Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Welcome to Looter-Moocher Land


Welcome to Looter-Moocher Land

Eric Paul Nolte

 

 Here in the Land of Plunder, it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas.  Lots of goodies to eat ... hmm, or is that loot to eat for the moocher class?  Or is this the ancient Norse legend of Gotterdaemmerung, the prophesied war of the gods,  portending the end of the world? 

Now, I do not think it is the end of the world.  It is, however twilight, not for the gods, in none of whom can I find an argument with a dram of evidence that will hold water, much less walk on water, but twilight for ... the idea of America, the sweet land of liberty. 

We have just held a referendum on freedom, and the majority of voters have utterly repudiated liberty in favor of the entitlement looter-moocher class.  I saw them on TV last night at Obama’s Chicago headquarters, dancing ecstatically, their faces radiating that kind of joy you can see in people whose team just won the game, “Man, we really stuck it to ‘em this time!”

So this sounds heartless, calling the underclass moochers, when I am sure that many of them are truly helpless and deserving of love and help.

I do believe in charity, properly delimited and stripped of its connotations of deontological, duty-bound, altruistic, self-sacrifice-for-everybody-but-you, as I’ve written elsewhere.  It’s just that it is a disastrous attack on individual liberty, to put the government in charge of social aid and charity, or in charge of anything but the protection of every individual’s rights, their liberty rights, not this bogus, impossible concept called “positive rights,” or welfare rights, which are claims on other people’s stuff, collected by the police power for redistribution to the government’s chosen beneficiaries.

This morning, Michael Hurd wrote a moving piece in which he concludes that it’s now twilight in America, but not because Obama won the election.  Obama won the election because it was already twilight in America.  I’m sure Hurd meant that it’s twilight for the idea of America, which is surely the idea that each of us should unfold our gifts in a way that allows us to present these gifts to the world, for the purpose of achieving our own happiness, trading these gifts for the gifts of others, cooperatively, voluntarily, for the purpose of our mutual well-being.

The results of this election are a big F-you to this vision of cooperation.  Government intervention does not truck in cooperation, it drives trucks over the decisions of people who don’t agree with the government’s vision.

We should strive to remember that people can live in a coma for a long time and yet eventually come to their senses.

As I wrote yesterday, another financial disaster lies ahead, and Romney’s policies would have done nothing more than to slow down the looming train wreck.

But whether the train goes off the tracks at 15 mph or 60 mph makes a difference, given that FM=A (Force times Mass equals Acceleration), but Romney’s policies proposed nothing that would have repaired the damaged railroad tracks in time to avert the wreck.

So with Senior Social Engineer Comrade Obama in the cab, throttling the producers, when the train of America derails, it should be clear to anyone paying attention that the cause of the disaster is our regulatory-entitlement statism, and not liberty.  Freedom will take the blame, in the mainstream press, of course, because they are mostly a bunch of unwitting (or witless) victims of the seductive intellectual hegemony which remains the specter of Marxism, but reality must eventually assert itself.

Reality is ultimately not to be cheated. 

You can call a pig a diva as long as you want, but when the pig squeals with strident,  piercing, fear of death, instead of singing with supple beauty, you will eventually realize it’s a pig in the slaughterhouse, not a musician in the opera house. 

On the other hand, if you’re blind, you won’t see the pig or the diva. 

If you’ve never studied the economics of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Reisman, or even Friedman, you will not have any idea why wealth is not created by printing phony money, or by paying one gang to dig a ditch from Washington to Shortpump, and another gang to fill it in the next day. 

If you’ve never absorbed this crucial body of ideas that gave rise to the American republic, and especially to the arguments that gave us a coherent formulation of the nature of rights and the purpose of government as limited to the protection of every individual’s right to life, liberty, and property ... well, you’ll be deaf and blind to the evil machinations of the gang of looters who govern by plunder to fund their protection racket.

Romney represents a less extreme version of the same regulatory-entitlement statism that has characterized the course this country has been taking since at least the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, by which  the government grabbed the wholly arbitrary power to destroy any business at its pleasure. 

It’s a footnote, but worth cataloguing a few other momentous events anyway:  there was the banner year of 1913, with the passage of legislation to create the income tax, the SEC, and the Federal Reserve System, which may have been the watershed marking the eventual and inevitable transformation of sovereign individuals, endowed with inalienable rights, into citizen serfs, with no rights at all, certainly no rights that are of an inviolate nature.  Certainly we were well along the statist road by the time of Hoover’s presidency, and there is no doubt that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal embodied the spirit of the whole collectivist agenda.  There have been periods where the pace of liberty’s destruction has slowed down, as during the presidencies of Eisenhower and Reagan, but the general direction, driving down Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, has been relentless.

We are now the most foolish naïfs in the history of our republic.

Congratulations, Barack Hussein Obama, Confiscator-in-Chief. 

Congratulations, Amerika. 

And welcome to France, without the French, soon to be Greece, without the Aristotle.

 

E P N
revised 2013.1119

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

For Whom Should I Vote in 2012?





For Whom Should I Vote in 2012? 

Eric Paul Nolte

 

For whom should I vote in this election?

You may know that I am champion of every individual’s right to life, liberty, and property.  I certainly agree with Jefferson’s formulation of an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness too.  I mention property first, because property is the fruit of one’s thought and labor, and without it one is stripped of the rudder we need to steer our life on a course of our choice.

I also uphold Ayn Rand’s formulation that life is made possible only by the application of reason—meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience—to the problems and threats of existence.  I believe that we must choose some vision of happiness as our purpose in life, and that self-esteem is the fuel that allows one to get out of bed in the morning and feel that we have the ability to make our way in life and are worthy of happiness.

All of these beliefs have political implications.  So who, among the candidates running for president this year, looks most like somebody who would be a champion of every individual’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and property?

It’s not the Green Party candidate or the chap flying the flag of the Socialist Workers’ Party.  These are hardly champions of individual rights, they are purveyors of big government leaders dictating every detail of life according to the rulers’ vision, and unlimited government control, if not outright ownership, of the means of production.

Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s candidate, clearly comes closest.  The Libertarians champion free minds and free markets, with the purpose of government limited to the protection of individual rights.  Sounds pretty good to me, notwithstanding Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwarz’s straw-man argument against the libertarians in their short book, Libertarianism: the Perversion of Liberty.

But the Libertarians stand not a snowball’s chance in Somalia of winning the election.  So which of those who do stand a chance of winning comes closer to my own beliefs?

It seems important to vote for somebody who might do a better job of protecting my values, and to condemn those who would attack my interests.

The short answer is that I think both Republican and Democratic candidates for president are deeply flawed, and I am not happy with either of our choices for president, as you might guess, if you’ve read my rant on the state of our nation’s addled notions of the purpose, powers, and capability of government.

Both major candidates promise something good and something awful.

The good thing Romney offers is more support for the free market system that provides us with the things that make life and flourishing possible.  I believe Romney also offers a more energetic and realistic defense of America in the international arena, but I’m still not entirely happy with his policies there.  The threat is his superstitiously inspired opposition to abortion and gay marriage, clearly threats to individual liberty.  There are also a long list of other bad things economically, including the matter of unfunded obligations for future welfare programs, but these aren’t as bad as Obama’s positions, in my opinion.  I believe Romney promises to do less damage to our international interests as a free and sovereign nation.

The good thing about Obama is that his presidency supports women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage, clearly supportive of individual liberty.  The bad things are a long list: his long-standing anti-American views expressed in his books and actions, his redistributionist, wealth-destroying, soak-the-rich politics, his collectivist and Keynesian economics, and a long list of more things too.

In balance, I think Romney is less destructive than Obama, but the matter bears so.  So here are my thoughts on the matter:

I have been writing another piece which I shall shortly post, that goes much deeper into the roots of how conservatives and liberals think about the world, and  elaborates in far more nuanced detail than I will go in this piece, why I believe that if Romney replaces Obama, we should not expect a transformation into a truly free country.  I call that article, “When We Fire the Confiscator-in-Chief, Don’t Expect the Sweet Land of Liberty.”  It is a much deeper piece than this one, but this one cries out to be written before the polls close today!

Now, maybe you’ve seen the billboard out there these days, posted by the American Business Owners, that addresses President Obama’s remark to business people that “You didn’t build that.”  I take Obama’s statement to mean that none of us is truly responsible for our own success or failure, and, by implication, that government must be there to help us all out.  We’re all in this together, after all, and so we, the regulatory-welfare state must be there to tax the rich and redistribute it to the needy.  The billboard,  proclaims, “WE built it!  YOU broke it!  WE’LL fix it!  YOU’RE fired!”

The political right was outraged and indignant at Obama’s cavalier dismissal  of individual effort as the basis for success in life.  Once again, Obama’s candor allows his true colors to show.

Now why is it that, for all their rhetoric about free markets, the actual policies of enacted by recent conservatives today are farther to left than those of  Roosevelt the Second, Kennedy, or Johnson?
 
Don’t Expect the Sweet Land of Liberty from the Conservatives
Seeing that billboard slogan against Obama filled me with the pleasurable thought of firing this worst of all presidents!  Except that the other side is so screwed up in their own way, too. 

Alright, to the point here:  to those who are praying for an end to the statist control, eagerness to nationalize whole sectors of the economy, and the  redistributive, entitlement and regulatory policies represented by the Obama administration ... abandon hope, ye fools!  Why?  Because Romney/Ryan do not embody a foundational departure from the welfare statism of the incumbent.  Romney/Ryan do not offer a real answer to the liberals because their policies are not an embodiment of anything like the American founders’ vision of freedom.

Do I hear you saying, "Huh? Not based on bedrock American values?

That's right.  Not if the most important value in our founding documents was an affirmation of the central importance of every individual's inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.  Not if the very purpose of government is held to be limited to the protection of these rights.  Not if the moral legitimacy of government is rooted in the rights of individuals to self-defense.  Not if the powers of the state are therefore seen to be derived from individual rights, an aspect of human nature, a delegation of power from individuals to the state, which would thereby embody the consent of the governed.

Left and Right Both Believe We Are Sacrificial Animals

This is the trouble with Republicans:  just like the liberals, they believe in self-sacrifice for the common good.  Individuals are treated like sacrificial animals on the alter of the common good—expendable cells in the greater organism of the state, to be disposed of according to judgment of the rulers.  The main difference between the left and the right seems to be that the conservatives believe their moral authority for freedom and individual rights comes from their imaginary friend for adults (that would be the Christian version of the god of Abraham), while the liberals believe their moral authority comes from some version of the socialist ideals of Karl Marx, John Rawls, Paul Krugman, or some other commie lib.

I get so sick of these political dogfights!  Neither the Dems nor the Pubs seems to have a clue about Ayn Rand's crucial insight that the basis for our rights comes neither from divine law nor congressional law, but from the Law of Identity.

Huh?  Yup.  The law of identity says that A is A.  This is the starting point of Aristotle’s laws of logic.  Things are what they are, and can act only in accordance with their own nature.  A plant is a plant and cannot roam the land in search of food.  A lion can't breathe under water, and a fish can't breathe on land.  The nature of all creatures, save one, sets them to act by instinct to pursue their own survival.  The one exception, of course, is man. 

The other animals are endowed by their physical equipment (wings, fur, fangs, gills, etc.) to survive in the wild, against the natural elements, and they are equipped with a set of instincts that is sufficient to guide their actions for survival without having to give the matter any thought,  in the propositional, conceptual, voluntarily directed manner that is characteristic of human beings. 

By contrast, Homo sapiens lack adequate physical equipment to brave the elements without the help of artificially crafted aides like clothing, shelter, weapons to hunt for prey and till the soil.  We also lack the comprehensive set of instincts that automatically guide the animals to succeed at living without conscious, voluntarily controlled thought.  It is this conscious, voluntarily controlled thought which is the singular distinction of humans, and without which we would die straight away. 

We are not born knowing how to survive and our instincts are inadequate to guide our actions successfully to live.  Survival requires knowledge of the nature of things and we can acquire and hold this knowledge only by means of concepts.  Only humans can expand our knowledge and accumulate it over a time longer than a single life span, or a hundred life spans.  To acquire this life-serving knowledge requires us to think and figure out how to produce what life demands of this, and we can only produce things if we are free to think and act on the basis of our thought.  Our nature is the source of our individual rights to life, liberty, and property, because we must use reason, logic applied to the evidence of experience,  to figure out how to produce the stuff we need.  Human rights are therefore an aspect of human nature, inherent in us.  Ayn Rand put this in a brilliant formulation, that rights are not gifts from a generous government, rights are conditions of existence, inherent in our nature, and without them we cannot survive for long.  Government, by this light, has no warrant except as the protector of individual rights.  The only legitimate purpose of government is as the protector of our rights.

When governments cross the line away from the road of protecting our rights, they tend to become the most destructive forces on the planet.  In the 20th century, totalitarian governments, those governments which steered farthest away from the task of protecting individual rights, murdered more than two hundred million of their own citizens, in peace time.  Asking governments to be our care takers for anything more than the bare minimum is like playing with a tiger inside its cage.  You can get away with it so long as the tiger doesn’t get hungry or bored for something to toy with.   

So when do we ever hear conservatives affirm these ideas in any consistent and principled way?  NEVER!  They NEVER say that we have inalienable rights.  Not in any way that means what they say, or reveals a glimmer of insight into what the words really mean.  

If something is inalienably yours, this means it's yours no matter what, unless you physically attack another person in an unprovoked, first-strike manner that is not in self-defense. 

I hasten to add as a sort of footnote here that a predatory, unprovoked attack on another would strip one of one’s own rights because this attack would contradict the very idea of rights as universally rooted in human nature.

Now, if something is inalienably yours, it means that nobody has the rightful power to take it away from you.  Conservatives,  just like liberals, are always harping on a long list of things they want to make you do against your will, and in clear violation of our natural freedom.

Now Romney can't even stick consistently to the idea that the purpose of government is to protect our rights.  He said in debate that people can't be left free.  Yes, he did!  What else can it mean when he says we require all kinds of government regulation.  Government regulation means state meddling, control, intervention, substitution of an individual’s free choice for that of a government agent, all of which add up to meaning “not free.”  Regulation means not free.  Advocating regulation means advocating that people not be left free.  In essence, this means, just like the Dems say, that we need government to meddle in damn near everything.  Romney gave a long list of things he wants government to mess with.  The biggest of the interventions he wants government to impose is probably in the area of healthcare.

Romney said that government must force insurance companies to operate like a de facto branch of the welfare state.  Yes he did!  What else can it mean when he says that under a Romney administration, insurance companies will be forced to take customers with pre-existing conditions?

By the way, as another footnote, I must point out that we live in such a crazy time that I feel compelled to point out that just because one asserts that government should not do something, this does not mean that one is arguing AGAINST the thing one wants government to keep its big nose out of.  This insight has a flip side too, and also means that just because I believe that people should be left free to do something, it does not mean that I approve of the things they are free to do!  So to say that government should not force insurance companies to do this or that does not mean that I'm against this or that.  To say that government should not force companies to cover pre-existing conditions does not mean that I believe people with pre-existing conditions should be left to die in the streets like Hindu untouchables in the filthy gutters of Kolcatta (formerly known as Calcutta.).  What I am saying is that if freedom means ANYTHING at all, then business, like every individual, has a right to be free.  We should be left free to pursue our own well being by our own lights, to profit, in other words, not to lose, and not to be a sacrificial animal on the alter of the welfare state.

Forcing insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions is precisely the same kind of regulation that would force an auto insurance company to cover automobiles with “pre-existing conditions.”

Forcing companies in this manner does not respect the nature of business, where the parties voluntarily trade one value for another value, to mutual advantage.  This regulation amounts to a mugging of the company by the government.  This imposition of government force is an act of the welfare entitlement police state, not free trade.  This "welfare" is defined by the government, and amounts to the nationalization of a business's profits and the privatization of losses.

This mode of government control is a kind of nationalization, which is a polite way of saying theft, pure and simple.  This intervention is just another massive tax imposed on business by bureaucratic central planners.

Imagine being forced to cover a car with an emissions control system that is pumping raw gas into the exhaust pipes (a fire hazard), has bald tires, 300,000 miles on the odometer, has had no oil changes in the last 100,000 miles.  Compelling the auto insurance company to pay for oil changes and every other kind of repair, all of it "regulated" by a sort of automotive, government regulated HMO which gets to dictate what repairs and diagnostics are to be allowed. (Footnote:  By the way, being a very lucrative monopoly enabled by the government, this sort of HMO fulfills every condition that would attract organized crime in the same way and for the same reasons as the gangs gravitate to gambling, prostitution, and illegal recreational drugs.  These companies could very possibly be taken over by an organized crime ring, as has happened to all the HMOs in New York, according to a colleague of mine who is the son of a prominent Mafia family and told me this is true.)

It appears to me that Romney is a good and decent man, although I disagree with him profoundly on many points.  Not so sure Obama is a good man, when I think about the company he has kept, although I hasten to add that it is not fair to find a man guilty by association .  It also appears to me that Romney and Ryan are men who at some deep level truly believe in the unprecedented American vision of a sweet land of liberty where the purpose of a government is to protect our rights.

At least I think they believe that they believe in this vision of America as the land of the free.  Too bad their policies do not embody this vision. 

But I find that Romney/Ryan inspire more confidence than Obama, whose vision is informed by a rogue’s gallery of America hating radicals.  There was, for example, the anti-colonial and Marxist writings of his father.  There was the deep  influence of his far lefty mother, step-father, and grand-father, and there was the Muslim madrassa in Indonesia, all of them pushing various anti-American ideas.  Back in Hawaii, as a teenager, there was his close friend and mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party.  At Columbia, there was the Palestinian radical, Edward Said.  At Harvard, Brazilian socialist Roberto Mangabeira Unger, his mentor.  Then there was Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist, a radical who bombed the Pentagon and a police station in New York City, and who in later years said that his only regret was that he did not do more bombing.  Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn,  later became his supporters when he came to Chicago,.  There was his “God damn America” pastor, the revolutionary preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose council Obama sought more than once, the pastor who married the Obamas and baptized their children, and in whose pews he sat for 20 years.  There are all of his communist and totalitarian buddies around the world, like Putin, the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, and Ahmadinejad, all of whom send Obama their endorsements and blessings for his reelection.

Now, I condemn Romney/Ryan for the avowedly superstitious and mystical basis for their values.  They would be offended to hear me call their religious beliefs superstitious and mystical, but the terms are almost synonymous.   

I condemn Romney and Ryan for their opposition to abortion and the rights of homosexuals to make families and lives by their own lights without interference from the meddling of government.  And I condemn them for following three steps behind, but on the same road to serfdom (as Hayek put it) as the Democrats’ progressive policies. 

The left and the right are both leading us to a more powerful and oppressive regulatory and entitlement state. 

Nevertheless, I believe that Romney et al will likely do less damage to our tattered but still sweet liberty than the incumbent commie in the White House, our Confiscator-in-Chief.  I give the prospect of a Romney win not three cheers, but maybe one quiet mumble of approval for a couple things.  How sad.

To me, a Romney presidency looks like a looming misfortune for liberty.  It’s absurd to believe that their return to the budget of 2008 will do much to address the tsunami of 60 trillion dollars worth of unfunded obligations to social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, to pick just one issue here, but this is far less threatening than the prospect of the policies that Obama would pursue in a second term.

To me, as the father of two daughters, a Romney presidency looks like a despicable and  genuine threat to women’s reproductive rights.  The possibility of a fifth Supreme Court judge to be appointed by the Romney administration looks like a real threat to Roe v. Wade, if not to the availability of abortion throughout the nation. 

A Romney presidency also looks like a real threat to an individual’s right to make families by the peaceful lights of whomever wants to call their blessed unions a family, which is just another way of saying gay marriage. 

But a second Obama presidency looks like an epochal catastrophe, a calamity, a tragedy for liberty’s prospects here and abroad, a threat to our security in the international arena, an epic disaster worse than Carter’s, from which a speedy  recovery seems as likely as a child’s bedtime prayer for world peace.

And yet, with all my doubts about Romney, I hope that Tuesday will bring us the knowledge that come January, we will be able to speak of the “former President Obama.”  What a lovely ring those words have!

The pleasure of my thinking of a “former President Obama” is almost destroyed by my fear of yet another superstitious religionist in the White House.

But the election of Romney would likely give us more time than the reelection of Obama to hope that we can purvey a more rational basis for liberty and the human prospect.

The reelection of Obama will make me start looking more deeply into safe havens for my retirement and what’s left of my investments.

So take your pick:

Romney-- a looming disaster, with the likelihood that freedom will once again be wrongly blamed for the disaster. 

Or Obama-- an epochal catastrophe, with the silver lining that Roe v. Wade and gay marriage will not be attacked so strongly, for what this is worth, knowing that at the same time everybody’s rights to life, liberty and property will be under a  profound and relentless assault of a kind that has not existed in America since before the end of slavery, the Jim Crow south, and the advent of women’s suffrage.

The great French champion of liberty, Frederic Bastiat formulated the idea that “government is the great fiction by which everybody attempts to live at the expense of everybody else.”   Obama’s vision of forcing everybody into being their brother’s keeper embodies this stupid fiction more radically than any president before him. 

This election will do nothing to right this line of cockamamie thinking.

We look forward to a better day, far in the future, I’m sure, when a more enlightened polity will have put a permanent and moral stop to the idea that individuals are sacrificial animals who can rightly be plundered, bossed around in every detail of their lives, jailed, and sent to slaughter on the alter of the “common good.” 
This election will have done little to bring that better day any closer. 

But we can each do something to bring that better day a little closer if we think and struggle to understand a few questions, such as these:

 

1.   How on earth has America come to have a commie lib Marxist in the White House, a man whose books clearly revealed himself to be an enemy of the American vision of freedom long before his first election, and who now stands an excellent chance of being reelected?  Anyone who bothered to read his books or to LISTEN to what the man told us could hardly fail to see that Obama’s Hope and Change was his hope to change America into something more like the egalitarianism and democratic socialism of France’s advanced welfare state.  He campaigned on the premise that he would unify us and make government more transparent.  We have to look as far back as our own Civil War to find a time when we were more divided.  Ask yourself why?  Never before Obama Care has a major piece of social legislation passed without ANY bipartisan support.  The great unifier not only failed to enlist the opposition, he cheerfully told them to go to hell.  How come?  Government has never been more opaque.  Why?  He promised more fiscal responsibility and lower unemployment, lower debt and deficits, an end to the unfunded long term obligations of social programs.  All of these issues are vastly worse now.  Why?  And, perhaps most puzzling of all, why on earth do all these failures seem not to make many more people turn against him?  The Republicans tell Obama that he can’t run on his record.  Liberal comedian Chris Rock recently tweeted, “Only Pres Obama could prevent a depression, end a war, get bin Laden, bring unemployment below 8 percent, then be told he can’t run on his record.”  How can Rock be serious?  This praise is ludicrous enough to inspire vertigo.

2.    Why is the Confiscator-in Chief’s opponent a man who bases his moral vision  on the ravings of his adult imaginary friend (the God of Abraham, of course) who tells him that marriage is a sacred union only between a man and a woman?  Why does he believe his imaginary friend, against the opinion of the scientific community, that life begins at conception and that therefore women should not have control over their bodies and their reproductive rights?  Why are Romney/Ryan set to do nothing essential to support the vision of America as a sweet land of liberty?  Why are the Republicans today miles to the political left of FDR, JFK and LBJ?

3.    Why does the mud wrestling contest between political left and right represent such an ironic tension between stupid false alternatives?  Think of the conservatives who say they champion individual freedom, but are so intolerant as to try to pass laws against gay marriage.  Think of liberals who say they champion freedom, but for more than a century have been passing laws to control the decisions that should be left between physicians and their patients, and why do liberals want to control damn near every detail of our lives?  Why do conservatives want to push their noses into peoples’ bedrooms?  Why don’t liberals trust consenting adults to commit capitalist acts together for mutual benefit?

4.   What is reality?  How do we come to know anything about the facts of reality?  What is it that makes Homo sapiens different from all the other animals?  How do we survive?  What are reason and rationality?  How do we come to know what is true and false?  What is ethics?  Morality?  How do we come to know what is right and wrong?  Are these matters merely the arbitrary ravings of the tribe into which we were born?  What is free will?  Determinism?  How do we reconcile free will in a deterministic universe, or is this impossible?

5.   What are rights?  How are they related to human nature?  What is the moral status of self-defense?  What is government?  What is the purpose of a legitimate government?  What is liberty?  Freedom?  Property?  To what are we entitled?  What should be the relation between individuals and governments?

6.   What is wealth?  There are material and soulful aspects of wealth; what are these, and how do you know?  In this context of wealth, again, what are rights and property?  What is trade?  Goods, services?  Barter?  Exchange?  Indirect exchange?  Money?  Government again, in this new context?  Banking?  Interest?  Usury?  Credit?  Central banking of governments?   Fractional reserve banking?  Government intervention?

7.   It is an unassailable fact that freedom works across every culture, in every time and place it has ever been remotely approximated.  You can look at social experiments like East and West Germany after 1945, at North and South Korea, at Japan before and after the war; these are like control and experimental groups of culturally similar subjects, in social experiments that prove beyond any doubt that freedom always works to increase the wealth, health, and perceived well being of those populations.  Freedom always works, and works better when it is increased and worse when it is diminished, AND YET, every major political group crusades passionately against it with relentless force everywhere in the world.  Why on earth can such a foolish and self-destructive politics be true?  And yet it is.  Why? 

 

We shall make little progress without better answers to these foundational  questions of philosophy than most of us appear to have today.

I believe the short answer to the above questions is, as Ayn Rand pointed out, that our world equates the essence of evil with a concern for one’s own self-interest, and the morally good with turning ourselves into self-sacrificial animals on the alter on the common good, which, at best, turns morality into the enemy of the individual’s unfolding and happiness, and at worst, provides the moral justification that opens the door to totalitarian slaughter.

Explaining this requires long study, in the face of the lifetime one has likely spent hearing the opposite.

 

As an antidote to the insanity, for starters, I recommend a short reading list:

 

Very quick read:

Leonard Read, I, Pencil

I know of no more pithy introduction to the true nature of markets is than this short, brilliant little pamphlet, available free and online, at the website of

The Foundation for Economic Education:   fee.org  )

 

Ayn Rand,   Atlas Shrugged

-----   ,       Philosophy: Who Needs It?

-----   ,       Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (Second Edition)

Leonard Peikoff,  Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

------ ,                The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West are Going Out

------,                 The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America

David Harriman,  The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins,  Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can

                                              End Big Government

David Kelley,   The Evidence of the Senses

----,                 The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration

Henry Hazlitt,    Economics in One Lesson

Ludwig von Mises,  Socialism

----- ,                   Liberalism

-----,                    Human Action

Murray Rothbard,  For a New Liberty

George Reisman,  Capitalism

Respect for Individual Rights = Purpose of Government


Respect for Individual Rights
is the Purpose of Government



Eric Paul Nolte


         I often hear it said that taxation is the price of civilization.  Well, they had taxation in every totalitarian dictatorship, and I hardly think that it was their taxation that was the active ingredient that allowed those bloody pits of death and destruction to lay any claim to being civilized.  I believe that only a profound confusion over the nature of rights and civilization could lead to such a silly pronouncement.  Rather, I believe that it is respect for individual rights that is the price of an optimal civilization.   

It appears that the American people are so confused about the legitimate purpose, powers, and capability of government that we now believe government should do anything that sounds like a good thing to do. 

         Moreover, if you tell an American that you are against the government’s doing something that would make the world a better place, it will sound as if you just said you are opposed to the thing itself.

         This confusion is so pronounced that you could say you’re against having a bricklayer as your surgeon, and be understood as saying you’re against surgery.

         So, for a more realistic example, it now seems impossible for you to say that you are opposed to the government’s virtual monopoly in education without being understood as having said that you are opposed to education itself.

         If you say that you believe education is far too important to be left in the hands of government bureaucrats and union bosses, people will think you just said that you’re not only against education but they will likely assume that you also want poor children to remain ignorant, and, moreover, surely the only reason you could say something so cruel and stupid is that you are an ignorant racist pig who probably voted for Romney.

         But you may not be a racist, you may not have voted for Romney, and you certainly are not against education for poor children.  So how can you have been so deeply misunderstood on several levels at once?

         Because, for one thing, we the people appear to have lost any coherent idea of the legitimate purpose of government.  We have no idea what its powers should be.  We have not a clue about what should be the fundamental relationship between the citizen and the government.  There is no widespread understanding of what government is capable of doing, and there is no agreement over what it should attempt to do.

         Barack Obama told the American people, five days before the 2008 presidential election, that his election would mark the beginning of a “fundamental transformation of America.” 

Well, he missed the transformation!  It was already long since in motion!  The fundamental transformation of America began more than a century ago, and some will point to elements of this sea change that were present in the ideas of some of the founding fathers.

         Of course, it can be seen by anybody who read Obama’s books that the Hope and Change on which he campaigned in 2008 were a vision of America morphing into something rather more like France than the America of 1787 or 1865.  America’s regulatory-welfare-warfare state may not be as highly developed as that of France or Germany, but we are not very far behind.  If we were to adopt the government of Germany or France today, this would not represent as fundamental a transformation as what has already happened in America between 1865 and today.  The fundamental transformation of America was already beginning with the first generation of progressives, in the late 19th century, such as James Dewey, William James, Louis Brandeis, Walter Lippmann, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.

         By 1870, a generation of young Americans was going to Europe for university, many to Germany, and they came home infected by German philosophy of a Kantian flavor, and a fevered enthusiasm for the economics  of Marx, the politics of Chancellor Bismarck’s welfare state, and the idea of public schools as the conduit by which children could be torn from their mother’s breasts and transformed by the “right ideas” into becoming obedient soldiers and docile citizens.  Many of these young American thinkers became progressives and influenced others to join them.

         By the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, 80 years ago, the idea of citizens as sheep and government as the Shepherd directing and protecting his flock was already well established, if not wholly unopposed.  But the opponents were few and largely unequipped to fight the Red Decade’s passionate arguments for scientific socialism, and the political left was widely perceived to have captured the moral high ground from the Neanderthal right.

        The formation of an outright totalitarian dictatorship in America today would represent much less of a fundamental transformation than would a government that suddenly began to behave as if it cherished the inalienable right of its citizens to their own lives, liberty, and property. 

        It would represent a radical change today for our government to declare that it would no longer operate as an instrument of plunder and stop looting its citizens and bullying them in every area of their lives.

        But it would be an unimaginable transformation for the government to fire its czars and disband its bureaus and alphabet agencies of coercion. 

        It would be a wonderful change if our government were to recognize that individual liberty and responsibility  are the first virtues, without which no others can count for much of anything.

        But such a transformation will never come without enshrining the inviolate right of every peaceful individual to his or her own life, liberty, and property. 

        This respect for individual rights will never come until we renounce forever the idea that one person may use others against their will for predatory advantage.

         We must renounce the idea that governments are endowed with some special power, infused metaphysically by some magical cosmic pixie dust, that justifies its forcing peaceful citizens to bend to its will.

         This renunciation of government coercion as legitimate will never happen unless we come to abandon our faith that it is acceptable to treat citizens as sacrificial animals on the alter of the common good.

         Until we reject the idea that self-sacrifice for random others is the starting point of morality, government will never respect our rights as inviolable.

         I believe that there is little hope for a peaceful world until we embrace the idea that the essence of morality must begin with the celebration of the sanctity of every individual as a unique and irreplaceable entity whose right to life, liberty, and property must never be violated by anyone, least of all by the government whose sole purpose must be as the protector of those rights.

         When the starting point of morality is held to be the sacrifice of oneself to everybody else, morality becomes the enemy of one’s own interests, but the world’s moral authorities have beaten us into accepting this suicidal idea.  Now it’s one thing to condemn predatory exploitation of others, but another to reject the pursuit of one’s own happiness as being the foundation of morality.  Notwithstanding that the pursuit of happiness is written into the American declaration of independence, the world’s moral authorities continue to treat altruism and self-sacrifice for others as the essence of the good, and one’s self-interest as, at best, morally neutral, and more often as the essence of evil.

         But we are profoundly confused about self-interest.  Selfishness is the only word we have to denote the activities of individuals pursuing their personal interests.  But the connotation of selfishness is imbued with every aspect of evil itself.  To be selfish is to be a predator, a greedy,  brutal, grasping bastard who is eager to rape, rob, and murder to get his own way.

         We need another word to denote the peaceful pursuit of one’s own unfolding and happiness.  We can describe this concept in a phrase, but we have no one word.  The closest term is Ayn Rand’s formulation of “rational happiness,” which she wrote about at book length in a volume with the inflammatory and provocative title, The Virtue of Selfishness, a title that was guaranteed to shock and repel many who might otherwise have been willing to give her a hearing.

 Until morality includes one’s own unfolding and happiness as the starting point, much as Rand defined rational self-interest, we will always be vulnerable to governments that treat its citizens as sacrificial animals, and citizens will more likely submit meekly to state coercion and exploitation, feeling  as if they had no right to resist.

         But rights are conditions of survival!  We are endowed to the right to be free because we would die without the freedom to act on the thoughts by which we figure out how to live, love, and work.  The right to liberty is therefore an aspect of our nature as a human being.

         The truly fundamental transformation of America would be to have a political class and a polity that began to understand this almost utterly forgotten, bedrock feature of our republic.

         If we understood that our rights are an aspect of human nature, we might remember that the purpose of government is to protect those rights from violation, and government would no longer be the primary enemy of our rights.

         If we understood that rights are inviolable, we would suffer no confusion between liberty rights and so-called welfare rights. 

 Liberty rights mean the entitlement of every individual to life, liberty, and property.  Welfare rights mean the entitlement of individuals to various goods and services.  But there is an insurmountable problem here: goods and services must be produced by people.  If one person is entitled to the goods produced by another person, that other person’s right to liberty and property is shattered.  It is certainly a good thing for people to choose to help each other out, but it is another thing altogether to say that one person can be entitled to another person’s stuff.

          If we understood that we are entitled to our own lives, freedom, and property, we would understand that we are not entitled to other people’s property.  That would be a contradiction, if all people are entitled to liberty by their nature as humans.  An entitlement to other people’s stuff would violate their fundamental rights by dragooning them, under threat of jail or fines, into providing those things as an unchosen obligation to the recipients of those goods.

         An understanding of the inviolate rights of individuals would make so many aspects of life clear! 

 If we understood individual rights, we could scale back government to a size that is appropriate to the legitimate purposes of the state.  This is very important to understand: that limiting government to its legitimate functions would preclude having a government of warring special interests competing to see which gang of thugs can grab the levers of power this election cycle and begin dispensing favors and punishments in preparation for the next election cycle. 

 As Friedrich Hayek pointed out, if government had not usurped the power to do enormous good, it would never have acquired the power to make or break any person or corporation at any moment, according to its fancy.  Neither would big government have become the beacon attracting the slimiest creatures to come crawling out from under their rocks in an effort to grab the levers of power.  Hayek understood that it was largely well-intentioned but misguided people who created these vast powers of government, and that others would then be attracted to that power, others who often had less scruples than the well-intended creators of this machinery of power.  Hayek knew that in many countries, these power-hungry politicians were happy to kill the high-minded founders to gain power.

         An understanding of the legitimate rights of individuals would finally make it clear what a proper government should do, and equally importantly, what it should not do. 

We would understand that if the government is the protector and not the violator of its own citizens’ rights, it may not engage in foreign adventures waging wars willy nilly as the world’s policeman.

We would understand that the powers of a government, whose purpose is  the protection of its citizens’ rights, would be limited to the protection of those rights.  A written constitution would sanctify and spell out the citizens’ rights and the limits of the state’s powers.  The system of laws could not be written to overstep these limits.  A system of courts would exist to help citizens work out their disputes.  A police system would exist to restrain the predators among us.  A military would exist to protect us from foreign aggression.  A treasury department would surely have to exist in order to receive the funds required to run the government.

 Now I hasten to add that while we would need a treasury department, there could not be an IRS, at least not as the instrument of coercion it is today.  Even a ninny who understood the nature of legitimate rights would plainly see that the IRS violates the citizens’ rights on a massive scale.  Taxation, as the involuntary taking of money from citizens, would be seen for the theft it plainly is, not as the alleged price of civilization, as many argue.

 Respect for individual rights is the price of civilization, and honest citizens would be happy to volunteer something like a tithe to the government that protects their rights from violation. 

 If rights were properly understood, the government would not be tempted to overstep its bounds in any other area either, and citizens would not be so willing to tolerate the government’s disdainful and arrogant violation of their rights.

 As for such other matters as the provision of infrastructure and the care of the poor and disabled, I trust the generous hearts of citizens more than the machinations of far-flung central planning bureaucrats.  For all goods and services, I trust the profit-seeking of businesses a million times more than I trust government bureaucrats to steer scarce resources most efficiently into creating the goods and services that real people want and need most urgently.

The major point is that nothing matters more in politics than understanding this rational formulation of rights.

 A close study of Rand, Mises, and so many others in this stream of thought, can make these matters clear.


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Revised 2015.1103