Despite Everything, Let Us Honor Memorial Day!

Despite Everything, Let Us Honor Memorial Day!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Yesterday, Memorial Day, I was brooding over the terrible situation that we Americans have created for ourselves with all our crazy wars abroad. I wrote nothing about it then. Today, a friend posted a picture of the grave stone of his grandfather, who was an Army veteran who bravely went ashore at Normandy in 1944. I wrote the following on my friend's post (and have since considerably elaborated on it below):

I honor our veterans, I treasure their service, as an aspect of the legitimate purpose of government, namely, the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property.

Now, I myself am an Army veteran of the Vietnam era. I was drafted--which hijacked my college career, because college deferments were abolished that year. I thought of immigrating to Canada as an expression of my loathing of the Vietnam War and what I deemed to be the immoral slavery of conscription, but I didn't go to Canada because, among other things, this would have meant that, as far as anybody could have known in 1972, I would never again have been able to see my friends and family unless they came to see me abroad.

I am increasingly troubled by how mindlessly our collectivist-altruist leaders squander the lives of our gallant young soldiers in crazy foreign military adventures that yield us worse than nothing--all guided by our leaders' insane, suicidal rules of engagement which are drawn from the marching orders they created for themselves in the doctrine of "Just War Theory.”

Nevertheless, let us honor Memorial Day. 

Let us honor those who gave their all to the unique, unprecedented, and crucial idea of America! 

Think of it!-- The idea of America: your life belongs to you! The good is to live it! Live and let live, and let those who can, voluntarily lend a helping hand to those who can’t! Let us deal with each other by mutual consent as traders, exchanging wonderful values for other wonderful values, all of it to our mutual benefit! 

This ethos never appeared anywhere else on Earth before America! These ideas certainly began here imperfectly, but for all their warts today, you have to conclude that they have nowhere played out any better anywhere on the planet, and nowhere do these ideas portend a more promising realization in the future! Heaven on Earth belongs to the future, but the idea of America is as close as we have come to it today! 

By the way, for those among you who "Feel the Bern," let the record show that Heaven on Earth is not to be found in Cuba or in Venezuela, or in the social science departments of American universities which lend themselves to these views. 

2016.0531

Limiting Government is Like Converting a Hyena to Vegetarianism

A Properly Limited Government 

Seems as Likely as 

Converting a Hyena to Vegetarianism 

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I am coming to believe that effectively and permanently limiting a government to its legitimate powers, namely, to the protection of individual rights, may be as likely as converting hyenas to vegetarianism.

But I am not prepared to give up this ideal of a proper government altogether! 

I agree that a proper government is required to sort out our disagreements and to restrain the predators and invaders, so long as its purpose is nailed down to the protection of every peaceful individual's right to life, liberty, and property.  And yet, in the blood red miasma of history, how can one not grow more pessimistic about the very possibility of restraining the government to such limits?  

In fact, history shows that in every attempt to create this vision of a properly limited government, this benevolent night watchman has always turned out to have hobnail boots and a swastika up his sleeve.  Well, sometimes it's a hammer and sickle in his pocket.

The specter of communism looms over the world's discussion of the social fabric--in spirit anyway, if not so much in this very term these days (outside of Italian and French politics, of course, where outright communist parties still exist in name.)  But few recognize this spirit in so many words, not as such anymore.  Even fewer people understand the moral problems inherent in socialism, in the way that Ayn Rand makes clear. 1.)  Few people even begin to understand the hopeless economics of socialism, as Ludwig von Mises so clearly analyzed it. 2.)  Fewer still know any antidotes to this ubiquitous socialist ethos.  

Moreover, even if one knows Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises down to the marrow, one should read the books of our most influential enemies, namely Marx, Kant, Plato, and perhaps their lesser acolytes... and throw in both the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, and the Koran too ... all in an effort to combat our own inevitable confirmation bias, to prevent us from being deafened by the echo chambers of our own minds.  If we don't read the work of those with whom we know we will disagree, we put ourselves in danger of remaining deaf and blind to any ideas we don't already know and approve of.

But we don't know Rand and Mises down to the marrow.  The common public discussion of Rand tends to be as sophomoric and ignorant as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's opinions of her.  Both Obama and Clinton have, in effect, dismissed any serious acceptance of Rand's ideas because, they say, while she may appeal to youthful naifs, one then grows up and gets over it.

Liberals tend to believe that there are no facts of human nature that might in any way limit their grandiose idealism in creating heaven on earth (hope and change for a fundamental transformation of the American system, as one of those recent presidential candidates put it...) with the result that when their uber-liberal soul mates, the socialists, get their hands on all the levers of power and completely substitute socialist central planning for capitalist markets, they create not a heaven on earth, but a stinking, slaughterhouse hell on earth.

And here is Bernie Sanders, avowed socialist supporter of communist causes from the time he was a wet young pup--Sanders does invoke a moral vision, but his vision is of the imposition of top down, holier-than-thou policies based on how government knows better than you how to run your life.  Sanders' socialism is a breast-beating policy of coercive, eat-the-rich collectivism and statism.  In a word, Marxism.  Righteous Marxism.  Morality as self-sacrifice for the lives of others, at least for those others who are smiled upon by the official, statist powers.  This is government by those who are eager to collect self-sacrifices from the polity, enforced at gunpoint by the police power.  Not to mention that this vision of government is run by people who have not the first clue about what material wealth is or how it is created--or even that it is indeed created, and not merely plucked from trees, like fruit, and that market freedom is a necessary precondition for the creation of wealth, or that menacing government edicts can never be the engine of creating real wealth. 

Republicans are no better, with respect to championing a secular, rights-respecting, life-serving morality for living on earth.  For example, take the comments of Ed Hudgins on the last Republican debate, in which he observes how none of the debaters argued for any of the foundational, crucial moral principles that should steer the ship of state on a proper course. 3.)

Conservatives tend to believe that there was some Halcyon past to which we should appeal, and all we need to do is to re-create this glorious past and model ourselves on that.  But the American founders' model was flawed from the start, as we can see in retrospect, in that it failed to recognize the rights of blacks or women, or the evil of slavery (not to mention the little Indian problem.)  And also not to mention that the founders' vision particularly failed to restrain the tyrannical growth of government.  Conservatives believe that wisdom and knowledge, including knowledge of right and wrong, come from God as revealed knowledge, and not as a consequence of secular, objective reason and observation of the facts of reality.  

Some libertarians understand that a proper defense of liberty must be based on foundational philosophy, but many others do not.  Ayn Rand despised libertarians because she mistakenly conflated all of them with anarcho-capitalists.  But you should read the luminous prose of Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty, and then tell me how we should address this withering problem of limiting the government to its proper functions—to the protection of these rights to our own life, liberty, and property.  We are endowed with these rights by our nature, we are entitled to protect ourselves, and we are thereby entitled to delegate the defense of these rights to others, which delegation is the moral source of legitimate government.  

Alas, governments have always grown like Topsy.  

So how do we nail government down to size? —put it a short leash, chained to a thick wall based on objective principles that go all the way down to objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics?

I believe Rand was right in her belief that a proper government is necessary to secure our legitimate rights. I agree with her that without such a government, anarchy prevails, which must result in gang warfare, such as what they have recently enjoyed in Somalia.  Of course, Rand also rightly observed that having no government would be preferable to a totalitarian government, with its inevitable death camps for dissenters and its other perceived enemies.

So where does this leave us?

I believe the better day is yet to come, and must depend on the elevation of consciousness--on our coming explicitly and better to understand our situation in the universe.  The state of this global elevation of consciousness will be greatly enhanced when more people have come by their own lights to understand the life-serving and crucial work of Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and their extended circles.

E   P   N

1.) See, for example, Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics" https://campus.aynrand.org/works/1961/01/01/the-objectivist-ethics/page6 

2.) See, for starters, Ludwig von Mises, Socialism,

http://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Sociological-Ludwig-von-Mises/dp/0913966630/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454210210&sr=8-1&keywords=Ludwig+von+Mises%2C+Socialism

3.) Edward Hudgins,  http://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/5934-trump-less-gop-debate-still-missing-moral-principles

2016.0130

Irwin Schiff, RIP

Irwin Schiff,  R.I.P.

1928-2015

by

Eric Paul Nolte

When decent people hear some authority justify his bad actions by saying, "We were just following orders," they will probably feel at least a little stab of horror rippling through their guts, like an echo of those many Nazis who were just obeying their orders to carry out the Jewish Holocaust. But to be Jewish, and a victim of some horror today, and then to hear these terrible words as a justification, is even more unforgivable.

Irwin Schiff, the eighth and last child of a Polish Jew who immigrated to America in the early twentieth century, died on 16 October 2015, of skin cancer that had metastasized to his whole body.

He was 87 years old, barely able to breath, blind, totally incapacitated. Yet the authorities hand-cuffed him to his bed frame. For months the family had been requesting that he be granted a compassionate release from jail so that he could die at home with his family around him. In the very week he died, after multiple appeals, the authorities demanded still further proof that his health was grave enough to warrant a compassionate early release.

Irwin Schiff's "crime" was that he challenged the American tax code and published books that attacked the legitimacy of the income tax. Prosecuted by the IRS, Schiff was sentenced to 14 years in jail. Given his rapidly declining health and his scheduled release in July, 2017, this meant that he was condemned to serving a death sentence. This is a man of great personal and intellectual integrity who served his country as a soldier during the Korean War. 

One of his books, The Federal Mafia, was actually banned by a court in Nevada, as if it were 1963, and the volume in question were Lady Chatterley's Lover or Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn, or, as in Germany after the war, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (which was then banned by the German censors.) The government authorities deemed Irwin Schiff's ideas a public threat requiring censorship. 

Now, the point should be made that censorship is an asinine belief. Why? In a free market of ideas, the craziest ideas are eventually self-exterminating because crazy ideas slam up against the wall of reality, like the belief that one can fly by jumping off a tall building and flapping one's arms. By contrast, the better ideas are viable because they must be consistent with reality. So I say to the worst bigots and bastards, go ahead and preach your vile, stupid nonsense openly and in public--because in a free market of ideas, the presence of these craziest notions will only make the better ideas shine even more brightly by comparison.

Here I shall not argue the merits of Irwin Schiff's case against the legitimacy of the income tax. If you have been following my blog, you will already know that I believe the IRS should be dismantled. I believe that they display the moral timbre, if not quite the ocean of blood, of the Nazi SS or the Soviet KGB. But none of this matters here. In my humble opinion, as I've written elsewhere, taxation is not the price of civilization. The price of civilization is the protection of the sacred rights of all individuals to their own life, liberty, and property. But none of this is exactly the issue here. 

The point here is that this poor man, Irwin Schiff, was essentially put away as a political prisoner for espousing and practicing an idea that offended the authorities, and he died, chained to his bed. The authorities could not be moved to release this blind, helpless man. 

The family continued to plead for his release in his last hours, but they were denied because, as the authorities explained, they were just following orders, and were forbidden to display a dram of humanity or moral autonomy. Think of Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority.

We can do better than this, we can make the world a better place. For starters, we could dismantle the IRS and stop this reprehensible tyranny.

E   P   N

2015.1123

Still a World of Unprecedented Opportunity!

Still a World of Unprecedented Opportunity!

by 

Eric Paul Nolte

The New Yorker style cartoon says, "My desire to remain well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane."

Well, then, there is also the fact that the "news" would seem to be largely a matter of one's point of view. What is news?  And what shall we make of it? As it stands, the "news" is produced mostly by crony big businesses who comb the world high and low for every little thing that will arouse our fear, outrage, disgust, and our despair, while ignoring every evidence of the inspiring, the creative, and the amazing! 

Of these inspiring and astonishing wonderments, there is so much of it that one can truly argue that we live in an age of unprecedented opportunity, even in the face of the government's dreadful drag of collectivist insanity!

What?! We have a hundred thousand pages of government regulations, issued by unelected bureaucrats who wield life and death control over our actions, dictating the details of damn near everything that anybody can hope to do in the world.  How can I say that ours remains a realm of unprecedented opportunity?  

Because this opinion is the result of my observation of the arithmetic of the matter.  I don't disagree with the idea that government is profoundly destructive, but follow the math here. 

Start with the addition of the amazing creativity of entrepreneurs and inventors.  Their passion to create new ideas infuses the world with their astonishing new stuff. Subtract from this sum the destruction created by the dead hand of government, whose terrible interventions of the righteous, socialist, egalitarian destroyers, greatly slow the stream of invention and creativity.  I won't attempt to document every step of the positive case here, but it should suffice to ask you to compare the worlds of 1980 and 2015.

Do I need to invoke anything more than the advent of the world wide web, the internet, cell phones, and email?  I didn't even try hard to name things that have led to this radical transformation of the quality of our lives.  The difference is dramatic and profound.  

Government produces nothing that is not financed by its coercive takings from the citizens.  Everything government does is made possible by the wealth they take from the citizens by force, through taxation.  

At best, government succeeds when it creates the stable atmosphere in which the creative elements can bring their products to market, restrains the predators in our midst, negotiates the disputes among the well-intentioned, and repels the attacks of foreign invaders.  These are the functions of a legitimate government, in essence: the protection of life, liberty, and property--the protection of the individual rights of all its citizens. The civil order, and ours is arguably the most generous population in the history of the world, should take care of that small percentage of the population that is truly hapless, helpless, and deserving of our charity.    

Now think of how dramatically greater all this progress since 1980 might have been, absent the dead foot of government control, as opposed to the "invisible hand" in Adam Smith's formulation of how the successful pursuit of selfish interest must necessarily benefit the greater good.

E   P  N

2015.1017

The Imperative of Praising Heroes Like Pamela Geller

The Imperative of Praising Heroes like Pamela Geller

by

Eric Paul Nolte

I continue to be appalled by the refusal of Americans, both liberals and conservatives, to name and condemn the naked evil that is sweeping much of the world in the name of Islam.

Much blame has been heaped upon Pamela Geller, Fleming Rose, and other heroes who publicly dare to condemn the Islamists who threaten anyone with death for the “crime” of drawing Mohammed or otherwise offending their, oh, so delicate feelings.  

The right to free speech is as fundamental and precious as the rights to life, liberty, and property, and to condemn those who draw the public's attention to the need for this most basic right is comparable to blaming the rape victim for being raped.

But there is something else that needs to be said to those cowards in the West who will not reprint the “offensive” cartoons, and who scorn brave idealists like Pamela Geller:

You who piously repeat the lie that Islam is “a great religion of peace,” you who fail to stand up and righteously condemn the absolute evil of Islamism, you are an accessary to the Islamist crimes of murdering innocents, you are guilty of aiding and abetting the evildoers of Islam, and you thereby make yourselves as loathsome and evil as the Islamists!  

This view derives from a crucial observation that Ayn Rand makes in her writings on ethics: that one who will not condemn an evil is an accessary to the crime, and is therefore morally little better than the perpetrator of that crime.

With all my talk about evil here, perhaps I should underscore, in a thumbnail sketch, this aspect of the ethics I believe: that the Good consists of everything that supports rational human life and flourishing, and the evil amounts to everything that threatens the well-being of such peaceful, rational people. 

All attempts to appease the Islamists are doomed.  There is no placating them.  In the end there is only outright surrender or principled opposition to them, backed by appropriately lethal force, in the name of self-defense.

To those who blame Pamela Geller, I say: shape up and recognize what is going on in the world, and realize that it is not yet too late to reclaim your moral virtue and stand up against this Islamist evil, this terrible threat to the great values that have created every wonder and comfort of the modern world!  It not yet too late to stand up in such an act of self-defense.  I’m not sure how much longer we have before it is indeed too late.  

E   P   N

2015.0731
rev. 2015.0801
and 2015.0828  

Man as Self-Made, Free Will, and Ayn Rand as Parent: Another Look

Man as Self-Made, Free Will, and Ayn Rand as Parent:

Another Look

by Eric Paul Nolte

I recently expressed my wish that Ayn Rand had become a parent, because I surmise that had she reared children, this experience might have enriched her view of man as a being of self-made soul.

I expressed the opinion that we are not entirely beings of self-made soul, because we are clearly delivered into the time and place of our birth as if by a roll of the cosmic dice, which endows us with a wide range of traits that limit our horizon severely.  However it is also clear to those of us who have studied the matter from an Objectivist perspective that every normal human is endowed with the power to think or not, or turn one’s attention from one thing to another.  This power of choice, the freedom to think, is in fact the very power of free will.  

So we do have the power of free will by which to guide the unfolding of our gifts, such as they are, and this is the most crucial human trait.

I suspect Rand might have worried that by not affirming Homo sapiens as beings of entirely self-made soul, she would be opening herself to the charge that she was denying free will and affirming the view of man as a helpless pawn in a deterministic universe.

But as Rand herself points out, free will is an aspect of human nature, granted to us by the law of causality.  As she says, free will does not contradict the deterministic laws of science, it is the embodiment of a power granted to us by our nature.

Neither did I intend to suggest the ironic point that had Rand been a parent, she would have been forced to come to the conclusion at which I would have hoped to see her arrive.  I agree that it is not necessary to have personal experience of many things in order to arrive at a true understanding of those things.  

For example, one needn’t actually be a parent in order to know with certainty that the moment babies arrive on the planet they are already endowed with a fully formed temperament and a matching style of learning that is unlikely to change radically as a result of subsequent experience.  Neither must one have been a parent in order to know with certainty that some poor blighted soul, born into a cruelly oppressive culture and with an IQ of 70, will not likely enjoy the same power to fashion one’s own soul as that of a genius born into an auspicious time and place.  Nor should it be controversial that the range of human potential embodied by these two children does not mean that they lack free will.  By our nature as human beings, all of us are born with this, our most singular and fundamental trait, the power to choose to think, the power of rationality.  What I am asserting here is that human beings cannot enjoy the power to fashion ourselves without a wide range of genetic and environmental constraints on our potential.  

In short, to be a being of entirely self-made soul is not in the cards for Homo saps, but any normal person is endowed with the power to choose to think, and this makes all the difference in the world!

E  P  N

2015.0610b

I Wish Ayn Rand Had Been a Parent

I Wish Ayn Rand Had Been a Parent

by

Eric Paul Nolte

We just saw the Oscar award-winning film, “Still Alice.”

The story involves the tragically unusually early mental decline of a brilliant professor of linguistics at Columbia, due to Alzheimer’s disease.

A truly horrible premise!  I can’t think of a much worse fate, unless it is losing a child at a tender age.

Now Ayn Rand was insistent that man was a being of entirely self-made soul.  I think she must have held this belief because she herself lacked a certain worldliness, a certain experience of life that is available to a large population of others who had the opportunity to be parents.  

I wish Ayn Rand had had children… imagine her getting up at 03:00 every night for months or years in the service of her babies!  Ah, yes, we are entirely beings of self-made soul!  Right.

Imagine if she had had a husband or parent with… Zeus forgive the thought… Alzheimers… or… if she herself had come down with dementia, and had enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on the horror of this condition while still in command of her intellect.  Is dementia the result of a being who is truly of self-made soul?

What revision to her view of man as a being of self-made soul might she have made  if she had had the opportunity to reflect on the situation of some poor sub-Saharan African girl, born into a Muslim family, born with AIDS, born into a family where, if she survives these miserable circumstances long enough to reach puberty, she will enjoy the opportunity to experience an adolescent rite of passage in which her loving elders will slice off her clitoris in some horrible, unhygienic ceremony in which she stands a good chance of contracting an infection that will kill her?  To what degree does this poor, blighted soul, who, if typical of much of her demographic, does not have an IQ much above 70, stand of creating a life of meaning, purpose, and joy?  

If you say this poor girl is a being of self-made soul, I pronounce you an idiot, an ideologue, in mindless orbit to the, yes, otherwise brilliance of Ayn Rand.

Now, I credit Ayn Rand with offering me a set of values that essentially saved my life from a fate at least as bad as death.  But let us acknowledge that she did not have all the answers.  So far, nobody comes even close to Rand’s best answers, but let us affirm that we are still keeping our minds open and searching for ever better answers as we move forward in this on-going search for wisdom and happiness.

E  P  N

2015.0604