A Proper Government is a Project for the Future

A Proper Government is a Project for the Future

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I sometimes despair that it is more likely that we can turn vultures into vegans than we can make governments behave properly.  

How do we civilize government’s barbaric lust for power and restrain their tendency to grow like aggressive cancers, spreading madness, misery and mayhem in their wakes?

Well, you cannot turn a vulture into a vegan or convert a lion into a vegetarian.  There never was a lion in the Garden of Eden who would peacefully lie down with a sheep.  Can you spell “carnivore?”

And we the sheeple have mentally reverted to the clueless, dumbass, dysfunctional condition of Hobbes’ primordial state, where we are lacking any insight into the unprecedented and wonderful idea of John Locke’s formulation of natural human rights.  

We the sheeple behave in the political arena as if we never heard of the idea of a natural, inalienable right to our own lives.  We behave as if there are no facts of reality that should limit anybody’s claim on other people’s property. A huge majority feels entitled to use peaceful others against their will, so long as they say that the goodness of their goal justifies this Machiavellian abuse of others.  Moreover, we are deaf, blind, and hostile to any argument to the contrary.       

But human beings do sometimes change their minds.  Sheep and lions can’t change their minds like humans because they have no powers of abstraction and no free will.  But human beings do have both abstract knowledge and more than a whiff of free will, contrary to the dominant views of contemporary philosophers (whose arguments against free will must ironically count on the ability of their listeners to hear their arguments and thereby freely come to agree with them!)  Free will is not a mystical blast from an unknowable dimension.  Free will is simply the power of every normal human being to turn one’s attention from one thing to another. The basis of this power to change our minds, like the very relation of mind to body, remains something of a puzzle for science to unravel, but the existence of mind and will is directly available to us by introspection and our personal experience.   

The proof of our free will is available to us in every slightest moment when we question anything and then apply logic to the evidence of experience.  

Changing our minds about the Big Questions does not often happen, but it does happen occasionally.  I myself experienced this transformation as I slowly moved away from the communist idealism of my youth for the humanist objectivism of my maturity.

When we change our minds on foundational issues, it usually happens in our lives at points of inflection and crisis. 

The Problem of Enforcing Legitimate Limits on Government

The demagogue Donald Trump’s election is just such a crisis in the lives of many citizens.  

On the one hand, we see protesting rioters and blood in the streets as a result of this election.  But this crisis may also be a cause for hope because many people feel dizzy and confused as well as angry, and this confusion may lead many people to be more inclined to examine their deepest beliefs and to meditate on the enduring Big Questions of life, and perhaps to be open to less destructive and more life-serving ideas in the political arena.

Back to the matter of this heretofore impossible difficulty of restricting government to its legitimate functions: it is this difficulty of limiting government that made me sympathetic to the case for libertarian anarchy, as eloquently stated by Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell and others.  But much as I tried to understand the case for anarcho-capitalism, in the end I failed to see how their policy of competing private defense agencies in the same neighborhood will not lead to old-time gang warfare, like competing mafiosi, warring illegal drug dealers, and the wreckage of Somalia’s anarchy. 

So, is it true that restraining the predation of governments is as impossible as converting vultures into vegans?  

No.  I believe we can ultimately keep government within legitimate limits, even though most of the evidence says that the state will always be assaulting the rights of individuals to life, liberty, and property.  

But … it always seemed impossible for humans to fly… until we figured out how to fly!  

It has seemingly never been possible for human beings to create a government that would not ultimately descend into tyranny, but I believe that a blueprint for a proper government is now available to us and that we can hope to build this project in the future.

Tyranny is not the product of an inevitable aspect of human nature.

A Blueprint for Legitimately Limited Government

I believe that the blueprint for a properly limited government shows an estate built on the foundation of unwavering respect for the right of every individual to life, liberty, and property.  I hold these rights to be sacred, not in a religious way, but in a secular sense, meaning “of the highest value.”  

Hmm… we seem to have heard something like this before in the last few hundred years, no?

Yes, of course!  It is the clangorous tolling of the glorious and unprecedented ideas of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, ideas which in America have been under attack and in mortal danger for more than a century of progressive ideology and politics.

But we never grasped or effectively implemented this idea of a right to liberty that would preclude a government’s claim to an individual’s property.  What we have now is an endless war between irreconcilable and mutually exclusive definitions of rights: liberty rights versus welfare rights; or as political theorists now speak of the matter, negative rights versus positive rights.

Our Dizzy Confusion About Rights Leads to Slavery—

Welfare Rights Versus Liberty Rights

Liberty rights mean the inherent ownership of all individuals to their own lives, liberty, and property.  They are “negative” in the sense that they prohibit using other people against their will. These rights oblige inaction.  Hands off!

Welfare rights are entitlements to goods and services.  They are said to be “positive” because they oblige the action of taking goods from some individuals to satisfy the alleged entitlement of others to those goods.  

Since goods can only come into being when they are produced by somebody’s work, when we say that some individuals are entitled to such goods and services as food, housing, education, healthcare, and so forth, it implies that this provision of welfare rights must mean that other people have an unchosen obligation to create and then surrender these goods, by force, if necessary.

Welfare rights therefore entail the outright destruction of liberty rights.  If Peter is entitled to the property of Paul, Paul is saddled with an unchosen obligation to produce the property claimed by Peter.  Paul’s liberty rights are thereby destroyed to that extent.  

When one person produces goods and another person takes those goods, this condition is called slavery (do I need to remind you that this condition of slavery and involuntary servitude is prohibited in the first breath of the first clause of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution?)  Slaves are people who are compelled to work for somebody else without consent or ownership of the things they produce.  

Is it any less slavery when the master does not take the whole of the slave’s products?  I think not.  It is still the dynamic of master and slave when one person grabs the police power and compels the slaves to work against their will.  It is no more or less tyrannical when it is a mafioso who offers “protection” from the death and destruction that will come unless his price is paid. 

Of course, today, progressives and liberals, and most conservatives too, will say it is absurd and impracticable to say that people have an inalienable right to stop this government protection racket, to declare that the people have an inalienable right to their own life, liberty, and property.  

Actually, progressives won’t phrase it this way, instead they will simply say that it would be morally abhorrent if liberty were allowed to deny people their right to all those goods and services they need so deeply.  Need trumps liberty.  The right to freedom is sometimes cynically lampooned as the right of poor people to sleep under an urban overpass. 

There is no country on the planet where this idea of inalienable liberty rights is practiced consistently.  

When progressives do agree that welfare rights destroy liberty rights, they think this is a good thing—as when dense thickets of government regulations choke off the freedom of producers and customers to do business throughout every sector of the economy. They believe that all these regulations are the only safeguard preventing greedy businesses from abusing and ripping off their customers.  Progressives tend to believe that, outside mothers’ milk, all good things flow from government intervention, and that capitalism is the mother lode of wickedness from which only government can protect us. 

In the end, progressives dismiss individual rights on moral grounds.  They say, “we’re all in this together,” and we are, after all, our brothers’ keepers, right?  And certainly the unassailable ground of morality begins with altruism and the bedrock belief that we must sacrifice ourselves for the lives of others.  It would be selfish and wrong of us to deny others their entitlement to welfare goods and services.  

Welfare rights have been the pole star of political ideology since at least the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, in which no mention was made of any inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and property.  

In the name of Roosevelt’s “freedoms from want and fear,” we have been happy to write into law the welfare rights that destroy individual liberty rights.  

In our postmodern world, reality is said to be a rainbow of prejudice woven on the loom of whichever race, class, and gender one happened to be born into, and where truth and falsehood, no less than right and wrong, are mostly arbitrary conventions agreed upon according to our particular tribe. 

But there is an objective reality and there are facts of reality by which we can grasp things objectively.  

This assertion will evoke howls from the postmodern keepers of that flame which is the identity politics, multiculturalism, relativism, subjectivism, and skepticism by which they deny the very possibility of objectivity regarding all of the Big Questions of existence.  They say that the only certainty is that no one can know anything for certain.  

Conservatives will also howl at my assertion of a worldly, secular power to achieve objectivity because they believe that, while there is indeed objective truth and morality, such truth must flow from the existence of God—their own one god, by the way, and not the gods of any of the other religions.  How can they know that they are right?  By faith.  But faith means the belief in the truth of a proposition in the absence of evidence.  There is no problem here, however, because they say that faith and reason are the coordinated and equal beating of two wings that keep the bird of truth aloft, to paraphrase the way a papal encyclical once put it.   

This is not the place where I can mount a proper argument for this assertion of an objective reality, but I am persuaded that this case is ably demonstrated in the long stream of work that begins in Greek antiquity with Aristotle and comes of age with Ayn Rand and her preceding and continuing circles.  We do not have the answers to everything, of course, but we do have some answers, and where so many questions remain open, we can by the appropriate declaration of, “I do not know,” leave open the possibility of better answers as we continue to search for them.

A Proper Government is a Project for the Future:

The Pole Star of Reality, Reason, and Individual Rights

A proper government does not exist today.  

A proper government remains for some future day when we can move forward and implement the better ideas we have been coming to learn since the time of Locke.

I believe the better day will come and that this better government will require us to write into law the bedrock purpose of government as the protection of the inherent rights of every individual to life, liberty, and property.

The American founders started out in this direction of government for the purpose of protecting individual rights and for more than a century mostly continued in the direction of extending this franchise of rights to all human beings.  But the system was saddled with a number of flaws that would eventually destroy the whole project and deliver us into the hands of confused but relentless tyrants from both the left and right.

So how can we create a government that will be invulnerable to morphing into tyranny?

We begin with reality and reason, which grasps (not invents) reality, and add individual rights to locate our pole star.  

Individual rights allow the enormous creative energy of individuals to be released in the world.  Freedom of exchange, genuinely free markets and a government designed to restrain the predators, protect the nation from foreign aggressors, and help individuals and companies sort out their differences by means of objective laws, courts, arbitration and negotiation.  

In short, we need legitimate government to be the police, the military, and the courts. 

To prevent tyranny, we must chain government down to a thick wall on a short leash, and the means for doing this must lie in this legitimate formulation of the state.  

When governments attempt to do more than these limited functions, they attract predatory rent seekers and lobbyists who are eager to win votes by promising to provide one group of people with goods and services they steal from other groups of people.  

The way out of this inevitably predatory dynamic is to write a proper formulation of human rights.  

And what would this formulation be?  

First, clearly show that by the nature of reality and our humanness, we are all endowed with this natural right to our lives!  Individual rights—our life, liberty, and property—are requirements of survival itself, they are the preconditions for pursuing the happiness possible to us when we unfold our gifts in the world and achieve a flourishing life.  These rights protect us all because they make it wrong for anyone to use other people against their will for any predatory advantage.

The Basic Evil is Predation: Forcing Others Against Their Will;

and the Antidote Against It

By my lights, the predatory use of other people against their will is the fundamental evil in the world!  Murder, genocide, slavery, rape, theft, and fraud are all examples of this evil.

The way out of this mess lies in writing laws that clearly restrain such predatory behavior.  We must have laws to show how it is a tyrannical abuse of some citizens to dragoon them into an unchosen obligation to provide their fellow citizens with goods and services.  It is wrong to allow one group of citizens to vote themselves material benefits they take out of the hides of their fellow citizens.  

Of course, many of these predator-restraining ideas have already been written into our constitution, but so much of this document has been ignored for more than a century now that I believe we may have to recast this document.  Principally I believe that what must be freshly written into our defining document must be the essential idea that animated Jefferson’s declaration of independence, namely, as I say, that all of us are endowed by our very nature to unalienable rights to life, liberty, and property so as to pursue our own happiness.  

I recently re-read our constitution, and I can find not a word of this declaration of unalienable rights that made its way into the constitution!

Finally, to be legitimate, government must be funded voluntarily.

How can this voluntary funding of government work?

Voluntary funding can work because the size of a properly limited government would be a tiny fraction of the monster that now rules us, and it would cost a tiny fraction of today’s government.  Free and rational citizens will understand that it is in their self-interest to pay for good government and they would cheerfully give of themselves to achieve it, in the same way that charities receive donations, and how religions are funded by tithing.  We Americans are the most generous people in the world and we give enormous amounts of money to the causes we champion.  I can think of no reason that a proper government would not freely arouse such support.  Would there be free riders?  Doubtlessly.  But it only makes sense that free people, unmolested by tyrants, will be far more generous than the same people when they are bossed around by meddlesome bureaucrats backed up by the police power.  

I have read proposals too that government could be funded by charging the citizens for its services.  For example, the courts could charge companies for the service of resolving disputes.  A company would be free not to pay, but then they would not be allowed to go to the court for help with their disputes.  

Working out the details of such voluntary relations is work for future thought, but the principle is clear: the moral government must not be empowered to coerce its peaceful citizens into doing or not doing anything except to restrain the predators and frauds.    

Governments must never be allowed to grab the power to use peaceful citizens against their will, no matter how noble the government claims its goals to be.

Very crucially, it would finally be recognized that the only equality that can be produced by the quest for economic equality is the equal misery that we see in every country that has gone very far down this road of attempting to create economic equality.  Why?  Because we are none of us equal in our gifts, energy, ambition, or luck in the circumstances of our birth. 

On this point, do not miss Don Watkins and Yaron Brooke’s, Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.   

However, if we are all held to be equal before the law, and if the laws are just, we can show up in the world as peaceful, productive, self-responsible actors who will cooperate and trade with each other, voluntarily, and to mutual benefit.  

There has never been a country that has fully put into practice this formulation of good government as the protector of individual rights, but to the degree that governments have approached this ideal, they have prospered vastly more than those that do not approach this ideal.

Ayn Rand’s Vision and Creating the Better Day

I believe that the better day coming will uphold something like Ayn Rand’s vision of the good life.  Rand persuaded me that if we want to live and flourish most successfully, the primary values must be reason, purpose and self-esteem.  The primary virtues one must practice in order to achieve these values must be rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, productiveness, justice, and pride.  I find it among Rand’s most stunning insights that virtues are finally seen to be the means by which we achieve values, and not merely as dreary obligations to sacrifice ourselves for others.

By Rand’s code of morality, we will guide our lives by reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience.  Reason is a human being’s principle means for grasping and interpreting the material provided by our sense-perception.  We must discover for ourselves an honorable purpose in life.  We can earn our self-esteem by showing up in the world with the virtues that success demands of us, namely: by guiding our lives by rationality; by practicing independence of mind; by displaying the integrity to walk our talk; by honesty (meaning the unflinching respect for reality); by productiveness (which means being responsible for ourselves to the extent that this is possible); by practicing justice in dealing with others; and withal earning our own pride, which Rand called the sum of all virtues.  There are countless other virtues, of course, such as benevolence, generosity, cleanliness and practicing good hygiene, running a ship-shape and well organized life, but the foregoing are the primary virtues.

I say we should strive to discover and unfold our talents in the world, we should live and let live, lend a helping hand wherever we believe this is right to do and where we are able, and we should deal with everybody with good will and an eye towards acting always for mutual benefit, and never, never, never for using other people against their will or for any predatory advantage.

Conclusion: The Moral is the Practical, as Ayn Rand Said  

These are not dubious, pie-in-the sky, impracticable ideals.  These are reasonable, realistic and attainable ideas which are consistent with human nature and the realities of existence.  These are ideas that would benefit everybody, especially the poor and downtrodden who, since the dawn of the industrial revolution two hundred years ago, (as compared with the great masses of humanity everywhere before that time) have seen their comforts and life spans more than doubled in those countries, and only in those countries, where a semblance of free markets and unhampered capitalism have been allowed to operate.  These ideas of free minds and free markets would also greatly benefit not only the great middle class of people as well, but also the geniuses in our midst, upon whom all the big advances for humanity have always depended.

It is no great comfort that we the sheeple have dodged the bullet of a shooting war with Russia as a result of Secretary Clinton’s defeat.  She was certainly a lying, corrupt criminal and totalitarian-minded progressive whose principles and policies contradict the best and most important ideas that animated the creation of America: the ideal of individual rights as an inalienable aspect of human nature.  

It is little comfort that we were saved from Secretary Clinton by the election of a man of mixed principles, an orange-haired blowhard of demagogic tendencies, but it may work out that Trump might actually save us for the better day that can now come in the future.

Americans were not so much for Trump, but against Clinton.  

Clinton and the Democratic Party would surely have continued marching us relentlessly farther down Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

Will the progressives’ fear come true that Trump, the demagogue, may become a strongman, a dictator?   

I can’t know that Trump won’t veer off into his own brand of tyranny, but it is worth revisiting my evaluation of the matter last week: 

We had a choice in this election between a loose cannon and a battery of artillery aimed at the heart of America, namely, the attack by Clinton, Obama, and the Democratic party against the unprecedented and inspiring ideas that animated the creation of the United States of America.  Clinton represents a continuation of Obama’s policies.  They might be appalled to hear their ideas so described, but any fool can see that the last eight years of the Democrats’ “hope and change” for the purpose of moving “forward” with a “fundamental transformation of America” does not mean a celebration of the fundamental idea of individual rights and liberty that animated the creation of America.  

Notwithstanding the sky-high stock market, it is mostly the Democrats who gave us a zombie economy like Japan’s, and a spirit of national defense against Islamic totalitarianism as suicidal as Europe’s. 

The better day will come with an evolution of consciousness that will lead to an ethos of reason, purpose, self-esteem, and the benevolent spirit of live and let live that encourages people to come together and experience each other as treasured partners in the search for wisdom, joy, and meaning.

E   P   N

2016.1119

Some Optimism About Trump's Election

Some Optimism About Trump’s Election

Believe it or not!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Many people in my circle and all their liberal friends are feeling wounded, afraid, and appalled by the election of Donald Trump because they feel he is such a bad person.  Some of these young people are rioting in the streets, burning flags and other property, and physically attacking some individuals who voted for Trump.

One of my liberal friends expressed her deep sadness that Secretary Clinton, this wonderful person, this superbly capable, credible, and brilliant woman of such great experience would now be denied the presidency for which she is so admirably well qualified.

Well, yes, I do see Secretary Clinton’s long experience, but I see it as long experience of political log-rolling, packaging, pay-for-play deal-making, and of the kind of reprehensible lying that is so vividly captured by her abandonment of our hapless Ambassador Stevens in Libya.  Ambassador Stevens died at the hands of attackers whom Hillary called peaceful civilians who were spontaneously aroused into an angry protest because of a movie made by a man in Los Angeles who said bad things about Muhammed.  The film maker was subsequently jailed for this offense!  What?  Brazen, bald-faced lies, all of it.  For weeks, Ambassador Stevens had pleaded for help, help which was readily available but was denied nonetheless.  The truth was that the mob consisted of organized militants intent on doing what they did, namely murdering those several brave Americans who were abandoned by the Secretary and our president.    

Then there is the whole horrible descent into chaos and the even greater threats to us created by the Arab Spring, with terrible outcomes in Libya, Egypt, Syria, and the ill-advised circumstances of our withdrawal from Iraq (not that we should have been there in the first place, but having gone there, surely some better consideration of how to withdraw should have been made?)

Then there was the terrible bribery and cluelessness of our deal with Iran, allegedly in order to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.  

For the last four decades, our State Department has called Iran the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, and here we are, far from preventing this country from acquiring the Bomb, we have now assured that Iran will be free to build a bomb in 10 years after signing the agreement.  And, oh, by the way, the mullahs are laughing at us and doing what they want to do anyway.

So, now what about Secretary Clinton’s wonderful character and political experience?  

I confess that I heaved a long and deep sigh of relief that Hillary Clinton was defeated. 

To me, it is clear that Donald Trump’s election marks the end of what I am persuaded is the worst presidency in the history of the American republic.  

I hasten to add that my sense of relief does not mean that I admire Donald Trump for his opinions on many issues. He is a man whose character and beliefs are not well aligned with many of my beliefs.  But I feel relieved nonetheless because, for one thing, I find Trump to be so much less reprehensible and threatening to the safety of the country than other side.  

At the very least, as the Green Party candidate Jill Stein observed, the election of Secretary Clinton would have provoked a shooting war with Russia because of her proposed no-fly zone in Syria.  Trump’s election may have saved us from the imminent start of WW-III.  

Almost all our pundits and pollsters were staggered by Trump’s win, but I must say that I was not surprised because, for one thing, there is a striking parallel here to how the opinions of nearly all the British and European pundits and pollsters were upset by the Brexit votes last June, which saw Britain’s leaving the European Union.  Ordinary Britons finally rose up and declared their anger against the rule of Britain by armies of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, who were wielding life and death power over their country.  Likewise, millions of Americans outside the ranks of pundits and liberally skewed pollsters (who were surveying unrepresentative samples of voters) finally rose up and resoundingly said no to the rule of arrogant, imperious, holier-than-thou politicians who always believe they know better than we how to run our lives.

My liberal friends are aghast at these assertions of mine.  Some of them wonder how on earth we can possibly remain friends now.

Thomas Sowell, in my opinion, one of the wisest and most thoughtful souls on the planet, wrote a book called A Conflict of Visions which shows how the foundational ideological visions of different people lead them to the conviction that only their own view is right.  This may be the explanation for how we come to be deaf and blind to others’ conflicting points of view, and is surely the root of that terrible personal echo chamber which is our own confirmation bias.  Sowell quotes Bertrand Russell, “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”  We can subdue our confirmation bias only by thoughtfully engaging with those who have a different vision of reality.  I have listened to my liberal friends and, in the end, I am still relieved by Trump’s election.  Now consider some of my other reasons for this sense of relief:

Trade, Regulation, and Taxes

Trump is no deeply principled advocate of the libertarian policies of live-and-let live, but he does offer a contrast to the Democrat party’s last eight years of imperious rule by armies of unelected bureaucrats wielding life-and-death power over us, unilateral rule by bossy politicians practicing top-down regulation, and he seems to understand much better than the progressives how lower taxes contribute to the growth of wealth.

Now, I don’t agree with Trump that protectionism and tariffs are the best means for growing the American economy, but some of his observations made more sense than those of the Democrats.  

Certainly scaling back the choking vines of ever-growing regulation can help dramatically.  

In my sector of the economy, the airline business, the deregulation of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1978 finally gave airlines the ability to choose routes and set their own fares, with the result that today airline traffic is more than twice as big as before the dismantling of the CAB. Before deregulation of routes and fares, only rich, fat cat executives and the occasional vacationer could afford to fly.  Now flying is everybody’s normal mode of long distance travel.  

Unfortunately, the simultaneous growth of airline regulation in other areas of the business has had a senselessly repressive effect too.  

For example, the FAA has now taken over the ability of long-haul pilots to judge when and how to manage their own sleep!  Our judgment is deemed good enough to steer hundreds of passengers safely from New York to Hong Kong over the north pole, but we are not allowed to decide for ourselves when to sleep!  The FAA has written yet another long chapter of regulations that micro-manages every aspect of when and how we are commanded to sleep.  Insanity.  

The 2012 edition of the Federal register was over 78,000 pages long and shows the government’s growing eagerness to dictate damn near every aspect of the lives of people and business.  

Trump’s election promises to cut back some of these oppressive regulations.  I believe this is a good thing because these regulations mostly do less for improving safety than for empowering big companies to enlist the power of the law to put their smaller competitors out of business without having to win over their customers through better services and products. 

Lowering taxes, especially corporate taxes will attract foreign companies and repatriate great numbers of American companies who have been driven out of the country in order to protect themselves from the deeply hostile policies of this gang of progressives that is now being removed from office.  American corporate taxes are at 35% and are therefore higher than any other major industrialized country.  Moreover, these taxes are just another factor of production which are all paid for by, guess who?—you, the customer.  Corporate taxes are just another income tax on us, but they are popular because “soak the rich” policies appeal to the economic ignorance of many envy-ridden people who believe that economic equality is not only possible but morally ideal (Footnote: the only possible equality is what can be, but is not often, granted under the law… see Don Watkins and Yaron Brook’s Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.)  

It is too much to be hoped that Islamo-Marxists like the outgoing president will soon be shunted into the dustbin of history because they are everywhere in the ranks of academe and among lefty politicians, but Donald Trump’s election may go some way towards discouraging them.  Until now, they have largely been able to boss us around and bully us with impunity.  Now they may think twice before uttering their liberal views, confident that nobody could possibly challenge them on matters of logic and history.  

While I know that I can’t change their views, when I am in a room of progressives who are waxing happy over their mutual politics, I sometimes tell them that I don’t agree.  There is rarely room to mount a big enough argument to persuade.  The totalitarian-minded heirs of Plato, Kant, and Marx are everywhere!  But even if these folks were to be open to persuasion, sometimes the mere statement of my disagreement is enough to send a little chill over their confidence and righteousness.

Environmental policy  

The NY Times today reports that Donald Trump has called human-caused climate change “a hoax” and vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.”  

I say, hallelujah!  This may be the most important thing about Trump’s election, even though the issue of environmentalism comes in dead last among the surveys of most citizens, but it is indeed a new religion that appeals to the hearts of so many.  It is important too because the matter represents a profound threat to liberty.  

The likes of NASA and NOAA’s James Hansen and Michael Mann, 350.org’s founder, Bill McKibben, and the vaunted “97%” of scientists who are said to be behind the affirmation of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are all largely in agreement with Jacques Chirac, the former president of France, on this matter.  About a decade ago, Chirac declared at the last Kyoto Protocol conference (at the Hague) that the theory of AGW represents the very best opportunity for these like-minded politicians and scientists to impose global governance for the purpose of creating social justice in the world, meaning, of course, the socialist hijacking of the industrial world.  This is a profound threat to freedom and the possibility of the personal unfolding of the gifts of the world’s peoples, especially those of the bottom billion, whose prospects are so threatened by the righteous environmentalist leaders who want to deprive them of the chance to use the cheap energy that is available to us today, namely fossil fuels (see Alex Epstein, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.)  

For the first time in two decades, I see a chance for a loosening of this death grip of the environmentalist ideologues and social justice warriors who want to take over the world.  

My hope is that intellectual freedom will be emboldened here by having the president of the US declare war on these data-altering frauds and liars at NASA, NOAA, the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (who were caught red-handed trying to fudge the data in order to hide two decades of declining temperatures.)  Scientists who see the careers of others ruined by daring to break ranks with these politically powerful ideologues may feel encouraged to raise their dissenting voices from now on.  

For 20 years, the academic and political elites have largely dispensed funds, grants, and tenure only to those who keep in line with the ruling narrative, that global warming is unprecedented, caused by humans, and portends a climate catastrophe unless governments take over industrial civilization.  Is it any wonder that this staggering flood of money has bought studies that attempt to prove this narrative? 

Immigration and National sovereignty

I do not agree with Trump that building a wall across our southern border will answer the problems engendered by tens of millions of illegal aliens (Footnote: my younger daughter tells me that she finds the term “illegal alien” offensive.  Her political clique calls them “undocumented immigrants,” which is fine with me, but I can read nothing offensive into this simple statement of legal fact.  I believe that, ceteris paribus, immigration in a free economy leads to good things!  I believe that liberty is an inherent aspect of human nature [not an arbitrary convention of governments granting goodies to citizens] and I can see nothing wrong saying that this liberty should surely include the liberty to decide where in the world one wants to live.  

(Footnote: Is it not true there is nevertheless a question of a nation’s sovereignty?  What is sovereignty and what are its limits?  One would have to give a better answer than I am hearing in political discourse today on the matter of the legitimate relation between the individual citizen and the state.  These are matters for another time and place…)

In short, I have no problem with immigrants who are peaceful, self-responsible, respectful of the rights of others, and productive.  I don’t believe that Trump can possibly attempt to send armies of police into homes in order to deport undocumented immigrants.  

Neither is he now proposing sending in armies of police to deport tens of millions—what he is proposing is the deportation of those criminals among this population who are already in jail or who are hiding in sanctuary cities.  I have no problem with this.  I don’t even see this as an actually racist dismissal of Hispanics because it is not the race of those among them who are violent criminals, it is those among them who are violent criminals.

Neither do I have a problem with the policy of assuring that we do not allow hundreds of thousands of improperly vetted refugees from war-torn countries with large populations of Muslim terrorists who want us dead.  I say we repudiate the suicidal policies of Germany, Sweden, France, Holland, and others which, among many sad developments, have turned Sweden in to the rape capital of Europe, where before Sweden experienced almost no rape.  Instead, we should lend a helping hand to these refugees so that they may remain in their homelands or in neighboring countries which share their cultures and values.  They should not be uprooted and brought here willy nilly. 

Health Care.

It is clear now to anybody who looks at it soberly, that Obamacare was never intended to work well, it was intended to provide an excuse for the progressives to look at its wreckage and say that capitalism has once again failed, so now we have to turn the health care system over to a single payer system, like that in Germany and other countries in Europe and elsewhere.

Respect for Women… the Glass Ceiling… and Gays?

Is Donald Trump a misogynist?  It would seem so, although his views on women are outright benevolent compared to the Islamic hundreds of thousands of refugees Secretary Clinton wanted to bring to our shores.  Ditto for the LGBTQ community.  The glass ceiling, said to be holding down women in business?  I would like to see a comparison between the salaries and status of the many women holding high positions in Trump organizations compared to those in the Clinton circles.    

Conclusion

While I do not agree with all of Trump’s beliefs, or believe that he is always  a man of exemplary personal character, I am nevertheless relieved by his election, which is a finger in the eye to the arrogant, petulant, bossy elites who have made such an even bigger mess of things during the eight years of Obama, and which promised to become even vastly worse, had Secretary Clinton taken over the reins of power from Obama.

Certainly not my choice for president, but my guy did not win.  And Trump’s election promises to shake things up and stimulate some deeper thought on how we can make things better for all of us… at least for those of us who are not advocating the destruction of America and all the other quasi-liberal (classical liberal, the old definition, namely free) countries around the world.

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Our Vote for President in 2016

Our Vote for President in 2016

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Without rehearsing every issue being stated by all the candidates here, let me discuss a few matters that I believe are most important to my decision on whom to vote for today.

First, I try never to talk about politics before establishing the philosophical basis for the subject.  Politics is, after all, a late and derivative branch of philosophy, and these matters rest on a foundation of one’s ethical or moral beliefs.  One’s politics is the social embodiment of what one believes is right and wrong.  One’s ethics can only be rationally formed on the basis of what one believes to be true and false in the universe.  One arrives at these views based on the nature of reality, the human place in the world, and on the nature of how we come to know anything at all.  In short, one’s view of metaphysics leads to a view on epistemology, which leads to views on ethics and thereby to one’s opinions on politics.  Postmodern philosophy denies all these views I just stated.  I derive my views from the Aristotelian stream of philosophy which culminated in the thought of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

So, in short, the standard by which I judge politics is rooted in Objectivism.  This means that human beings are endowed with rights which are inherent in our nature.  We have a right to our own life, liberty, and property, and it is right for us to pursue our own happiness, guided by reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience.  So long as we are self-responsible, productive, peaceful, and respectful of every other person’s equal rights, it is the ultimate good to put together lives by our own lights for our own happiness.  No one has a right to use you against your will for any predatory purpose.  You are not an expendable cell in the greater organism of the state, to be disposed of according to the judgment of your country’s leaders and against your own opinion.  You are not a sacrificial animal to be slaughtered on the alter of the lives of others.  Socialism is therefore bad, not to mention that it is also impossible to implement fully for a variety of problems.  Reason, purpose, and self-esteem are the ultimate values to pursue.  The chief virtues, corresponding to these values, and the means by which one can hope to achieve those values, are: rationality (logic), independence (of mind), integrity (walk your talk), honesty (recognition of the facts of reality), productiveness (self-responsibility), justice (treating others as they deserve), and pride (a well-earned pride for achieving one’s rational values by means of putting these virtues into practice.)

Now, this philosophy implies an ethics of dealing with each other by good will and the peaceful, voluntary exchange of goods and services to mutual benefit.  Force wielded against others is wrong.  Coercion is wrong. Using other people against their will for predatory advantage is the fundamental evil, and every bad thing in society is an example of this terrible policy: murder, genocide, rape, slavery, theft, and the predatory, fraudulent use of others against their will.

So, again, all individuals are endowed by their nature as human beings to the right to life, liberty, and property.  Rights precede the formation of governments.  Rights are not goodies handed out by generous governments.  Government therefore should have the purpose of protecting the rights of every individual.  Governments which stray from this principle are therefore bad.

By this standard, all socio-political systems now existing in the world are bad in varying degrees.  All governments today use other people against their will for predatory advantage.  The worst governments have been the brutal totalitarian socialist dictatorships of the last century: Communist, Nazi, Fascist, and then the assorted nasty, ruthless one party dictatorships like Uganda’s Idi Amin and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

Liberty and individualism are the supreme values; without these, everything else is compromised, which is why the world is in such a mess.

Now, how do the current American presidential candidates measure up to my standards?  Not very well at all.  

Four candidates stand a theoretical chance of winning the Presidency on the basis of being on the ballot in enough states to garner enough electoral college votes.  

There are other candidates who are on the ballot in more than one state, among whom is Alyson Kennedy, the Socialist Workers Party candidate, who is on the ballot in only seven states and therefore does not stand even a theoretical chance of winning the election.  

Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate is on the ballot in 48 states.  In my opinion, Jill Stein represents everything wrong with socialism—it is the elevation of good intentions over outcome and the facts of reality and history.  Good intentions count for everything, given how ruinously the idea of socialism has played out in the world.  Everywhere the socialists have actually gotten their hands on the levers of power, they have created not their socialist workers’ paradise of heaven on earth, but a stinking slaughterhouse hell on earth.  The so-called social democracies of Europe are in reality mixed economies, partly free and partly government controlled.  They are financially in trouble today because of their armies of unelected bureaucrats who boss everybody around and pursue stupid policies that drag them down in many ways.  (Footnote: Sweden ran into terrible financial trouble about 20 years ago, and so scaled back on government spending and  promoted more economic freedom for business, with the result that today they are doing much better than the economies of their neighbors.  Incidentally, Sweden also enjoys greater freedom and less government regulation than the US!) 

Since the Green Party’s centerpiece politics is about climate change, let me briefly address this issue:

The idea that global warming or climate change is caused by the human creation of industrial CO2 is a crackpot notion promulgated by lying, data-altering ideologues like NASA and NOAA’s James Hansen, Michael Mann, and Bill McKibben, of 350.org.  Then there are also the likes of the frauds and cheats at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit who were caught red-handed attempting to hide the decline in temperatures of the last two decades.  Punish scientists who disagree with the anthropogenic theory of climate change, pour enough money on scholars and tie their tenure to finding a human cause for global warming, and one can expect to see a lot of research reflecting this narrative.  Anybody who can read a graph, however, can plainly see that there was a Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago, in which temperatures were three degrees warmer than today. Wine grapes were grown in the north of Scotland, which can’t be done today.  The Vikings farmed the southern shores of Greenland and buried their dead in soil which today is a permafrost that will not allow one to push a Viking shovel a millimeter into the soil.  One can also see that the Earth has been through hot house periods in which the polar ice cap was completely melted while the atmospheric saturation of CO2 was much lower than today.  Conversely, the Earth has also been through periods in which atmospheric CO2 was greater than 4,500 parts per million, more than 10 times higher than today’s 400 ppm, while at the same time the Earth was going through an ice age!  Jacques Chirac, the former president of France once told a Kyoto Protocol meeting that the theory of anthropogenic global warming represented his like-minded politicians’ best chance ever for implementing global governance for the purpose of social justice, meaning socialism, of course.  THIS is what this gang is up to, not the man-eating and absurd chimera of saving the earth from humans.

So I reject Hillary on this point just I did Obama and the Greens.  They want to take over industrial civilization and hand it over to control by armies of bullying politicians and unelected bureaucrats.  In short, Hillary’s policies on climate change are really no better than the Green Party’s.  

While Gary Johnson affirms that global warming is a problem and that it is caused by humans, he points to his record as governor of New Mexico to show how he would address the matter: a company on a river was pumping toxic wastes into the river, so the EPA was called in to stop them on the grounds that this pollution was a species of trespass into the rights of citizens not to be poisoned by an industrial firm.

Alone among third party candidates, the Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson, is on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Johnson has been reviled for his embarrassing lapse of not knowing about current events in Aleppo, Syria.  Now, I worked for a Saudi Arabian company for a year, flying business jets all over the Middle East and much of Africa.  I often flew to Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Tehran, and to many other cities in the area.  While Aleppo has a long history, it began a long decline after the Suez Canal was built in 1869, and by 1977, when I moved to the Middle East, the city was in such bad shape that I never even heard of it the whole time I was there!  I knew of nobody who even spoke of it.  The current battle of Aleppo which began four years ago was not among the biggest news from the Middle East until maybe a year or two ago, and even then other news from the region seemed much bigger. 

The point about Johnson’s foreign policy is that he actually has a much better grasp on the nature of the Islamic world than any of the other candidates.  His beliefs on the purpose of government is much closer to my own than any of the other runners in this election, namely, that it should confine itself largely to the protection of individual rights.  He knows that when we back Sunnis, we shortly get mass murder of Shias, and when we back Shias, we soon have mass murders of Sunnis.  He knows that our recent deal with Iran is sheer suicidal madness.  Hillary does not; Hillary was all in on that deal.  Hillary represents a continuation and even a worsening of the awful policies of Obama.  Trump makes much more sense than Hillary on this matter.

Now, speaking of the Middle East, I find one fact so appalling that it trumps (so to speak) everything else:  If Secretary Clinton wins the election and follows through with her threat to impose a no-fly zone in Syria, then the United States will be shooting down Russian airplanes, which means war with Russia, for crying out loud!  

Dr. Stein therefore concluded that the election of Secretary Clinton would be vastly more dangerous for us than that of Donald Trump!

Along these lines, Mikhail Gorbachev recently commented that Russia and America are closer to outright war than at any time since the Cold War.  Think of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and now wrap your mind around the idea that we are closer to war than at any time since then.

Think about that when you go to the polls today.

Clinton is unacceptable for other aspects of her foreign policy too.  Not only will she get us into a war with Russian over Syria, as Secretary of State, she has already made a much bigger mess of things in the Middle East by emboldening our enemies and abandoning our only genuine ally through her antisemitism.

If Hillary were an Army officer, the scandals of her handling of the Clinton Foundation and her email server would have stripped her of the security clearance she would need even to be put in charge of a motor pool in Montana—much less to become the Commander in Chief of the US military!  Talk about poor judgment!  Hers is much worse than Trump’s  The career of General Pretraeus was ruined by his mishandling of classified material, an offense that was not nearly so egregious as Secretary Clinton’s crimes.  Other officers have been jailed for lesser offenses than Clinton’s. 

There are so many more reasons to reject Hillary for president!

Hillary recently said that the world leader she most admired is Angela Merkel, whose ruinous handling of Muslim refugees has turned Germany, like Sweden, into one of the rape capitals of Europe.  It is horrible that Hillary plans to bring into the US hundreds of thousands of Muslims from countries known to have large populations of terrorists.  It is absurd to think that it is a good idea to bring these people here instead of helping Middle Eastern countries to protect them in their own countries or neighboring countries of the same culture.

I believe it is ridiculous that the Democrats are against having voters show proof of their citizenship and identity as a condition for voting.  But Democrats have famously encouraged immigration as a means of enlarging their voter base.  Some Republican business people also want this immigration as a means for enlarging their access to cheap labor.  But one has to show an ID for so many other things!  Why not have to show an ID to vote?  You can’t buy a beer or board an airplane without proving your identity!

But enough about Hillary.

Finally on to Donald Trump.  The man is egocentric and apparently misogynistic.  He is a Type A, boorish Alpha male who is not well spoken.  He is accustomed to getting his way and not above using the government to help him succeed in business, which makes him at least somewhat of a crony capitalist.  But he is also advocating policies that in my view promise to be significantly less ruinous than Hillary Clinton’s.  Trump will not begin to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, although he will rightly deport those who are already imprisoned criminals.  He will close down funding for sanctuary cities that harbor illegals who are violent criminals.  His foreign policy promises to be much less harmful to the US than Clinton’s and his handling of the military will promote our country’s strength in the world, empower our allies and strike a better pose against our enemies.  His policy of reducing taxes on business will attract foreign businesses to the US and repatriate so many businesses that were driven away by outrageous taxation.  The envy-driven policy of soaking the rich through business taxes is insane, as one can plainly see when it is understood that business gets its money solely from its customers—so, in other words, it is customers, name you, who pay the taxes of business, just as we pay for every other factor of production. A tax on business is actually another tax on your income.

Alright, enough already!  There is so much more to mention, but it’s time for me to go vote. 

In the end, I think Trump may be a bit of a loose cannon, but Clinton is a battery of heavy artillery aimed at the heart and soul of America.

All right, so here's the bottom line:

I'm voting for Gary Johnson.  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All the smart folks I follow believe that Trump will win, in the same way and for the same reasons that the Brexit vote prevailed in the UK.  And I hope he wins.

Hillary represents the horrible continuation of Obama's ethos, and I hope that she sinks.

    

    

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