What Do We Cherish "as Americans"?

Tibor R. Machan

In a recent talk, responding to the Arizona law that's said to be aimed at containing illegal immigration, President Barrack Obama stated that this piece of legislation "threatens to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans….” I am not enough of a student of the Arizona law to pass judgment on it now but I am definitely skeptical about the claim that Americans as such cherish "basic notions of fairness".

To start with, there is nothing in any basic American political document that mandates fairness across the land. Neither the Declaration of Independence, nor the Bill of Rights (or the U. S. Constitution) insists that Americans be fair. And a good thing that is, since such a demand cannot be met. Fairness is a fantasy, a dream, one that has been widely shown to be impossible, not only throughout recent human political history but also in some of the most politically astute literature. It barely works at the level of family life, let alone in a huge country.

As to the former, the attempt to institute a system of total fairness across a major society went miserably astray in the former Soviet Union and its colonies. It is a failure in all remaining socialist systems such as those in North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, each of which has leaders that stick to the rhetoric of fairness and equality as they keep their countries in a perpetual state of underdevelopment and act like fascist dictators (which certainly doesn't follow egalitarian principles).

As to the latter, George Orwell's masterful novella, Animal Farm, amounts to, among other things, a fierce indictment of the effort to politically engineer a society to be equal. Ayn Rand's novella, Anthem, is no less a superb fictional work that shows the viciousness of such an effort. And Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron is a fine presentation of both the pros and the cons of a completely egalitarian world in which even good looks must be eliminated so as not to leave some folks disadvantaged.

Among the classic political economic works defending egalitarianism one will find that Rousseau's Social Contract, Karl Marx and Frederick Engel's The Communist Manifesto, R. H. Tawney's Equality, and Ronald Dworkin's Sovereign Virtue are some of the most prominently published and widely embraced in political philosophical circles. Not each lays out the same position and, Marx and Engels, especially, present a somewhat nuanced type of equality as the social norm. But they all champion equality above individual liberty as the prime principle of social organization.

Today the dream of egalitarianism is with us in full force via Hollywood's political culture--the movie Avatar, for example, presents a idyllic society of species of near-humans who behave as one might imagine those in a society wherein everyone is equal, and indeed uniform, akin to all the bees in a bee hive.

What is so off about President Obama's remark is that America is precisely the country which is distinctive among most others for placing individual liberty as the first political principle that must be implemented and which government must secure. The equality Americans prize is "equality under the law," manifest, most evidently, in how before a court no one accused of a crime is supposed to be treated either favorably or unfavorably because of his or her race, sex, place of birth, and so forth--what in jurisprudence is referred to procedural equality, not the substantial type fantasized by egalitarians.

Rightly or wrongly, Americans as Americans do not cherish equality but individual liberty--that is what comes closest to being the official political philosophy of the nation. If Mr. Obama finds this misguided, he should state it instead of lying about the matter, which is what it amounts to saying that Americans as Americans cherish basic notions of fairness that. It is especially bizarre to make such an allegation in connection with the criticism of the Arizona law since immigrants to this country, be these legal or illegal, do not in the main cherish equality but liberty. The great majority of them come here because their liberty is routinely curtailed in their native countries and they hope that they will be able to live as free men and women and choose to pursue their happiness according to their own, not their government's, lights.

Ignorance vs. Intervention

Tibor R. Machan

Some of the most prominent and influential defenders of the regime of individual liberty, such as F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Richard Epstein, Don Boudreaux and others, have argued that the main reason adult men and women must be left free from others' interference is that we are all ignorant when it comes to how people ought to conduct themselves, how they should act. So, for example, after surveying arguments for a strictly limited government, English classical liberal jurist F.W. Maitland reportedly concluded: "But after all, the most powerful argument is that based on the ignorance, the necessary ignorance, of our rulers." The ignorance would be about right versus wrong ways to act!

Trouble is, now and then there will be some people who really do know a good deal, at least about some special matters like in the sciences or engineering. And this makes sense--just look around you and see the marvels of human creations and tending (e.g., to the sick or to harvesting nature). Certainly when juries reach a verdict about someone's guilt, they, too, lay claim to knowing right from wrong, at least so far as how we should act toward one another--e.g., that murderers should not murder, thieves should not steal, etc.

Of course, the kind of knowledge rulers, politicians, and government regulators lay claim to is different--they pretend to know how we, each and every single solitary one of us, ought to live from moment to moment, and this is impossible. Should I eat salty foods? Exercise regularly? Follow a diet? Go green? Drive an SUV? Save my money or spend it? Become a high school teacher or a Wall Street operator?

The little bit of this kind of knowledge that's available is only local, knowledge that intimates have of intimates (and even then much of it is speculative) and never authorizes people to regiment others' lives except when it comes to parents vis-a-vis their children and those who have been given the authority by people they might choose to instruct (doctors or trainers from patients and clients, respectively).

Such intimate and rare knowledge by no means implies the usual belief of the totalitarian sort that is so popular with governments, of people's proper goals in their lives and the means by which to reach these goals. Furthermore, the kind of knowledge one might have of how another should act does not imply that it should be imposed on people by laws and regulations. Simply as a matter of sound reasoning, logic, from the fact that one has knowledge of how another ought to act it does not follow that this knowledge may be imposed, used to justify ruling another. It is a non sequitur to think otherwise; it just doesn't follow!

So the ignorance-based defense of limited government needs to be supplemented with the rights-based defense in line with which even in those rare cases when others may well know a thing or two about how another ought to act, it is not up to these others to put that knowledge into practice but up to the agents themselves. (My doctor does know a bit about what it is that I ought to do to be well, yet he may only advise me, not force me!)

If all one relies on in the defense of liberty is widespread human ignorance of how other people should live their lives, there are simply too many cases that don't fit the situation. It is often enough that one knows that a friend or neighbor or colleague is doing something wrong and should stop this. It doesn't follow that one may do the stopping for another. It at most implies that those who care for their intimates need to try, sometimes persistently, to convince these intimates, to persuade them, to change some of their conduct. Resorting to coercive force is actually being lazy in these matters of aiming to reform people! All those reformers who want to change us need to confine themselves to educating, imploring their fellows and give up their paternalist habits (even if it is just nudging people around).

Attempting to make other people do the right thing, apart from when they embark upon violating the rights of their fellows (in which case it is a case of defensive intervention) is to deny them their moral sovereignty, to treat them as invalids or children instead of grown ups who, admittedly, may sometimes do the wrong thing and need to stop this of their own volition.

Tea Party versus ACORN, etc.

Tibor R. Machan

It looks like the way the Right despises ACORN, the Left does the Tea Party. It may not even be so much about their political stances, although that is part of it for sure. It is sad, though, that supporters of Mr. Obama had no problem with--indeed were proud of--his history of community organization but forget about this completely as they deride the Tea Party. And I am not just talking about Leftist talk show hosts and hostesses but snooty publications like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books. Instead of celebrating this clearly democratic phenomenon, the Left is demonizing it.

It is one thing to be against the ideas of some organization, quite another to be against organizing itself. Why would organizing be proper and commendable for Leftist causes but not for those of the Right? The Tea Party isn't some criminal gang burning down building, upending cars, and so forth--they march, mostly, and now and then shout out loud.

But I suppose what is good for the goose isn't always good for the gander, right? Well, let me add something then to objections against ACORN. Unlike the Tea Party phenomenon, ACORN has a history of freely dipping into public funds in support of its activities, never mind that these are certainly not approved of by all the taxpayers whose funds are being used by the organization. So while the Tea Party has that integrity about it, namely, supporting its mission by voluntary means, the means it advocates for solving problems in society, you cannot say this for ACORN and a whole lot of other Leftists outfits that have no problem with using their critics' funds.

This is something about which the Left has been very hypocritical over the years I have been aware of its political efforts in America and even before. On the one hand the Left, or most of them, opposed, say, the War in Vietnam and wanted to be able to refuse to pay the portion of taxes that funded this war. Yet when it comes to the Right's objection to government funded abortion clinics, this doesn't sit well with them at all. Indeed, whereas many on the Left would wish to withdraw government funding of whatever it is they oppose--subsidies to industries, bailouts, etc.--they seem to have no problem with using such funding for their own objectives.

But this is nothing very new, vis-a-vis the Left's political philosophy. From as long as there has been a Left, the official position has opposed the individual's basic right to private property--the first on the list of what must be abolished, according the Marx and Engels in their The Communist Manifesto. But at the same time the Left insists that the labor of the working classes is being ripped off by capitalists in the employment relationship.

So it seems the right to private property is just fine and dandy when it comes to the labor of the proletariat! However, when it comes to governing actual socialist societies, the Left has no problem with treating labor as anything but private property. No labor is public property; so that the East Germans who were attempting to flee the country could be considered thieves because they were stealing labor from the public! (This is one excuse the government gave for shooting those trying to scale the Berlin Wall back in those days!)

Maybe this is just another feature of a substantially pragmatic political outlook--never mind any principles, just forget ahead any which way you can get away with. Here is how it was put by Lenin: "Only one thing is needed to enable us to march forward more surely and more firmly to victory: namely, the full and complete thought of our appreciation by all communists in all countries of the necessity of displaying the utmost flexibility in their tactics. The strictest loyalty to the ideas of communism must be combined with the ability to make all the necessary practical compromises, to attack, to make agreements, zigzags, retreats, etc." [Lenin, "Left Wing Communism," 1920].

Education: Philosophical versus Political Correctness

Tibor R. Machan

You will know what I am after here when I tell you how much I dislike it when people talk of "her majesty" or "his highness" as they talk of various pretenders to heads of countries around the globe and throughout human history. For me such terms are like ones out of fairy tales because, well, there are no kings or queens or any such thing except in myths and fabricated political regimes. In other words kings are really not what they pretend to be, namely, God's chosen leaders here on earth. As with all in-born status that places some above others not in height or even talent but in political authority--some may rule and others will be ruled--the whole monarchical idea is a lie. Yet even now one can encounter references to these pretenders, right here in the United States of America, as if these were the real McCoy! Poppycock. Was it not the American Founders who participated in the revolution that demoted, demythologized these pretenders and declared that no one is by nature the ruler of someone else?

Of course in all of history, wherever there have been human inhabitants, such pretentious ruses and the accompanying distortions of language have been ubiquitous. It is not so much that the thought of it ought to be banned by law. No ideas should be regarded as subject to censorship, which is the ultimate objective of construing certain ideas as politically incorrect. The Pope, the Reverend Moon, Father this and Sister that--all these are titles dependent on a dubious narrative. Most of them are phony offices with no rational reason for them. But the idea of them all, however debatable, has to be tolerated in a free country, even if those ideas are a threat to the freedom that's so central to such a country. Yes, then, folks ought to give them all up, just as they have given up superstitions of any sort. However, this has to happen through enlightenment, education, reflection, conversation and other peaceful means, not through government intervention. A free country defers to the market place of ideas when it comes to what ideas will be deemed worthy of embrace even if the market place doesn’t always produce sterling results. So, for example, it should not be government that chooses between creationism and Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, any more than it should be government that chooses between one or another religion or ethics.

It is another thing, however, for citizens themselves, independently of government, to consider some ideas philosophically incorrect. Just what is and what is not will, most probably, be subject to eternal disputation, especially in societies where ideas of any kind have the protection of the legal system. Even racist ideas, or anti-Semitic ones—indeed any kind of bigotry—must be given legal protection and their criticism needs to be confined to argumentation, ostracism, disputation, debate and such.

There is just one big problem with this in our time. When a country tries to combine freedom of thought and speech with government-administered education, there will be irresolvable conflict. In a system of private education competition among schools would take care of philosophical correctness. In some schools certain books will be featured in the library, in others they will not, and students and their parents will be able to select which they want to be exposed to. Biology will be taught as creationists wish or as Darwinians do. No official doctrine will be imposed, period.

But when government delivers a coercive system of "education"--actually mostly indoctrination, since no alternative is available to the bulk of us who have to pay for and use such a system--any selection of books, magazines, films shown in classes and so forth will amount to censorship of the materials not chosen. They will be deemed as having been banned--whereas in a private system selection by the administrators of some schools, library officials, or teachers will not preclude exclusion by others. It is government's nearly one-size-fits-all approach to education that stands in the way of free inquiry.

Unfortunately, in many societies people want to mix elements of liberty with elements of coercion, as if that were something trouble free—health food with some poison! It isn't--the courts will struggle forever with trying to square that circle and politicians will engage in varieties of demagoguery to gain the power over the “educational” turf.

Only by getting government out of education can that matter be made consistent with the principles of a free society and fit for human beings whose minds must forever be free to think.

Looking at Some Bright Points

Tibor R. Machan

My specialty as a columnist is political economic commentary, with a good bit of cultural observation thrown in to round things off. So what my columns focus on tend to be unwelcome news and trends, such as the widespread loss of commitment to liberty, the abandonment of natural rights jurisprudence, the virtual abolition of the legal respect for private property rights, freedom of contract, and the growth of the scope of governmental power--all those calls for more and more regulations, as if the regulators were a special omniscient and virtuous species--by leaps and bounds.

But just as people's political convictions aren't all that constitute their character, so political economic features of our world are but a fraction of what is important. I like to check things around my own premises--my family, friends, colleagues, the home in which I live and spend most of my time, the restaurants and shops and stores I frequent, so as to gain a proper perspective. (One point I have made again and again is that for a half hour of news from, say, CNN or Fox-TV or MSNBC, I usually turn to a half hour of the travel channel or science TV or some other source of mostly positive news and information. Even the history channel can cheer up a person, given how often it shows how much more miserable matters were in ancient and medieval times, on average, than today.) And on my trip back to Budapest a year ago I observed, in a follow-up column, just how much worse was much of the twentieth century for the bulk of the world than it is now.

I am, then, in full accord with the outlook of the late Julian Simon who was what is certainly optimistic about where the world is headed (and who won a bet with Paul Ehrlich, the doomsayer from Stanford University and author of The Population Bomb [1968], about how bad things are going to get in soon when Ehrlich swore the world would go to hell in a hand basket and quite incredibly is holding on to his views despite the fact that his predicted doom by the 1970s never materialized). A book that recently came out, contrarian in its way as well, is Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist (Harper, 2010). It follows in the footsteps of Simon's work, much of it conveyed in his follow-up to his The Ultimate Resource (1981), namely, The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment (1996). You want to cheer up a bit, read the Ridley book ASAP.

My reason for listing these works and reminding readers of the dismal failure of doomsday predictors like Paul Ehrlich is that I consider it one of the media's major disservices to us all that so little time is spent on good news. I suppose it is understandable, since there appears to be little profit in discussing welcome information--most people run across it all the time anyway, right around their lives, at home, work, school, the market place. Just the other day I decided for once to indulge myself and do my grocery shopping at Whole Foods and the abundance of exceptional grocery items therein just took my breath away. I have shopped in one of them near where by daughter lives in New York City but never actually bought a basket full from the place, nor sat down to have a proper little (health food) meal there, which I did this time. And when one considers the kind of grocery shopping my mother was doing back in Budapest in the 1950s and what millions of people faced in earlier times, who can doubt that things are looking up all the time, at least as far as the non-political dimensions of our lives are concerned.

Of course not all can be beneficiaries of all such welcome development. One thinks of the people of Greece who, ignoring the teaching of their great ancient thinkers like Socrates and Aristotle, forgot all about the virtue of prudence and seemed to have fully embraced the entitlement mentality that helped bring about the recent financial fiasco there and elsewhere.

Still, amidst all the irrational exuberance of the last several decades--not to mention the growing governmental habit--there has also been a great deal of useful innovation, creativity, initiative, entrepreneurship, discovery, and engineering in most areas of human concern. So it seems to me that Ridley is on the right track to chronicle what should give most of us a sense of optimism rather than doom and gloom.

And it makes sense to keep in mind that one reason doom and gloom are so evident--only one among many--is that the delivery of news from all corners of the globe happens so much more rapidly these days than it used to. Given, then, that news reporting agencies seem to believe, rightly or wrongly, that audiences want bad news, they can dish it up much faster than before. Which contributes to the misperceptions that can get anyone into a funk. But don't believed it--turn on your iPod, put in on "shuffle," and listen to your selection of wonderful music and leave the doomsayers in the dust.

Rights May Never Be In Conflict

Tibor R. Machan

If rights were no more that fancy ways of expressing preferences—in short, if morality and politics could only produce emotional expressions—there would be no doubt about the possibility of conflict between rights. Those who embrace the emotivism of the likes of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume (e.g., Michael Oakeshott, Karl Popper, and, I assume, many economists) must admit to the possibility that an assertion of a right to, e.g., private property or freedom of speech, could be in conflict with an assertion of a right to, say, political participation. That is because these asser tions are for them, in the last analysis, no more than expressions of private or collective emotional preferences.

There is, however, the alternative of the natural rights classical liberal tradition. Within its tenets, which I believe make better sense than alter natives do, a conflict of true rights claims cannot exist. It is one vital contention of this tradition that when a claim is made as to someone's having a basic right, the claim may be confirmed by reference to a correct understanding of human nature. That such an understanding is possible is itself a controversial issue. Yet it seems to me that skepticism here, as in many other cases, stems from a wholly unrealistic conception of what it takes to know something. With a conception of knowledge such that when we know something, we have the clearest, most self-consistent, and most complete conceptualization possible to date of what it is we supposedly know the problem is solved.

The natural rights position sees human nature as one category of reality that rests on our achievement of a grasp of reality. And with human nature we discover, according to this tradition, that a new aspect of reality, unlike that we are familiar with outside the human world, has come into focus, namely, morality and politics. We need to answer a question concerning ourselves, namely, "How we ought to live?" —since we haven't the programming of other living beings that will just take care of living for us, that will avoid mistakes automatically. We need, also, to answer the question "How should we organize ourselves in communities?"

In both these human spheres of concern we are dealing with reali ty and just as anywhere else—say between economics and biology—no conflict is tolerable between true claims, so in ethics and politics no such conflict is possible. The reason is metaphysical, in the last analysis, justified in Aristotle's defense of the Law of Non-Contradiction, a defense that still hasn't been adequately challenged and the challenge of which will always be self-defeating.

In particular, the natural rights classical liberal tradition identifies the rights to life, liberty and property (etc.) as basic for human community organization. These rights are not, however, basic to human life—no concern with rights arises on a desert island for Robinson Crusoe. They derive from human nature and the ethics of individualism, to whit, that each person ought to live an excellent human life, a life of freely chosen rational conduct.

From the right to life and liberty there emerges, with suitable analysis, the right to private property. It rests on two considera tions: (a) human beings require sphere of individual or personal jurisdiction, so that they may carry out their moral responsibility to choose to do the right thing; (b) the choice to acquire valued items from nature or by trade is a moral responsibility, the exercise of the virtue of prudence.

Any bona fide political system must be organized in large measure so as to protect the rights to life, liberty and, in the practical respect of both of these, the right to private property. Thus any political rights—to be free to engage in decision-making vis-à-vis political matters (Sen)—must not violate those basic rights. Political rights include the right to vote, serve in government, take part in the organization of political campaigns, etc. Practically speaking, the exercise of one's political rights may have an impact on who governs, various internal rules of government, and the organization of political processes. But there is no political right to override anyone's right to life, liberty or property. Any evidence of some community's legal system overriding these rights is ipso facto evidence of the corruption of that system from a bona fide political one into one of arbitrary (even if majority) rule.

As we judge communities across the globe, we must keep in mind that what is comparatively best is not always the best possible. Thus we can affirm the greater merits of certain political communi ties or countries despite their evident violation of basic rights. Just as in personal assault cases we can distinguish between major and minor ones, as well as those in between, we can also tell when communities rest on principles that render them entirely corrupt, those that simply are confused and messy, and those that come reasonably near to meeting the standards of basic human rights.

In an informal way we already apply this method of judging communities, even if not for all purposes. We should go much farther and apply it more strictly and substantively, including as we appraise our own country's laws.

Are Kids Altruists?

Tibor R. Machan

In The New York Times Magazine an article recently discusses whether babies have an inherent moral sense. It beings as follows: "A video featuring adorable cherubs — what’s not to like? But 'The Moral Life of Babies' addresses a heady topic: are babies inherently amoral, or can they actually distinguish right from wrong? In a laboratory at Yale University, researchers stage puppet shows in which one character does a good deed, while another does a bad deed. The babies are then asked, wordlessly, to express their preference for one character over another. It’s a video that is both thought- and smile-provoking."

I will not address whether babies have a sense of right versus wrong, only the way this matter was reportedly tested by the researchers who investigated it. Paul Bloom and his wife, Karen Wynn, of the Infant Cognitive Center at Yale University, conducted studies with babies and reached the conclusion that, indeed, babies have a moral sense. One piece of evidence supporting their conclusion was that babies tended to show a preference for people who were nice to other people and didn't much like those who weren't.

For my money this is where a big problem arises with their findings. From the fact that babies liked people who helped others, Bloom and Wynn conclude that the babies preferred altruist as opposed to selfish behavior. This is because they liked people who were helpful to others.

However, based on what they report, their conclusions does not follow--or, more precisely, another conclusion, quite different from the one they drew, could be more reasonable. If the babies liked people who were being helpful to others, this may very well be explained by reference to their preference for people who would help them in case they needed help. And that would not point to a preference for altruism, quite the contrary. The babies, maybe quite naturally, saw who among those whom they were observing would be better for them, who would prove to be to their own interest.

When people help other people and this is welcome by us, it could very well be because we realize that the help could come in handy to us. Whereas the behavior of those who show no care for others would not suggest that they would be helpful in case their assistance may become useful. So then what at first appears to be a preference for altruism is, quite possibly, a preference for egoism.

Of course throughout history it has often been assumed that human babies are indeed quite self-interested. And there seems to be ample grounds for thinking that people in general are quite self-interested. When they get up in the morning they usually first take care of themselves--wash up, brush their teeth, have breakfast, select suitable clothing to wear, etc., and so forth. They are not likely to turn to helping their neighbors with their chores instead of caring for themselves. Later, once they are done with this self-interested behavior they often do, of course, reach out to help other people.

In any case, there is much to be explored here but it is worthwhile to just take a step back and notice that what the researchers concluded is by no means the only result that could be reached from the evidence that was given in the article about the morality of babies. Moreover, it is noteworthy, also, that the research team equivocated between morality and altruism.

There are numerous moral systems, ethical positions, that have been advance throughout human history and it is simply misleading to assume that being moral must necessarily mean being altruistic. Indeed, there is something quite misanthropic about such an assumption--why would it be commendable for people to work to benefit others while neglecting themselves? Who will then take care of them? They are more likely to understand what they need and want and so attending to these matters would probably be more efficient than imposing one's idea of what others need and want on these others.

But let that go for now. What Bloom and Wynn present us in with their findings calls to mind, once again, the quip that is associated with the poet W. H. Auden, namely, "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know."

Who is Free to Discriminate?

Tibor R. Machan

Everyone who is awake discriminates—it is what people do with their minds, it’s the way they know the world, more or less well. The kind of discrimination that’s objectionable is when people use irrelevant attributes of others to classify them—like their race when hiring them for jobs where race is irrelevant. The race of a CPA has no bearing on the work of a CPA, so taking it into account in the hiring or promotion process is morally wrong, a kind of professional malpractice.

In a free country such discrimination may not be forbidden however offensive it is. No more than one may ban dirty talk or filthy movies or indeed any conduct that doesn’t violate anyone’s basic rights. (A legal right not to be discriminated against doesn’t amount to the same thing. Legal rights can be granted by government, independently of anyone’s basic natural rights, even opposed to them.)

In the US, however, some features of the civil rights law have made discrimination based on race, sex, national origin, etc., illegal for most people though by no means all. A clear case in point is that customers may indulge their racial and similar irrational prejudices with complete impunity.

If racists go shopping at the local mall, there is no law against their refusing to patronize stores where Jews, blacks, women or people with obvious ethnic backgrounds happen to work. Throughout the market place anti-discrimination laws actually discriminate mainly against sellers, vendors, proprietors, employers, and so forth. If a prospective employee stay away from places of work for prejudicial reasons, there is no law against this. If racists stay away from a restaurant because it is owned or employs people against whom they harbor racial prejudice, this is not legally forbidden. You will not be able to turn in such potential customers to the EPA and get any action taken against them.
It is probably quite impossible to force such customers to stop acting on their irrational prejudice but it is also quite clear that this amounts to the unequal application of the spirit and even letter of the civil rights laws that were enacted to prohibit prejudicial conduct throughout the American economy.

Perhaps this contains an important lesson. Conduct that does not violate others’ rights may be very ill suited for governmental action. When people do violate the rights of others, this is usually evident by way of some actions that can be publicly observed—assault, battery, kidnapping, rape, murder, and so forth. But conduct that doesn’t involve such violation is not available for control. This is akin to the problem with hate crimes—how can it be verified that someone commits a violent crime out of hate?

Of course there are some measures that can be taken to counter prejudice at a certain point of its manifestation. For example, if one opens up one’s commercial establishment to all a sundry but then tries to inject criteria midway through the deal, when one notices that a potential customer is gay or black or from Bulgaria, that can be countered since the offer has already been made and to arbitrarily withdraw it can be legally actionable. Not unless the criteria, be these valid or not, are announced before the invitation has gone out to all a sundry to come and do business, may they be deployed.

Ok, but this of course has no impact on the great majority of market agents who are free to indulge their racism, sexism, ethnic prejudice and such by refusing to deal with merchants who may well have just the product or service, for the right price, they are in the market for. People who insist on using the government to make people behave well are facing a big problem with this.

But there is one avenue of recourse against the market agents who act irrationally, namely, to work very hard and vigilantly to educate them and to condemn them whenever their irrational discrimination comes to light. The trouble is that there has emerged such a heavy dependence on fixing moral failing by way of the law that such non-governmental approaches are not even explored, let alone practiced.

Interstate Commerce Muddles

Tibor R. Machan

In America most of the mild and Draconian intrusions in people's economic lives are legally justified by the interstate commerce clause of the U. S. Constitution--Article I, Section 8 in particular. "Congress shall have power...[t]o regulate commerce with foreign nations, among the several States, and with the Indian tribes...." (Another source is the arcane police power of governments!)

The best interpretation of this power has never been uncontroversial. Some argue it could mean virtual Stalinist powers by Congress over the economy of the nation; some say it means only that Congress is authorized to regularize commerce, make all of the states conform to the principles of free market economics (instead of the mishmash of protectionism that was in place before the establishment of the country).

In recent times the former interpretation has prevailed in the courts, so now Congress is taken to be in charge of any economic activity that crosses state borders or even the sort that has a more impact on commerce is neighboring states!

Does this make any sense? Not for free adult men and women, not in a free country. In such a country Congress would not be regulating commerce of any kind since that entails regimenting the economic activities of the citizenry and no one has the basic, natural, human individual right to do that. Congress isn't God or even king! Congress exists so as to secure our rights, period, just as the Declaration of Independence states. Anything more is dictatorship, even if only of the majority of the country's voters over the rest of us. In a free country no such dictatorship is justified. Democracy isn't any excuse for regimenting the minority's lives by the majority. Democracy pertains, in a bona fide free country, to applying the basic laws of the land to new areas of life (say, the Internet). But always consistent with the basic (constitutional) principles of the country, never in contradiction to them. (If judicial review is a valid activity of the country's courts, the courts must strike down any effort by majorities to violate individual rights!)

Why is it that the federal government has the legal power to tell citizens with whom they must do business? Because of the interstate commerce clause. And that is all wrong. No such power of Congress or any other political body may be authorized over the choices of free adult men and women. Such men and women, citizens of a free country, have the right to decide for themselves with whom they will do business and not be regimented by a bunch of their fellow citizens! Of course, they must also follow through on commitments they make in the process, such as when they enter into contractual relations with their fellows. And sometimes such relations are entered into implicitly, not overtly, as when a citizen opens a store, shop, or restaurant--any place of business--"to the public," meaning to anyone in the market for doing business with him or her (who behaves in a civilized fashion).

So if one invites people to do business, one may only restrict or qualify the invitation ahead of time and must be fully disclosed. If I don't want to admit married men or women into my store, this must be something people can learn before they enter the store. This is like the restrictions on who may join a club or religious order. No one married may become member of the Roman Catholic clergy, and this is made clear up front and everyone must live with it even if it is a silly requirement. Some such requirements are not silly, such as requiring that only men come to do business in one's barbershop or medical clinic. Similarly, if one makes clear, up front, that one will not do business with blacks or women or very tall or very short people, this is something--be it an ethical or unethical practice--that must be declared up front, not once someone enters to conduct business or to seek a job being on offer. That is because opening an establishment without specifying the restrictions implies the absence of restrictions by the reasonable person standard of (common) law.

In a free country the right of freedom of association must be fully protected. But, also, once it is announced that one will do business with any civilized potential customer, that too must be protected from any arbitrary breach. The fact that America's Constitution permits Congress to ignore this just shows how far the country needs to go to become a truly free and just society.

Dealing with Racists in a Free Market

Tibor R. Machan

Finally, in the Rand Paul furor we have an issue in politics worthy of sustained, serious attention--How should people who act badly be dealt with? More particularly how should people who discriminate based on irrelevancies such as race, sex, national origin, physical impediments, etc., be treated? Should they be punished and forced to do the right thing? Should they be ignored and left to rot with their evil souls. Should they be ostracized and boycotted?

Since free men and women may not be forced to stop doing the wrong thing unless it involves violating other people's rights, there are limits to what may be done to them. Sadly this point is often overlooked by even the most earnest reformers who want to make others good. It cannot be done and may not be tried with violence, coercively. Human goodness must come from the heart, as it were, voluntarily. Otherwise it isn't really goodness. At most it could amount to being well enough behaved, like a child whom parents threaten to punish for misconduct.

But there are also many, many options available to respond to misconduct that has an impact on others without quite violating their rights. Strictly speaking no one's rights are violated when one discriminates against them without a valid reason, say for being black or a woman or coming from Somalia. No one is owed patronage from anyone--I don't have to buy something from you even if you are selling it at a good price and it is a fine product or service. Such an interaction, too, must be voluntary on both sides. And even if I invoke stupid reasons for avoiding dealing with you, you aren't due anything from me except, perhaps, an apology for my oversight.

In a free market place, however, when you enter it and do not state any preconditions others must meet to deal with you--to eat at your restaurant, shop at your store, rent a room at your motel, go watch a game at your stadium--you are extending an offer to anyone who can pay and behaves in a civilized fashion. But if certain prerequisites are in play, you can restrict those with who you will do business, provided these are fully disclosed and people considering doing business with you can find out before they enter your premises. That is the reasonable understanding of one's going into business, opening a store or shop or eatery. No irrelevant criteria can stand in the way of commencing business, not unless these are stated up front.

This would mean that if one wants to exclude blacks or whites or women or some other identifiable group of customers or traders from engaging in trade with one, that condition would have to be knowable to any prospective customer. Many institutions operate this way already--no women are allowed into the Roman Catholic priesthood; a bridge or ping-pong or bowling club or tennis tournament requires certain qualifications from those who would join it. And while these may be valid, sometimes they aren't--is it really valid for Roman Catholics to have their policy of celibacy for the clergy or mightn't it really be an insidious thing after all, once closely considered? But in a free society what matters is that they choose to have that practice and it doesn't violate anyone's rights--no one has a right to become a member of the RC clergy unless admitted by the RC administration.

If, however, you go on record with offering your goods and services for trade without specifying any conditions, you would be violating an implicit promise--understood by the reasonable person standard--to people whom you would bar from this. And that could be legally actionable.

Moreover, if you did make an announcement, such as "No blacks or women or 7 feet tall people served here," you would alienate a great many potential customers and so it is not like that anyone with a modicum of rationality will try to do business that way. Still, one could. And that is what freedom means, among other things, that you can be an ass so long as you do it peacefully.

Freedom of Association and Rights

Tibor R. Machan

A big flaw of the famous 1964 Civil Rights law is that it engages in regimenting who may or must associate with whom in private commerce. Among free men and women no such regimentation by government is permissible even if, to quote one prominent Republican "it is the law of the land." So is the war on drugs, so used to be laws mandating segregation. Saying something is the law of the land settles nothing at all about whether it should be the law of the land.

We are here not talking about whether those engaged in private commerce ought to do so without racial prejudice. Of course they should. It is immoral to hold it against someone that he or she is of a certain race, for the simple reason that no one has a choice about his or her race. Being black or white or yellow or whatever race or color isn't either a liability or asset for a human being, any more than being short or tall or a male or a female could be. For some limited purposes it may matter whether one is tall or short--basketball or riding in horse races. But for nearly all other purposes for which people may interact, their race and color are of no significance at all.

Those, however, who think otherwise have a right to do so. Not a legal right, as things now stand in America, but a basic natural-moral right. Which is't the same as their being right or correct in how they think or act. But freedom entails the right of people to engage in malpractice, both personal and professional. Otherwise one simply isn't free.

Just compare this to freedom of the press--it means, among other things, that one may not be stopped from speaking and writing morally objectionable material. Those who think otherwise believe in censorship as does Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who said at one time that "There are freedoms, but they can't contradict our traditions; we must guarantee that freedom of expression agrees with our values." [From in Christian Science Monitor]

Those who support banning of racial and other immoral discrimination in commerce or elsewhere also believe that the government must guaranteed that freedom of association agrees with certain values. And those values may well be correct. That isn't the issue here. What is the issue is that when one makes immoral choices about who to interact with and whom to ostracize, this is not open to be banned, not among free men and women.

This issue is timely now that Democrats and mainstream Republicans have finally found something with which to demonize Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican who pulled off a win in Tuesday's primary election in Kentucky. When Californians attempted to resist federal regimentation of their associations with fellow Americans back in 1964, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White helped cancel their efforts, arguing as follows:

The right to discriminate, including the right to discriminate on racial grounds, [would have been] embodied in the state's basic charter, immune from legislative, executive, or judicial regulation at any level of the state government [had Proposition 14 (Art. I, Sec. 26) not be held unconstitutional].

Justice White explained that the California law enacted via Proposition 14 "authorized private discrimination," even though only "encouraging, rather than commanding" it. But what of it? All sorts of bad behavior is authorized on the part of free men and women--their very possibly bad choice of religion, political affiliation, and bad personal choices of all kinds. That is exactly what is entailed in the notion of a right—its exercise, wisely or unwisely, is shielded from others' interference. Justice White made this evident, albeit disapprovingly, in the following observation: “Those practicing racial discrimination need no longer rely solely on their personal choice. They could now invoke express constitutional authority, free from censure or interference of any kind from official source". (But how could one freely make a personal choice to discriminate if government has the legitimate power to stop one from doing so?)

Yes, in America, which is now a full blown Nanny State, bad behavior on the part of adults is dealt with by governments as parents are authorized to deal with bad behavior on the part of their children. And Mr. Paul opposes this, to his credit.

Charles Krauthammer's Fallacy

Tibor R. Machan

In a recent discussion about the war on drugs Charles Krauthammer, the most avidly conservative columnist in the nation's capital (and who writes for The Washington Post), defended the war by comparing the abuses associated with it--such as police raids on homes where no drugs are found--with abuses associated with raids aimed at car thieves when no stolen cars are found. But the comparison is utterly misconceived.

Chop shops, at which stolen cars are stored and reworked and then sold, are criminal operations because they are the fruits of grand theft auto! That is to say, the crime has clear cut victims whose property was stolen and when mistakes are made in the prosecution of such crimes they are not committed in the pursuit of innocent individuals. Sure, even when guilty parties are being pursued mistakes can occur but unless these are committed maliciously, they can be excused.

Pursuing drug offenders involves prosecuting people who have engaged in entirely victimless crimes. Sure, sometimes drug offenders are involved in criminal activities, but these have nothing to do with the sale or consumption of drugs. They have to do with breaking and entering, for example, so as to steal money or other valuables that can be used to purchase drugs. Those crimes, however, are independent of drug use itself. They are, instead, related to the prohibition of such use.

Drug use can be a very hazardous activity, just as gambling or mountain climbing can be. People sometimes become addicted to drugs as they can be to gambling or other hazardous activities. But in principle people can get addicted to nearly anything--in the famous movie The Days of Wine and Roses Jack Lemmon's and Lee Remick's characters become addicted to bon-bons before they turn into alcoholics. Such afflictions of people have nothing to do with victimizing anyone--they are what can be seen as self-regarding misconduct, like imprudent spending, overeating or other types of recklessness.

In free and civilized societies self-regarding misconduct may not be made into crimes. The most famous political philosopher associated with America's political tradition, the English political economist John Stuart Mill, insisted that only when someone engages in conduct that's harmful to other people can he or she be interfered with by the police. That is indeed the original meaning of liberalism--people are to be treated as free individuals unless they aggress on other people.

The fact that some drug users--and they are few and far between apart from those who try to evade the war on drugs in societies where there is official drug prohibition--misbehave under the influence of drugs is irrelevant. Anything can influence people's conduct and some such conduct can turn out to be aggressive. But it need not. And that is the difference between what must be made criminal and what must not be made criminal.

I will not even dwell on the obvious inconsistency of making drug abuse illegal while leaving alcohol and other types of abuse legal. It is, in point of fact, all part of the Nanny State mentality which, interestingly enough, the likes of Charles Krauthammer roundly condemn when it comes to welfare policies but seem not to mind when it comes to dealing with drug abusers who are adult human beings while they are treated like children or invalids.

Nor will I spend time on discussing the controversy over the very idea of drug addiction. There are others who have done a very fine job debunking the abuses perpetrated in the name of this idea--e.g., Thomas Szasz. I merely want to alert readers to the fact that the likes of Charles Krauthammer are just as willing to take over people's lives and rule it for them regarding their use of drugs as the likes of Keynesian economist Paul Krugman do when it comes to people's economic activities. Which confirms just how widespread the impulse is to rule other people, both from the Right and the Left. Neither shows much confidence in human beings--what is odd is that they do show confidence in the most dangerous human beings, governments, who hold guns in their hands.

NYTimes' Magazine Hides Sunstein

Tibor R. Machan

On Sunday, May 16th, The New York Times Magazine ran what amounts to a puff piece about Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, President Obama's long time friend, former colleague, and current regulation czar. It was penned by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who is identified as "a contributing writer for the magazine and a contributing editor for Rolling Stone" magazine.

The essay is a decent enough account of Sunstein's career and personal life but the only idea it focuses upon in his repertoire of significant and controversial ideas is "nudging" or "libertarian paternalism." This is the belief in a system of government regulations that amount to creating government incentives for people to do the right thing (as per how the government or Professor Sunstein see it, of course). Instead of coming down on what government considers objectionable or undesired human conduct with a sledge hammer, nudging works by setting up various tricks by which people are lead to act in the way the government intends for them to act.

Call it behavior modification or libertarian paternalism, the gist of Sunstein's type of government meddling in people's lives is to use a kind of Skinnerian program of stimulus-response (after the late Harvard behaviorist psychologist, B. F. Skinner), whereby what government officials want the citizens to do isn't commanded but made the result of various more or less subtle prompters. Although Sunstein and his collaborators prefer the term "nudging," it is a misleading idea since if it involved no more than than, one could just sidestep it. Suppose my neighbor wants his guests to stop wearing shoes in his home, so he leaves bits and pieces of suggestions to you as you enter it that leads you to take off your shoes and proceed into the home in your socks. OK, but you need not visit him in the first place. So when you realize you are being manipulated into doing stuff you don't want to do--say you don't particularly like showing people the condition of your socks--you can just not enter or take some other evasive action. There are numerous such situations in our lives, when those with whom we interact desire for us to act in certain ways and we can either comply or opt out.

With so called nudging, however, we are ultimately being forced to comply with how the government wants us to behave. There is no escape. If we don't go along, we could end up fined or even sent to jail. That is why it is called paternalism, since the government acts as would parents act toward their children who have full authority over them. The "libertarian" part is a ruse--it comes from the fact that government tries to keep the citizenry in the dark about what it is doing, making it appear that one is making one's own choices when one isn't really.

Anyway, this idea is almost the only one associated with Cass Sunstein and with what he is supposed to be contributing to the Obama regime. The article does mention that he has urged government to go to court in support of animal rights but what it failed to do is mention Professor Sunstein's most dangerous and vile idea, namely, that government is the source of our basic rights.

In the American tradition of law and politics, the foundation of these come from human nature. That is what the Declaration of Independence points out, namely, that we have equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--among others--because of our human nature. They are unalienable so long as we remain human!

What Professor Sunstein and his co-author Stephen Holmes claimed, in their 1999 book, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, is that “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” and “Statelessness means rightlessness.” This is the pre-revolutionary, pre-Lockean--and pre-Jeffersonian--idea that governments grant us rights; that there are no natural rights but mere privileges we get from government which can also promptly take them away. It isn't just the protection of our rights for which government is needed but their very existence is due to government as Sunstein & Co. see things! Instead of the citizens having rights that government is instituted to secure, all governments, like monarch, czars, dictators and such, give people rights, which they can promptly take away at their discretion.

That such a reactionary view should be held by the foremost legal mind in the Obama administration is worth full disclosure and exploration, something The New York Times Magazine essay failed to do. Never mind nudging or animal "rights"--those are small potatoes. What matters far more is that Sunstein and Co. believe the thoroughly anti-libertarian notion that government is the source of law and rights, not their administrator and protector, respectively.

Europe's (and our coming) Tragedy of the Commons

Tibor R. Machan

Is this stuff with Greece and, soon, with Portugal, Spain and Italy, and the rest of us all that surprising? Has it not been clear for ages that when people draw their support from a common pool, the resources will soon vanish?

Aristotle already noted this phenomenon when he said, “For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few." (Politics, 1262a30-37) Biologist Garrett Hardin reaffirmed the point in an influential essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," for the magazine Science, on December 13, 1968.

The gist of the tragedy is that commonly held (important) resources will be depleted and will not be replenished. And this doesn't apply only to how the wilds are being ruined by being held in common but also to national treasuries which everyone in a country believes is there for him or her to dip into indiscriminately. And then, with international communities, the tragedy isn't contained by national borders.

One of the largest commons these days is the European Union. Everyone in Europe is fighting to take from its common pool of stuff--mostly funds through such outfits as the IMF, the World Bank, etc.--but few are eager to replace what they have taken. And this applies to the citizenry, clearly, not only the politicians who want to please them. (The IMF draws a lot of its funds now from the USA! How long can that go on?)

And the same is happening in the USA, of course, what with common pools such as the so called Social Security fund slowly being drained. What are all those lobbyists doing in Washington? Looking to dip into the common treasury as deeply as they can. Getting stuff from the government is always enthusiastically pursued while refilling its coffers is not--who really volunteers to pay taxes, let alone more than one must fork over? That is just what the tragedy of the commons amounts to, get as much out as you can, and put as little back as possible.

The best way to deal with the tragedy of the commons is privatization! But of course that would help put an end to this constant promise of a free ride. Moreover, once people get used to getting a free ride, at least for a while, they regard it as a God given right for them to continue. And there you have Greece today and the rest of the welfare states of the globe tomorrow. (Actually, most of them are merely postponing their comeuppance.)

Privatization--making the stuff of the world private property instead of held in common--solves the problem because it imposes discipline. Everyone must cope with the limited stuff he or she has, can produce, can obtain through peaceful trade, nothing more. No one may dump his or her waste on the neighbor! No one may rip off the neighbor once out of private resources. Maybe in a few drastic emergencies such transgressions will be tolerated but not as a rule, which is how it goes now. Such discipline as privatization brings about would also handle most environmental problems. Even a fiasco such as the oil mess in the Gulf of Mexico would be more likely to be contained if the oceans itself were privately owned--without very serious assurance of safety, drilling would not be possible because private parties would be vigilant about protecting their rightful interests!

On numerous fronts, then, we see that the problems that keep showing up in the daily news are the result of reliance upon the commons. Hardin himself thought that a strict administration of the commons might solve the problem but he didn't take public choice theory into consideration--people "in charge" have their own agendas and will not really guard the ever elusive public interest.

One way to deal with all this is to come up with a sound constitution for a country! Constitutional economists, like James Buchanan, have been advocating this for years but the public and the political class knows that it would mean the end of their free ride. Never mind that such a free ride will end anyway. But folks do think they can continue eating their cake and having it, too. Not a promising picture!

The Choice Haters' Error

Tibor R. Machan

If you keep up with works coming from the academy hoping to influence the world as I try to do--in part because I wish I could claim some success at the same task--you may know that during the last several years a spate of books has hit the market in which the target is consumer choice. Like how we are supposed to have too many choices when we go to the grocery store, the mall, or more generally, throughout the market place. Too many flavors of ice cream; to many makes of automobiles; too many styles of shoes and pants and so forth. Well, anyone who has ever been to a mall, like the pretty swanky ones in my neighborhood--South Coast Plaza, Fashion Island, and so on--can figure out what the beef is about. No one could possibly process all the options he or she faces when entering these places. (Ergo, let's have politicians and bureaucrats limit our choices--for our own good!)

But it's just this that should alert one to the problem with such laments. The plain fact of the matter is that most of us don't go shopping expecting to peruse everything that's on display from which we could make our selections. No. Even when one goes to a grocery store--one of these huge ones that used to amaze European, especially Eastern European visitors to North America--one usually knows the places where what one is after can be found. Yes, there are a lot of cereals available to choose from but people don't explore all of them but a few--say, the several varieties of granola or oatmeal. Or one goes straight to the seafood or cheese sections.

In other words, not everything is on display for everyone who enters. Thousands of people come to these markets and most of them know where their kind and range of merchandise is to be found. No psychological trauma will afflict them--as suggested by the choice-haters who write these books, aiming therewith to undermine the merits of the market place where all these things may be found--because of some kind of mental overload.

But then this is common sense and too many of the academic enemies of the market are looking for the worst case scenario instead of crediting shoppers with the intelligence required to narrow the sphere wherein they will make their selections. It isn't as if we all went shopping tabula rasa, without a clue as to what we wanted. Most people know pretty well which region of the market place they will be checking out when they get on the road to do their shopping.

I recall another area where something like this came up, namely, in how a great many urban planners dislike tack houses. Yes, these structures do look very similar when looked at casually or from the air. However those who live in them aren't standing about looking at their homes from the outside and when you enter these homes, you find all the variety that humanity is capable of displaying within its living spaces. So while looked at as some kind of art form, from afar, they may not be very appealing, such cookie-cutter homes are (a) affordable and (b) plenty different where it counts, namely, inside.

Frederick Bastiat, the great French classical liberal political economists, coined the expression, which is the title of perhaps his most famous essays, "That which is seen, and that which is not Seen." It points up how often intellectuals fail to see what is important in economic affairs because they only notice what's on the surface--like when they champion minimum wage laws since on the surface these appear to help wage-earners, never mind that once closely examined it turns out that such laws produce unemployment among just those who need work most, namely, the unskilled.

I think Bastiat's point is applicable elsewhere, also, including when it comes to this matter of how we face too many choices in the market, so many, in fact, that it traumatizes most of us and contributes to our unhappiness. No--look closer--it does not!

The Fatal Allure of Pragmatism

Tibor R. Machan

Just a little background: pragmatism is America’s only home grown prominent philosophical movement. It was formulated by the likes of Charles Peirce, John Dewey, C. I. Lewis, Sidney Hook, and others, including the most radical member of the team, the recently deceased Richard Rorty. In America’s community of jurists, several major pragmatists stand out, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and, today, Richard Posner and Cass Sunstein.

From knowing that these people are pragmatists it isn’t a simple matter to tell what kind of political philosophy and public policies they champion. Indeed, with a pragmatist you can never tell. That is why it is such an alluring general philosophy—no one can hold you responsible for anything since a cardinal feature of pragmatism is the rejection of all principles. This is ironic, since among major countries America is the one most clearly associated with a set of principles, as identified in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the U. S. Constitution. For the country, then, to have developed the pragmatic approach to law and public policy is a tragic contradiction. All of the fundamental ideals and principles that America is known for is rejected by pragmatism and pragmatists. They take them to be myths or, as one major contemporary pragmatist recently emailed me, as pure BS!

So what is afoot here? Throughout human intellectual, including political history the great contributors have mostly attempted to find basic principles of justice and good community life on which to rest the institutions of society. The very idea of the rule of law rests on principles that aren’t mere personal preferences, arbitrary intuitions, wishes, hunches and such but something stable so citizens can tell in the main (though not in detail) what to expect and what will be unacceptable. To want this is to want a coherent enough philosophy of community life but for skeptics it amounts to wishing for the impossible, some kind of ideology that has no firm relationship with reality. Pragmatists have concluded that such an aim is hopeless—no basic principles are available at all, as far as they see it. So what is left? Well, nothing much outside one’s personal hunches, preferences, desires, wishes and such. None of this, according to them, is true or right but at best widely shared. But that, too, isn’t a requirement in pragmatic thinking. Whatever works, is the motto of the pragmatist—a phrase that was recently used by Woody Allen as the title of a movie in which he seriously promoted the idea.

Problem is, sadly, that “whatever works” is hopelessly vague. When something works, it does so because it helps promote a valuable goal. Exercise works if it makes one fit, diet works if one manages to lose a few pounds, the engineering strategy of lowering a massive box on to the gushing oil in the Gulf of Mexico works if it manages to contain the flow. So what is left unaddressed by “whatever works” is what a policy is supposed to work for and why that instead of something else.

After all, corruption works for those who want to garner illicit gains! Lying works for those who want to deceive, etc., etc. Which simply says that depending on what one aims for, anything might work. There is no check on any policy this way, nothing that renders it successful or not. Whatever works is a blank check, a ticket with which any kind of conduct may be excused however vicious, harmful, fruitless it turns out to be, since anything can work for some purpose and if no standard (principle!) can be identified for distinguishing sound from unsound purposes, then whatever works is just an empty gesture, a wave of the hand, toward the real thing, namely a solid standard of right and wrong.

Any political candidate who proclaims proudly that he or she is a pragmatist must, therefore, be watched very carefully because the pragmatist ploy is, ultimately, a ticket to unchecked power, a world in which trickery, muscle, and such are the arbiters of acceptable policies, never mind whether the rights of citizens are being crushed in the process.

My Pitch for Some Solid Selfishness

Tibor R. Machan

Hardly anyone will dispute that most folks who chime in about ethics consider selfishness wrong. There have been exceptions in history and some of the most prominent ethical philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle, can even be said to have been ethical egoists or at least ones who championed the moral virtue of prudence as a vital one for living a good human life. But after some significant changes in how human nature began to be understood, being selfish or self-interested--or even prudent--started to be scoffed at, treated as a moral liability, not worthy of praise but of blame.

Of course, even after this, using one's common sense showed that being selfish is what most of us are, normally, routinely, and quite benignly. When folks awake in the morning they proceed to begin to take good care of themselves before reaching out to help others, for example. (Just as that announcement would have it on air planes, first help yourself and then others in case there's loss of oxygen.) But apart from such common sense support, selfishness gets little respect (other than perhaps from psychotherapists who usually don't advise their clients not to care about themselves!).

So while selfishness is widely opposed by such official moralists as priests, ministers, politicians, and pundits, most people will choose to be selfish instead of selfless. And by this they do not intend to be mean toward others, only to put themselves first on the list of their priorities. And in that spirit, even if in opposition to the moralizers, I want to give support to the virtue of prudence or even selfishness (something only Ayn Rand had the courage to affirm in her book by that title). I am not interested here in developing a full blown morality or ethics only to point out that in times of virtually daily disaster stories from all corners of the globe near or far, it is a very good idea to keep being focused on what will benefit one's life, how one can stay well and happy rather than distressed and frightened.

For one thing, "follow my old recipe"--to quote Socrates in a similar discussion--when it comes to checking out the daily news. Once having gotten through the half hour or hour long newscasts--via TV, radio or some other source--and having perused the newspapers and magazines, all of which have a pretty predictable tendency to be filled with reports of horror and misery, one should spend maybe at least a half hour checking out TV's best offering, namely, the Travel Channel. I do.

The Travel Channel, you see, reliably reports and depicts only good things happening everywhere. Be it Iceland or Greece, from which only bad news has emanated lately, or California, Louisiana or New York City, when the people from the Travel Channel go there they will unfailingly bring their viewers good news. This would be news of wonderful beaches, great hotels, opportunities for quirky adventure, the best cuisine, outstanding shopping, health and fitness options and similar positive things everyone can use, or at least use to learn about, when the official news reports from every mainstream source give us virtually nothing but heartache.

I have for a long time assumed that the practice of official news outfits of any sort is to try to scare us to death, to make us pay attention by telling us that we are all doomed, no matter what, no matter who one is. The politicians, of course, love this because they can then proceed to offer their magic to have it all fixed for us in a jiffy, never mind that it is mostly lies and more lies.

So there is, as I see it, a severely negative bias in the news. Just consider, as a test, that even if there is a horrible plane crash someplace or a bomb scare, thousands of other places are safe and millions and millions of people get to where they wanted to go without a hitch. But this is never mentioned on "the news," perhaps understandably. But it does produce major distortions in reports of how the world is doing.

So as a corrective, one needs the discipline and personal initiative to seek out some good news, some antidote to all the reports of crises. A little of this is achieve when one encounters advertisements, of course, since ads also focus on what is good about life, hoping that this will stimulate some interest in the products and services being offered for sale. The bottom line, though, is simple. Make sure that you know of good stuff, that as much as possible you make room for it in your life.

This is my pitch for rational selfishness today, even while I know that it is not the full story. But I recommend that it be a significant portion of it for everyone.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano's Lies the Government Told you, Myth, Power, and Deception in American History (Thomas Nelson, 2010) is a great book on applied libertarianism. I highly recommend it. While firmly grounded in the principles of the American Founding, the work surveys a great many concrete areas of contemporary American law to see how loyal it is to those principles. Much to learn here, indeed.

The Folly of Fairness

Tibor R. Machan

So Bill Gates sold me some software when he was still in that business. He was then immensely rich, certainly compared to me. I was not compared to him. How unfair, you say? But Bill took his gains from this trade and used it to feed starving African children, while I used the software I bought from him to do something utterly trivial on my computer, like writing a dull column. Now was this a fair trade? Impossible to tell.

Trade is never fair--the entire notion of fairness is very difficult to apply to trade as would be the idea of blue or funny. When I purchase something I look for what I want and can afford, while those from whom I am purchasing stuff want me to pay the price they think the market will bear. So long as we both do this of our own free will, because this is what we want to do, not because some thug is standing behind us threatening to beat us up if we don't take his orders, we take part in free trade.

But what would show that we are taking part in fair trade? Frankly, I cannot even imagine, honestly! Fairness occurs when someone lives up to a promise made to several people, like a professor promises students that all the tests will be graded by the same criteria. Unless this is what the professor does, he or she will be unfair. Fairness will happen if the promise is fulfilled to those who received it. If, however, one is traveling on a highway, how would one be fair? How would one be fair if one went shopping in a grocery store? Buying the same number of items from each shelf? The same amount of meat as fish? None of this makes any sense even though it may appear fair.

If a rich country's citizenry sells its products to those in a poor country and both do this because that is what they choose to do, this is free trade but is it fair? Maybe those in the poor country would have preferred to shop from someone else, not those from a rich country. Would it have been fair if they could do that? Very doubtful that that is what amounts to fair trade. Suppose China subsidizes the farms of its citizenry and they can now sell their crop for less than they could without the subsidy. If non-Chinese purchase the crop, is that fair? Are customers supposed to know the history of how the crop came to cost what it does? The subsidies may be wrong, a rip-off but unfair? Why?

I just have no clear clue as to what fair trade or even fairness is supposed to be. I can understand fairness as it works in my family--get each of my children a suitable birthday gift (though not the same--that would be silly)--and even in my neighborhood--I will not refuse to give a little help to those on my right versus those on my left. But already this is stretching it. Why is it fair if they don't need the same measure of help?

Somehow fairness has come to be a big deal yet clearly in the natural world it isn't. Is it fair that the lion can devour the zebra but not vice versa? Nor are we even close to being fair in our interaction with nature. Is it fair that we put pretty flowers in our homes but leave the weed outside? Is the demise of thousands of fish when a whale is feeding fair?

Is it fair that some women are cherished for their aesthetic appeal while others admired for their sharp wit and yet others get no love at all? Is it fair that some rock bands get featured on national television programs while others never leave their small towns?

As anyone can see, fairness is a mess and insisting on it is futile in all but very restricted contexts. Nonetheless politicians and pundits and theorists of all sorts keep harping on how people are being unfair, how countries are engaging in unfair trade, how some people's good looks or brilliant minds gain them fame and fortune while others get very little, etc., and so forth.

All this stress on fairness produces confusion, envy, and resentment.

Egalitarian Straitjackets

Tibor R. Machan

In numerous areas of human life treating people in nearly exactly the same way may make sense. Thus, for example, when you go to your dentist, you are probably implored to floss--and so is everyone else who visits dentists. Other doctors, too, will prescribe practices one should adopt, such as eating nutritiously, exercising, getting regular sleep and so forth, which virtually all other patients are also told they will benefit from. Although at this point diversity starts kicking in quite evidently. We don't all need the same number of hours of sleep; our age difference will invite different diets, forms of exercise, and so forth. Men and women require different diets, too. The dosage of medication we need to take in cases of illness also varies widely. And all this is in an area one might think needs to be approached uniformly. But no, variations begin to emerge in our lives at nearly every point. Even at the level of our similar DNA, individuals differ sufficiently that each of us has a totally unique measure which today serves to differentiate us as finger printing used to in the past.

But once we got to such areas of human life as what kind of career suits us, what kind of significant other will promise greater happiness, where we will enjoy our vacations most, what sort of apparel is most attractive for us to wear, what it the kind of weather that suits us best--in these and innumerable other areas variety is the rule. No wonder they say it is the spice of life!

So when one runs across those who have enormous faith in centralized planning and economic regulation, one is facing people who are, to borrow a term from the late Austrian economist and libertarian Murray N. Rothbard, in revolt against nature. And this holds for nearly all aspect of one's economic life, including the sort of financial instruments we should utilize as we prepare for our future. Yet, when the great variety of such instruments is confronted by enthusiast of government regulation, based in large measure on their explicit or more likely implicit embrace of egalitarianism, what they want to do is cut out the variety and implement, by force of law and regulation, a wholly unnatural uniformity.

In financial aspects of one's life, as in many others, there are innumerable ways to go. Some people are adventurous for a while, then more conservative, based on not only such facts about them as the size of their family, the circumstances of their career, their hopes and plans for the future, etc., but also on personality and style. Some folks I know are fabulous speculators who also realize the hazards of going about their financial affairs that way; others do some speculation and some conservative investing; others give very little thought to all this, may even find it too bourgeois to fret about such things and proceed to live on the edge and would not have it any other way. Not unlike it is with other aspects of their lives!

Are some of the variations in all these approaches people take to different aspects of their lives unwise? You bet they are. But very few can tell--one would have to be an intimate for that kind of knowledge about a person. And even if one knew how a friend or pal or neighbor ought to carry on about his or her finances, all that is available among civilized people is to offer advice, suggestions, maybe a bit of nudging. But for adults it is up to them how they ought proceed about such matters, with a little help from their friends.

Sadly when the likes of Goldman Sachs executives are drilled by a bunch of self-important petty tyrants in our government, these folks are not really prepared to answer the bullies unleashed at them. Most of us know about all of the above implicitly, without writing it down, without articulating it, even when we are smack middle of the businesses which address it. That behind all the government regulation hysteria lies an old fashioned political and social philosophy the implication of which is, well, the kind of society they are trying to impose in North Korea--where even the public symbols wreak of equality for all (what with all those blue pajamas on display during mass parades)--does not seem to make such difference to the enthusiasts. They just follow their sentimental desire for all of us to be placed under the same rules, for all of us to submit to a one-size-fits-all policy in every sphere of our lives, with them at the helm implementing it all.

Maybe this is what the Tea Party folks sense better than all the intellectuals at our universities and prominent newspapers and magazines and just don't want to accept as the norm. I am with them on this, all the way.

Are Regulators Incorruptible?

Tibor R. Machan

Enthusiast for increasing government regulations of people in business, including those in the financial markets, never bother to answer the one basic question that any rational person would need to have answered before joining them as champions of their proposed remedies of our economic wows. This question is, "Why would those in governments regulating those in markets manage to be incorruptible?" For incorruptibility is a presumption of the policy that these enthusiasts are committed to. Otherwise what's the point? Where is the remedy?

You see, if those in government are not incorruptible, their regulation of business cannot be of any help. They would just as easily game the system as those whom they intend to regulate, indeed, more easily because of their legal power. Are there ways to stop them doing this? Would they be regulated by some other regulators who would make sure they aren't corrupt? And then how would those regulators manage to be invulnerable to corruption? More regulators, ad infinitum?

It is plain common sense and historically fully validated that people in government easily fall prey to the temptation of corruption. Since the time of Aristotle and before it has been noted over and over again that people with power over other people tend toward corruption. Aristotle argued that despite the fact that the idea of an ideal leader of society sounds appealing, it is a trap because once in power, such "ideal" leaders tend to become despotic. Which is exactly true about government regulators, sometimes quite unintentionally (when the system goes bad).

As Lord Acton is often quoted to have said, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." And this is no mere cheap slogan. Those in government have a great many ways to dodge any charge of corruption. A prominent legal device is sovereign immunity--since government officials, including regulators, are agents of the citizenry, they cannot be sued by us. It would be like suing ourselves! So the only way to cope with malpractice by such folks is to implore their bosses to fire them or to vote against those who hired them. Only if they are out and out thieves or embezzlers can they be touched. Favoring their pals as they make decisions, for example, isn't something for which they can be convicted. And one of the big charges against government regulators is precisely that they favor those like them in the market place--former colleagues, past employers, etc.

The economic school of thought called "public choice theory" has developed this idea so well that some of its pioneers have received the Nobel Prize (Professor James Buchanan, for example). Others have shown that regulators don't manage to anticipate problems early enough and by the time they go after some company about some possible malpractice, it's too late. Also, regulators tend to worry about easily detected problems and leave those that are difficult to detect untreated. What is seen gets their attention but what is hidden does not.

Aside from these pitfalls government regulators face there is also the plain fact of their having agendas of their own; and there is the problem, as well, that they often have no clue what exactly is the public interest they are supposed to promote since the public interest is, in fact, a multitude of private interests pursued by millions of different market agents.

So, the bottom line is that government regulation is mired in confusion and the probability of ineptitude and malpractice, probably much more so than faced by market agents who are supposed to be regulated. So this faith in government regulation repeatedly voiced by Obama & Co. simply isn't well founded. Indeed, it is most often misdirected. Sure, now and then regulators can do something right but even a broken clock shows time correctly twice a day. This is no reason to have confidence in such clocks any more than in government regulation.

Anytime I am told not to worry about things because the government will regulate something and we will be saved from the problems of reckless, anarchic free markets, I cringe about the naivete of those who believe such things. When will they learn?

Anti-Libertarian Point Refuted

Tibor R. Machan

The English Marxist political philosopher Ted Honderich asks us to imagine a perfectly just society, constituted according to libertarian principles. Then he asks, rhetorically, whether it is possible that there exist starving people in such a society? (Sure, that might be so but that's true of any society and much less likely in a free one.) So Honderich then continues: "[I]n this perfectly just society they have no claim to food, no moral right to it. No one and nothing does wrong in letting them starve to death. There is no obligation in this society, on the state or anything else, to save them from starving to death. It is not true of anyone that he or she ought to have helped them. This is vicious."(p.44)

Here we have a blatantly misleading assessment of a free society as well as men and women in such a society. Yes, Honderich is right that no one has an enforceable claim on other people providing food for them. There is in such a country no legal right to be supported except by parents of their children. That's correct.

But first, to backtrack a bit, libertarians do not usually claim that a society with a libertarian political system is "perfectly just." Only Socrates has laid such claim to a society, namely the imaginary one in his Republic. What libertarians claim is that their legal order secures political and criminal justice better than do alternatives. With libertarian principles in its constitution, such a system has a better chance at resolving conflicts justly than do others.

Now to Honderich's charge: In a society with such a system of law it is quite often morally wrong for many who know of such a case to fail to provide help. (If, however, they had more vital goals to pursue, say attending to their children's medical needs, this wouldn't be so.) Lack of generosity, compassion, or support for those who deserve it would be morally wrong. Indeed, it could well be true of many that they ought to help anyone in such dire straits and very wrong for them not to do so. What the libertarian is convinced of is that no such help may be coerced from anyone, that government, in particular, has no moral authority to mandate the help, to use its power to make some people help others. Government exists to secure our rights, not to make us morally good, whether as this is understood by modern liberals or by modern conservatives.

This is something very different from the claim that no one ought to help those in dire straits, quite the opposite. Where there is no unjust, coercive welfare state, it is the citizenry's responsibility to reach our and help when people are suffering through no fault of their own.

Would there be such people in a free country? Of course. To begin with, the near-free countries around the globe, such as the USA, are also the most generous when, for example, tsunamis or earthquakes occur! The people give freely, without having to be made to do so. Then, also, if the administrators of a welfare state could find the extra resources to help the needy, why couldn't the citizenry itself do this? After all, supposedly the welfare state is representative of its citizenry--it would be implementing policies of which the citizenry approves. So the same motives that may induce them to forge the welfare state would also induce them to be generous. The only difference would be that there would be no coercion involved.

By the way, Professor Honderich is also one of the most avid hard determinists in contemporary philosophical circles, so talk by him of what people ought to do and not do is entirely superfluous. He cannot mean it, not if he is convinced that que sera, que sera, what will be will be. Only men and women with free will could be implored to do anything they aren't doing, including to provide help to the poor. There is no morality without freedom to choose. At most one can talk about prodding or encouraging certain kinds of behavior but since the behavior isn't chosen by the agents, it has no moral significance.

It wasn't Capitalism, Stupid

Tibor R. Machan

The Sunday, April 25, 2010, issue of The NYT Magazine carried a very clearly written essay by Roger Lowenstein, titled "Cracked Foundation, Fannie and Freddie are Broken. What would fixing them mean?" It further substantiates the point I have been making in numerous columns, essays and scholarly papers over the last several months, namely, that capitalism had nothing to do with the recent financial fiasco. Indeed, it was nearly all due to government meddling, especially with the policy exemplified best by the establishment and operation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants established by the federal government and recently bailed out by taxpayers at a cost of "upward of $125 billion."

As Lowenstein put it, "government support of the mortgage twins was among the original sins of the financial crisis. It stemmed from the country's affection for homeownership--a legacy of a frontier nation that subsidized homesteading for pioneers and encouraged later generations to homestead in the suburbs via the mortgage-interest deduction...."

Now whatever one may think of the sentiments that drove all this, one matter should be crystal clear: laissez-faire capitalism is entirely incompatible with such public policy. Accordingly, all the blather about how market fundamentalism (Paul Krugman's favorite term) led to the fiasco should by now be admitted to be utterly false.

There is a lot more and anyone who insist that laissez-faire capitalism is the source of our wows would need to come to terms with what the essay makes evident, namely, that government meddling, overt and covert, was the culprit. And it is useful to note that this article is published in The New York Times, a paper that has backed the Krugman explanation all along. Admittedly, the Sunday magazine has, on a few occasions, published essays and notices that put forth a dissenting account, akin to what we get from Lowenstein. The first of those I noticed was published about a year ago, by Professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard University back on May 17, 2009, titled "Diminished Returns," and made the point up front, namely, "The biggest blunder of all [behind the financial meltdown] had nothing to do with deregulation."

As I see it, the best objection to government regulations and other type of interference with people's economic activities rests on the fact that free men and women tend, in the main, to be far more competent at managing their own professional affairs than do government bureaucrats and, even more importantly, have every right to do so without others' intrusive meddling. Call it interference, call it paternalism, or call it nudging, as I understand human community affairs no one has the proper authority to manage the affairs of other people who haven't invited them to do so and have done nothing to violate anyone's rights. That this may now and then result in what some folks consider unwelcome--high risks, high or low prices, lack of full employment or complete financial security--is no excuse for the violation of anyone's rights. It is, in fact, part and parcel of a regime of individual rights that personal errors, even by large groups, will probably be made now and then. But it is far less damaging than the damage caused by governmental intrusions in the free market place.

Now this line of reasoning is out of fashion in our time because it rests on principles that are defended as true. That's because in our day pragmatism is very popular. As Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's Chief of Staff put it in an interview in Bloomberg Businessweek (4/26-5/2, 2010, page 41), "Well, he [Obama] is a pragmatist....He is not wedded to a philosophy or ideology." (But, quite oddly, Mr. Emenuel adds: "[Obama] sees government mainly for setting rules and then letting the private sector operate within those rules." Oh yes? Utterly dishonest, this remark.)

Anyway, despite being a principled opponent of government interference in people's lives, economic or otherwise, I do keep my eyes on the arguments made by more empirical minded thinkers and so I welcome Mr. Lowenstein's contribution in The Times, indicating that my principled stance has the backing of the more research-minded folks.