individualism that most politicians and governments, including America’s, find most annoying because it is the bulwark against arbitrary power.
If, as the Declaration of Independence states, individual human beings have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no one may violate these rights. Every adult individual is sovereign, a self-ruler and not subject to the rule of others. (This is why Americans are referred to as citizens, not as subjects, like so many around the globe.)
Karl Marx was among the many political theorists--like Hegel and Comte--who realized that if individualism becomes prominent, their dream of ruling others in the name of whatever “higher goal or power” is over and done with. So they worked tirelessly to discredit individualism, to establish that no one is sovereign and we all belong to some group--the nation, the tribe, the race, the class, the ethnic group, whatever.
Today some of America’s most powerful mainstream politicians have gone on record denouncing individualism and they are joined by a great many academicians, even some scientists in trying to besmirch the idea. Instead of each person having the free will to guide him or herself in life, each of us is said to be but a cell in the larger organism that is humanity. There have been many who laid out this idea in forceful ways--just read what the French “father of sociology” said about this: “All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.” Marx put it even more succinctly: “The Human essence is the true collectivity of Man,” and referred to human beings as “specie beings,” meaning they are part of the larger organism or body of humanity. The book, by Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell, defended the idea in the mid-20th century!
Most recently the highly honored Canadian philosopher, a recent recipient of the prestigious Templeton Prize, has argued for “a principle of belonging or obligation, that is a principle which states our obligation as men to belong to or sustain society, or society of a certain type, or to obey authority or an authority of a certain type” in contrast to John Locke’s idea, those laid out in the Declaration, that there are unalienable rights every individual possesses simply by virtue of his or her humanity. These rights are definitive claims against anyone who would intrude upon one’s life, who would rob one of one’s liberty and moral autonomy, who would deny one’s freedom to choose and to pursue happiness.
In our current political climate it is the philosophy of entitlement that undermines the Lockean idea, which is the philosophy of the Declaration, by insisting that people have a right to take from others what they need or badly want--be this health care, retirement funds, opportunities for purchasing goods and services at lower cost than what some favorite group wants, land on which to build important shops, etc. And the idea of such entitlements, namely, that they are to be legally mandated, enforced, is backed by the philosophy of communitarianism, one that takes us all to belong to society, belong to a larger and more important entity than ourselves.
Yet, of course, it is always some individuals who make these claims and insist that they be the ones to decide what everyone’s obligation is to others, to the country, the nation, or the racial group. It is these individuals, after all, who try to secure power for themselves with the phony claim that we all belong to society and thus must be made to pay up what they decide with our lives and labors.
This anti-individualism or communitarianism then comes to no more than the special privilege of certain individuals to run the lives of other individuals, to live off the lives of others who may very well have perfectly justified goals of their own that could be supported with their lives if they were left free to decide about such matters.
Whenever you hear or read attacks on individualism, these attacks are nothing more than efforts to wrest power from people so that only a few select individuals can legally enforce their will on the rest of us, the will of those with whom they disagree.
Communitarianism--or collectivism--is false. Individualism is true. And even communitarians know this perfectly well.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Ron Paul and the Cause of Liberty
Tibor R. Machan
Among libertarians hardly anyone criticizes Dr. Paul. The few who do have, in turn, abandoned him completely.~ I haven’t and I do write some supporting missives regarding his candidacy, although I think he has a style that stands in the way of his getting taken seriously as a presidential hopeful. And I also criticize his ideas now and then.
Mostly I find fault with his blowback theory vis-Ã -vis 9/11, the belief that terrorists act as they do largely because of America’s Middle East policies.~ In contrast, I believe terrorists are motivated by an ancient anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment ideology and religion and America’s Middle East policies have only been fuel on the fire, not the reason for the terrorist stance at all.
I support Dr. Paul because he is the only candidate today who firmly and consistently advocates limited government, something that to me is a bigger issue than his ideas on~foreign policy. Yet even on this score I am concerned with how Dr. Paul expresses his position. For example, he keeps saying we should “just go back to the U. S. Constitution.” But this is a troublesome idea because it doesn’t spell out which version of the U. S. Constitution is supposed to be worth going back to. It is surely not the original one, the one that permitted slavery and included some highly disturbing and false claims about African Americans. Or is it supposed to be the current version, one that has innumerable statist amendments included in it and no longer supports limited government?
In my view Dr. Paul should not issue blanket endorsement of the U. S. Constitution. Although sound bite talk is now the preferred way for candidates to communicate, it is very risky to yield to that policy because sometimes where one ought to stand on the relevant issues is complicated and cannot be stated simply. Perhaps what Dr. Paul and others who publicly advocate the free society should do is identify themselves as “Declarationists” so as to indicate that what they support is the principles of the free society as the Founder paid them out in the Declaration of Independence, not in the compromised political-legal document that became the U. S. Constitution.
The Declaration, which is a pre-legal, philosophical document, is nearly flawless and would really be very good to go back to--or rather to move ahead toward, since America never did full justice to it and it is high time it begins to do so. It is the ideas of the Declaration that have inspired millions of people to head toward America’s shores because of its position in the world as the beacon of liberty.
Ron Paul will probably not win the Republican nomination or the presidency but with the message that America should aspire to realize and implement the principles laid out in the Declaration he could spawn a serious political movement and influence the country’s direction henceforth. Even his foreign policy ideas--namely, that the government’s task is to fend off those who attack the country because the justification for its existence is the securing of the rights of its citizens--would flow much easier from the Declaration than from the U. S. Constitution.
Dr. Paul could then become today’s popular voice of America’s true and distinctive political ideas and ideals, not the voice of the rather muddled and corrupted ideas contained in the U. S. Constitution. There is hardly any principle in that legal document that hasn’t been eroded over the centuries--only the defense of freedom of speech and religion remains reasonably intact (although even there cracks are evident now).
Sometimes in the heat of election campaigning even candidates who are committed to sound principles will lapse because of the demands imposed on them. Sound bite communication makes it impossible to be thorough and nuanced. But I think it is possible to resist this with some careful guidance--and Ron Paul now has enough cash to hire folks who can provide him with the text he needs to make clear that he stands for human liberty first and foremost, something this country desperately needs.
Tibor R. Machan
Among libertarians hardly anyone criticizes Dr. Paul. The few who do have, in turn, abandoned him completely.~ I haven’t and I do write some supporting missives regarding his candidacy, although I think he has a style that stands in the way of his getting taken seriously as a presidential hopeful. And I also criticize his ideas now and then.
Mostly I find fault with his blowback theory vis-Ã -vis 9/11, the belief that terrorists act as they do largely because of America’s Middle East policies.~ In contrast, I believe terrorists are motivated by an ancient anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment ideology and religion and America’s Middle East policies have only been fuel on the fire, not the reason for the terrorist stance at all.
I support Dr. Paul because he is the only candidate today who firmly and consistently advocates limited government, something that to me is a bigger issue than his ideas on~foreign policy. Yet even on this score I am concerned with how Dr. Paul expresses his position. For example, he keeps saying we should “just go back to the U. S. Constitution.” But this is a troublesome idea because it doesn’t spell out which version of the U. S. Constitution is supposed to be worth going back to. It is surely not the original one, the one that permitted slavery and included some highly disturbing and false claims about African Americans. Or is it supposed to be the current version, one that has innumerable statist amendments included in it and no longer supports limited government?
In my view Dr. Paul should not issue blanket endorsement of the U. S. Constitution. Although sound bite talk is now the preferred way for candidates to communicate, it is very risky to yield to that policy because sometimes where one ought to stand on the relevant issues is complicated and cannot be stated simply. Perhaps what Dr. Paul and others who publicly advocate the free society should do is identify themselves as “Declarationists” so as to indicate that what they support is the principles of the free society as the Founder paid them out in the Declaration of Independence, not in the compromised political-legal document that became the U. S. Constitution.
The Declaration, which is a pre-legal, philosophical document, is nearly flawless and would really be very good to go back to--or rather to move ahead toward, since America never did full justice to it and it is high time it begins to do so. It is the ideas of the Declaration that have inspired millions of people to head toward America’s shores because of its position in the world as the beacon of liberty.
Ron Paul will probably not win the Republican nomination or the presidency but with the message that America should aspire to realize and implement the principles laid out in the Declaration he could spawn a serious political movement and influence the country’s direction henceforth. Even his foreign policy ideas--namely, that the government’s task is to fend off those who attack the country because the justification for its existence is the securing of the rights of its citizens--would flow much easier from the Declaration than from the U. S. Constitution.
Dr. Paul could then become today’s popular voice of America’s true and distinctive political ideas and ideals, not the voice of the rather muddled and corrupted ideas contained in the U. S. Constitution. There is hardly any principle in that legal document that hasn’t been eroded over the centuries--only the defense of freedom of speech and religion remains reasonably intact (although even there cracks are evident now).
Sometimes in the heat of election campaigning even candidates who are committed to sound principles will lapse because of the demands imposed on them. Sound bite communication makes it impossible to be thorough and nuanced. But I think it is possible to resist this with some careful guidance--and Ron Paul now has enough cash to hire folks who can provide him with the text he needs to make clear that he stands for human liberty first and foremost, something this country desperately needs.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Freedom & the Needy
Tibor R. Machan
The defenders of the free society assume that, generally, people can fend for themselves, often alone, more often in voluntary cooperation. But they are not blind to the plain fact that not everyone can or will do this--there are serious hard luck cases, people in dire straits, as well as many who make mistakes by failing to prepare for bad times or by producing bad circumstances for themselves. So such folks will require support in order for them to live reasonably well.
What the champions of the free society assume, significantly and unlike those who distrust liberty, is that the support required for those in special need should come from fellow citizens who will provide the necessary support of their own free will, from a spirit of generosity. This should not involve the government, which in a free country has as its proper task to secure the rights of the citizenry against criminals and foreign aggressors. Why?
For one, government as property understood is certain select people using force defensively. When the force is used coercively, the “government” has gone astray, become corrupt, by engaging in the violation of citizens’ rights. This is simple to grasp: It is akin to when police officers use force not to fight crime but to subdue citizens to follow some course of action the officers happen to prefer but are not morally authorized to enforce. Sadly, of course, all too many police officers do act in such morally unauthorized ways around the globe, including in America, just as too many governments overstep their authority and instead of defending their citizens embark upon ordering them about to act as the officials deem proper and desirable.
Another reason why it is a very bad idea to conceive of government as doing more than protecting the rights of citizens is that when government lends a hand, it does so mostly to advance the agenda of its agents and only rarely just the interest of the citizenry. Pro-active government policies involve "self-dealing" because this is what comes naturally, this is what is most easily achieved.
Helping others is a very difficult task since few know, especially in far away centers of power, what those in dire straits actually benefit from. It's no simple task to be the supporter of others, especially if one is using resources that aren't one's own. Just consider how skilled those in the helping professions must be, how much schooling they require and how often even they get it wrong about what actually helps their clients.
So in a free country support for those in special need, those in dire straits, must not come from government but from fellow citizens. They are the ones who can offer genuine help to the needy, on terms the needy accept freely. Otherwise the needy are demeaned, their human dignity is undermined--they become wards of the state, not people who are being offered and freely accept their fellows’ help.
It appears that politicians willfully evade this fact, especially during election campaigns. All we hear these days is how once elected, candidates will provide for those who need something, necessarily at the expense of others who have not volunteered to give help but are being forced to provide it. This is precisely what a free society cannot tolerate and the policy that leads to its demise. One need but reflect on the fact that throughout human history the tyrants, tsars, dictators, and nearly all others who took up the task of helping the people turned out to be vicious oppressors. The people lacked sovereignty and these “leaders” grabbed it all for themselves.
This bad habit, of conceiving of politicians and bureaucrats as embarking on helping out the needy, is still very much with us--it is that insidious governmental habit and it is far worse than any dependence on using debilitating drugs or engaging in other self-destructive practices. Yet because so much of human history involved not mutual respect among people but the conquest of some of them by others, the radical idea that we can live in peace and mutual respect for each other’s rights is taking a long time to become standard practice.
The American Founders began the radical reformation of government along these lines but they only gave it a start. Sadly, it seems that contemporary politicians do not really want to follow their lead and want to reinstitute the old regime whereby government was seen as the care taker, not rights protector, within the realm.
Tibor R. Machan
The defenders of the free society assume that, generally, people can fend for themselves, often alone, more often in voluntary cooperation. But they are not blind to the plain fact that not everyone can or will do this--there are serious hard luck cases, people in dire straits, as well as many who make mistakes by failing to prepare for bad times or by producing bad circumstances for themselves. So such folks will require support in order for them to live reasonably well.
What the champions of the free society assume, significantly and unlike those who distrust liberty, is that the support required for those in special need should come from fellow citizens who will provide the necessary support of their own free will, from a spirit of generosity. This should not involve the government, which in a free country has as its proper task to secure the rights of the citizenry against criminals and foreign aggressors. Why?
For one, government as property understood is certain select people using force defensively. When the force is used coercively, the “government” has gone astray, become corrupt, by engaging in the violation of citizens’ rights. This is simple to grasp: It is akin to when police officers use force not to fight crime but to subdue citizens to follow some course of action the officers happen to prefer but are not morally authorized to enforce. Sadly, of course, all too many police officers do act in such morally unauthorized ways around the globe, including in America, just as too many governments overstep their authority and instead of defending their citizens embark upon ordering them about to act as the officials deem proper and desirable.
Another reason why it is a very bad idea to conceive of government as doing more than protecting the rights of citizens is that when government lends a hand, it does so mostly to advance the agenda of its agents and only rarely just the interest of the citizenry. Pro-active government policies involve "self-dealing" because this is what comes naturally, this is what is most easily achieved.
Helping others is a very difficult task since few know, especially in far away centers of power, what those in dire straits actually benefit from. It's no simple task to be the supporter of others, especially if one is using resources that aren't one's own. Just consider how skilled those in the helping professions must be, how much schooling they require and how often even they get it wrong about what actually helps their clients.
So in a free country support for those in special need, those in dire straits, must not come from government but from fellow citizens. They are the ones who can offer genuine help to the needy, on terms the needy accept freely. Otherwise the needy are demeaned, their human dignity is undermined--they become wards of the state, not people who are being offered and freely accept their fellows’ help.
It appears that politicians willfully evade this fact, especially during election campaigns. All we hear these days is how once elected, candidates will provide for those who need something, necessarily at the expense of others who have not volunteered to give help but are being forced to provide it. This is precisely what a free society cannot tolerate and the policy that leads to its demise. One need but reflect on the fact that throughout human history the tyrants, tsars, dictators, and nearly all others who took up the task of helping the people turned out to be vicious oppressors. The people lacked sovereignty and these “leaders” grabbed it all for themselves.
This bad habit, of conceiving of politicians and bureaucrats as embarking on helping out the needy, is still very much with us--it is that insidious governmental habit and it is far worse than any dependence on using debilitating drugs or engaging in other self-destructive practices. Yet because so much of human history involved not mutual respect among people but the conquest of some of them by others, the radical idea that we can live in peace and mutual respect for each other’s rights is taking a long time to become standard practice.
The American Founders began the radical reformation of government along these lines but they only gave it a start. Sadly, it seems that contemporary politicians do not really want to follow their lead and want to reinstitute the old regime whereby government was seen as the care taker, not rights protector, within the realm.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Ron Paul’s Middle East Foibles
Tibor R. Machan
At Saturday's (1/05/08) Republican presidential candidates debate nearly all the candidates ganged up on Ron Paul for his stance on the U. S. role in instigating 9/11 and other Middle Eastern terrorist activities. Although Dr. Paul has some valuable points to make concerning how U. S. foreign policy exacerbates the terrorist problem--namely, by providing terrorists with some valid reasons to criticize elements of that policy--he is also careless in blaming what the terrorists do primarily on U. S. Middle Eastern foreign policy.
As several of his rivals pointed out, radical Islamist hostility toward the West and, thus, its leading power, the U. S. A., is based on ancient hostilities. Terrorism against Western targets actually predates considerably even America's support of Israel, another supposed reason for the terrorists' anger and attacks.
For some reason, however, Dr. Paul will not relent in blaming it all on America. His moral equivalence thesis, invoking a hypothetical expansionist foreign policy by China, is way off the mark.~ Most of America's so called "imperialism" is economic, an element of global capitalism, whereas what China would be exporting is anything but capitalism and its free institutions but innumerable coercive ones. (There is in Dr. Paul's rhetoric an unfortunate relativism so that exporting free institutions is just as bad as exporting coercive ones.)
It is unfortunate that Dr. Paul refuses to finesse his views on this topic because on so many other fronts a great many Americans have no trouble supporting him. They will not yield, however, on the issue of whether, all things considered, America is a more just and decent country than are the Middle Eastern dictatorships--admittedly often supported by the American government--that support the terrorists who are bent on bringing it down. Now that it is evident that Mrs. Clinton’s politics and public policy ideas do not sit all that well even with many Democrats, Dr. Paul’s limited government, sound monetary policy philosophy, could take off but for his insistence that around the globe America is the criminal.
Among libertarians this is no novel dispute. Even during the Cold War there were some who insisted that it isn’t the Soviet Union but America that is aggressive, that is a greater threat to human liberty. These libertarians were--and some still are--of the “anarchist” persuasion, believing that government of any kind whatever is coercive, tyrannical, evil. And from this it tends to follow that whichever government is close is the worst, the greatest threat.
Actually, these libertarians are mistaken in calling their view “anarchist.” They believe in government but of a peculiar type, one that isn’t stationary but fluid, floating around from area to area providing its “clients”--citizens--with legal services. But they are, allegedly, not monopolistic.
Genuine anarchists, however, believe in no government at all, no law or legal authority, regarding all of that a source of mischief. Libertarian “anarchists,” however, disavow only governments that claim to be the sole representative of a group of people. So what seems to irk libertarian “anarchists” is that they cannot up and select some alternative representation right where they live, without having to move.
Now this is like complaining that Macys has a monopoly because in order to compete with it one must actually leave its premises and go to another store. But we often have just that kind of competition in a free market, so if a country did have a genuine free government--taking care only of protecting its citizens’ rights, and anyone could emigrate--there would be nothing libertarians could object about it.
Anyway, all this anti-American stuff coming from Dr. Paul is misconceived and self-destructive. It is too bad because otherwise Dr. Paul’s ideas are superior by a long shot to those of his rivals. And that would seem to be something he and his supporters could advocate with considerable success, especially to young people in the country who do prize America above most other countries around the globe, often for very good reasons.
Tibor R. Machan
At Saturday's (1/05/08) Republican presidential candidates debate nearly all the candidates ganged up on Ron Paul for his stance on the U. S. role in instigating 9/11 and other Middle Eastern terrorist activities. Although Dr. Paul has some valuable points to make concerning how U. S. foreign policy exacerbates the terrorist problem--namely, by providing terrorists with some valid reasons to criticize elements of that policy--he is also careless in blaming what the terrorists do primarily on U. S. Middle Eastern foreign policy.
As several of his rivals pointed out, radical Islamist hostility toward the West and, thus, its leading power, the U. S. A., is based on ancient hostilities. Terrorism against Western targets actually predates considerably even America's support of Israel, another supposed reason for the terrorists' anger and attacks.
For some reason, however, Dr. Paul will not relent in blaming it all on America. His moral equivalence thesis, invoking a hypothetical expansionist foreign policy by China, is way off the mark.~ Most of America's so called "imperialism" is economic, an element of global capitalism, whereas what China would be exporting is anything but capitalism and its free institutions but innumerable coercive ones. (There is in Dr. Paul's rhetoric an unfortunate relativism so that exporting free institutions is just as bad as exporting coercive ones.)
It is unfortunate that Dr. Paul refuses to finesse his views on this topic because on so many other fronts a great many Americans have no trouble supporting him. They will not yield, however, on the issue of whether, all things considered, America is a more just and decent country than are the Middle Eastern dictatorships--admittedly often supported by the American government--that support the terrorists who are bent on bringing it down. Now that it is evident that Mrs. Clinton’s politics and public policy ideas do not sit all that well even with many Democrats, Dr. Paul’s limited government, sound monetary policy philosophy, could take off but for his insistence that around the globe America is the criminal.
Among libertarians this is no novel dispute. Even during the Cold War there were some who insisted that it isn’t the Soviet Union but America that is aggressive, that is a greater threat to human liberty. These libertarians were--and some still are--of the “anarchist” persuasion, believing that government of any kind whatever is coercive, tyrannical, evil. And from this it tends to follow that whichever government is close is the worst, the greatest threat.
Actually, these libertarians are mistaken in calling their view “anarchist.” They believe in government but of a peculiar type, one that isn’t stationary but fluid, floating around from area to area providing its “clients”--citizens--with legal services. But they are, allegedly, not monopolistic.
Genuine anarchists, however, believe in no government at all, no law or legal authority, regarding all of that a source of mischief. Libertarian “anarchists,” however, disavow only governments that claim to be the sole representative of a group of people. So what seems to irk libertarian “anarchists” is that they cannot up and select some alternative representation right where they live, without having to move.
Now this is like complaining that Macys has a monopoly because in order to compete with it one must actually leave its premises and go to another store. But we often have just that kind of competition in a free market, so if a country did have a genuine free government--taking care only of protecting its citizens’ rights, and anyone could emigrate--there would be nothing libertarians could object about it.
Anyway, all this anti-American stuff coming from Dr. Paul is misconceived and self-destructive. It is too bad because otherwise Dr. Paul’s ideas are superior by a long shot to those of his rivals. And that would seem to be something he and his supporters could advocate with considerable success, especially to young people in the country who do prize America above most other countries around the globe, often for very good reasons.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
“I’ll Think of Something!”
Tibor R. Machan
Often when some unexpected challenge faces a person, someone asks, “What are you going to do about this?” The answer, frequently delivered with casual confidence, tends to be: “I’ll think of something.”
No answer and attitude better characterizes how to think about problem solving in a free society. Unlike the attitude in the Nanny State, which requires massive bureaucracies to plan for endless and often completely unanticipated “solutions,” in a free society problem solving is left to citizens who individually or cooperatively volunteer to address the challenges, great or small, that face them. And this approach is most likely to bear better fruit than does the bureaucratic approach for a number of reasons, including the fact that local knowledge is often far more useful and important than what far away bureaucrats have at their disposal, with their loose, general theories as to what people in society need and want.
If one believes, however, that to meet these challenges, one requires a well established formula and the force of government to apply it, then confidence in “I’ll think of something” will tend to be lacking. Of course, history and familiarity of how governments work confirms that (a) state officials do not know or care enough to solve the problems they take on as if they were the only ones fit to address them, and (b) these officials have their own agendas and will attempt to provide solutions not to the problems their constituents face but to what they themselves think is important to deal with.
This is the gist of public choice theory, for which Professor James Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in economic science back in the mid 1980s. Public servants, so called, are anything but! Indeed, nearly all the problems these men and women are called upon--and promise--to solve amount to the particular problems of some select group of citizens (the special interests we hear so much about from political candidates, those terrible folks whom decent, upstanding candidates promise never to listen to once they get elected!).
There are very few problems shared by all members of the public! Instead, different individuals and groups have different problems, in different measures, with different levels of urgency, so the solutions cannot be the one-size-fits-all type, which is what governments usually propose.
It is not so much that the politicians and bureaucrats are a bunch of greedy officials, as some believe public choice theory claims! No, they just have their own agendas, very possibly motivated from concerns and good will but mostly thoroughly misdirected. So it is a bad idea to entrust problem solving to them.
Even when these men and women are dedicated, hard working individuals and do achieve some good, it is virtually always at great and avoidable cost and sacrifice. Devoting taxes to this project, deprives people of the chance to solve ones to which they would choose to contribute their resources. This is a plain fact that anyone can understand without needing the brain power of Nobel Prize winner. I am always impressed by the impact of the thought experiment in which a family with an old car would devote the money extorted from them in taxes to buy new tires for the jalopy but is deprived of that chance and then suffers a fatal blow-out; few think to blame taxation for this yet it could be just the thing that led to the disaster!
Of course when governments become accepted as the default problem solvers--people are urged to call their members of City Council or Congress when they see something needing attention--the “I’ll think of something” attitude can be seriously arrested. Bad money drives out good and bad habits also drive out good ones. Yet, in the end there really is no better source of problem solving in human life and communities than the personal initiative to think about what is the solution to one’s problems, problems that are most likely going to be best solved with just the knowledge that only those close to them possess.
Tibor R. Machan
Often when some unexpected challenge faces a person, someone asks, “What are you going to do about this?” The answer, frequently delivered with casual confidence, tends to be: “I’ll think of something.”
No answer and attitude better characterizes how to think about problem solving in a free society. Unlike the attitude in the Nanny State, which requires massive bureaucracies to plan for endless and often completely unanticipated “solutions,” in a free society problem solving is left to citizens who individually or cooperatively volunteer to address the challenges, great or small, that face them. And this approach is most likely to bear better fruit than does the bureaucratic approach for a number of reasons, including the fact that local knowledge is often far more useful and important than what far away bureaucrats have at their disposal, with their loose, general theories as to what people in society need and want.
If one believes, however, that to meet these challenges, one requires a well established formula and the force of government to apply it, then confidence in “I’ll think of something” will tend to be lacking. Of course, history and familiarity of how governments work confirms that (a) state officials do not know or care enough to solve the problems they take on as if they were the only ones fit to address them, and (b) these officials have their own agendas and will attempt to provide solutions not to the problems their constituents face but to what they themselves think is important to deal with.
This is the gist of public choice theory, for which Professor James Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in economic science back in the mid 1980s. Public servants, so called, are anything but! Indeed, nearly all the problems these men and women are called upon--and promise--to solve amount to the particular problems of some select group of citizens (the special interests we hear so much about from political candidates, those terrible folks whom decent, upstanding candidates promise never to listen to once they get elected!).
There are very few problems shared by all members of the public! Instead, different individuals and groups have different problems, in different measures, with different levels of urgency, so the solutions cannot be the one-size-fits-all type, which is what governments usually propose.
It is not so much that the politicians and bureaucrats are a bunch of greedy officials, as some believe public choice theory claims! No, they just have their own agendas, very possibly motivated from concerns and good will but mostly thoroughly misdirected. So it is a bad idea to entrust problem solving to them.
Even when these men and women are dedicated, hard working individuals and do achieve some good, it is virtually always at great and avoidable cost and sacrifice. Devoting taxes to this project, deprives people of the chance to solve ones to which they would choose to contribute their resources. This is a plain fact that anyone can understand without needing the brain power of Nobel Prize winner. I am always impressed by the impact of the thought experiment in which a family with an old car would devote the money extorted from them in taxes to buy new tires for the jalopy but is deprived of that chance and then suffers a fatal blow-out; few think to blame taxation for this yet it could be just the thing that led to the disaster!
Of course when governments become accepted as the default problem solvers--people are urged to call their members of City Council or Congress when they see something needing attention--the “I’ll think of something” attitude can be seriously arrested. Bad money drives out good and bad habits also drive out good ones. Yet, in the end there really is no better source of problem solving in human life and communities than the personal initiative to think about what is the solution to one’s problems, problems that are most likely going to be best solved with just the knowledge that only those close to them possess.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
The Return of Serfdom
Tibor R. Machan
The American Founders initiated a revolution by removing sovereignty from the government--kings and the like--and recognizing that it is individual human beings to whom sovereignty rightfully belongs. (Sovereignty means self governance, self rule.) By implementing the political philosophy of John Locke, who identified the natural rights of every human being to life, liberty, and property, the founders changed things radically, far more radically than did the communists later on who followed Karl Marx’s reactionary program of socialization.
But the American Founders did not eliminate one of the crucial features of the old order, namely, taxation. That is the system under which the government owns the wealth of a country and merely permits the people to live and work there, collecting a good chunk of their earnings as payment for the privilege. Serfdom, the other crucial feature of the old order, had however been overthrown in America. That was because individual rights are plainly incompatible with the government’s ownership of the people, which is what serfdom really amounts to. The serfs were supposed to belong to the king who gave them to the lords and other occupants of land, supposedly so they be taken good care of. In fact, of course, they were thoroughly exploited for the economic benefit of the ruling classes, including the royal court.
To remind ourselves that the elapse of time doesn’t always mean the improvement of circumstances, we should notice that in our day there is a slow, sometimes imperceptible return to the age of serfdom. The government now provides for millions of people, through various welfare programs for nearly every segment of society, supposedly to take good care of them. And all this is now being vigorously supported by some of the most prominent political theorists at America’s premier universities.
But so far the apologists for the massive and growing welfare state have only argued that the wealth of the country belongs to government instead of the citizens. (It is actually the corporate sector that is now the greatest recipient of welfare, of so called entitlements--via subsidies, protection against competition from abroad as well as domestic rivals.) They have openly, denied the right to private property in books such as The Myth of Ownership and The Cost of Rights, as well as various articles published in prominent magazines and journals. The idea is that individuals have no right to private property and government owns the country’s resources. The defense of this notion takes a variety of forms but the bottom line is the rejection of the Lockean individualist view in favor of a collectivist vision of society.
Few of these apologists have done so far as to claim that individual human beings belong to the government, although some, like the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, have argued that people’s lives belong to their communities, not to themselves. (Oddly, Taylor was a recent recipient of the substantial Templeton Prize! This despite the fact that John Templeton is reputed to be a defender of the free market, an institution that depends on the Lockean theory of individual rights!) In fact, however, with the growing number of citizens who demand entitlements from the government their claim that their lives are their own is unconvincing. When the government feeds you, houses you, provides you with medical care, with retirement benefits, and all the rest to which one is now entitled, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Americans are no longer citizens but have reverted to the status of subjects, if not outright serfs. Is your life really yours when you live off the state? No.
It is one thing to advocate a social order in which men and women freely help their needy fellows. That is what generosity recommends. It is an entirely different matter when men and women are coerced into involuntary servitude and the beneficiaries become beholden to them for nearly everything in their lives, starting from early childhood education all the way to old age pension.
Do not be surprised that very soon we will be hearing and reading explicit arguments for the claim that individuals do not own their lives--they have no right to it--but actually belong to the state; that they are actually serfs! And all this coming from the progressives among our political thinkers.
Tibor R. Machan
The American Founders initiated a revolution by removing sovereignty from the government--kings and the like--and recognizing that it is individual human beings to whom sovereignty rightfully belongs. (Sovereignty means self governance, self rule.) By implementing the political philosophy of John Locke, who identified the natural rights of every human being to life, liberty, and property, the founders changed things radically, far more radically than did the communists later on who followed Karl Marx’s reactionary program of socialization.
But the American Founders did not eliminate one of the crucial features of the old order, namely, taxation. That is the system under which the government owns the wealth of a country and merely permits the people to live and work there, collecting a good chunk of their earnings as payment for the privilege. Serfdom, the other crucial feature of the old order, had however been overthrown in America. That was because individual rights are plainly incompatible with the government’s ownership of the people, which is what serfdom really amounts to. The serfs were supposed to belong to the king who gave them to the lords and other occupants of land, supposedly so they be taken good care of. In fact, of course, they were thoroughly exploited for the economic benefit of the ruling classes, including the royal court.
To remind ourselves that the elapse of time doesn’t always mean the improvement of circumstances, we should notice that in our day there is a slow, sometimes imperceptible return to the age of serfdom. The government now provides for millions of people, through various welfare programs for nearly every segment of society, supposedly to take good care of them. And all this is now being vigorously supported by some of the most prominent political theorists at America’s premier universities.
But so far the apologists for the massive and growing welfare state have only argued that the wealth of the country belongs to government instead of the citizens. (It is actually the corporate sector that is now the greatest recipient of welfare, of so called entitlements--via subsidies, protection against competition from abroad as well as domestic rivals.) They have openly, denied the right to private property in books such as The Myth of Ownership and The Cost of Rights, as well as various articles published in prominent magazines and journals. The idea is that individuals have no right to private property and government owns the country’s resources. The defense of this notion takes a variety of forms but the bottom line is the rejection of the Lockean individualist view in favor of a collectivist vision of society.
Few of these apologists have done so far as to claim that individual human beings belong to the government, although some, like the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, have argued that people’s lives belong to their communities, not to themselves. (Oddly, Taylor was a recent recipient of the substantial Templeton Prize! This despite the fact that John Templeton is reputed to be a defender of the free market, an institution that depends on the Lockean theory of individual rights!) In fact, however, with the growing number of citizens who demand entitlements from the government their claim that their lives are their own is unconvincing. When the government feeds you, houses you, provides you with medical care, with retirement benefits, and all the rest to which one is now entitled, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Americans are no longer citizens but have reverted to the status of subjects, if not outright serfs. Is your life really yours when you live off the state? No.
It is one thing to advocate a social order in which men and women freely help their needy fellows. That is what generosity recommends. It is an entirely different matter when men and women are coerced into involuntary servitude and the beneficiaries become beholden to them for nearly everything in their lives, starting from early childhood education all the way to old age pension.
Do not be surprised that very soon we will be hearing and reading explicit arguments for the claim that individuals do not own their lives--they have no right to it--but actually belong to the state; that they are actually serfs! And all this coming from the progressives among our political thinkers.
It’s deja vu All Over Again
Tibor R. Machan
Back in 1971 the late Harvard behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner published his popular best seller, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York, Knopf). The book followed several more technical works by Skinner arguing that the belief that human beings have free will and are morally responsible is all wrong, a pre-scientific prejudice that needs to be discarded and replaced with a technology of behavior.
This work prompted me to write my first book, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (Arlington House, 1973), in which I disputed Skinner’s claim to have come up with scientific reasons for rejecting free will and moral responsibility. I argued that he was actually subscribing to a certain school of philosophy that advanced the views he championed. His conclusions about free will and morality were not based on scientific findings at all.
It is now over 30 years since Skinner’s work appeared and behaviorism is no longer all the rage in the discipline of psychology. But the basic goal of discrediting free will and moral--including legal or criminal--responsibility is still very much on the agenda of some folks. Only the school of psychology that is supposed to be undermining the belief in human freedom and morality is no longer behaviorism. Now it is some people’s version of neuroscience.
The basic contention put forth by some of the champions of this new scientific approach to understanding human behavior is that our actions aren’t really ours at all. And, very interestingly, the idea has enormous financial support from no less than the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It has contributed $10 million to do research on the issues involved, with the work carried out at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Now I say that this money will go to do research but it looks very much like some of those involved do not think much research is needed because they write as if they had already reached their conclusions. As an article on the website of the project-- http://www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org/neurolaw%20fact%20sheet%20QandA.pdf--tells it,
"The U.S. legal system incorporates assumptions about behavior that, in some cases, are centuries old and based on common sense and culture. For example, it tends to assume that people make deliberate choices and that those choices determine what they do. However, recent breakthroughs in neuroscience research indicate that such choices may sometimes be based upon electrical impulses and neuron activity that are not a part of conscious behavior. These actions can include not only criminal activity, but also decisions made by police, prosecutors, and jurors to arrest, prosecute, convict, or mandate treatment."
In other words, as some of these scientists would have it, we are back to Skinner, although in slightly modified terms. As the new technologists of human behavior see the matter, it is not operant conditioning that drives human behavior but impersonal electrical firings in our brains. Human beings do not make conscious decisions, they do not deliberate but are being driven by “electrical impulses.” (I wouldn’t put much stock in the qualification “sometimes” since anyone familiar with the work of some of the enthusiasts behind these ideas can tell that theirs is actually a sweeping pronouncement about all human behavior!)
A column isn’t the place to attempt to rebut these ideas, merely to call attention to the eagerness with which some are promulgating them and to the enormous investment in the attempt to make them influential. But one thing can be said so as to put a bit of a break on all this enthusiasm about denying the efficacy of human conscious thought in directing human conduct. The British psychologist D. Bannister put the matter very poignantly over 30 years ago: “... the psychologist cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture.”
The point is that the champions of the relevant kind of neuroscience and its alleged findings are themselves making decisions, deliberating, and consciously deciding about what to do, day in and day out, including when they decide to make various claims about the implications of their work for the legal system they wish to discredit and take steps to convince the rest of us of how outmoded our thinking and institutions are. They cannot have it both ways--deny that people make decisions but then proceed to make all sorts of significant decisions themselves!
The plain fact is that there is something basic, undeniable about the role of our minds in our conduct, even in conduct that aims to discredit the human mind itself.
Tibor R. Machan
Back in 1971 the late Harvard behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner published his popular best seller, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York, Knopf). The book followed several more technical works by Skinner arguing that the belief that human beings have free will and are morally responsible is all wrong, a pre-scientific prejudice that needs to be discarded and replaced with a technology of behavior.
This work prompted me to write my first book, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (Arlington House, 1973), in which I disputed Skinner’s claim to have come up with scientific reasons for rejecting free will and moral responsibility. I argued that he was actually subscribing to a certain school of philosophy that advanced the views he championed. His conclusions about free will and morality were not based on scientific findings at all.
It is now over 30 years since Skinner’s work appeared and behaviorism is no longer all the rage in the discipline of psychology. But the basic goal of discrediting free will and moral--including legal or criminal--responsibility is still very much on the agenda of some folks. Only the school of psychology that is supposed to be undermining the belief in human freedom and morality is no longer behaviorism. Now it is some people’s version of neuroscience.
The basic contention put forth by some of the champions of this new scientific approach to understanding human behavior is that our actions aren’t really ours at all. And, very interestingly, the idea has enormous financial support from no less than the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It has contributed $10 million to do research on the issues involved, with the work carried out at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Now I say that this money will go to do research but it looks very much like some of those involved do not think much research is needed because they write as if they had already reached their conclusions. As an article on the website of the project-- http://www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org/neurolaw%20fact%20sheet%20QandA.pdf--tells it,
"The U.S. legal system incorporates assumptions about behavior that, in some cases, are centuries old and based on common sense and culture. For example, it tends to assume that people make deliberate choices and that those choices determine what they do. However, recent breakthroughs in neuroscience research indicate that such choices may sometimes be based upon electrical impulses and neuron activity that are not a part of conscious behavior. These actions can include not only criminal activity, but also decisions made by police, prosecutors, and jurors to arrest, prosecute, convict, or mandate treatment."
In other words, as some of these scientists would have it, we are back to Skinner, although in slightly modified terms. As the new technologists of human behavior see the matter, it is not operant conditioning that drives human behavior but impersonal electrical firings in our brains. Human beings do not make conscious decisions, they do not deliberate but are being driven by “electrical impulses.” (I wouldn’t put much stock in the qualification “sometimes” since anyone familiar with the work of some of the enthusiasts behind these ideas can tell that theirs is actually a sweeping pronouncement about all human behavior!)
A column isn’t the place to attempt to rebut these ideas, merely to call attention to the eagerness with which some are promulgating them and to the enormous investment in the attempt to make them influential. But one thing can be said so as to put a bit of a break on all this enthusiasm about denying the efficacy of human conscious thought in directing human conduct. The British psychologist D. Bannister put the matter very poignantly over 30 years ago: “... the psychologist cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture.”
The point is that the champions of the relevant kind of neuroscience and its alleged findings are themselves making decisions, deliberating, and consciously deciding about what to do, day in and day out, including when they decide to make various claims about the implications of their work for the legal system they wish to discredit and take steps to convince the rest of us of how outmoded our thinking and institutions are. They cannot have it both ways--deny that people make decisions but then proceed to make all sorts of significant decisions themselves!
The plain fact is that there is something basic, undeniable about the role of our minds in our conduct, even in conduct that aims to discredit the human mind itself.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Fifth Estate Anyone?
Tibor R. Machan
It used to be thought that the press is the fourth estate, meaning a kind of shadow branch of government that keeps an eye on Washington and other centers of power to make sure politicians and bureaucrats are being watched. After all, government officials have a special advantage in gaining the ear of reporters with their news releases, declarations, and other proclamations of good will! So it is a helpful thing, one would hope, that an entire industry is devoted to challenging what they tell us.
Alas, now we seem to need a fifth estate, what with the press having become a sort of independent force that has its own agenda which tends to distort what is reported by it. This fifth estate is what the on line encyclopedia, Wikipedia describes, as the “media that sees itself in opposition to mainstream (Fourth Estate) media.” We might call it the meta-media!
One sign of how bad things have become in the fourth estate is to see all the journalists who are interviewing other journalists, not the actual players, when some vital or interesting event is “in the news.” Television news reports are especially notorious for this. Often instead of finding someone in the middle of a news story who should be interviewed, scrutinized, challenged or the like, what we are given is another reporter from the same or some other friendly “news” organization who becomes the subject of an interview. This kind of celebrity journalism seems to need some oversight.
One individual who seems to have taken an oath to do just this is the Chair of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, near Washington DC, Professor Donald J. Boudreaux. For quite some time now he has been reading a great many of the country’s prominent newspapers each morning (I assume) and sending off letters to the editor whenever he finds that the papers contains errors of fact or some other infelicities which need to be corrected so readers get the real scoop instead of some kind of spin the papers would like to be promulgating. He sends these not only to the papers but to a fairly long list of his friends and acquaintances who then can take whatever action they might deem warranted.
A good example of Professor Boudreaux’s tireless efforts is his frequent criticism of the New York Times columnist, fellow economist Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton University. With the kind of prestige Princeton enjoys, Krugman’s columns carry extra impact and if they contain errors, it is especially helpful to have these pointed out.
Not that Professor Boudreaux’s every letter gets published, far from it, Only a small percentage makes it into the letters sections of the various papers he keeps on eye on. But by sending them around to colleagues and friends, others can also chime in about the matter after they have been alerted to the problem and done some of their own research to verify Professor Boudreaux’s claims.
One of the letters came to me via email the other morning and it is an especially poignant instance of how important Professor Boudreaux’s pro bono work turns out to be. Here is the entire text of the letter he sent to The New York Times:
"Paul Krugman asserts that the steady decline in labor-union membership happened because "beginning in the 1970s, corporate America, which had previously had a largely cooperative relationship with unions, in effect declared war on organized labor" ("State of the Unions," December 24). Two facts cast doubt on this assertion.
"First, the decline in union membership began in the mid-1950s, not in the 1970s. Second, union membership in almost all of Europe and the rest of the industrialized world followed a similar trajectory to that in America."
When I received the letter and briefly checked the substance of the criticism, I decided this one needs to get the attention of the New York Times public editor, the person at The Times who is supposed to keep looking over the shoulders of reporters and editors so they don’t misbehave. So I sent a copy to this individual.
It will be interesting to see if Professor Boudreaux’s correction of Professor Krugman makes it into The Times. Do you want to bet whether it will?
Tibor R. Machan
It used to be thought that the press is the fourth estate, meaning a kind of shadow branch of government that keeps an eye on Washington and other centers of power to make sure politicians and bureaucrats are being watched. After all, government officials have a special advantage in gaining the ear of reporters with their news releases, declarations, and other proclamations of good will! So it is a helpful thing, one would hope, that an entire industry is devoted to challenging what they tell us.
Alas, now we seem to need a fifth estate, what with the press having become a sort of independent force that has its own agenda which tends to distort what is reported by it. This fifth estate is what the on line encyclopedia, Wikipedia describes, as the “media that sees itself in opposition to mainstream (Fourth Estate) media.” We might call it the meta-media!
One sign of how bad things have become in the fourth estate is to see all the journalists who are interviewing other journalists, not the actual players, when some vital or interesting event is “in the news.” Television news reports are especially notorious for this. Often instead of finding someone in the middle of a news story who should be interviewed, scrutinized, challenged or the like, what we are given is another reporter from the same or some other friendly “news” organization who becomes the subject of an interview. This kind of celebrity journalism seems to need some oversight.
One individual who seems to have taken an oath to do just this is the Chair of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, near Washington DC, Professor Donald J. Boudreaux. For quite some time now he has been reading a great many of the country’s prominent newspapers each morning (I assume) and sending off letters to the editor whenever he finds that the papers contains errors of fact or some other infelicities which need to be corrected so readers get the real scoop instead of some kind of spin the papers would like to be promulgating. He sends these not only to the papers but to a fairly long list of his friends and acquaintances who then can take whatever action they might deem warranted.
A good example of Professor Boudreaux’s tireless efforts is his frequent criticism of the New York Times columnist, fellow economist Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton University. With the kind of prestige Princeton enjoys, Krugman’s columns carry extra impact and if they contain errors, it is especially helpful to have these pointed out.
Not that Professor Boudreaux’s every letter gets published, far from it, Only a small percentage makes it into the letters sections of the various papers he keeps on eye on. But by sending them around to colleagues and friends, others can also chime in about the matter after they have been alerted to the problem and done some of their own research to verify Professor Boudreaux’s claims.
One of the letters came to me via email the other morning and it is an especially poignant instance of how important Professor Boudreaux’s pro bono work turns out to be. Here is the entire text of the letter he sent to The New York Times:
"Paul Krugman asserts that the steady decline in labor-union membership happened because "beginning in the 1970s, corporate America, which had previously had a largely cooperative relationship with unions, in effect declared war on organized labor" ("State of the Unions," December 24). Two facts cast doubt on this assertion.
"First, the decline in union membership began in the mid-1950s, not in the 1970s. Second, union membership in almost all of Europe and the rest of the industrialized world followed a similar trajectory to that in America."
When I received the letter and briefly checked the substance of the criticism, I decided this one needs to get the attention of the New York Times public editor, the person at The Times who is supposed to keep looking over the shoulders of reporters and editors so they don’t misbehave. So I sent a copy to this individual.
It will be interesting to see if Professor Boudreaux’s correction of Professor Krugman makes it into The Times. Do you want to bet whether it will?
Monday, December 17, 2007
MOST LIBERTARIAN OF THE CANDIDATES HAS PROS AND CONS
[This column, posted at www.FMNN.com on December 10, 2007, generated a discussion that may be of interest to some folks not familiar with that site, one that's accessible to anyone, by the way.]
Ron Paul, the Texas Republican House member, is undoubtedly the most committed libertarian among all the presidential hopefuls. "Dr. No," as he is sometimes called, opposes virtually all government spending and other forms of oppression. He believes that many of the laws passed by Congress aren't authorized by the Constitution - a document he believes is sound because of its support of the free society and a limited federal government - and could only be passed by state political bodies, not by the feds. Paul is pro-life, but instead of wanting to outlaw abortion - a dubious libertarian idea in my book - he wants the issue of whether there is a right to have an abortion to be dealt with at the state level.... [the full column appears below, dated December 10, 2007]
1. 12/10/2007 - 20:46:6PM
BY: Tannim
Tibor writes well as usual, but he does not explain why he finds Dr. Paul's non-interventionism to be disturbing, as he puts it. Sure, he may not be totally libertarian on everything, but this isn't a libertarian purist contest, it's a race for President of the United States! I tend to agree with Dr. Paul on most everything (except abortion, but for unusual reasons), and he's a Presidential candidate I can feel proud to vote for. I cannot say the same for ANY of the others in the GOP, and NONE of the Democrats.
2. 12/10/2007 - 21:18:31PM
BY: Eric
This article is quite ridiculous. Ron Paul has never said that "killing 3,000 people is OK". Pointing out that terrorists attacked America because of US involvement in the Middle East does not mean that the terrorist acts were morally or legally justified.
3. 12/11/2007 - 0:58:40AM
BY: Greg Lippold
"To a libertarian, for whom the right of an individual to his or her life is a core principle of community life, thinking that killing 3,000 people is OK - because Americans went to Saudi Arabia and other places "there" - is quite disturbing." Mr. MACHAN this is a load of crap. Sounds like something MSM would come up with.
4. 12/11/2007 - 13:10:39PM
BY: joan green
I agree with Ron Paul in the way that he views the Constitution, and the many ways that the present administration has violated their power of office. My vote is for Ron Paul....and if I had a "trillion" votes, they would all be for Ron Paul for President in 2008!
5. 12/11/2007 - 17:34:8PM
BY: texpat
This is such a careless misrepresentation of Ron Paul's position that I can only hope Tibor Machan's article was edited without him reviewing it. If not, it lowers my esteem for Mr. Machan.
Ron Paul had no problem going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, given their involvement in 9/11. What he does have a problem with is still being there, six years later, and invading Iraq, a country that had not attacked us.
Furthermore, Ron Paul never said that the 9/11 attacks were justified. His blowback theory merely explains the motivation for those attacks, and it makes far more sense than imbecilic explanations such as "they hate us because we're free".
6. 12/12/2007 - 5:54:20AM
BY: Tibor Machan
The blowback theory exculpates bin Laden & Co. It is offered as an explanation for 9/11. If I kick you and then this is explained by reference to your behavior as something that provoked the kick, clearly I am left blameless. Sure, Paul was producing a sound bite but he ought to have qualified it with "our being there has contributed to bin Laden & Co.'s anger but the murder of 3000 innocents was totally unjustified in response ot that."
7. 12/12/2007 - 10:30:52AM
BY: Greg Lippold
Mr. Machan I enjoy your articles and look forward to your views. Plain and simple, you are turning a fart into global warming. The ability to entertain the concept of blow back does not prove guilt or innocence, it does not even provide an excuse. It's like raising kids, when big brother hits little brother. Now for pay back little brother blows up big brothers bedroom. Do you really think those parents are going to let little brother off the hook? Check out Mr. Pauls voting record on these two wars and you'll get a better idea where he is coming from because Mr. Paul did vote differently on these two issues.
8. 12/12/2007 - 17:59:2PM
BY: Henry Pierson
While I usually agree with Prof. Machan, in this case it is clear that the “blowback theory” that Ron Paul has advocated does not exculpate bin Laden and Co. as the good professor suggests. Neither do I believe that Ron Paul’s position on the matter is indicative of such beliefs. My perception of Mr. Paul’s view is that he believes, were it not for our misplaced foreign policy, the attacks on our country and people would likely not have occurred. I tend to agree.
Great metaphor, Mr. Lippold.
9. 12/13/2007 - 17:51:22PM
BY: Tibor Machan
Sadly when someone EXPLAINS a criminal act, it is to exculpate the perpetrator. Just consider whye defense attorneys love to bing up psychology when they discusse why their client committed a crime--if the client's background, mental state, cultural practices or such serves to EXPLAIN the criminal conduct, the jury is urged not to hold the defendant responsible. What is responsible is one of these factors, not the defendant. Just as with bin Laden, what is responsible is not bin Laden but the fact that "we are there."
10. 12/13/2007 - 20:48:45PM
BY: Greg Lippold
Mr. Machan your statement, "Sadly when someone EXPLAINS a criminal act, it is to exculpate the perpetrator." I say no, not always, sometimes it is to point the finger in the right direction. Mr. Pauls voting recored speaks for itself. I do not adhere to this Chris Wallace school of thought of putting words in Mr. Pauls mouth. We do a great diservice to all parents that have a son or daughter in these two wars when we twist the facts. It is easy to find fault with Mr. Paul, he is only humane, but on this issue his voting record is very clear.
11. 12/14/2007 - 12:22:4PM
BY: Tibor Machan
I never put any words in Paul's mouth but I do draw implications from what he said, which was that 9/11 happened "because we are there." Those are his words. And what I say about an explanation functioning as a exculpation when it comes to otherwise criminal acts is a plain, demonstrable fact.
12. 12/14/2007 - 17:32:3PM
BY: MetaCynic
Few if any crimes occur in a vacuum. Although an individual must wilfully act to commit a crime, perhaps only a psychopath will do so outside a social, economic or political context. To understand the context is not to exculpate the act. For example, children who grow up in single parent households are much more likely to become violent, self destructive and generally dysfunctional adults than those who grow up in two parent households. No one should condone criminal behavior because the perpetrator grew up without a father, but neither should we support values and policies which produce single parent households. Such values and policies will ultimately elevate the social pathology level thus leading to the possibility that even we will become crime victims.
Ron Paul's observation that foreign intervention produces unpleasant, unexpected consequences is nothing more than placing a blowback crime, such as 9/11, within its context. He urges us to not support a foreign policy that brutalizes other countries because this will greatly increase the likelihood that innocent Americans will become crime victims. I fail to see why such a warning can be interpreted as exculpating the 9/11 perpetrators.
13. 12/14/2007 - 23:49:13PM
BY: Kerk93
Mr Machan, It appears that you have missed a fundamental premise to human action. That premise-with deference to von Mises-is that all humans act to maximize their satisfaction. I am unaware of a group-throughout history-who willingly acted for their subversion. Dr. Paul is quite accurate in his assertion that they attacked us because we were "over there."
His words should only be taken for their basic meaning. After all, words have specific meaning. Words and numbers are characters invented to convey a specific meaning. These characters and numbers are how we convery our specific values to one another.
You have inferred something from his speech that may or may not be true. How do you, based on logic or reason, know that he meant anything more than what he said?
Perhaps, he was simply stating they were enraged because we were over there? This is nearly the exact cause/effect relationship that Adam Smith noted back in the 1770s.
Is that not a logical explanation for their actions?
A much more illogical explanation is that they hate us because of our freedoms.
In the vast eras of human history, I am confounded to find any sect that has ever fought to be oppressed. Quite the contrary, people have fought-throughout history-because they are oppressed.
When one realizes that the system of governance guaranteed by our Constitution is a republican form, the premises of spreading democracy to the rest of the world become all the more paradoxical.
14. 12/15/2007 - 8:22:19AM
BY: Tibor Machan
I am not a believer in the economic man analysis of human action--my criticism of von Mises may be found in my book, Capitalism and Individualism, Reframing the Argument for the Free Society (St. Martin's Press, 1990). We do not always act to promote our own interest, although we ought to more often than we do! In any case, when Dr. Paul said 9/11 occurred because "we are there," he provided an unqualified explanation and such an explanation implies an exculpation of the actors, as I have explained before (on the model of how explaining criminal conduct exculpates the accused agent).
15. 12/16/2007 - 19:53:31PM
BY: Aaron
I find Mr. Machan's position in regard to Dr. Paul's blowback explanation very disturbing. Mr Machan seems to be saying that because we were attacked we are therefore blameless. It is Machan and not Paul who is exculpating and in a very bizarre way. In essence he is saying that if you provoke (attack) someone you are blameless if they retaliate beyond simple self defense. If that is the case, then appling Machan's logic, he is the one exculpating Bin Laden, as we responded to his provocation beyond simple self defense.
Obviously this in nonsense, and anyone who listens to what Dr. Paul says cannot honestly believe that he feels any sympathy toward Bin Laden or his tactics.
16. 12/16/2007 - 23:40:34PM
BY: Tibor Machan
I am told that "Mr Machan seems to be saying that because we were attacked we are therefore blameless. It is Machan and not Paul who is exculpating and in a very bizarre way. In essence he is saying that if you provoke (attack) someone you are blameless if they retaliate beyond simple self defense. If that is the case, then appling [sic] Machan's logic, he is the one exculpating Bin Laden, as we responded to his provocation beyond simple self defense." Well, am I saying it or am I seem to be saying it, whatever that can mean. In fact I nevere said that
bin Laden is blamesless or even that the American government is blameless. I have been stressing that Dr. Paul should have qualified his claim that 9/11 happened "because we are there." He should have said that our being there has possibly contributed to bin Laden & Co.'s anger but that anger has deep historical and religious origins that have nothing to do with how the American government acts--just check out Islamic Imperialism by Efraim Karsh (Yale, 2006).
17. 12/17/2007 - 0:37:38AM
BY: Denny Jackson
I'll take von Mises any day against Machan, and I'll take Ron Paul any day against him too. Machan's patently absurd accusation that Dr. Paul is excusing the terrorists of all blame when he points out the reason for their action -- whether reasonable or not -- is barely worthy of a response. Does Mr. Machan really think that we would have been attacked if the US government had been minding its own business and not been in the Middle East attacking Muslim nations? Frankly I don't find their response all that unreasonable myself. Criminal, yes, but not unreasonable.
I find it telling that Mr. Machan seems to have little concern for constitutional constraints on the actions of the federal government, nor seemingly any concept of limits to jurisdiction. At least he did not mention them. Libertarians know where their limits are and respect them. Statists think there are none other than what are determined by the extent of state power and blame others for defending themselves against their aggression.
18. 12/17/2007 - 8:32:20AM
BY: Tibor Machan
In fact, of course, Machan has been writing steadily against the Iraq war from before it started. It would help one who posts on my views to actually know those views. See www.Tibormachan.com for how steadily, consistently I have protested the war and argued that a free country has no business doing what the American government has been doing. But the dicussion here is about what Dr. Paul said and might have said regarding responsibility for 9/11, not about the war.
[This column, posted at www.FMNN.com on December 10, 2007, generated a discussion that may be of interest to some folks not familiar with that site, one that's accessible to anyone, by the way.]
Ron Paul, the Texas Republican House member, is undoubtedly the most committed libertarian among all the presidential hopefuls. "Dr. No," as he is sometimes called, opposes virtually all government spending and other forms of oppression. He believes that many of the laws passed by Congress aren't authorized by the Constitution - a document he believes is sound because of its support of the free society and a limited federal government - and could only be passed by state political bodies, not by the feds. Paul is pro-life, but instead of wanting to outlaw abortion - a dubious libertarian idea in my book - he wants the issue of whether there is a right to have an abortion to be dealt with at the state level.... [the full column appears below, dated December 10, 2007]
1. 12/10/2007 - 20:46:6PM
BY: Tannim
Tibor writes well as usual, but he does not explain why he finds Dr. Paul's non-interventionism to be disturbing, as he puts it. Sure, he may not be totally libertarian on everything, but this isn't a libertarian purist contest, it's a race for President of the United States! I tend to agree with Dr. Paul on most everything (except abortion, but for unusual reasons), and he's a Presidential candidate I can feel proud to vote for. I cannot say the same for ANY of the others in the GOP, and NONE of the Democrats.
2. 12/10/2007 - 21:18:31PM
BY: Eric
This article is quite ridiculous. Ron Paul has never said that "killing 3,000 people is OK". Pointing out that terrorists attacked America because of US involvement in the Middle East does not mean that the terrorist acts were morally or legally justified.
3. 12/11/2007 - 0:58:40AM
BY: Greg Lippold
"To a libertarian, for whom the right of an individual to his or her life is a core principle of community life, thinking that killing 3,000 people is OK - because Americans went to Saudi Arabia and other places "there" - is quite disturbing." Mr. MACHAN this is a load of crap. Sounds like something MSM would come up with.
4. 12/11/2007 - 13:10:39PM
BY: joan green
I agree with Ron Paul in the way that he views the Constitution, and the many ways that the present administration has violated their power of office. My vote is for Ron Paul....and if I had a "trillion" votes, they would all be for Ron Paul for President in 2008!
5. 12/11/2007 - 17:34:8PM
BY: texpat
This is such a careless misrepresentation of Ron Paul's position that I can only hope Tibor Machan's article was edited without him reviewing it. If not, it lowers my esteem for Mr. Machan.
Ron Paul had no problem going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, given their involvement in 9/11. What he does have a problem with is still being there, six years later, and invading Iraq, a country that had not attacked us.
Furthermore, Ron Paul never said that the 9/11 attacks were justified. His blowback theory merely explains the motivation for those attacks, and it makes far more sense than imbecilic explanations such as "they hate us because we're free".
6. 12/12/2007 - 5:54:20AM
BY: Tibor Machan
The blowback theory exculpates bin Laden & Co. It is offered as an explanation for 9/11. If I kick you and then this is explained by reference to your behavior as something that provoked the kick, clearly I am left blameless. Sure, Paul was producing a sound bite but he ought to have qualified it with "our being there has contributed to bin Laden & Co.'s anger but the murder of 3000 innocents was totally unjustified in response ot that."
7. 12/12/2007 - 10:30:52AM
BY: Greg Lippold
Mr. Machan I enjoy your articles and look forward to your views. Plain and simple, you are turning a fart into global warming. The ability to entertain the concept of blow back does not prove guilt or innocence, it does not even provide an excuse. It's like raising kids, when big brother hits little brother. Now for pay back little brother blows up big brothers bedroom. Do you really think those parents are going to let little brother off the hook? Check out Mr. Pauls voting record on these two wars and you'll get a better idea where he is coming from because Mr. Paul did vote differently on these two issues.
8. 12/12/2007 - 17:59:2PM
BY: Henry Pierson
While I usually agree with Prof. Machan, in this case it is clear that the “blowback theory” that Ron Paul has advocated does not exculpate bin Laden and Co. as the good professor suggests. Neither do I believe that Ron Paul’s position on the matter is indicative of such beliefs. My perception of Mr. Paul’s view is that he believes, were it not for our misplaced foreign policy, the attacks on our country and people would likely not have occurred. I tend to agree.
Great metaphor, Mr. Lippold.
9. 12/13/2007 - 17:51:22PM
BY: Tibor Machan
Sadly when someone EXPLAINS a criminal act, it is to exculpate the perpetrator. Just consider whye defense attorneys love to bing up psychology when they discusse why their client committed a crime--if the client's background, mental state, cultural practices or such serves to EXPLAIN the criminal conduct, the jury is urged not to hold the defendant responsible. What is responsible is one of these factors, not the defendant. Just as with bin Laden, what is responsible is not bin Laden but the fact that "we are there."
10. 12/13/2007 - 20:48:45PM
BY: Greg Lippold
Mr. Machan your statement, "Sadly when someone EXPLAINS a criminal act, it is to exculpate the perpetrator." I say no, not always, sometimes it is to point the finger in the right direction. Mr. Pauls voting recored speaks for itself. I do not adhere to this Chris Wallace school of thought of putting words in Mr. Pauls mouth. We do a great diservice to all parents that have a son or daughter in these two wars when we twist the facts. It is easy to find fault with Mr. Paul, he is only humane, but on this issue his voting record is very clear.
11. 12/14/2007 - 12:22:4PM
BY: Tibor Machan
I never put any words in Paul's mouth but I do draw implications from what he said, which was that 9/11 happened "because we are there." Those are his words. And what I say about an explanation functioning as a exculpation when it comes to otherwise criminal acts is a plain, demonstrable fact.
12. 12/14/2007 - 17:32:3PM
BY: MetaCynic
Few if any crimes occur in a vacuum. Although an individual must wilfully act to commit a crime, perhaps only a psychopath will do so outside a social, economic or political context. To understand the context is not to exculpate the act. For example, children who grow up in single parent households are much more likely to become violent, self destructive and generally dysfunctional adults than those who grow up in two parent households. No one should condone criminal behavior because the perpetrator grew up without a father, but neither should we support values and policies which produce single parent households. Such values and policies will ultimately elevate the social pathology level thus leading to the possibility that even we will become crime victims.
Ron Paul's observation that foreign intervention produces unpleasant, unexpected consequences is nothing more than placing a blowback crime, such as 9/11, within its context. He urges us to not support a foreign policy that brutalizes other countries because this will greatly increase the likelihood that innocent Americans will become crime victims. I fail to see why such a warning can be interpreted as exculpating the 9/11 perpetrators.
13. 12/14/2007 - 23:49:13PM
BY: Kerk93
Mr Machan, It appears that you have missed a fundamental premise to human action. That premise-with deference to von Mises-is that all humans act to maximize their satisfaction. I am unaware of a group-throughout history-who willingly acted for their subversion. Dr. Paul is quite accurate in his assertion that they attacked us because we were "over there."
His words should only be taken for their basic meaning. After all, words have specific meaning. Words and numbers are characters invented to convey a specific meaning. These characters and numbers are how we convery our specific values to one another.
You have inferred something from his speech that may or may not be true. How do you, based on logic or reason, know that he meant anything more than what he said?
Perhaps, he was simply stating they were enraged because we were over there? This is nearly the exact cause/effect relationship that Adam Smith noted back in the 1770s.
Is that not a logical explanation for their actions?
A much more illogical explanation is that they hate us because of our freedoms.
In the vast eras of human history, I am confounded to find any sect that has ever fought to be oppressed. Quite the contrary, people have fought-throughout history-because they are oppressed.
When one realizes that the system of governance guaranteed by our Constitution is a republican form, the premises of spreading democracy to the rest of the world become all the more paradoxical.
14. 12/15/2007 - 8:22:19AM
BY: Tibor Machan
I am not a believer in the economic man analysis of human action--my criticism of von Mises may be found in my book, Capitalism and Individualism, Reframing the Argument for the Free Society (St. Martin's Press, 1990). We do not always act to promote our own interest, although we ought to more often than we do! In any case, when Dr. Paul said 9/11 occurred because "we are there," he provided an unqualified explanation and such an explanation implies an exculpation of the actors, as I have explained before (on the model of how explaining criminal conduct exculpates the accused agent).
15. 12/16/2007 - 19:53:31PM
BY: Aaron
I find Mr. Machan's position in regard to Dr. Paul's blowback explanation very disturbing. Mr Machan seems to be saying that because we were attacked we are therefore blameless. It is Machan and not Paul who is exculpating and in a very bizarre way. In essence he is saying that if you provoke (attack) someone you are blameless if they retaliate beyond simple self defense. If that is the case, then appling Machan's logic, he is the one exculpating Bin Laden, as we responded to his provocation beyond simple self defense.
Obviously this in nonsense, and anyone who listens to what Dr. Paul says cannot honestly believe that he feels any sympathy toward Bin Laden or his tactics.
16. 12/16/2007 - 23:40:34PM
BY: Tibor Machan
I am told that "Mr Machan seems to be saying that because we were attacked we are therefore blameless. It is Machan and not Paul who is exculpating and in a very bizarre way. In essence he is saying that if you provoke (attack) someone you are blameless if they retaliate beyond simple self defense. If that is the case, then appling [sic] Machan's logic, he is the one exculpating Bin Laden, as we responded to his provocation beyond simple self defense." Well, am I saying it or am I seem to be saying it, whatever that can mean. In fact I nevere said that
bin Laden is blamesless or even that the American government is blameless. I have been stressing that Dr. Paul should have qualified his claim that 9/11 happened "because we are there." He should have said that our being there has possibly contributed to bin Laden & Co.'s anger but that anger has deep historical and religious origins that have nothing to do with how the American government acts--just check out Islamic Imperialism by Efraim Karsh (Yale, 2006).
17. 12/17/2007 - 0:37:38AM
BY: Denny Jackson
I'll take von Mises any day against Machan, and I'll take Ron Paul any day against him too. Machan's patently absurd accusation that Dr. Paul is excusing the terrorists of all blame when he points out the reason for their action -- whether reasonable or not -- is barely worthy of a response. Does Mr. Machan really think that we would have been attacked if the US government had been minding its own business and not been in the Middle East attacking Muslim nations? Frankly I don't find their response all that unreasonable myself. Criminal, yes, but not unreasonable.
I find it telling that Mr. Machan seems to have little concern for constitutional constraints on the actions of the federal government, nor seemingly any concept of limits to jurisdiction. At least he did not mention them. Libertarians know where their limits are and respect them. Statists think there are none other than what are determined by the extent of state power and blame others for defending themselves against their aggression.
18. 12/17/2007 - 8:32:20AM
BY: Tibor Machan
In fact, of course, Machan has been writing steadily against the Iraq war from before it started. It would help one who posts on my views to actually know those views. See www.Tibormachan.com for how steadily, consistently I have protested the war and argued that a free country has no business doing what the American government has been doing. But the dicussion here is about what Dr. Paul said and might have said regarding responsibility for 9/11, not about the war.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Who Fires or Lays you Off?
Tibor R. Machan
During economic downturns many people become hostile toward their employers, thinking whatever hardship they suffer is their fault. In fact, however, the responsibility lies with customers, consumers, and a host of other economic agents, rarely if ever with one’s employers.
I work for a university and have indeed done so for most of my career after I left graduate school, having earned my entry ticket, the PhD degree, which is what one usually needs to go on the market for a teaching position at colleges and universities. Much of this industry, of course, is bizarre. People are paid in most places from funds extorted from citizens via taxes, so there is hardly a genuine free market in play.
I did, however, work outside of the academy for nearly a decade, prior to entering college, where I was subject to market forces. Which is to say, when I lost my job a Carrier Air Conditioning, for example, or at the architectural drafting firm where I worked afterwards, I was let go because the number of those directly or indirectly seeking to buy my skills significantly diminished.
Yes, my pink slips were given to me by my bosses but they were only telling me what they were told by their own potential customers: “We do not want what you and Machan and the rest in your company would like to sell us. Or we want much less of it than before. Or we want to buy it from some other provider. Or we found something else we want to spend our money on instead of what you have to offer us. And so forth.”
Sometimes, as seems to be the situation now in my region of the world, many potential customers are in a belt-tightening frame of mind. For a while they may have extended themselves, gone out to buy what they wanted even beyond their means, and now it has downed on them that this could have severe consequences. So they decided to withdraw from the market place, or to go there more infrequently than before.
In the case of the housing market, for example, many people went in over the heads big time. They and their lenders took big risks, borrowed and lent much more than was reasonable given their economic circumstances. And this has resulted in widespread defaults and unless some kind of successful restructure could be arranged, it may even have led to having to give up one’s home. When such things happen with great numbers of people, then the economy undergoes a recession, at least if this happens over a prolonged period of time. But, except for when the government muscles in and causes all kinds of distortions instead of leaving people in the marketplace to sort things out, this is all nothing more mysterious than folks, as economic agents, acting somewhat wildly and then trying to take steps to rectify matters.
Yes, and there can be some malfeasance in play throughout the market which contributes to such situations, just as when the market is doing extraordinarily well. People hustle and others are all too willing to play along, take advantage. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance of selling something for much more than it was bought for even if doing so could be quite unreasonable? Much of what is called “the economy” is you and me and the rest of us, sadly often unthinking, human beings. It is not all a matter of malice but it is often plain old negligence. And there are consequences. Among those are widespread layoffs and firings.
But don’t blame the managers of firms for this. Sure, they can be more or less sensitive to the situation, handle it crassly or with consideration. But those are relatively minor matters when the major issues is the fact that one’s job is no longer wanted by the potential customers.
Unfortunately, as in so many cases, people blame the messenger, the one who hands out the pink slips, and forget that it is mostly due to potential buyers, like you and me, deciding to withdraw from the market for a while. Such, in some cases rather unfortunately, is economics.
Tibor R. Machan
During economic downturns many people become hostile toward their employers, thinking whatever hardship they suffer is their fault. In fact, however, the responsibility lies with customers, consumers, and a host of other economic agents, rarely if ever with one’s employers.
I work for a university and have indeed done so for most of my career after I left graduate school, having earned my entry ticket, the PhD degree, which is what one usually needs to go on the market for a teaching position at colleges and universities. Much of this industry, of course, is bizarre. People are paid in most places from funds extorted from citizens via taxes, so there is hardly a genuine free market in play.
I did, however, work outside of the academy for nearly a decade, prior to entering college, where I was subject to market forces. Which is to say, when I lost my job a Carrier Air Conditioning, for example, or at the architectural drafting firm where I worked afterwards, I was let go because the number of those directly or indirectly seeking to buy my skills significantly diminished.
Yes, my pink slips were given to me by my bosses but they were only telling me what they were told by their own potential customers: “We do not want what you and Machan and the rest in your company would like to sell us. Or we want much less of it than before. Or we want to buy it from some other provider. Or we found something else we want to spend our money on instead of what you have to offer us. And so forth.”
Sometimes, as seems to be the situation now in my region of the world, many potential customers are in a belt-tightening frame of mind. For a while they may have extended themselves, gone out to buy what they wanted even beyond their means, and now it has downed on them that this could have severe consequences. So they decided to withdraw from the market place, or to go there more infrequently than before.
In the case of the housing market, for example, many people went in over the heads big time. They and their lenders took big risks, borrowed and lent much more than was reasonable given their economic circumstances. And this has resulted in widespread defaults and unless some kind of successful restructure could be arranged, it may even have led to having to give up one’s home. When such things happen with great numbers of people, then the economy undergoes a recession, at least if this happens over a prolonged period of time. But, except for when the government muscles in and causes all kinds of distortions instead of leaving people in the marketplace to sort things out, this is all nothing more mysterious than folks, as economic agents, acting somewhat wildly and then trying to take steps to rectify matters.
Yes, and there can be some malfeasance in play throughout the market which contributes to such situations, just as when the market is doing extraordinarily well. People hustle and others are all too willing to play along, take advantage. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance of selling something for much more than it was bought for even if doing so could be quite unreasonable? Much of what is called “the economy” is you and me and the rest of us, sadly often unthinking, human beings. It is not all a matter of malice but it is often plain old negligence. And there are consequences. Among those are widespread layoffs and firings.
But don’t blame the managers of firms for this. Sure, they can be more or less sensitive to the situation, handle it crassly or with consideration. But those are relatively minor matters when the major issues is the fact that one’s job is no longer wanted by the potential customers.
Unfortunately, as in so many cases, people blame the messenger, the one who hands out the pink slips, and forget that it is mostly due to potential buyers, like you and me, deciding to withdraw from the market for a while. Such, in some cases rather unfortunately, is economics.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
The Attack on Good Luck
Tibor R. Machan
Over the last few years a controversy has been brewing about the death tax. While a great many people whom it doesn’t effect support it, some who would pay huge sums in this unjust policy do as well. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet both are on record in favor of hefty taxes on estates that could otherwise benefit family members, offspring of the wealthy.
Now Hillary Clinton has jumped on the bandwagon and this really should be no surprise. Although her line of defense is kind of weird--“The estate tax has been historically part of our very fundamental belief that we should have a meritocracy, that we do not want a system--where we expect people to make it on their own--to be, over time, dominated by inherited wealth.” She continued, speaking in the characteristic fashion of royalty (that uses “we” without actually consulting anyone included), saying that “What we do believe that people should have to get out there and make their way, to a great extent.”
Two points need to be made in response to this. One is that those who earned the wealth may not be coerced into using it in ways they do not choose. Wealthy people like Gates and Buffet have every right to give away all they have earned, so their freedom and property rights are not at all violated by abolishing the death tax. If they don’t want to have their kids get their wealth, they can do with it was they choose. But those who would like their wealth to go to their offspring and others in their surviving families ought not to be prevented from doing so. They, too, have the right to private property, the greatest principle in defense of freedom of choice, a bulwark against statism and populism which amount to nothing less than confiscation.
Another point worth raising is that we are all subject to the vagaries of good and bad luck. Some of us are born with talents and these talents may well give us a leg up when it comes to competing with others in the market place. Tall people have advantages that short ones lack. Healthy people are clearly luckier than those with inherited medical problems. There simply is no end to the inequalities of fortune and misfortune in human life. Those who wish to even things out voluntarily are, of course, quite free to make that effort. No one, however, has the moral and should have the legal authority to forcibly fiddle with the advantages and disadvantages people have in their lives. In a society of free men and women this issue must be left to the free choices of the people involved. And, in fact, America, which still tends to be more in line with the idea of economic laissez-faire--though only barely by now--has more economic equality than do other countries because when governments are entrusted with equalization, look out! Bias and cronyism are sure to dominate, which is far worse than some “unfair” economic advantages or disadvantages due to inheritance and other sources not directly related to merit.
It is, furthermore, very odd to see Hillary Clinton suddenly champion meritocracy when, in fact, the history of her own type of democratic politics--populism--has been precisely to reject it and embrace government wealth redistribution based on what politicians and bureaucrats deem to be fair.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet need not worry--no one would prevent them from allocating their wealth as they choose should the inheritance tax disappear. What would stop is the government taxing the wealth and using it in line with the vision of its ideological leaders instead of the choices of those who would otherwise have the authority to use it as they see fit because wealthy parents decided to leave it to them to make the decision.
Sadly, the death tax and similar schemes of extortion that enable politicians and bureaucrats to allocate funds they certainly haven’t earned--talk about meritocracy--appeals to the envy of many people who simply refuse to live with how nature and human decisions distribute wealth in the country. This envy then is used by the likes of Hillary Clinton to grab power for themselves, economic power they certain didn’t earn. Moreover, this is also a source of the expansion of economic statism whereby individuals are deprived of their right to choose how to allocate the fruits of their labor.
Let’s leave the wealth and the luck to those who have it without violating anyone’s rights. It may not always work out to everyone’s satisfaction but it will certainly be far superior to giving the power to the likes of Hillary Clinton.
Tibor R. Machan
Over the last few years a controversy has been brewing about the death tax. While a great many people whom it doesn’t effect support it, some who would pay huge sums in this unjust policy do as well. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet both are on record in favor of hefty taxes on estates that could otherwise benefit family members, offspring of the wealthy.
Now Hillary Clinton has jumped on the bandwagon and this really should be no surprise. Although her line of defense is kind of weird--“The estate tax has been historically part of our very fundamental belief that we should have a meritocracy, that we do not want a system--where we expect people to make it on their own--to be, over time, dominated by inherited wealth.” She continued, speaking in the characteristic fashion of royalty (that uses “we” without actually consulting anyone included), saying that “What we do believe that people should have to get out there and make their way, to a great extent.”
Two points need to be made in response to this. One is that those who earned the wealth may not be coerced into using it in ways they do not choose. Wealthy people like Gates and Buffet have every right to give away all they have earned, so their freedom and property rights are not at all violated by abolishing the death tax. If they don’t want to have their kids get their wealth, they can do with it was they choose. But those who would like their wealth to go to their offspring and others in their surviving families ought not to be prevented from doing so. They, too, have the right to private property, the greatest principle in defense of freedom of choice, a bulwark against statism and populism which amount to nothing less than confiscation.
Another point worth raising is that we are all subject to the vagaries of good and bad luck. Some of us are born with talents and these talents may well give us a leg up when it comes to competing with others in the market place. Tall people have advantages that short ones lack. Healthy people are clearly luckier than those with inherited medical problems. There simply is no end to the inequalities of fortune and misfortune in human life. Those who wish to even things out voluntarily are, of course, quite free to make that effort. No one, however, has the moral and should have the legal authority to forcibly fiddle with the advantages and disadvantages people have in their lives. In a society of free men and women this issue must be left to the free choices of the people involved. And, in fact, America, which still tends to be more in line with the idea of economic laissez-faire--though only barely by now--has more economic equality than do other countries because when governments are entrusted with equalization, look out! Bias and cronyism are sure to dominate, which is far worse than some “unfair” economic advantages or disadvantages due to inheritance and other sources not directly related to merit.
It is, furthermore, very odd to see Hillary Clinton suddenly champion meritocracy when, in fact, the history of her own type of democratic politics--populism--has been precisely to reject it and embrace government wealth redistribution based on what politicians and bureaucrats deem to be fair.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet need not worry--no one would prevent them from allocating their wealth as they choose should the inheritance tax disappear. What would stop is the government taxing the wealth and using it in line with the vision of its ideological leaders instead of the choices of those who would otherwise have the authority to use it as they see fit because wealthy parents decided to leave it to them to make the decision.
Sadly, the death tax and similar schemes of extortion that enable politicians and bureaucrats to allocate funds they certainly haven’t earned--talk about meritocracy--appeals to the envy of many people who simply refuse to live with how nature and human decisions distribute wealth in the country. This envy then is used by the likes of Hillary Clinton to grab power for themselves, economic power they certain didn’t earn. Moreover, this is also a source of the expansion of economic statism whereby individuals are deprived of their right to choose how to allocate the fruits of their labor.
Let’s leave the wealth and the luck to those who have it without violating anyone’s rights. It may not always work out to everyone’s satisfaction but it will certainly be far superior to giving the power to the likes of Hillary Clinton.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Consumerism and Christmas
Tibor R. Machan
You all may recall that after 9/11 Osama bin Laden explained his orchestration of the terrorist deed that murdered some 3000 innocent human beings as payback for America’s materialism. (His anti-materialist rant is routine--a good discussion of his views may be found here: http://www.army.mil/professionalwriting/volumes/volume5/january_2007/1_07_4.html.)
Yet as the writer of the above piece notes, anti-materialism is a common theme among most religions. Of course! The idea that what life is all about is preparation for an after-life, a spiritual life that is superior to the mundane life we can lead here on earth, is central to most religions.
In the West, however, many religions have made peace with the mundane elements of human existence so there tends to be a less avid denunciation of materialism, which is how the idea of being seriously concerned with living prosperously here on earth is usually designated. After all, the Christian God is both human and divine, in the person of Jesus, for example. Destruction of life is generally deemed to be a sin for Christians, whereas, as bin Laden himself has noted, the love of death is central in his version of Islam. As one account has it, “This originated at the Battle of Qadisiyya in the year 636, when the commander of the Muslim forces, Khalid ibn Al-Walid, sent an emissary with a message from Caliph Abu Bakr to the Persian commander, Khosru. The message stated: ‘You [Khosru and his people] should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don't, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life’.” This account is widely recited in contemporary Muslim sermons, newspapers, and textbooks.
Yet despite the Western theological tradition’s more friendly attitude toward the mundane, nearly every Christmas leaders of Christian denominations tend to revert to the original, anti-life doctrines by condemning materialism or, actually, commercialism. This year the latest Pope, Benedict XVI, lamented what he called the “materialist” approach to celebrating Christmas. He referred in his proclamation to “the dead-end streets of consumerism,” according to newspaper reports, chiding people everywhere for what the report calls “being caught up with consumerist pursuits.”
Ironically, the Pope issued his proclamations form St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. If you have ever visited the Vatican, as I and millions of others have, you would know it to be one of the West’s if not the world’s most opulent places. And as to consumerism, the gift shop dominates the entrance to the Vatican, where one can spend great sums of money on various small or sizable trinkets. Commerce flourishes there, believe me, as the Vatican cashes in on the desire of many of the visitors to take way some reminder of their having been to that historically and theologically significant place.
Of course, even apart from the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church, as well as others within Christianity, often excel in ostentatious display of riches--one need but go to high mass, indeed, on Christmas Eve, to witness this.
An why not? That is how human beings tend to celebrate what they value highly. By honoring the occasion with gift-giving. And gift-giving necessarily involves commerce--most of us aren’t skilled at the crafts that it takes to create the various gifts we wish to bestow upon those we love and cherish. I personally bought airline tickets for some of my family members, a computer for another, in part because I have no airplane in which to fly them where they would like to go or no factory and expertise to make a modern, up to date computer. To obtain these gifts, I rely, as do billions of others, on commerce.
So why then would the Pope besmirch consumerism and commerce? Beats me. (And remember, also, that “materialism” is ultimately a nonsense term--nothing we purchase is simply material but embodies the creative intelligence--indeed the creative spirit--of many human beings!) So, I urge the Pope to change his message and to have a more generous understanding of all of us who make use of commerce in our celebration of Christmas!
Tibor R. Machan
You all may recall that after 9/11 Osama bin Laden explained his orchestration of the terrorist deed that murdered some 3000 innocent human beings as payback for America’s materialism. (His anti-materialist rant is routine--a good discussion of his views may be found here: http://www.army.mil/professionalwriting/volumes/volume5/january_2007/1_07_4.html.)
Yet as the writer of the above piece notes, anti-materialism is a common theme among most religions. Of course! The idea that what life is all about is preparation for an after-life, a spiritual life that is superior to the mundane life we can lead here on earth, is central to most religions.
In the West, however, many religions have made peace with the mundane elements of human existence so there tends to be a less avid denunciation of materialism, which is how the idea of being seriously concerned with living prosperously here on earth is usually designated. After all, the Christian God is both human and divine, in the person of Jesus, for example. Destruction of life is generally deemed to be a sin for Christians, whereas, as bin Laden himself has noted, the love of death is central in his version of Islam. As one account has it, “This originated at the Battle of Qadisiyya in the year 636, when the commander of the Muslim forces, Khalid ibn Al-Walid, sent an emissary with a message from Caliph Abu Bakr to the Persian commander, Khosru. The message stated: ‘You [Khosru and his people] should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don't, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life’.” This account is widely recited in contemporary Muslim sermons, newspapers, and textbooks.
Yet despite the Western theological tradition’s more friendly attitude toward the mundane, nearly every Christmas leaders of Christian denominations tend to revert to the original, anti-life doctrines by condemning materialism or, actually, commercialism. This year the latest Pope, Benedict XVI, lamented what he called the “materialist” approach to celebrating Christmas. He referred in his proclamation to “the dead-end streets of consumerism,” according to newspaper reports, chiding people everywhere for what the report calls “being caught up with consumerist pursuits.”
Ironically, the Pope issued his proclamations form St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. If you have ever visited the Vatican, as I and millions of others have, you would know it to be one of the West’s if not the world’s most opulent places. And as to consumerism, the gift shop dominates the entrance to the Vatican, where one can spend great sums of money on various small or sizable trinkets. Commerce flourishes there, believe me, as the Vatican cashes in on the desire of many of the visitors to take way some reminder of their having been to that historically and theologically significant place.
Of course, even apart from the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church, as well as others within Christianity, often excel in ostentatious display of riches--one need but go to high mass, indeed, on Christmas Eve, to witness this.
An why not? That is how human beings tend to celebrate what they value highly. By honoring the occasion with gift-giving. And gift-giving necessarily involves commerce--most of us aren’t skilled at the crafts that it takes to create the various gifts we wish to bestow upon those we love and cherish. I personally bought airline tickets for some of my family members, a computer for another, in part because I have no airplane in which to fly them where they would like to go or no factory and expertise to make a modern, up to date computer. To obtain these gifts, I rely, as do billions of others, on commerce.
So why then would the Pope besmirch consumerism and commerce? Beats me. (And remember, also, that “materialism” is ultimately a nonsense term--nothing we purchase is simply material but embodies the creative intelligence--indeed the creative spirit--of many human beings!) So, I urge the Pope to change his message and to have a more generous understanding of all of us who make use of commerce in our celebration of Christmas!
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Are Values Universal?
Tibor R. Machan
A frequent claim by erudite people is that the values on which America was founded--individual rights, rule of law, due process--are obsolete. They have been superseded by more recent ways of seeing things, of understanding people and their world.
This point is made especially concerning America’s roughly free enterprise, capitalist economic system. Some refer to them as “voodoo economics,” suggesting that they are old fashioned, outmoded, in need of being discarded by now. The right to private property, a basic principle the American Founders referred to in their writings and the framers included in the Fifth Amendment, is also dismissed along these lines, sometimes by very prominent thinkers in prestigious academic institutions.
At other times the point is pressed that although some of the ideas or principles of the American Founders had merit, they were in serious need of being updated, improved upon--so, for example, whereas the Founders believed in the right to life and liberty, Franklin D. Roosevelt wisely updated these with his idea of Four Freedoms, including the freedom to obtain support from others whether or not they wish to provide it--the entitlement doctrine that’s become the basis of the welfare state--which unambiguously overrules the right to liberty.
Yet, all the while some of the very same people who urge upon us this view also offer fierce criticism of early practices, laws, and customs. They will condemn slavery and the subjugation of women unhesitatingly and not accept the idea of, well, those were okay back then but not now. Favoring the upper classes, for example, is condemned, as is keeping the poor in their wretched conditions. Torture, which was routine in the Middle Ages, often comes in for chiding, never mind that back then it was widely accepted, as was corporeal punishment, child labor, and similar practices widely disapproved of.
Is it possible to have it both ways? Are some principles universal, so we can invoke them to judge the conduct of people in any age, while others are not, so that while back then it was OK to act that way but now it isn’t? If so, how do we tell the difference?
To put it differently, when is invoking the idea that is was a different era and thus OK to do some things we now know to be wrong merely an excuse? How can we avoid cherry picking the conduct we want to disapprove of in any and all eras versus the conduct we are going to condemn only for certain times and places?
The idea is not merely academic by any means. It is of considerable practical importance. There are many people who claim that various ideas and ideals advocated should not be applied to certain countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela. They are different places and thus what is proper in the West or the U.S.A. may not be proper there at all. Yes, freedom of speech is a good idea here in America, some will say, but in the Venezuela being ruled by Hugo Chavez it is inapplicable. How women are treated in Iran is fine there but not here.
Examples can be heaped upon examples of such cultural, ethical, and political relativism which is proclaimed side by side some very earnest absolutism. Democracy is good for every society--or is it? But if it is, does that also mean that driving on the right side of the road is the right way or can that vary from country to country--or continent to continent?
Most of us confront these issues only in our college philosophy or ethics courses and once that’s done, we rarely give the matter much thought. Yet it is really the very stuff of international diplomacy, of globalization, of how the World Court should decide cases and so forth. Maybe the issue is directly relevant even to how we deal with our next door neighbors. Should we judge their conduct as we judge our own? Do our principles of decency, justice, and such reach beyond our front doors? And if so, why not farther away, to the other side of the globe?
I am only raising the matter here because despite the abstract nature of the concern, it will certainly come up in our lives, including in the coming presidential elections. Is mandatory universal health care something right for us in America, in Canada, anywhere, or quite wrong however much other countries experiment with it? Should social security become voluntary, as it has in certain countries? Should religion be central our political system as it is in various places around the globe, or should we stick to separation of church and state and maybe even advocate it for others?
Now and then it bears reflecting on these matters; so however troubling it may be, it is worth admitting that the issue is actually quite central to human life anywhere.
Tibor R. Machan
A frequent claim by erudite people is that the values on which America was founded--individual rights, rule of law, due process--are obsolete. They have been superseded by more recent ways of seeing things, of understanding people and their world.
This point is made especially concerning America’s roughly free enterprise, capitalist economic system. Some refer to them as “voodoo economics,” suggesting that they are old fashioned, outmoded, in need of being discarded by now. The right to private property, a basic principle the American Founders referred to in their writings and the framers included in the Fifth Amendment, is also dismissed along these lines, sometimes by very prominent thinkers in prestigious academic institutions.
At other times the point is pressed that although some of the ideas or principles of the American Founders had merit, they were in serious need of being updated, improved upon--so, for example, whereas the Founders believed in the right to life and liberty, Franklin D. Roosevelt wisely updated these with his idea of Four Freedoms, including the freedom to obtain support from others whether or not they wish to provide it--the entitlement doctrine that’s become the basis of the welfare state--which unambiguously overrules the right to liberty.
Yet, all the while some of the very same people who urge upon us this view also offer fierce criticism of early practices, laws, and customs. They will condemn slavery and the subjugation of women unhesitatingly and not accept the idea of, well, those were okay back then but not now. Favoring the upper classes, for example, is condemned, as is keeping the poor in their wretched conditions. Torture, which was routine in the Middle Ages, often comes in for chiding, never mind that back then it was widely accepted, as was corporeal punishment, child labor, and similar practices widely disapproved of.
Is it possible to have it both ways? Are some principles universal, so we can invoke them to judge the conduct of people in any age, while others are not, so that while back then it was OK to act that way but now it isn’t? If so, how do we tell the difference?
To put it differently, when is invoking the idea that is was a different era and thus OK to do some things we now know to be wrong merely an excuse? How can we avoid cherry picking the conduct we want to disapprove of in any and all eras versus the conduct we are going to condemn only for certain times and places?
The idea is not merely academic by any means. It is of considerable practical importance. There are many people who claim that various ideas and ideals advocated should not be applied to certain countries, such as Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela. They are different places and thus what is proper in the West or the U.S.A. may not be proper there at all. Yes, freedom of speech is a good idea here in America, some will say, but in the Venezuela being ruled by Hugo Chavez it is inapplicable. How women are treated in Iran is fine there but not here.
Examples can be heaped upon examples of such cultural, ethical, and political relativism which is proclaimed side by side some very earnest absolutism. Democracy is good for every society--or is it? But if it is, does that also mean that driving on the right side of the road is the right way or can that vary from country to country--or continent to continent?
Most of us confront these issues only in our college philosophy or ethics courses and once that’s done, we rarely give the matter much thought. Yet it is really the very stuff of international diplomacy, of globalization, of how the World Court should decide cases and so forth. Maybe the issue is directly relevant even to how we deal with our next door neighbors. Should we judge their conduct as we judge our own? Do our principles of decency, justice, and such reach beyond our front doors? And if so, why not farther away, to the other side of the globe?
I am only raising the matter here because despite the abstract nature of the concern, it will certainly come up in our lives, including in the coming presidential elections. Is mandatory universal health care something right for us in America, in Canada, anywhere, or quite wrong however much other countries experiment with it? Should social security become voluntary, as it has in certain countries? Should religion be central our political system as it is in various places around the globe, or should we stick to separation of church and state and maybe even advocate it for others?
Now and then it bears reflecting on these matters; so however troubling it may be, it is worth admitting that the issue is actually quite central to human life anywhere.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
The Right to Private Property
Tibor R. Machan
America’s most prominent modern liberal legal theorist is Professor Ronald Dworkin, professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and the New York University School of Law. His books, Taking Rights Seriously, Law’s Empire, and Sovereign Virtue are all serious defenses of the idea, basically, that the Lockean tradition of law and politics which the American Founder’s had invoked in crafting the Declaration of Independence and, to a lesser extent, the U. S. Constitution, is wrong. As he said in a recent exchange in the pages of The New York Review of Books (December 6, 2007), the U. S. Supreme Court, in upholding the law in New York State, in the famous Lochner decision of 1905, that defended private property rights, “relied consistently on the mistaken but principled view that property rights are basic human rights.”
But contrary to Dworkin’s assertion, the right to private property is indeed a basic human right. It is fundamental to any bona fide free society. Just consider, as one vital case in point, that unless one has the right to private property, one does not have the right to freedom of speech--it is because of that basic human right that government may not censor what we say and write but may do so when it involves public property, such as radio or television stations that use the public airwaves, or a public park. In fact, all basic individual rights rest, practically, on the right to private property and are threatened by its abrogation.
Some have made the point that property rights had been used to justify slavery but that is sophistry. The only reason that one could plausibly claim to own slaves is that they were falsely, immorally, declared not to be full human beings, more akin to domesticated animals than to people. It needed such spurious thinking to get around the fact that human beings have a property right in their own life, their labor and its fruits.
The idea goes back to John Locke and even farther in human political history, to William of Ockham. Both of these philosophers realized that to be in charge of one’s own life, one must have the right to it fully respected and protected in the legal system. If one may not own one’s life and resources--lacks the right to life and property--one is at the mercy of governments and all other people. They can command how one will live, who one will serve, etc. But if one has one’s right to life and one’s right to private property secured, others must ask for one’s support or help or consent and are barred from simply using a person against his or her will.
Of course, modern liberals like Professor Dworkin don’t approve of this principle because they believe that people must be available to government to order about, to conscript for all sorts of purposes they do not themselves freely accept. This is the Left’s major thesis, after all--people belong to society, to humanity, to the body politic. (The most forceful advocate of this was the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who wrote that "...All human rights … are as absurd as they are immoral. This ['to live for others'], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.")
It is no accident that the first thing Karl Marx listed as in need of abolition on the way to socialism and communism is the right to private property. That principle, when observed and protected, is what makes us sovereign individuals instead of serfs and slaves or mere cells in the “organic body” of society.
Sadly the American Founders spelled out excellent ideas in the Declaration of Independence but then, in the pursuit of national unity, they compromised them in the U. S. Constitution. But today, with the leadership of the likes of Professor Dworkin, even the ideas of the Declaration are in jeopardy, ready to be abrogated in the name of some undefined public or common good or the will of the people. It is going to be most important whether this jeopardy will be effectively resisted or yielded to in the coming decades. On that issue the future of human liberty will hinge.
Tibor R. Machan
America’s most prominent modern liberal legal theorist is Professor Ronald Dworkin, professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and the New York University School of Law. His books, Taking Rights Seriously, Law’s Empire, and Sovereign Virtue are all serious defenses of the idea, basically, that the Lockean tradition of law and politics which the American Founder’s had invoked in crafting the Declaration of Independence and, to a lesser extent, the U. S. Constitution, is wrong. As he said in a recent exchange in the pages of The New York Review of Books (December 6, 2007), the U. S. Supreme Court, in upholding the law in New York State, in the famous Lochner decision of 1905, that defended private property rights, “relied consistently on the mistaken but principled view that property rights are basic human rights.”
But contrary to Dworkin’s assertion, the right to private property is indeed a basic human right. It is fundamental to any bona fide free society. Just consider, as one vital case in point, that unless one has the right to private property, one does not have the right to freedom of speech--it is because of that basic human right that government may not censor what we say and write but may do so when it involves public property, such as radio or television stations that use the public airwaves, or a public park. In fact, all basic individual rights rest, practically, on the right to private property and are threatened by its abrogation.
Some have made the point that property rights had been used to justify slavery but that is sophistry. The only reason that one could plausibly claim to own slaves is that they were falsely, immorally, declared not to be full human beings, more akin to domesticated animals than to people. It needed such spurious thinking to get around the fact that human beings have a property right in their own life, their labor and its fruits.
The idea goes back to John Locke and even farther in human political history, to William of Ockham. Both of these philosophers realized that to be in charge of one’s own life, one must have the right to it fully respected and protected in the legal system. If one may not own one’s life and resources--lacks the right to life and property--one is at the mercy of governments and all other people. They can command how one will live, who one will serve, etc. But if one has one’s right to life and one’s right to private property secured, others must ask for one’s support or help or consent and are barred from simply using a person against his or her will.
Of course, modern liberals like Professor Dworkin don’t approve of this principle because they believe that people must be available to government to order about, to conscript for all sorts of purposes they do not themselves freely accept. This is the Left’s major thesis, after all--people belong to society, to humanity, to the body politic. (The most forceful advocate of this was the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who wrote that "...All human rights … are as absurd as they are immoral. This ['to live for others'], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.")
It is no accident that the first thing Karl Marx listed as in need of abolition on the way to socialism and communism is the right to private property. That principle, when observed and protected, is what makes us sovereign individuals instead of serfs and slaves or mere cells in the “organic body” of society.
Sadly the American Founders spelled out excellent ideas in the Declaration of Independence but then, in the pursuit of national unity, they compromised them in the U. S. Constitution. But today, with the leadership of the likes of Professor Dworkin, even the ideas of the Declaration are in jeopardy, ready to be abrogated in the name of some undefined public or common good or the will of the people. It is going to be most important whether this jeopardy will be effectively resisted or yielded to in the coming decades. On that issue the future of human liberty will hinge.
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