One Reality

Massacre at Fort Hood

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:56:00 +0000

I like the “Today’s Headlines” email feature that the New York Times provides free for the asking. The daily post starts with links to three top stories and a quotation of the day, this last of which is generally intended to pique interest in one of the headline stories.

So, I find it interesting that on a day when more and more alarming details emerge about the connections between the Fort Hood murderer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, and virulently anti-American Muslims, the daily quote that the New York Times chose to present was this:

“Whether it’s self-medicating, anger or violence, these are the consequences of war, and you have to think about all the people affected by soldiers coming home, the parents, spouses, children, brothers, sisters, aunts and cousins.” - Cynthia Thomas, an Army wife who runs a private assistance center for soldiers in Killeen, Tex., called Under the Hood Café.[Note 1.]

Are we supposed to infer that this is the source of last week’s massacre at Fort Hood?

Obviously, there are very real troubles related to suicide and violence among returning soldiers, who have undergone stresses unimaginable to those of us who have not seen combat. These are serious problems that deserve attention, and it is perfectly appropriate for a newspaper to run an article on the topic. But the presence of this quote on this day, along with the accompanying story, “At Fort Hood, Some Violence Is Too Familiar,” leaves little doubt that the Times is pressing hard to scatter some chaff, the purpose being to direct attention away from Hasan’s Muslim connection and to make this atrocity seem like just one more in a series of violent acts by American soldiers.

Is Nadal Malik Hasan really the typical troubled soldier with post-traumatic stress, as the Times would have us believe? Maj. Hasan had not returned from combat; he had never been deployed. He was himself a psychiatrist. While his fellow American soldiers were fighting in the field, Hasan was busy surfing radical Islamist web sites urging Muslims to kill U.S. Troops; he had been in occasional contact (“10 to 20 times”) with an Islamist spiritual leader in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who had previously been the imam of Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center, the Virginia mosque attended by Hasan. (Awlaki, who knew three of the September 11 hijackers, had “drawn the interest of law-enforcement officials in several terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.”[Note 2.])

Hasan did not quietly and desperately commit suicide as tragically ten American soldiers have done this year alone at Fort Hood. He did not kill his wife and then turn the gun on himself, as happened in one awful incident at Fort Hood last year. He did not kill a fellow member of his division in a moment of violence at a party, as did a soldier last July.

No, Maj. Hasan systematically shot forty-three of his fellow American soldiers, killing thirteen of them while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

Because there is no indication that Maj. Hasan was part of a conspiracy - and perhaps also out of obedience to political correctness - the incident is not being classified as a terrorist attack. But his actions, with their apparent jihadist motive, the plodding pre-meditation, and the sheer casualties of his final fury, have much more in common with say, the attack on the USS Cole than with the violence of a distraught soldier. In fact, if one looks clearly at the matter, Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan acted much less like a soldier (no matter how troubled) of the United States Army than as an enemy of the United States.

If the New York Times had wanted to capture the essence of the Fort Hood massacre, they would have done better to select for the daily quote the words of the imam that Hasan had contacted. Anwar al-Awlaki wrote on his web site, following the incident, that Hasan was a “hero”:

“He is a man of conscience who could not bear living a contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people . . . The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.” - Anwar al-Awlaki.[Note 3.]

NOTES

1. From the “Today’s Headlines” email distribution, The New York Times, 10 Nov 2009.

2. “Hasan, Radical Cleric Had Contact,” The Wall Street Journal, 10 Nov 2009.

3. “U.S. Knew of Suspect’s Tie to Radical Cleric,” The New York Times, 9 Nov 2009.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall - Twenty Years Later

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:01:00 +0000

To commemorate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 Nov 1989, here is an interview with Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate.

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 11

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:23:00 +0000

(Note: This is Part 11 in the series started here. The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #11:

Without God nothing is holy. This is definitional. Holiness emanates from a belief in the holy. This explains, for example, the far more widespread acceptance of public cursing in secular society than in religious society. To the religious, there is holy speech and profane speech. In much of secular society the very notion of profane speech is mocked. [Note 1.]

If Mr. Prager is speaking of the strictly religious definition of the word holy - namely, revered due to association with God - then as he says, it is a matter of definition. Without God nothing is holy. Also true: Without man nothing is manly, without fruit nothing is fruity, without red nothing is scarlet, etc. The point is trivial.

However, his elaboration and example - sacred speech versus profanity - indicates he is speaking of the more general concept of reverence, which is not necessarily religious. I’ll return to this point in a moment, but first I have a couple of points to make about profanity itself, since he introduced the topic.

The reason that public cursing has much more widespread acceptance in secular societies than in religious ones is that only secular societies are free. That is, societies that accept public profanity are societies that permit profanity, along with all other forms of speech.

There is an irony here: The very respect for individual freedom that is required to defend freedom of speech is the quality that unmuzzles the vilest disrespect for everything, including religion, freedom, or any other thing that one may hold as a value. But so be it. One may disdain gutter talk, loathe four-letter words, and regard profanity as offensive or even blasphemous - but in a free country, the recourse is to change the channel, leave the theatre, put the magazine back on the shelf, or tell the foul-mouthed offender to leave your house. Barring direct threats, which are a form of force, one has the right to say whatever one wishes - provided it is on his own property and on his own dime.

Furthermore, cursing and swear words do not exhaust the field of offensive language. Hearing an occasional four-letter word from a fan in the bleachers at Fenway Park is far less offensive to me than hearing a mufti spew invective against the Jews and deny the Holocaust, or hearing a Christian minister blame the September 11th atrocity on the United States government and shout, “God damn America!”

Many of us may dislike public cursing (and for good reasons), but for those that dislike the acceptance of public cursing, as Mr. Prager put it, it may be instructive to look at the alternatives. In Islamist countries, I have no doubt that the prevalence of public cursing is far less than in the West, and in communist countries, other forms of speech (possibly including cursing), would be suppressed. Does this indicate that Islamist or communist societies that cow their citizens into holding their tongues are superior to Western civilizations that permit freedom of expression? Certainly not. Paradoxically, though widespread cursing itself may be a symptom of cultural deterioration, the fact of its presence indicates political superiority.[Note 2.]

The profanity that Prager attributes to secular societies tends to be of a disintegrating nature. Habitual curses vary in degree and are usually not malicious. Nevertheless, they can never elevate; they can only tread upon values, tear down, shock, trivialize, humiliate, mock. This brings me back to his main point (i.e. his general point of reverence, not his tautological point of holiness). What Prager should be damning (though perhaps he would choose another word) is not secularity but subjectivism and its irrationality.

If God is the proper source of reverence, then the objects of reverence are to be obtained from authorities. What is holy is what the shaman or priest or imam or rabbi says is holy. (Less traditional religions may replace scriptural authorities with one’s own whims and feelings - establishing one's own "personal Jesus," as it were - but it amounts to the same thing since scripture itself is the collection of the whims and feelings of ancestors.)

If, on the other hand, one is guided by reason, then the objects of reverence are determined by the facts of reality. One will respect and revere things that are good - which is to say, things that are beneficial for one’s life.

I can tell you first hand that I hold as solemn a reverence for my values - for reason, individual rights, capitalism; the Founding Fathers; heroes of sport, science, and industry; my favorite authors, composers, artists - as the holiest of the faithful does for his saints. The source of that reverence is my own judgment; no authority is or could be higher. I cannot conceive of admiring a hero that was chosen for me by somebody else; a reverence based in faith or obedience is counterfeit. True reverence requires an unshakable commitment to living a human life; it is profoundly selfish.

If one looks up the word honor in the American Heritage Dictionary [Note 3.], the definition of the word is followed by a list of synonyms and their connotations. To illustrate the meaning of reverence, the dictionary turns not to some ancient icon of faith, but to mankind’s arch-defender of reason:

Reverence is a feeling of deep respect and devotion: “Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man” (Ayn Rand).

(Note: The next installment in the series is coming soon.)

NOTES

1. Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2. The fate of America hangs in this struggle. Will this cultural deterioration continue to erode the values that make America and the West superior? Or will we manage to preserve reason and liberty - and indeed, not only preserve but establish them explicitly as never before?

3. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MA, p. 843.

Weather Report - Teen Town

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:30:00 +0000

I noticed that my blog has become even more one dimensional than usual lately, so I thought I would start adding some short, easy, and light posts on a variety of topics, such as some music that I like. (It's nice to do a post that doesn't require eight hours of writing and editing.)

Below is Weather Report playing "Teen Town" live in Germany in 1978. It's strange that I don't know too much about the band because when I was about sixteen, I immediately fell in love with the Night Passage album, which I had taken out of my local library. It would have been like me to go to the used record store and buy all the Weather Report I could get my hands on, but for some reason I never did. I own only a couple of their albums.

Anyway, the lineup in the video is the one I am most familiar with: the incomparable bassist Jaco Pastorius, Peter Erskine on drums, and of course, Wayne Shorter on sax and Joe Zawinul on piano.

Too Big to Fail - Addendum

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:23:00 +0000

A comment to my last post reflected a view that at first blush seems like plain common sense: When a company accepts money voluntarily from the government, it is henceforth beholden to that government. In effect, the company is no longer private, and thus it ought to accept the government’s decrees as the price of having been helped with public money.

As reasonable as this may seem on the surface, I think it is profoundly mistaken. In fact, it is precisely this logic that the government uses to ratchet its hold on private citizens. My view is that though this state of affairs may be sensible for voluntary transactions between free, civilized individuals, it does not pertain to parties that initiate force – of which governments are the most dangerous examples.

For one thing, the money that the government uses to bail out businesses is not theirs, the government’s, to give away; they have seized it by force from citizens who earned it (including the very businesses they are bailing out). Thus, the government can no more justly claim that it is “owed” something in return than could a gangster who demands money in return for “protection.” Some may object here that even if the government is not owed concessions in exchange for a bailout, the public who footed the bill is. But there is no collective “public” that pays for bailouts; it is productive individuals who suffer the loss in uncountable ways. There is simply no practical way to equitably restore the wealth that was taken. The only way to solve the problem is to remove the government from the economy, not to increase its role with further rules.

Another consideration is indicated by a word I used in the first paragraph, which I deliberately preserved from the original comment: voluntarily. How are we to know if a company accepted money voluntarily? What does that even mean when the government holds all the cards - which is to say, holds all legal use of force? This is the equivalent of saying that the victims of a holdup, faced with the “choice” of “your money or your life,” handed over their valuables “voluntarily.” I submit that the adverb “voluntarily” cannot apply to the charade of government handouts. The distortions introduced by government interference in the economy apply force in so many direct and indirect ways, it is impossible to untangle the layers of complicity or resistance.[Note 1.]

Sure, there exist immoral businessmen that overtly cozy up to the government, lobbying for favors, actively seeking to use the government to block out competitors (e.g. via anti-trust laws), or urging regulations that will open up a new “market” for them (e.g. the “cap-and-trade” vultures). The executives at such companies deserve to burn in hell, if I may borrow the religious image to emphasize my point. Nevertheless, I still cannot consent to that hell being delivered to them via ever-increasing government controls. The businessmen that sought government favors surely deserve to be destroyed by the monster they nurtured . . . but the rest of us don’t!

Nearly every company - especially those in the heavily regulated industries such as automobile manufacturing, finance, energy, and medical - can quite plausibly argue that they would not have taken a government handout if they had not been hampered by the government in the first place. The one detail I remember from Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, which I read some twenty-five years ago, is his claim that all things being equal, he would not have sought the government bailout of Chrysler, but did so only because the government-imposed burdens (such as environmental regulations and union support) had rendered Chrysler unable to keep up with Japanese competitors.

The bottom line is that the logic of quid pro quo, when applied to compulsory transactions, is a blank check to increase government control by degrees until freedom is extinguished. We must never sanction increased government controls, even when there is a superficial “logic” to it.

To see this process at work, let us look at the TARP handouts. These funds were foisted upon the nine major American banks, whether they wanted them or not, and when several banks wanted to hand the TARP money right back, they had to get special permission to do so.[Note 2.] This TARP money was used as the excuse for the government to limit the wages of executives at financial companies that received TARP funds. Going forward, this restriction will obviously cause a “brain drain,” a flight of talented executives from companies saddled with a salary cap to companies that are still free in that respect. So what is the next “logical” step? Seeing that the free companies have an “unfair advantage” over financial companies that have a salary cap, the government will then impose the salary cap on all financial companies, whether or not they ever received government funds. This will cause executives to flee to other industries, which will invite further controls to fix the problems caused by previous controls, and on and on.

Ayn Rand encapsulated this self-perpetuating power-grabbing technique, writing, “One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism, consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.”[Note 3.] Let us not compound the failures and injustices of intrusive governments by ascribing logic and common sense to their actions as they pull the noose tighter around our necks.

NOTES

1. A case in point is Treasury Secretary Paulson’s forcing of banks to accept TARP funds in the October 13, 2008, meeting behind closed doors in Washington. True, Secretary Paulson (probably) did not literally brandish a baseball bat as he walked around the conference table, as did Robert De Niro’s Al Capone in The Untouchables, but his “talking points” amounted to an implicit threat. Here was an agent of the federal government (in this case, the Bush Administration) presenting private citizens with an offer they could not refuse – literally not letting them out of the room until they complied. Quoting from the document obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act, Paulson's threat was subtly veiled: “’We don’t believe it is tenable to opt out because doing so would leave you vulnerable and exposed. If a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware your regulator will require it in any circumstance,’ the document said, citing Paulson talking points.” (Source: “Paulson Forced Banks to Take TARP Money: Documents,” CNBC, 14 May 2009.)

2. One of the banks was BB&T, and as an aside, I strongly recommend listening to the wonderful lecture by the retired BB&T CEO John Allison, available here at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

3. “The Lessons of Vietnam – Part II,” The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. III, No. 25, 9 September 1974.

Objectivist Round Up #120

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:28:00 +0000

Check out the latest Objectivist Round Up at 3 Ring Binder!

Too Big to Fail?

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:46:00 +0000

The federal government’s blitz on private property continues with the latest move out of the Obama playbook. The headline: “U.S. Considers Reigning In ‘Too Big to Fail’ Institutions.”

Congress and the Obama administration are about to take up one of the most fundamental issues stemming from the near collapse of the financial system last year – how to deal with institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to rescue them when they get into trouble.[Note 1, emphasis mine.]

Notice that the Times article did not state that the government believes it has no choice; it states as if it were a matter of fact that the government has no choice. Such is the mentality of the left; it cannot even conceive of a civilization in which people stand on their own feet.

Even the term “too big to fail,” which has become all too common in this bailout era, is deliberately deceptive. The concept really means “too big to allow to fail.” Discounting the very idea that failure could be allowed makes it seem like government intervention is a necessity, a metaphysical fact of nature, as opposed to a set of choices (and bad ones at that) made by politicians. “Too big to fail” bypasses the necessity to think; there is no question of whether a company should be left to reap the consequences of its own actions or be artificially propped up with taxpayer money. The modern politician does not pause to consider his self-appointed role as meddler. Ham-handed interference comes so naturally, it would not occur to him to think about the rights he tramples and the destruction he wreaks.

We have already seen the Bush-Obama federal government shower taxpayer money upon private companies as an alleged “rescue” from a crisis the government itself created, in some cases forcing the companies to accept the loot against their wishes. This “gift” was used as a means of exerting pressure on them days or weeks later. Now, the Obama administration claims the prerogative not only to decide which companies are “too big to fail” and what constitutes “being in trouble,” but seizes the power to “throw out management, wipe out the shareholders and change the terms of existing loans held by the institution.”

This power-grabbing strategy is simple in the extreme, and is as ancient and common as gullibility, fear, and hatred itself. The government exerts force upon its citizens, which invariably creates a problem; this problem is blamed on a resented group (foreigners, Jews, corporate executives), which is used by the government as the pretext to grab more power, creating more problems, etc. This vicious cycle is precisely the means by which the protection of individual rights has been whittled away in the United States for more than a century. It is not hard to see that the technique is self-perpetuating, if the public is willing – or forced – to fall in line.

This trend must be checked and reversed now, before it is too late. We are not yet in the thrall of dictatorship; we are not yet at the point of being fully silenced by force. True, there are ominous threats to free speech (to name just a couple, the White House snitch line and the FTC threat against bloggers), but I can still publish this blog post without fear of direct punishment by the government. The time to hide typewriters and printing presses under the floorboards has not yet come. Nevertheless, the acceleration of the federal government’s grasp of power under George Bush and Barack Obama is frightening. Mr. Obama’s “shock and awe” campaign against American citizens is intended to numb and inure us to complete government control.

The federal government (with the nearly full cooperation of the mainstream media) obtains the consent of the public by obscuring the nature of their increasing grip on us. Private businesses are demonized as predatory and compulsory, while government activities are characterized as “offering more choices” and “protecting the consumer.” Politicians and journalists count on Americans either not understanding what freedom is, or simply going along with the pretense that this is just business as usual. For instance, in the Times article I quoted, assistant Treasury secretary Michael S. Barr characterized the takeover as “market discipline”; the difference between private citizens judging how to handle their own affairs voluntarily and the government forcing citizens to act against their own judgment is supposed to be disregarded by the public as a superficial technicality.

Americans must not let the government pull this legerdemain without naming its nature. Government actions are not “market mechanisms,” but are anathema to free markets. Governments are institutions not of free trade but of force, and as such, must be strictly limited to their only appropriate role: safeguarding the rights of its citizens to deal with each other peaceably and voluntarily as each sees fit. Contrary to his own opinion, President Obama is not in charge of every company in America; in fact, he should have far less say in the operations of businesses than any floor-sweeper or hamburger-flipper. Not only should the president not preside in board rooms, but he ought to be respectfully thrown out. Capitalism requires the complete separation of the economy and the state.

The fact that the president and his team of czars think they can fire executives, defy shareholder contracts, and set wages to what they deem fit, is shocking and outrageous. It is not merely un-American but anti-American. Mr. Obama has demonstrated conduct befitting South American dictators and Chicago gangsters, not the President of the United States - and it deserves every bit of indignant protest from the Americans who are still alert enough to cry foul amid the masses dazzled under the president’s spell.

Despite the endless insistence by the media and politicians, it is plainly not true that any company is “too big to fail,” or that “the government has no choice but to rescue them.” In fact, when any company, big or small, goes out of business in a free market, it constitutes justice; it indicates that the company judged something wrong and the failure sends accurate signals to the rest of the market. People who did not make mistakes are not forced to pay for those who did.

It is only the unfree market - government meddling, such as we have under Bush and Obama - that causes distortions that destroy wealth and trample upon justice.

NOTES

1. “U.S. Considers Reining In ‘Too Big to Fail’ Institutions,” The New York Times, 25 Oct 2009.

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 10

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:50:00 +0000

(Note: This is Part 10 in the series started here. The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #10:

Without God, there is little to inspire people to create inspiring art. That is why contemporary art galleries and museums are filled with "art" that celebrates the scatological, the ugly and the shocking. Compare this art to Michelangelo's art in the Sistine chapel. The latter elevates the viewer -- because Michelangelo believed in something higher than himself and higher than all men. [Note 1.]

I do not dispute Mr. Prager’s denigration of modern art as “the scatological, the ugly and the shocking,” but he misidentifies the root of this cultural phenomenon. The disgraceful procession of trash that has passed for art in the last century or so is not a symptom of the rejection of God but of the rejection of values, which itself has a deeper cause: the rejection of reason. In this, paradoxically enough, the religious have a philosophical root in common with the modern artists who not only generally reject the mind in favor of primal emotions, but spit upon the specific symbols and icons held sacred by the faithful.

This is not to equate the religious with the nihilistic, of course. There is no comparison between civilized, respectful, and thoughtful religious people (like Dennis Prager himself) and the “artists” who see the urinal, with or without a crucifix immersed in it, as a suitable means of expressing their view of mankind. My point is that the antidote for the disgusting bile that is vomited forth from the unfocused minds of modern artists is not faith but reason. Faith unfastens the human mind from the moorings of reality. This is relatively harmless, to be sure, in the average modern citizen, who at most fingers the rosary for an hour on Sundays but otherwise leads a civilized, productive life. But faith also gives rise to other manifestations, including purportedly secular ones, that are destructive. The irrationality that leads some to the Bible or the Zodiac leads others to Dada and the shock-value of sacrilege.

Mr. Prager invokes a popular formulation to indicate the requirements of the great artist - that he “elevates the viewer” because he believes in “something higher than himself.” I am sympathetic to this idea and there is a certain plausibility to it; after all, great art must somehow escape from the trivial, the day-to-day. It should expand to epic scale; it should endure through the ages. The naturalistic banality embodied by modern works like Duane Hanson’s Tourists, for example, sneer at greatness. The random smears of Mark Rothko and drips of Jackson Pollock are so empty of content, they elevate the viewer only in the contortions of logic that they require of him to pretend they belong on a gallery wall.

However, the phrase “something higher than oneself” carries with it two connotations that miss the mark as a proper requirement for works of art. First, there is a suggestion of sacrifice, the idea that men owe their lives and efforts to “something higher”: a god, the state, or one’s fellow men. The phrase also contains a hint of Platonic duality, a severing of the mind and body. The physical, in this view, holds an inferior status to the contemplative. It suggests a disdain for the material needs of man, for his efficacy, for the pursuit of practical values. Both connotations are perfectly consistent with Prager’s religious viewpoint - specifically, the altruist morality and the philosophic intrinsicism of religion, respectively - but are not properly held as prerequisites for great art.

In contrast to Mr. Prager’s formulation, I hold that an artist's works can be great when he is able to express something universal about men. This is not the same thing as “something greater than oneself.” Universals are not “transcendent” in the supernatural sense; properly conceived, they are objectively real abstractions. The pages and canvases of great works of art depict particular characters, events, and images that represent high-level concepts and universal truths. They depict men’s actions and capabilities, his victories and follies.

For religionists, the realm of universal truth is some supernatural dimension; for modern artists, there is no universal truth (with the exception, perhaps, of man’s depravity, misery, and helplessness). Neither perspective is correct. Great art should convey man’s rationality, not his superstitions; it should present his suitability for living in this world, not his dismissal of reality for a mystical paradise.

Figure A - Christ Washing the Feet of St. Peter; (top) from Gospel book of Otto III, ca. 1000 AD, (bottom) from Sadao Watanabe, 1992. Does either of these “elevate the viewer”?

Dennis Prager’s choice of example actually serves to subvert his point. He cites Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel as being great art - which, of course, it is. But does Michelangelo represent a truly Christian viewpoint or the opposite?

My claim is that from a broad historical perspective, the effect of Christianity on art is the same as its effect on all cultural matters, and for the same reasons: namely, it was detrimental and corrupting. “More than any other form of human expression,” wrote Leonard Peikoff, “art is the barometer that lays bare a period’s view of reality, of life, of man.”[Note 2.] The rise of Christianity signaled the turn of men away from reason to faith, from rationality to mysticism, from earth to heaven... and European art reflects this.

In Greece of the 5th-century BC (with particular emphasis on before Christ), man was a virtuous, noble, thinking hero. It is here that great art was born, along with philosophy, history, and science. Christianity interrupted and reversed this development, consigning man to his divine status as a puny, groveling slave. Then, in the Renaissance, man was reborn as a rational, efficacious hero once more. The Renaissance was, in philosophic terms, a throwing off of the chains of feudal Christendom and a restoration of the pre-Christian Greek ideals. Sure, the exemplary figures of the Renaissance had the superficial vestiges of Christianity - how could it be otherwise after a thousand years of Christian domination? - but the essence of the Renaissance was a rediscovery of reason.

If Mr. Prager wanted to demonstrate art inspired by God, why did he choose a Renaissance artist - arguably, the greatest Renaissance artist - and not choose art from a period that was informed uniformly by religious devotion? There are countless examples of great historical and artistic significance to be found from medieval architecture, sculptures, mosaics, tapestries, and paintings. Why choose the Adam of the Sistene Chapel (Figure B) instead of the Adam of the Hildesheim Cathedral (Figure C)? Surely the latter conveys the cringing humility that is expected of the pious. Mr. Prager ought to regard Michelangelo’s Adam as demonstrating a blasphemous equality with God, bursting with the Promethean qualities that Prager condemns in point #12 as “hubris.”

Figure B. Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam. (Image credit below.)

Figure C. Adam and Eve Reproached by the Lord. (Image credit below.)

Of course, my questions are rhetorical. Mr. Prager chose Michelangelo precisely in order to artificially prop up his religious argument with the creations of a reasoning genius. The ambiguity of who created whom in The Creation of Adam is a product not of Christian devotion but of the rebirth of reason. The figure of Michelangelo’s David (Figure D) cannot be squared with a religious viewpoint; deference, humility, and obedience are utterly absent from its aspect. It is impossible to imagine this figure with a bowed head or bent knee. This titan could serve neither man nor god; he is his own master. We see in David independence, competence, thoughtfulness - a profound and serene confidence. If there were ever a phrase that David would not accept it would be this: that something is "greater than himself" or "higher than all men."

Figure D. Michelangelo, David. (Image credit below.)

It is plainly not true that without God, there is “little to inspire people to create inspiring art.” The subject and inspiration of great art is properly man and his reasoning mind. True, God - or more specifically, man’s relationship to his gods - has been the subject of many great works of art. But many more great works have nothing to do with God. Revolution, war, leadership, industry, productivity, justice, and revenge have inspired great works of art. And let us not forget romantic love, filial love, fraternal love, and maternal love (not to mention hatred).

If faith is the inspiration for great art, we should expect the greatest art to have emerged from the periods and locations in which faith or anti-reason dominated: the Dark and Middle Ages in Europe, the Orient, the Weimar Republic, and today, from Iran and Afghanistan. If, on the other hand, reason is the inspiration for great art, we should expect the greatest art to have emerged from those places and times in which reason was valued: ancient Greece, and Europe of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

History has given us the answer.

(Note: The next installment in the series is here.)

NOTES

1. Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, Penguin Putnam, Inc., New York, 1982, p.161.

IMAGE CREDITS

Figure A. (top) Christ Washing the Feet of St. Peter, from the Society of Clerks Secular of Saint Basil, http://www.reu.org/public/Iconholy/Jesus/ChPeterFeetOtto.jpg.

(bottom) Sadao Watanabe, Christ Washing the Feet of St. Peter, from the Scriptum Modern Japanese Prints, http://www.japaneseprintart.com/images/prints/watanabe%5Fchrist%5Fwashing%5Fpeters%5Ffeet%2Ejpg

Figure B. from Wikipedia entry for “The Creation of Adam,” Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/God2-Sistine_Chapel.png

Figure C. from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Adam and Eve Reproached by the Lord, http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/91/3991-004-E18BF0E9.jpg

Figure D. from Wikipedia entry for “Michelangelo,” http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Michelangelos_David.jpg

Note to the Republican National Committee

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:26:00 +0000

I sent this note to Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican National Committee. It’s a little too long, I know, but I wanted to drive home my assertions with enumerated details that emphasized just how far the Republicans have strayed from defending limited government. I’m hoping a couple of things mitigate the defect of the letter’s length. First, I sent it by “snail mail,” which may earn the letter slightly more attention than would an email or blog comment. Second, the bold type may help highlight the essence of the idea, even if the bulk of the text is glossed over by the intern who is likely to be reading it.

Dear Mr. Steele:

The leftist attack on individual rights led by Barack Obama is unquestionably a disaster for America. However, the Democratic hold on the White House and Congress does have one benefit: it has unshackled the opposition, leading, as you said, to “the rising mood of freedom-loving Americans across this country.” The spontaneous rise of the “Tea Parties,” the indignant opposition to the government takeover of industries, and the exploding sales of Atlas Shrugged simply would not have happened with the Republicans in power.

Why not? The reason is certainly not that John McCain would have been much better than Barack Obama. Freedom lovers are being heard now because Republicans had silenced defenders of American principles more effectively than the Democrats could hope to have done.

Precisely because Republicans are supposed to be the guardians of freedom and limited government, they have rendered the true defenders of liberty impotent. When Republicans pursue the policies of a bloated, paternalistic state, as they have for decades, their failures are blamed on freedom. When Republicans expand the federal regulatory grip with ever-increasing rules and restrictions, the inevitable failures are blamed absurdly on “deregulation” and the “free” market. Republicans have outspent Democrats for almost half a century; they dealt the killing blow to the gold standard, imposed price controls, meddled ceaselessly with the monetary system, and expanded the welfare state. It is primarily Republicans who have ushered religion into government affairs and legislation. Republicans are behind compulsory health insurance, corporate bailouts, TARP, funding of religious groups, and the prescription drug bill. Republicans have prosecuted a weak and sacrificial war, putting our fathers and sons in harm’s way not to crush an enemy but to hand out food. With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have been the active enemies of freedom. Thanks to the Republicans alone, freedom has taken the blame.

In the last presidential election, despite my overwhelming disgust at the prospect of an explicitly un-American socialist presiding in the White House, I voted for no one. (I handed in an empty ballot.) If John McCain or any Republican had been elected, he would have eroded liberty in more or less the same manner as Barack Obama and his predecessors. His administration would have been a continuation of the Bush “compassionate conservatism,” replete with pleas for sacrifice and national service, capitulation to environmentalists, religious groups, and multiculturalists, and heavy-handed, pragmatic meddling in the economy. Republicans are simply weak, “me too” Democrats; they offer 75% the socialism of their opponents, with the identical moral underpinnings: altruism.

All my life, I had voted exclusively for Republicans... until recently. I refuse to vote for a Republican again until they explicitly, in word and deed, hold individual rights as the fundamental principle of the United States. Republicans must recognize anew that the sole purpose of government - the founding principle of our republic - is to safeguard the rights of every individual to his life, the property he earns, and the pursuit of his own happiness for its own sake.

Republicans must heed this message: They were booted out of office because they were too religious and gave mere lip service to freedom. They will return to office when they embrace the principle that makes America the greatest nation in history: the defense of individual rights.

Sincerely,

Stephen Bourque

The Treachery of Unintegrated Facts

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:23:00 +0000

or The Audacity of Hoping No One Connects the Dots

Freedom is eroding at the hands of the government at an alarming rate. Of course, this is not news; the individual rights that were identified by America’s Founders and safeguarded with the institutions they established have been whittled away for more than a century. But we are clearly in the midst of a particularly virulent rush to serfdom that accelerated during the George W. Bush administration and has reached full boil under Barack Obama. It is a bipartisan attack, and until recently, has been virtually unopposed by more than a handful of voices. Both major parties (and to a worse degree, all the minor “third” parties) completely ignore individual rights; they simply bicker over to which degree and in what manner Americans are to be forced to comply with government’s demands. The “compassionate conservatism” of Republicans and the “Organizing for America” of Democrats are both explicitly statist, programmatic calls for national servitude.

I am struck, though, by one characteristic of the government’s power grab: its openness. All the facts are completely on the surface. There is no hidden agenda. Contrary to absurd conspiracy theories, government officials do not conceal their true intentions; they boast of them. The egregious particulars of “recovery” and “reinvestment” and “reform” laws are often not buried surreptitiously in bills, but are announced with press releases. When a president (Republican or Democrat) shakes hands warmly with a foreign dictator, it is not a clandestine betrayal; it is a photo op. When Mr. Obama’s subordinate dictators are installed to issue edicts, nobody bothers to assign friendly-sounding names like “comrades” or “citizens”; they are frankly called “czars.”

This openness indicates either an astonishing brazenness or naïveté on the part of the politicians.

To seize power without opposition, presidents and legislators count on the majority of the population having a certain type of mentality - they must be relatively educated, some highly educated, but with an inability to think critically and integrate their knowledge. This is best achieved with an education of a certain sort, and fortunately for politicians, it is exactly the sort that has been imposed upon students for generations: a compulsory, increasingly centralized, government curriculum that emphasizes the group over the individual, that denies the possibility that answers can be fully right or wrong, that stuffs students’ heads with a barrage of state-approved aphorisms (e.g “selfishness is wrong,” “recycle plastic,” “greedy capitalists cause poverty,” etc.) which are to be held as if they are perceptual-level truths, and above all, that presents every piece of information to the students as a succession of disparate facts, unconnected and unconnectable.

This education churns out students - and hence, adults - whose minds are filled with facts and opinions, yet who are unaccustomed to thinking for themselves. The mind of the typical student emerging from school is well-practiced in collecting, but is stunted in other faculties: integrating, classifying, determining similarities and differences, identifying the essence of a set of particulars. As such, the modern American (especially a young one) simultaneously feels that he knows quite a lot and yet views the universe as intractably complex. He is the perfect subject for a benevolent dictatorship. Politicians want voters to be “informed” - to listen to NPR, read the New York Times, watch television - and to believe what they are told. They expect their constituents to regard the endless stream of terrorist attacks, military conflicts, economic reports, natural disasters, and crimes as constituting a complexity too difficult for individuals to grasp, and thus to passively surrender their judgment to a smiling, reassuring, omnipotent government that knows best.

After Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. (This is not a pipe.)

Americans are expected to be familiar with the words “tyranny” and “socialism,” but not to recognize tyranny or socialism when they are in its midst. The young professional today righteously places a “Question Authority” bumper sticker next to the “Obama/Biden” label on the trunk of his hybrid car, blissfully unaware that he accepts every government directive and politically-correct norm without question.

This confidence of politicians that Americans will fall in line with their expectations represents an opportunity for us to defend freedom. Since politicians openly admit the particulars of their policies and deny only their meaning, our task is simply to connect the dots. It is not so much a matter of educating the public, but one of getting people to think about the facts that are already before them. Americans already have two and two in view; they just need to practice putting two and two together to make four.

Let’s look at a few examples. When Sarah Palin warned that the Obama administration’s health care “reform” would result in “death panels,” she was pilloried by politicians and the media with an unrestrained and decidedly uncivil hostility. Now, if the reader does not already know it, I am unambiguously opposed to Sarah Palin’s political ideas and regard her as anathema to liberty, particularly because of her religious views. But on this particular issue she was absolutely right. Her exact words were:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost... The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.[Note 1.]

In an earlier essay, I wrote of these “death panels,” “What else shall we call a central committee of bureaucrats who make ‘recommendations’ that must be obeyed, meting out from a dwindling pile of loot every treatment, therapy, medicine, test, doctor visit, and hospital stay?” This is not crazy hyperbole. “Death panels” are a completely apt characterization of this particular aspect of Mr. Obama’s health “reform.” Palin (and I) properly drew conclusions from the facts that the president and lawmakers themselves provided. Politicians and the media do not deny the facts, but only the conclusions. They resist evaluation and judgment. They refuse to connect the dots.

In my note to the White House, in which I turned myself in to the authorities at the informant hot line, I pointed out how in the very same breath that the Obama administration denied its intent to eliminate private health insurance coverage, it listed as evidence its eight directives that constitute the complete government takeover of the health insurance industry. In this blog post called, ironically, “Facts Are Stubborn Things,” a White House official accuses opponents of making “it look like the President intends to ‘eliminate’ private coverage, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.”[Note 2.] Two sentences later, the post lists the official “Health Insurance Consumer Protections.” These “protections” dictate the terms under which the government will permit insurance companies to exist. They will clearly be “private” in name only. As a means of showing how ridiculous are the rumors that Mr. Obama wants to eliminate private health insurance, the White House submits its list of rules for private health insurance companies, telling them who they shall accept as “customers,” how much they will charge, and what services they shall cover! It is an astonishingly distilled example of the point I am conveying here - the confidence of politicians that the public is incapable of thinking.

In my essay “The Reluctant Dictator,” I noted that the president denies that he wants to be in the car business. “What we are not doing, what I have no interest in doing, is running GM,” the president assures us.[Note 3.] As evidence of this, Mr. Obama fired the CEO of General Motors and his administration has effectively nationalized the company by seizing a majority stake in shares. No doubt, the White House and media could construct a long list of facts to show that the president’s outrageous abuse of power was technically legal, that the word “nationalization” is not exactly the correct term for the government takeover of a private company, and in any case, the government does not intend to use the powers that it seized to direct the operations of the company. All of these details distract from the obvious: President Obama nationalized General Motors. The president is counting on citizens to defer to his expertise and authority, to appreciate that the complexity and nuance of the economy is surely beyond their grasp, and to not be so simple-minded as to draw a parallel between his actions and those of tin-pot South American dictators.

When President Obama denies being a socialist, when the media scoffs at the “right-wing nuts” that call him a socialist, when avowed socialists themselves claim that the president is not “one of them,” shall we simply take their word for it? Or shall we consider the essence of socialism - that it is “the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”[Note 4.] This is the essence of the Obama administration (as it was the essence of the Bush administration and would have been the essence of John McCain’s administration, had he won the election). This is the driving principle behind the prescription drug program, compulsory medical insurance, corporate bailouts, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act, “cap-and-trade” legislation, pay restrictions for executives, the virtual enslavement of medical professionals, and the grotesque “I Pledge” video.

The United States has not yet descended to point where naked force is directed against the population at large. Today, all that is needed to defeat this growing tyranny is to name it. Americans, who have been taught not to judge, must judge. Individuals, who have been taught to place their trust in governments because the world is too complex to fathom, must think for themselves.

I am somewhat heartened by signs in recent months. Perhaps the tide is turning. There are indications that at some level, people are adding things up, identifying the nature of the government’s actions. Indeed, this is reflected in the growing panic and shrillness of the left-leaning media. Their confidence that individuals will accept their pre-digested assertions at face value without extracting their true meanings has been shaken - hence, the name-calling, the inarticulate, spitting hatred, the fear of “Astro-turf” movements. The tea parties that spontaneously arose over the spring and summer, the booming sales of Atlas Shrugged, and recently, the open revolt of the president’s speech to children returning back to school, may signal a positive trend toward Americans’ best defense against tyranny:

Thinking!

NOTES

1. Sarah Palin: Statement on the Current Health Care Debate, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434.

2. “Facts Are Stubborn Things,” Macon Phillips, White House blog, 4 Aug 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/.

3. “The Government and GM: How Reluctant a Shareholder?” The Heritage Foundation, 1 Jun 2009.

4. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, Signet, 1961, p. 43. [Emphasis in the original.]

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 9

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:27:00 +0000

(Note: This is Part 9 in the series started here. The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #9:

If there is no God, humans and "other" animals are of equal value. Only if one posits that humans, not animals, are created in the image of God do humans have any greater intrinsic sanctity than baboons. This explains the movement among the secularized elite to equate humans and animals. [Note 1.]

I share Dennis Prager’s disdain for the “secularized elite,” which we have come to understand as being the left-leaning, subjectivist intellectual establishment. But I must point out that once again, he is conceding all ground to his enemies.

To claim, as Mr. Prager has, that men deserve special consideration only if they are created in God’s image is to imply that there is no natural reason - there are no facts - that justifies distinguishing men from other animals. This is exactly the position maintained by the subjectivists that he reviles. The only difference is that religionists, wishing to rescue mankind from being relegated to the status of lowly animals, proceed to invent a supernatural pretext; they regard men as divine beings, created and chosen by God as the stewards of the earth. Subjectivists refrain from fabricating this pretext, and thus regard men as mere animals, crass beings driven by their appetites and whims.

To see how both sides are mistaken - and to arrive at the correct perspective - it is instructive to recall the arguments of the “intrinsic/subjective/objective” trichotomy that I have written about elsewhere and is one of Ayn Rand’s important identifications.[Note 2.] Mr. Prager is precise in his term “intrinsic sanctity.” It is exactly the intrinsic value of man that he seeks to preserve - a value that is somehow an attribute of every man, apart from his relationship to the real world. It is a “sanctity” unsullied by the coarse considerations of the requirements of survival, and of living the life of a man qua man. In essence, the intrinsic value of man that Prager is attempting to secure is a divine one: eternal, other-worldly, inaccessible, akin to a Platonic Form.

A proper perspective is neither subjective nor intrinsic but objective. In this, we regard value as relating to all living organisms, and only to living organisms, for it is living entities that will exist or perish according to their natures and actions. For a living organism, its basic value is life, and each of its derivative values reflects this fundamental value in its capacity to contribute to or enhance the life of the organism. Crucially, it is from the perspective of each organism that value is determined.

In this last statement we see the sharp distinction between Prager’s “intrinsic sanctity” and objective value. In Prager’s view, the value of human beings exists as an intrinsic attribute - a value in itself, apart from any consideration of a valuer. It is a sort of reified universal imposed by a supernatural Creator, a stand-alone fact of the universe. As an implicit consequence, not only should a man recognize his superiority over animals, but a baboon (or lizard, worm, amoeba, tree) would necessarily defer to it; thus, built into each of God’s lower creatures would be a “sanctity” of its own life that was somehow less than that of a human.

Of course, that is nonsense. The value of human beings is not intrinsic; it is objective. For every living organism, from single-celled microbes to Homo Sapiens, its own life is the standard of value. A man’s regard of his own life as having sanctity is derived not from some divine proclamation - from the lucky chance of having been born among God’s chosen species - but from his nature as a living being. (To be more precise, a man’s value itself follows from his being a living organism; his regard of his own value follows from his being an organism with the ability to think and to be self-aware.)

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Prager left a clue that revealed how anti-scientific and anti-reason his perspective actually is. In the phrase “humans and ‘other’ animals,” Prager put quotes around the word “other,” as if humans are not animals at all. How deeply does he hold this idea? Can he really think that humans are not to be classified as part of the animal kingdom?

Humans are the rational animals. We have a perceptual apparatus that is similar to many of the higher mammals, but we also have a faculty that, as far as can be discerned, is utterly unique among all living things: a rational, reasoning mind that operates with free will.

The abilities to abstract and conceptualize, and to choose our actions, are far and away the most significant attributes of our species. Our conceptual faculty accounts not only for our survival, but for our ability to seek happiness. Human minds have created philosophy, science, mathematics; crop rotation, the printing press, the automobile, and the computer; Hamlet, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Parthenon, Falling Water, and the Empire State Building. By any objective standard, the human species is amazing and remarkable, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”[Note 3.]

If subjectivists - seeing humans as automatons determined by social conditions and slavishly compelled by emotions - evade men’s true nature and consider us to be equal (or even “less than equal”) to other animals, they should be defeated on rational grounds. There is absolutely no reason to reach into the supernatural realm, as Mr. Prager has done, to find an excuse to shout the merits of man. As I have indicated, doing so has quite the opposite effect: it implicitly concedes that men have no value in reality.

(Note: The next installment in the series is here.)

NOTES

1. Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2. To capture the relevant idea, it is necessary to quote a relatively lengthy passage from Ayn Rand’s essay, “What is Capitalism?”

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose - claiming that the food is good in, by, and of itself.

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an "emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

The objectivist theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of values. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man - and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man.

Ayn Rand, “What is Capitalism?” from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, pp. 21-22. [Italics are in the original.]

3. To be sure, it is the human mind that is behind the worst atrocities of history as well - slavery, the wars of conquest, inquisitions, persecutions, pogroms, and People’s States. But this consideration only emphasizes the importance of philosophy, and of getting our answers right.

Cash for Clunkers

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:03:00 +0000

The three billion dollar Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) program, known affectionately as “Cash for Clunkers,” is coming to an end on Monday because it is running out of money. After the program burned through $1 billion dollars in its first week, Congress approved an additional $2 billion that has now apparently followed the first billion down the drain.

The fact that this money has been scooped up so eagerly seems to have taken some by surprise, though when it is given a moment’s sober thought, the prospect that a lot of consumers would snatch the “free” $4500 giveaway is about as shocking as a pound of raw meat disappearing when dropped into a school of piranhas. President Obama spun this unexpected evaporation of taxpayer dollars as an indication of the program’s success - a success “beyond anybody’s imagination,” as he put it. “We’re slightly victims of success because the thing happened so quick, there was so much more demand than anybody expected, that dealers were overwhelmed with applications.”[Note 1.]

In the media, Cash for Clunkers is portrayed as being wildly successful; the implication is that the program is a magnificent example of the ability of the government to stimulate the economy. When the additional $2 billion funding was approved, the president lauded Congress for using the Recovery Act funds to extend the CARS program, so that “the American economy will continue to get a much needed boost.”[Note 2.] “This program has been a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. He characterizes the program as “the best economic news story in America.”[Note 3.] “According to some estimates,” a CNN report stated, “the total of $3 billion in the Cash for Clunkers program could result in an $18 billion boost to the overall economy.”[Note 4, emphasis mine in all quotes.]

Well, that’s a pretty good deal. If the federal government can put $3 billion into a hat, wave a wand, and pull out $18 billion, then who can blame Americans for being tempted to hand over the reins of their lives to their trusty politicians?

Despite the general euphoria, though, it may occur to a few people that something doesn’t seem quite right about this account.[Note 5.] And a handful of Americans might even be suspicious of the notion that a government is able to “stimulate” anything at all. (In this set of critically-thinking individuals, of course, I exclude nearly all economists, the “expert analysts” who are so immersed in a Keynesian fantasy world and in the results churned out by their computer models that they believe in their own magic.) Skeptics of the government’s story may not be able to put a finger on the problem; they may not be able to identify which rapid move in the shell game, which sleight of hand, which gesture to the pocket or the sleeve, is the one that explains the trick. But they know something doesn’t add up.

For these honest people, I submit the following questions that might help give them the confidence to expose the “experts” and the government policy-makers for what they are: emperors with no clothes.

(1) How can Cash for Clunkers “run out of money,” as is reported?

If CARS really does provide a net benefit to the economy, as is claimed (or at least implied) by its supporters, why is the program being stopped for want of funding? How can something that is profitable be running out of money?

The fact that the program cannot be sustained without a continuous influx of tax dollars indicates that there is a cost associated with it. And where there is a cost for something, there are producers who pay for it.

Characterizing the program as being beneficial for America is dishonest at best. Cash for Clunkers does not make money; it costs money. It is necessary for the president and lawmakers to hide this fact because the cost is borne by Americans. Inevitably, for every $4500 that Cash for Clunkers puts into someone’s pocket, it takes more than $4500 away from the Americans to whom that money belongs. The program is not a “stimulation” of anything; like all government “stimulation,” it is a carefully disguised welfare package.

(2) How would Cash for Clunkers work on a smaller scale?

When dealing with complex abstractions, it is often helpful and instructive to adjust the scale of a concept to isolate certain characteristics. For instance, when considering the workings of a free market, one can identify some of the same principles operating in a child’s lemonade stand as in a multinational corporation. The trader principle remains constant both for the man agreeing to mow his neighbor’s lawn in exchange for babysitting services and for the bank lending a hundred million dollars to a pharmaceutical company.

So, as an exercise, let us consider how the economic stimulation of Cash for Clunkers would work in a household.

Suppose Johnny and Mary Smith are a married couple with three kids. To make ends meet, both Johnny and Mary work, and for this purpose they each own a car. Unfortunately, Johnny gets laid off, so they suddenly depend entirely on Mary’s income and a little bit of savings while Johnny looks for another job.

According to the principles of the Cash for Clunkers program, the ideal thing for the Smith household to do at this point is to have Mary give Johnny $4500 out of their children’s college savings account in exchange for his car. Next, Mary should drain the oil and pour a water-silica-sand solution into the engine so that it will seize when the car is next turned on. (This is what the “clunker” dealers are instructed to do.) This will make it necessary for Johnny to buy another car so that he can drive to his job interviews. To keep our example a closed system so that we can trace every step, let us say that he must now buy Mary's car. He returns to Mary the $4500 in exchange for her car, which she will now have to share with her husband, making it difficult for her to get to work on time.

The net result of this series of transactions is that nothing has changed for the Smith’s except that one of their two vitally important automobiles has been destroyed.

The important thing to notice in this scenario is that without an injection of money from an outside source - a source that gets nothing in return - the Cash for Clunkers program fails utterly. It can only destroy wealth; it cannot create it.

This is another demonstration of why it is necessary for the president and Congress to dissemble when advancing “economic stimulus” as providing a net gain for Americans, as opposed to being a simple welfare program. In order to prop up the facade of “stimulus,” it is necessary to conceal the source of real wealth that pays for it.

(3) Injustice aside, are participants in the program better off now?

There is no justification whatsoever for ignoring the monstrous injustice incurred by the millions of hard-working Americans who were compelled to pay for Cash for Clunkers in exchange for absolutely nothing. However, as a mental exercise, let us momentarily set aside that injustice to consider a question. Did the consumers who took advantage of the program benefit? That is, did the federal government’s moral atrocity at least provide an economic benefit to the consumers that they claimed to be helping?

Since “clunkers” are cars that had to meet certain criteria for consideration - not the least of which is to be worth no more than $4500 in an open market - we can make a guess that many of the participants in the program were ordinary Americans, most of whom were not likely to replace their soon-to-be-demolished car by paying cash for a new Mercedes Benz or Maserati. It is likely that the typical beneficiary of Cash for Clunkers used about half of the $4500 windfall to pay off some of their credit card debt and the other half to buy a new vehicle. Significantly, it is also likely that any loans that had been used to buy the beneficiary’s “clunker” had been paid off for some time, while the purchase of the new vehicle required the beneficiary to take out a four- or five-year loan (since he had only a couple thousand dollars for a down-payment). Considering all this, it should be clear that it is a stretch to call the typical participant a “beneficiary” of the program when he is probably worse off now than he was before. Sure, he may feel a surge of excitement when he starts the engine of his brand new F150, but this fleeting benefit is more than offset by the troubles he faces burdened with the $300 or $400 per month car payment that he did not have before.

Now, politicians will undoubtedly point to all these new vehicle purchases as being good for automobile manufacturers, which in turn is good for the American economy. But we have already identified this as a diversionary tactic intended to draw attention away from the fact that other people are compelled to pay for it.

So, even if we set aside the injustice, the sheer economic ignorance of the plan is stunning and can be comprehended only by recognizing the persistence of politicians and “expert” economic analysts to misunderstand the nature of their meddling. Consider: It is obvious, or at least it should be, that a significant cause of the current financial crisis was the direct and indirect force applied by the federal government upon banks to issue mortgages to Americans so they would buy homes they could not afford. In the wake of this self-made disaster, for the government to try to fix the problem by enticing Americans to now buy cars they cannot afford is simply beyond the pale of reason.

(4) If destroying a few hundred thousand cars can stimulate the economy, then why stop there?

In “A Kerquillionty Dollars,” Doug Reich, referring to the topic of government “stimulus” programs in general, asked a similar question:

The logic behind the stimulus program is that the government needs to steal money from some taxpayers (or borrow from bond investors under the presumption that it will be stolen from future taxpayers) and give it to other people... If their logic is correct, and expropriating the wealth and capital of some and redistributing it to others will somehow generate economic growth... it appears to be a huge mistake that they only spent $787 Billion. Why did they stop there? Under their reasoning, wouldn’t $788 Billion have been more stimulative? Wouldn’t $1 trillion have been really, really stimulative?[Note 6.]

One might ask the same question about the Cash for Clunkers program. The question exposes its nature - that it is a disguised welfare program that cannot create wealth but can only destroy or redistribute it.

Recall that enthusiasts claim that Cash for Clunkers gave the American economy a much needed boost, a desperately wanted stimulus, a shot in the arm. If such a “lifeline” to the economy, constituting the “best economic news in America,” can be invoked by simply using tax dollars to pay people to destroy cars, why could this principle not be extended? Why not introduce a government program to pay Americans to throw out their cell phones and computers, thus using the “power of the market” to generate new cell phones and computers? Why not entice citizens to burn down their houses, thus generating new houses? Why not provide an incentive to tear down every garage, gasoline station, pizza place, bagel shop, bodega, grocery store, department store, warehouse, and factory?

Why not create infinite prosperity by wrecking everything? According to the principles of "economic stimulus," all this taxpayer-backed destruction should put Americans back to work, boosting the economy beyond our wildest dreams and creating an unprecedented era of good times.

Naturally, most Americans (with the possible exception of latent jihadists, eco-terrorists, and some university professors) would be aghast at the suggestion of such wholesale destruction. Yet the principle holds at every scale. The same irrationality at the heart of Cash for Clunkers fuels many of the absurdities of the economic thought of the last century (for example, the idea that war is beneficial to a free economy, or that paying farmers to destroy their crops enhances prosperity).

The error of this idea is described by Henry Hazlitt as the “broken window” fallacy. In his scenario, a hoodlum throws a brick through a baker’s shop window. A little crowd gathers in front of the shop, discussing the implications. From a certain perspective, note some in the crowd (i.e. consistent with that of the Obama administration), “the misfortune has its bright side.”

It will make business for some glazier... The glazier will have $250 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $250 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.[Note 7.]

If Hazlitt’s scenario seems artificially exaggerated or preposterous, I remind the reader of the report I quoted earlier, which CNN delivered without a trace of irony, as if it were an incontrovertible fact: “According to some estimates, the total of $3 billion in the Cash for Clunkers program could result in an $18 billion boost to the overall economy.”

Unlike today’s economists, Hazlitt goes on to trace the remainder of the effects introduced by the hoodlum. The glazier would indeed have $250 worth of new business:

But the shopkeeper will be out the $250 that he was planning to spend for a new suit... Instead of having a window and $250, he now has merely a window... The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye. [Again, note 7, emphasis mine.]

(5) Why is force needed?

Even if a politician or economist produced a ready answer for all of the above questions, citing this or that statistic, interest rate, wise saw, or modern instance, with the exasperated air of one unaccustomed to having his authority questioned and with an irritation reserved for those stubborn few among us who do not surrender their lives and livelihoods to him without first asking a few questions - even if such a one could manufacture this many excuses, there is one question that he will find to be devastatingly unanswerable. Or rather, it is answerable only by giving the game away.

The question is: If the program benefits everyone, why must the government compel some people to comply?

Of course, the answer is that protestations to the contrary, the program does not benefit everybody. Force is required because that is the means to get someone to act against their interests.

The simple fact is that nothing that President Obama or Congress can do will stimulate the economy in any real sense - that is, no government can create real wealth. It can only make itself appear to have done so, by focusing public attention on only part of the picture.

The only power a government has in the economy - and it is a formidable power indeed - is to make some people pay for things that are consumed by others.

The power that philosophers have in the economy - equally formidable - is to convince people that they are morally justified in making some people pay for things that are consumed by others.

We have seen that politicians have an inestimable advantage in staging the legerdemain required to prop up farces like “economic stimulus plans” and the Cash for Clunkers program. As in Hazlitt’s scenario, when the earnings of individuals are taken and redistributed to others, it is quite impossible to count how the money would have been used otherwise, precisely because those free actions never came about. It is easy to add up the numbers for press releases - for instance, to boast that Cash for Clunkers put $1.9 billion in participants’ pockets through 457,000 transactions - but we will never know what the people who paid for the program would have done with the money if it hadn’t been seized from them.

What we do know for sure is that the fact that it was seized is an unpardonable injustice.

As a final comment, I’ll mention that I think a lot of ordinary Americans feel helpless to contradict the “experts” on CNN, Nobel Laureates such as may be found on the editorial page of The New York Times, and the brain trusts of the federal government. I for one am not an economist; I fully concede that they know far more than I will ever know about academic economics.

But it is a mistake to surrender one’s mind and morals to “experts” in any field. I cannot even begin to fathom the economic complexities, for instance, of Bernard Madoff’s fraudulent schemes, but I do not need to be an expert to identify those schemes as fraudulent, i.e. as violations of individual rights. The same principle applies to the lawful violations of rights perpetrated daily by the Obama administration and Congress. The complexity of federal programs - a complexity that makes it difficult or impossible for even the lawmakers themselves to understand (even when they bother to read the bills they sign) - does not change their nature. Abrogations of rights are in essence the same whether they are delivered in one hundred pages of the Federal Register or with one squeeze of a trigger.

NOTES

1. “Government Will End Clunker Program Early,” The New York Times, 20 Aug 2009.

2. “Statement by President Barack Obama on Senate Passage of Cash for Clunkers Extension,” Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, 6 Aug 2009.

3. “Secretary LaHood Announces Wind Down to Hugely Popular CARS Program,” Department of Transportation Press Release, DOT 126-09, 20 Aug 2009.

4. “Analysts predict billions in benefits from ‘Cash for Clunkers,” CNN, 7 Aug 2009.

5. The general euphoria was not shared by some of the dealerships who are experiencing delays or hassles with application forms. It is not surprising that such problems would be encountered when dealing with the federal government, but I am ignoring this detail in my post because it is a non-fundamental side issue.

6. Doug Reich, “A Kerquillionty Dollars,” The Rational Capitalist, 2 Aug 2009.

7. Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Arlington House, NY, 1979, (orig. Harper & Brothers, 1946), p. 23 - 24.

Elan Journo on D’Souza’s Agenda

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:53:00 +0000

Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights has just published the sixth (and I believe final) installment of his excellent article, “D’Souza’s Trojan Horse.” In the series, Journo exposes Dinesh D’Souza’s ominous agenda and the broader significance that it signals of religion in America.

Death Panels

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:13:00 +0000

Like most of the media, a recent NY Times article [Note 1.] condemns crazy right-wingers for concocting the “stubborn yet false rumor” that the Obama administration is planning to adopt “death panels” to decide who gets medical care and who doesn’t. The Times characterizes the very notion of “death panels” as baseless rumor - a false “assertion” that has somehow spread despite an “avalanche of reports laying out why it was false.” The term evokes a “specter of government-sponsored forced euthanasia.”

To be sure, there are some people who think literal Nazi-style forced euthanasia and abortion are on the White House agenda. However, reports of such opinions are straw men used by the White House and media to discredit with one sweep all opposition to the president’s plan.

The term “death panel” should not be limited to such concrete exaggerations as forced euthanasia committees; the use of the term does not indicate irrational fears. On the contrary, there are very rational reasons to fear and condemn the president’s agenda. It is obviously not correct to assign intentions of forced euthanasia and abortion to the Obama administration, but it is certainly appropriate to extrapolate the consequences of the centralized planning it is pushing for. Such projections are perfectly valid, and indeed, vitally important. By embracing socialism, Barack Obama has opened himself up to this. It is fair play to project the ominous trends of his administration and to compare it to the tyrannies of the twentieth century, which were all based on the same socialist principles.

The fact is that opponents of Obama’s health care reform need not exaggerate or embellish the administration’s policies to show that it is a disaster in the making. “Death panels” properly refer not to a hidden, sinister agenda but to the policies of which the president openly boasts.

The Times article itself provides a perfect example of the stunning inability (or unwillingness) of modern “liberals” to connect ideas. As an alleged demonstration of how ridiculous and unfounded are the claim’s of Obama’s opponents, the piece quoted Betsy McCaughey as saying that the economic stimulus bill “would create a bureaucracy to ‘monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost-effective.” The Times gleefully this as a refutation:

The legislation did not direct the coordinator to dictate doctors’ treatments. A separate part of the law- regarding a council set up to coordinate research comparing the effectiveness of treatments - states that the council’s recommendations cannot “be construed as mandates of clinical guidelines for payent, coverage or treatment.”[Again, Note 1, emphasis mine.]

So, the fact that a federal bureaucracy, which holds mammoth regulatory power over the medical industry, calls its commands “recommendations” is supposed to show that McCaughey exaggerated? Far from refuting her point, the example proves it.

_____________

It is not a misrepresentation to call an all-powerful government board that controls access to health services a “death panel.” It is a perfectly apt label. What else shall we call a central committee of bureaucrats who make “recommendations” that must be obeyed, meting out from a dwindling pile of loot (dwindling, because the American health industry will be choked to death; loot, because it is paid for by the seized earnings of citizens and the virtual enslavement of medical professionals) every treatment, therapy, medicine, test, doctor visit, and hospital stay? What better than “death panel” could capture the meaning of a council of wise government officials who sit around a table deciding who gets what health care, like the Three Fates, spinning, weaving, and - yes - cutting?

The essence of Obama’s plan is to pool the earnings of all citizens into one pile from which this solemn panel will dole out portions. Of course, the actual details of this are much more complicated than that - necessarily so, for complexity provides the obscurity that lets the president and Congress get away with it. The Obama administration cannot summarily take over private insurance (such as it is) in the manner of a South American dictator. Instead, the White House explains that all they really wish to do is tell the insurance companies what they can charge for products, and what they must pay out to the customers that they are forced to have. Nor can the Obama administration seize citizen’s paychecks directly; it is less upsetting to the public to tax, inflate, and regulate away their earnings in innumerable indirect ways.

The ideology that drives Barack Obama’s health care “reform” is: to each according to his need, from each according to his ability. As such, it is manifestly unjust. It severs the earner from the earned, enshrines need as the standard of value, and holds citizens at the mercy of politician’s whims.

Let us now consider the opposite of the president’s plan: the health care that would exist in a free country (and did exist when America was more free than it is now). When a private individual has to make a decision about his health (or that of a dependent family member), it is indeed life and death that is at stake. It is a fact of reality: people must sometimes make hard choices and painful decisions. But the consequences of those decisions directly affect only themselves. They can neither force others to pay for them nor be forced to pay for others.

In a free market, private insurance companies would exist to offer a range of plans that people could purchase - or not - as they see fit. Individuals would visit their doctors, seek treatments, and consume medicines according to their own standards and means. If they want health care (or anything else, for that matter) they must purchase it with their own earnings; they cannot force others to pay for it.

The reigning principle of free-market health care - as opposed to the Obama administration’s socialist system - is justice.

The president is counting on his ability to cancel the true meaning of his policies by using words that obscure their nature, or denying labels that are apt. Don’t let him get away with it.

NOTES

1. “False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots,” New York Times, 13 Aug 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/policy/14panel.html?scp=1&sq=False%20Death%20Panel%20Rumor&st=cse.

How to Convince A Reporter You’re Not Violent

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:00:00 +0000

Does anyone else see how grimly preposterous this is?

The caption for this photograph on the main page of the New York Times web site was, “An Afghan police officer pointed a gun at journalists. Unnerved by another wave of attacks, the government banned the reporting of violence during Thursday’s vote.”[Note 1, emphasis mine.]

image credit, Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

What did the police officer say? Don’t call me violent or I’ll shoot you?

NOTES

1. “Election Day Censorship in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, 18 Aug 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/world/asia/19afghan.html?_r=1&hp.

Submission to the White House Snitch Line

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:24:00 +0000

“Facts are stubborn things.”

So said John Adams, and so is titled an astonishingly brazen post on the official White House blog. In a most Orwellian manner, the post claims to hold the “inconveniently” true position, and warns of “scary” emails and videos spreading “disinformation.”

Some excellent responses to this outrageous exertion of power have already been made this week on 3 Ring Binder, NoodleFood, Titanic Deck Chairs, Gus Van Horn here and here, John Lewis, and many others - and of course, Texas senator John Cornyn wrote directly to the president on this matter on Wednesday.[Note 2.]

Here is the note I myself submitted to the White House Informant Line, flag@whitehouse.gov:

Dear Ministry of State Security:

I wish to report “something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy.” The White House blog is shocked to see opposition to its socialist health care plan, and insists that its critics are liars making “breathless claims.” The post highlights one example that “couldn’t be further from the truth”: the claim that “the President intends to eliminate private coverage.”

As supposed evidence of this “falsehood,” the White House post links to an official list of “Health Insurance Consumer Protections.” However, these “protections” consist of eight directives that completely constrain what insurance companies can and cannot do. Any ONE of these directives is sufficient to eliminate the notion of private insurance; all eight together constitute a complete federal takeover of the industry.

Thus, to see the facts that show the Obama administration’s intention to take over the health insurance industry (and the financial industry, the automobile industry, etc.), one need go no further than the White House web site.

Facts are indeed stubborn things. Empty claims to the contrary will not change them, nor will even ominous threats from the White House directed toward American citizens.

Stephen Bourque

United States of America

NOTES

1. “Facts are Stubborn Things,” Macon Phillips, White House blog, 4 Aug 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/ .

2. Senator John Cornyn (R. - Texas), Letter to President Barack Obama, http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/cornynletter20090805.pdf .

Obama's Flag

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:33:00 +0000

Here is the flag of the United States of America:

Here is the flag of the Barack Obama administration:

flag@whitehouse.gov

The Absolutism of Principles

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:00:00 +0000

An article I read recently told an anecdote attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to G. Bernard Shaw. While at a dinner party one evening, Shaw asked the woman next to him if she would sleep with him for a hundred thousand pounds. She considered for a moment, then consented: “Yes!” Shaw continued, “Well then, how about for five pounds?” To this, she replied indignantly, “What kind of woman do you think I am?” “We’ve already established that,” said Shaw. “Now we’re merely haggling over the price.”

The anecdote is amusing, but more importantly it points to something crucially important: the absolutism of principles. Like a crack in a dike, a single breach of a principle is enough to collapse it. The tiniest compromise eventually becomes a gaping hole through which all the values that the principle once supported pour out.

Consider Barack Obama’s programs for “overhauling” American health care. In his press conference last week, the president promised millions of listeners that he would improve their health care and make only the very wealthiest Americans pay for it. I am not disheartened enough to think that nearly everybody would be taken in by this, but it is surely true that many Americans, probably millions of them, would vaguely (and some, enthusiastically) consider the president’s policy to be beneficial.

As the president himself urged his listeners to ask themselves the question, “What’s in this for me?” I am sure some Americans leaned forward a little, eagerly hoping to find out what they would receive. After all, isn’t it good to be healthy? And if the government can make other people (best of all, the greedy rich) pay for the health care that everyone else uses, doesn’t that benefit the common good? It’s a “win-win” situation; the majority gets the stuff that they want and they don’t have to pay for it.

The problem is that all Americans do pay for it - not with money, but with something more fundamental and precious: our freedom.

Americans who would applaud an explicit government policy of flaying the rich for the sake of a share of plunder do not value freedom anyway (though like any parasites, they need at least a modicum of freedom to exist in order to survive themselves). It is not to them that I direct this article; they are beyond reach.

But I believe many Americans sincerely do not understand what is at stake, and would not hold their liberty so lightly if they did. From politicians and the press, they hear the words “freedom” and “marketplace” and “efficiency” associated with the government’s actions, while individuals and corporations are characterized as “predatory,” “greedy,” and “wasteful.” They hear Mr. Obama assure them that it is the government that will “give you the security” of having health coverage while it it private companies that “force you to pay” for it “out of your own pocket.” And since they’ve been told for as long as they remember that selfishness is wrong, that private corporations are corrupt, and that something as complex as a modern economy cannot possibly operate properly unless it is managed by a cadre of “disinterested” geniuses such as may be found at the helm of the federal government, they nod assent to the president in a ill-founded trust that the “experts” must know what is best.

What those nods of assent grant to Barack Obama and Congress is permission - permission to direct the lives of all Americans as they see fit. (Whether or not they are well-intentioned is irrelevant; both parties now, Democrats and Republicans, are hell-bent on tightening the federal government’s grip on American citizens.)

How do politicians receive this permission from basically good people in a free country? It is simpler than it may seem. What the president and legislators know, and what most Americans do not know or evade, is that politicians need not ask citizens directly to surrender their lives and livelihoods. They would never get away with it. Instead, their approach is indirect. All they need to do is obtain the public’s assent to dispose of a relative handful of citizens.

This is particularly easy to do today for two reasons. First, the fact that America is a republic safeguarding the rights of every individual has been completely obscured and (through sheer repetition) supplanted by the false idea that America is a democracy that institutionalizes the “will of the majority.” The second thing that facilitates demagoguery is the ready availability of a group that is hated or resented. In other places and times, foreigners and Jews have served as suitable targets; in America today, it is businessmen that are the disposable minority. Mr. Obama rode into power fomenting this resentment with smooth eloquence, pitting “Main Street” against “Wall Street.” In his speech last week, after briefly pretending he didn’t know the exact details, the president reassured his listeners that only “families whose joint income is a million dollars” would have to “shoulder the burden” for his plan.

Once you have granted the president permission to dispose of millionaires, what stops him from disposing of anyone and everyone? Nothing. The only defense from enslavement is to stand on principle - the very principle that was cast away. Like the woman in the anecdote who gave away her honor for a hundred thousand pounds, the American public has, by giving Barack Obama the green light to throw the yoke upon a few millionaires, surrendered its moral ground. It has lost its ability to object to any conceivable command to serve. When the Obama administration raises taxes and inflates away the wealth of all working Americans (which it will), the Americans who nodded assent can blame no one but themselves. Surcharges? Tax increases? Rations? Waiting lists? Having established that individuals are expendable, all of this is “merely haggling over the price.”

If you want a thorough examination of the compromise of principles played out to its logical conclusion, I refer you to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, as the once free nation collapses by excruciating degrees into dictatorship and ruin, the hero identifies the reason. “In any compromise between food and poison,” he says, “it is only death that can win.”

Obviously, such compromises by the American public did not begin with the ascent of Barack Obama; the freedom established by the Founders has been whittled away steadily for more than a century. However, the last decade or so has been an ominous one, a period in which Americans ushered into office presidents and legislators that apparently feel unlimited in their power to prescribe and proscribe the activities of individuals. They think they have a democratic mandate to do so, and with good reason: Americans as a whole have given them permission in the manner I described above. For the love of our lives and liberty, we must withdraw that permission.

Now.

NOTES

1. Transcript from “News Conference by the President, East Room, July 22, 2009,” Office of the Press Secretary, White House, 23 Jul 2009. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from the president were taken from this transcript. In two brief quotes, I applied italics for emphasis.

One Reality en Español

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:30:00 +0000

Well, this is a first for me! One of my recent posts, “Caritas in Veritate: A Manifesto for the Right and Left,” was translated into Spanish for the web site Objetivismo.org. Check it out here.

Beware Trojan Horses

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:31:00 +0000

I want to call attention to a couple of excellent blog posts related to the ominous seeping of religion into the United States.

The first is “Portland’s Unholy Alliance of Evangelicals and Progressives,” by C. August at Titanic Deck Chairs. The article notes the recent incursion of evangelical Christianity into one of the most left-leaning, “progressive” cities in America: Portland, Oregon. That the evangelicals are “less preachy” than is typical may help them deliver their message to a largely secular audience, but C. August puts his finger on a more fundamental reason. The deeply religious are gaining a foothold in this secular city because of the intellectual and moral vacuum of modern “liberalism.” With no strong philosophical grounding of their own, the secular left gives way to the zealous newcomers. Furthermore, the altruism at the heart of Christianity is completely consistent with the left’s statist policies, so this is a natural alliance.

Another great article is actually a series of posts by Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. In part 1 of “D’Souza’s Trojan Horse,” Mr. Journo identifies the outrageous tenor of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The Enemy at Home, and sees beneath the contorted logic and outright falsehoods (which are bad enough) an insidious agenda: "a thinly disguised attempt to establish religion as the central integrating principle of American society.” In part 2 of the article, Mr. Journo captures the essence of D’Souza’s viewpoint, which differs from jihadist Islam only in degree, not in kind. Future installments of the article are forthcoming.

Both pieces highlight a point that I have been emphasizing in my posts; both conservatives and “liberals” are anathema to liberty.

Caritas in Veritate: A Manifesto for the Right and Left

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:13:00 +0000

In martial arts, a basic principle of dealing with two simultaneous attackers is to maneuver oneself so that they are both in view in one direction: in front or to one side. To be confronted by two enemies at once is problem enough, but to be between them is exceptionally difficult - one’s attention is split, and it is necessary to continually shift focus from one attacker to the other. It is the same in military affairs. A war is more difficult when it is fought on two fronts. An army’s resources are divided and spread thin, and if the attacking enemies have dissimilar natures, an effective repulsion may require different strategies and equipment for each enemy even when one’s fundamental defensive principles are constant.

I introduce this concept because it holds to some degree in the realm of ideas. If Pope Benedict XVI is going to throw his intellectual weight over to the political left, as he has done with his released encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, then he is doing us, the defenders of reason, a service. As the premier religious leader of the world and infallible composer of Roman Catholic doctrine and opinion, the pope surely qualifies as an intellectual representative of religion in general - of what we would call conservatism or the “religious right” in America.[Note 1.] We have come to understand the intellectual foe of the pope and Church to be the political left, consisting of modern “liberalism,” “progressivism,” multiculturalism, relativism, subjectivism.

So, it is significant that Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate is essentially a socialist manifesto. In it, the pope has faithfully articulated the platform for a worldwide, paternalistic welfare state.

Our enemies are consolidating. The political right and left are, in many ways, starting to line up on one side; the two fronts in our intellectual war are converging. While modern “liberals” and conservative claim to be opposed to each other, they reveal through their actions their common root: altruism, which requires the sacrifice of the individual to the group. This consolidation might make it a little easier to convince minds that for the free world to be saved, the fundamental philosophical choice is not between right and left, but between reason and anti-reason.

This mingling of left and right is indicated in the very title - the theme and motivation of the encyclical: Caritas in Veritate. (Charity in Truth.) The pope’s explanation for this concept is contained in a relatively murky passage early in the document.[Note 2.] The passage is difficult largely because it takes some practice to glean the new meanings of words that are otherwise familiar. For instance, truth for the Church does not mean the quality or state of being a fact of reality. It refers to facts or revelations from God; truth really means revealed, doctrinal “truth,” or Truth with a capital T (though it is not generally capitalized in the text). Similarly, charity is not confined to its common meaning of voluntary giving, but seems to be a social duty and responsibility “at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine,” replete with economic and political mandates.

The motivation for issuing the encyclical seems to be that the pope is concerned that charity, in the modern world, is divorced from truth - that is, a subjective view of charity strips it of morality. Truth, to remind the reader, is “revealed truth”; charity is the duty of a citizen in the welfare state. Thus, roughly speaking, the encyclical rescues charity (international socialism) by propping it up with truth (religious faith).

The parade of left-leaning policies in Caritas in Veritate is relentless and comprehensive. The document, though lauding the principle of property redistribution expressed in the 1891 Rerum Novarum, considers mere redistribution to be old-fashioned, “insufficient to satisfy the demands of a fully humane economy.” It is the 1967 Populorum Progressio that first introduced the truly international, all-embracing socialism that Caritas in Veritate advances, urging the State to “convince [men] that they must accept the necessary taxes on their luxuries and their wasteful expenditures in order to promote the development of nations and the preservation of peace.”[Note 3, emphasis mine.]

As is typical of the left, Caritas in Veritate rails against “inequalities” of wealth, “consumerism,” and “superdevelopment.” The raison d’etre of work is not to produce but to provide a man with a wage, dignity, and a comfortable retirement; the purpose of creating wealth is to deliver aid to the poor in developing countries. The encyclical expresses a “strongly felt need” to reform the United Nations “so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth” - teeth apparently being the apt tool to hand to an organization half composed of thuggish dictatorships. Justice is upheld not by institutions that defend property rights, but by institutions that distribute wealth to the poor. The environment is an intrinsic value that must not be “abused” by productive men. The financial sector must be regulated to “safeguard weaker parties,” who are “exploited” by greedy capitalists. But these same greedy capitalists should “promote new ways of marketing products” from countries that produce little or nothing of value, “so as to guarantee... a decent return.” Wealthy nations have no right to “stockpile” energy while poor nations lack the ability to produce their own, just as wealthy individuals have no right to consume what they earned while there are hungry bellies in the world.

Above all, the encyclical holds an utter contempt for the individual - a contempt made all the more insidious by the occasional lip service it pays to rights and freedom. The document explicitly emphasizes the inseparability of “life ethics” and “social ethics.” Every obligatory mention of “freedom” and personal “development” (obligatory because without them the Church would not be able to plausibly maintain its charade of standing for freedom) is subverted by the “transcendent” command to serve God and humanity. Pope Benedict XVI echoes Pope Paul VI: the purpose and duty of exercising one’s freedom consists of service. The primary goal of this earthly life is “rescuing peoples, first and foremost, from hunger, deprivation, endemic diseases and illiteracy.” Note the unambiguous emphasis on the standard of value: others. The paradise of the Church is not one in which every man lifts himself from poverty and squalor, but one in which every man lifts his neighbor. For the Church, man must be free; free to serve.

To be sure, the encyclical peppers its socialist advocacy with enough assertions and denials to provide cover lest it be accused of being the socialist manifesto that it is. It claims, for instance, that its notion of development “presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual.” It warns of cultural relativism, insists upon religious freedom, and admires technology. But none of this changes the overarching theme: that to be a human is to serve the common good.

In an article of this scope, it is impossible to enumerate and discuss all the examples of leftist policy advanced by Caritas in Veritate, but I have included a handful of excerpts in the notes. (See Note 4.)

It becomes more clear as time goes on that the alleged opposites of the secular left and the religious right are not opposites at all... and more importantly are not the only choices. A third choice exists, a view that neither dispenses with morality (as do the modern “liberals”) not plants it in a supernatural dimension (as do the conservatives). This view regards reason as an absolute, rejects faith completely, holds morality to be an essential, life-sustaining code of values based in reality, and for precisely these reasons, defends each man’s right to his life, the property he earns, the freedom of his thoughts and actions, and the pursuit of his own happiness.

If the socialist underpinnings of Pope Benedict XVI’s manifesto help to make clear that both the left and the right are enemies of freedom, then I welcome his words and beg him to keep talking and writing until thinking people grasp his real meaning.

NOTES

1. It’s true that conservatism and the religious right are driven also by Protestantism (especially Evangelical Christianity), which is often at odds with Catholicism. Nevertheless, the general shift to the political left that I describe in this article applies to many of the Protestant sects as well, so my point remains the same.

2. “Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate: Of the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI to the Bishops Priests and Deacons Men and Women Religious The Lay Faithful and All People of Good Will,” 2009. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in the article are from this document. Italics in the quotes are in the original, but bold emphasis is mine.

3. “Populorum Progressio: Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the Development of Peoples,” 26 Mar 1967.

4. Below are a few selected quotes from Caritas in Veritate:

“Hunger is not so much dependent on lack of material things as on shortage of social resources, the most important of which are institutional. What is missing, in other words, is a network of economic institutions capable of guaranteeing regular access to sufficient food and water for nutritional needs...”

“It is therefore necessary to cultivate a public conscience that considers food and access to water as universal rights of all human beings, without distinction or discrimination.”

“Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good... Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.”

“Economy and finance, as instruments, can be used badly when those at the helm are motivated by purely selfish ends.”

“Economic life undoubtedly requires contracts, in order to regulate relations of exchange between goods of equivalent value. But it also needs just laws and forms of redistribution governed by politics, and what is more, it needs works redolent of the spirit of gift.”

“Hence it is important to call for a renewed reflection on how rights presuppose duties, if they are not to become mere licence.”

“...the natural environment is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure; it is a wondrous work of the Creator containing a ‘grammar’ which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation.”

“In the search for solutions to the current economic crisis, development aid for poor countries must be considered a valid means of creating wealth for all.”

Yaron Brook’s Call to Action - July 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:00:00 +0000

In a newly released video, Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute speaks out against the socialization of the medical industry (i.e. “health care reform”), reminding us that health care is not a right.

OCON Update - July 10 and 11, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 13:38:00 +0000

John Lewis concluded his course on “The History of Ancient Greece: The Archaic Period.” I think it was my very favorite of the optional courses, which is saying quite a lot. Naturally, his time was very limited in this short course, but Dr. Lewis managed to paint a wonderfully rich sketch of this amazing infancy of western civilization, and to demonstrate its significance as it leads to the classical period of Greek history. LB and I came away from the course with a much better understanding of the archaic period, and we are both excited to explore some of the poetry and writings that Dr. Lewis introduced in the class.

I took copious notes in Elan Journo’s course, “Understanding the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” He managed to cover an enormous amount of material, and interestingly, even though he was presenting this at OCON, I think his approach would be very suitable for a general audience. (That is likely the intent, for it was being filmed.) His was a systematic approach: a chronological, objective unfolding of facts with little or no evaluation. It is true that a rational person could come to only one conclusion faced with these facts, but Mr. Journo left the conclusions to the listener.

In a general lecture called “Free Minds and Free Markets,” Peter Schwartz pointed out the inextricable connection of liberty and capitalism. As Ayn Rand put it, “A free mind and a free market are corollaries.” Mr. Schwartz elaborated upon this with his typical brilliance and intensity, and he illustrated his points with many examples, including some execrable quotes from Nicholas Kristof, David Brooks, and Cass Sunstein.

Wayne Fortun, the CEO of Hutchinson Technology, presented an inspiring lecture called “Objectivist Corporate Culture Is a Durable Competitive Advantage.” The published and practiced values of his extraordinarily successful company incorporate Objectivist principles with consistency. It is not a surprise to see this success, of course, but it is nice to observe the practical manifestations of implementing reason, and of establishing the virtues that derive from reason.

Finally, Harry Binswanger presented the conclusion to his lecture, “The Objective vs. the Intrinsic and the Subjective.” In this, he pointed out the false dichotomy of subjectivism versus intrinsicism, and showed how reality actually supports a trichotomy. It is the objective view of ethics, politics, law, etc. that is proper, as against the subjective and the intrinsic. Though there is a clear distinction between the subjective and intrinsic views, they often have a surprising amount in common... and of course are invariably wrong. There is a wealth of material here, including some very powerful concepts that tie in with Leonard Peikoff’s DIM Hypothesis, so I plan to return to my notes frequently in order to “chew” on the ideas. I would say that of all the general lectures at the conference - and that includes the ones by superstars like Tara Smith, Onkar Ghate, and Peter Schwartz - the most valuable ones for me were the pair by Dr. Binswanger.

____________

It would be hard to overstate the spiritual lift that these days at OCON have provided. (Naturally, I use the word “spiritual” here in an utterly non-mystical sense!) I came into the conference feeling a bit overworked and discouraged about the state of America and the world. I feel completely recharged now and armed for battle, as it were.

If I have a regret, it is that LB and I had not come to OCON before. I had attended one by myself back in 1992, but now I rue missing the conferences of the intervening years (though we had legitimate obstacles - it is difficult for us to leave for a week or two on a vacation that does not include the kids). I don’t know when we will be able to return, but tentatively, we are regarding the Fort Lauderdale conference in 2011 as our next opportunity. In the meantime, I am determined to improve my thinking and writing, and to fight a fight worth making: to make the world a better place... for me.

OCON Update - July 7 through 9, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:24:00 +0000

Lisa Van Damme concluded her course “Ibsen the Iconoclast” with an analysis of The Wild Duck. While preparing the material for the course, Miss Van Damme had a dramatic transformation in her own thinking of the work - and indeed, of Ibsen’s work more generally - but I’m not going to reveal the nature of that transformation. To find out, you’ll just have to purchase the recording, which will be available at some point at Ayn Rand Bookstore!

Yaron Brook finished with his course on “The Financial Crisis: What Happened And Why,” He did an exceptionally good job of encapsulating and reducing to essentials an enormous amount of material in just over four hours of lecture time. Similarly, Elan Journo has the challenge of condensing a complex succession of events in his course “Understanding the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” which began on Wednesday. And last but not least, LB and I are together taking John Lewis’ course, “The History of Ancient Greece: The Archaic Period,” in which Dr. Lewis will establish the historical context for the Classical Period in Greece. The depth of his knowledge is impressive and his enthusiasm infectious; he is clearly thrilled to be teaching a positive topic for a change, considering how he has lately been concentrating on the Islamist war on America.

LB and I have also attended all the general lectures. Tara Smith gave her second lecture at the conference, entitled, “Humanity’s Darkest Evil: The Lethal Destructiveness of Non-Objective Law.” In this, she demonstrates that for the very reason that the purpose of government sets the standard for objective law, a government that adopts or gradually accepts non-objective law becomes an unparalleled menace to human life.

Harry Binswanger’s lecture, “The Objective vs. the Intrinsic and the Subjective,” contained many profound ideas about objectivity in general. One point in particular was something of a new perspective for me: that objectivity consists of the self-conscious, deliberate use of logic. Note that both the self-conscious and deliberate components are required, something that I had not quite fully identified before. It is not enough to use logic, but one must also know one is using logic in order to be truly objective. Dr. Binswanger made another point that I regard as profound: he speculated that one of the troubles with the culture today is that people hold moral premises (ones that they have invariably absorbed uncritically from various sources) as if they were metaphysically-given percepts. I think this is a brilliant insight, and it explains much of the overwhelming passivity - the non-thinking - exhibited by America and the West.

Greg Salmieri presented a lecture called “Atlas Shrugged on the Role of the Mind in Man’s Existence.” In this he explored the theme of Atlas Shrugged from a philosophical perspective, including Ayn Rand’s unique position on reason, consciousness, and the false dichotomy of the soul and body.

Finally, John Allison, the heroic former CEO of BB&T, made a very inspiring speech called “Principled Leadership.”

On Thursday night, LB And I had a great time going out to dinner with many OBloggers whom we had never met before. Of course, we already knew C. August from Titanic Deck Chairs, but we also got to meet Diana and Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood, Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn, Kendall J from The Crucible, Jason from The Rational Egoist, Shea Levy from Cogito’s Thoughts, Craig Biddle from The Objective Standard, Mark from Randex, and special guest Trey from Flibbertigibbet!

Objectivist Round Up #104

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Bourque) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:13:00 +0000

Welcome to the July 9, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Round Up! This blog carnival features posts by blog authors who are advocates of Objectivism.

Objectivism is the philosophy of the 20th-century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. It is a comprehensive system of thought that identifies the basic axioms of the universe, and formulates and defends a reality-based theory of concepts, free will, morality, political liberty, history, and aesthetics. In short, it is a philosophy for living life.

If you are new to Ayn Rand and wish to discover more about her philosophy, I recommend you start by reading her two greatest novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, followed by some non-fiction works such as Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. The Ayn Rand Institute and the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights provide very relevant information and commentary, and a great introduction to Ayn Rand’s works can be found here.

In addition to items of general interest, this week’s posts feature reports from some of the “tea parties” that have been held across the country - in particular, the one in Boston, for which many of the bloggers happened to be present because of the 2009 Objectivist Conferences.

So, with no further ado, I present this week’s Objectivist Round Up posts:

Andy presents “The Purpose Driven Life (Part 1)” at The Charlotte Capitalist, saying, “On Independence Data, Mega-pastor Rick Warren served up a nasty Dark Ages-Nazi Cocktail. I foresee a very bad hangover.”

Paul McKeever presents “Paul McKeever’s Minimal Maxims and Bon Arrows, volume 1, issue 6” at Paul McKeever, saying, “ignorance, need as a value, the nature of a free man, and the daily clamour for something to make the worthless feel valuable...who could ask for more?”

John Drake presents “History of Information Systems” posted at Try Reason!, saying, “Inspired by The Objectivist Standard's many great articles and their emphasis on history to demonstrate principles, I have been redesigning a core business class to focus on the historical lessons about information systems and how those principles can enhance business success. This post details my reasons and challenges with this redesign.”

Paul Hsieh presents “Photos from the Boston Tea Party” posted at NoodleFood, saying, “Lots of Objectivists turned out for the Boston Tea Party!”

Jason Crawford presents “The Cult of Need” posted at The Rational Egoist, saying, “First post on my new blog!”

Ari Armstrong presents “July 4 Tea Party Arvada Colorado” posted at FreeColorado.com, saying, “Listen to the concerns of those who attended the Arvada Tea Party July 4.”

Francis Luong presents “Celebrate Your Independence By Choosing To Read Atlas Shrugged” posted at Just Add Rationality.

Grant Jones presents “Manhattan, Kansas July 4th Tea Party” posted at The Dougout.

Jared Rhoads presents “Tea Party” posted at The Lucidicus Project, saying, “The July 4th Tea Party protests in Boston were a success. Here is a brief report, with photos.”

Edward Cline presents “Parsing Obama” posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, “To grasp the magnitude of the national debt Obama (and his Republican predecessor) has been ringing up, a comparison should help illustrate the task. Bernard Madoff’s robbery and defrauding investors of some $50 billion can be represented by the diameter of the solar system. The federal government, using the same scamming tactics, is amassing a debt about the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. Madoff’s scheme can be measured in millions of miles. The federal government's, in almost limitless parsecs. That measurement ought to suffice to dramatize the scale of the hole he is deliberately digging for the country in his role as Community-Organizer-in-Chief.”

Stephen Bourque presents “The Reluctant Dictator” at One Reality, saying, “Barack Obama is not trying to lead a government takeover of one American industry after another. We know this because he told us so himself.”

Michael Labeit presents “Midget, Midget, Midget, Midget, Midget....” posted at Coroner's Bureau, saying, “Midget, Midget, Midget, Midget, Midget....”

C. August presents "Alan Reynolds, the Answer to CAFE is NOT Taxes" posted at Titanic Deck Chairs.

That’s it for this week. Titanic Deck Chairs will host the carnival next week. Please submit your blog articles for the next edition of the Objectivist Round Up using the carnival submission form.

UPDATES

I added a post from Titanic Deck Chairs.