Dear Glenn Beck,
I watched your show this afternoon and thought it was interesting that you juxtaposed your words next to Obama's words and they were practically the same words. Yet, they meant two entirely different things.
What is going on here? Of course two different philosophies are underneath the same words. Marxist thinkers and activists, such as Alinsky in the 30s and later Cloward and Piven in the 60s in their Strategy for Change through Orchestrated Crisis advocate using the morality of the middle class to bring it down and socialize it under dictatorial control. This change to socialism is what is transpiring in our country at this time with Obama as moral and political leader.
The morality that allows this to happen is the morality of altruism - that we somehow have an obligation to take care of our brother - that society is not whole until the rich have sacrificed for the poor, the able have sacrificed for the unable, and the strong have sacrificed for the weak. It isn't sufficient for a person to give a person a helping hand when he sees value in doing so. He must do so because he doesn't want to do so. This is why we hear so much moral sanctimony in every Obama speech. He has the charisma of a revival preacher.
What is the error here and what can we do about it? The error is that a man must sacrifice himself for another man - that he must be a sacrificial animal rather than a man. No man can even properly be a human being in the full meaning of the term unless he seeks and obtains the values that give his life what he needs - his material needs, his spiritual needs and his happiness. To not allow him to do that is an evil of the first sort. And yet, this is what Obama is asking. Well, actually, he is not asking for it; he is forcing it - at the point of a gun, the final authority the government has to achieve its edicts.
The real battle is a moral battle. The battle of sacrifice as a way of life vs. rational self-interest, i.e., egoism, as a way of life. This is the battle we have to fight lest we lose our country down the sewer of all altruist societies and political systems.
Further, the sacrifice of which I am speaking has been invoked in the name of God and a life in the hereafter, and in the name of society and the greater good. Both have to be fought. Although the Founders of the United States of America may have been Christian, or more properly deists, there achievement was not in the name of God nor a tribute to God. It was in the name of man and it is to man that the United States is a tribute.
Here, for the first time in history, every man had a chance to rise to what he could and ought to be. This is the moral vision that we have to have for ourselves and this country if this battle is going to be won.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
The Ayn Rand Factor
TIA Daily • February 24, 2009
The Ideal Hostess for an Ideological Boston Tea Party
by Robert Tracinski
Last week, in his now-famous rallying cry against the Obama administration's march toward socialism, CNBC financial commentator Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" to protest against the rapid expansion of government.
The idea of a Boston Tea Party-inspired tax protest had already been percolating, if you will, and when Santelli gave voice to it, it emerged as a new movement. A group that calls this the "New American Tea Party" has set up a website to coordinate protests across the nation this Friday, including in Washington, DC.
The comparison to the Boston Tea Party is appropriate, because it is a reminder that the American Revolution began with a revolt against taxes—and against a government that was much smaller and less intrusive than the one we have now.
It is also appropriate because it captures the sense that the political class has been acting without our consent. The ever-changing bailout plans have been hatched by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve on their own apparently unlimited authority, backed by a blank check rammed through Congress last year with little debate. Or consider the automakers' bailout, which the Bush administration decreed after Congress had specifically refused to approve it. Or take the stimulus bill, the final version of which was pushed through the House with only ten hours to read through a thousand-page preserve of leftist giveaways and insidious new regulations.
It has been said that freedom is indivisible, and since the beginning of the financial crisis we have seen that in taking away our economic freedom, our leaders in Washington are also increasingly giving unchecked power to unelected bureaucrats and turning Congress into a mere rubber stamp.
A backlash has been brewing against this rapid expansion of government power, and this week's tea party protests are just the beginning. The American people as a whole are still largely giving President Obama the benefit of the doubt, and his approval ratings are still relatively high. But what will happen in a year or so, when it is likely that his interventions in the economy will have made things worse, rather than better? The new administration's policies have already driven the stock market down to levels not seen since 1997, wiping out more than a decade of wealth-creation. What happens in 2010, when the public finds that they're still afraid of losing their jobs, and their personal savings haven't recovered? I think we will see these protests grow and spread.
But we will need more than just a political rebellion against the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. We will need to engage in an ideological struggle, a battle of ideas. Columnist Monica Crowley named it best early last week when she called for a "21st century Boston Tea Party" and said that we needed a "second American revolution of ideas," "of getting back to the ideals of limited government, of constitutional parameters on government power, of individual liberty, and of the free market."
But such an ideological revolution would need to be more extensive than Crowley realizes, because we have to ask: where is the intellectual ammunition for this battle of ideas going to come from? It is important to remember that a Republican administration started us down this plunge into socialism. President Bush started the bailout frenzy, and John McCain pointedly refused to defend capitalism when Barack Obama tried to make the presidential election into a referendum against free-market economics.
For the right, this taxpayers' rebellion should be seen, not merely as a way to regain some of the political power they have lost, but also as a means for the Republican Party to reform itself and revive its ability to defend the free market after a decade of Bush-style "big-government conservatism." For too long, the right has neglected the case for free markets, and they need to re-learn it. That's the revolution we need most of all.
In praising Rick Santelli, conservative author Roger Kimball asks a very good question: "do we really need to go back to economic kindergarten and relearn" the lessons of the failure of statism and the superiority of capitalism? The answer is that we never learned the fullest, deepest, philosophical reasons for the moral and practical superiority of capitalism.
Fortunately, we know where to find the free-market ideas we need, and this source is already indirectly driving the new taxpayer revolt. It's time to bring it fully out into the open.
Note that in defending his stance against the bailouts, Rick Santelli referred to himself as an "Ayn Rander"—a reference to the great 20th-century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who is most famous for her ideological defense of laissez-faire capitalism. (That's not Santelli's first reference to Rand; TIA Daily reader Bill Sims found an earlier one.) Similar references seem to be lurking behind nearly every expression of resistance to big government. Rush Limbaugh—whose coining of the term "porkulus" helped galvanize the right's resistance to the so-called "stimulus" bill—has frequently recommended Ayn Rand's magnum opus Atlas Shrugged in recent months, as has conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.
In January, Stephen Moore caused a stir by arguing, in the Wall Street Journal, that the current crisis is turning Atlas Shrugged "from fiction to fact." References to Ayn Rand have even popped up at such unlikely sources as Human Events—a magazine for religious conservatives that recently published a surprisingly friendly article referring to the atheist philosopher—and even from the New York Times's safely timid in-house conservative David Brooks, who is the farthest thing from an "Ayn Rander" that you could imagine. And those who are warning that increased government restrictions will cause the nation's most productive workers to withdraw their talents have taken to calling this the "John Galt Effect," a reference to the hero—and the main plotline—of Atlas Shrugged.
It is no coincidence that the strongest resistance to a government takeover of the economy is coming from people influence by Ayn Rand. She has functioned as a stiffener of resolve and as the fountainhead of pro-free-market ideas.
I have written about this at greater length, but Ayn Rand's contribution to the philosophical defense of capitalism can be summed up in one central idea: individualism. Ayn Rand demonstrated that the ultimate source of all wealth—everything from steel mills to microchips—is the individual reasoning mind. Thus, a society that wants to prosper has to ask what is required by its thinkers and producers, the "prime movers" who originate and implement new ideas. And the first requirement of these thinkers is that they be free from coercive interference by bureaucrats, by blowhard legislators, or by federal "czars."
Ayn Rand was an individualist in the fullest sense: she regarded the unfettered individual, not just as a source of wealth, but also as an end in himself with the right to pursue and enjoy his own happiness, without being forced to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the collective. The issue, as she once put it, is not whether or not you give a dime to a beggar. The issue is whether you have a right to exist if you don't—and whether you have to buy your life, one dime at a time, from every moocher who comes along asking for a handout. She gave the clearest and most consistent "no" to that standard of morality, and clearest and most consistent "yes" to the moral rights of the creators and producers.
There has been some recent crowing about how the current financial crisis has discredited Ayn Rand's defense of the free market, as demonstrated by the defection of Alan Greenspan, who has now gone so far as to advocate the nationalization of failing banks. But Greenspan actually rejected Ayn Rand's philosophy decades ago, and he did it during the triumph of free markets in the early years of the Reagan Revolution. In reality, the current financial crisis does not demonstrate the failure of Greenspan's alleged pro-free-market ideas; rather, it demonstrates the failure of his presumption that a talented "maestro" can ensure prosperity by setting himself up as the monetary central planner of the economy.
In fact, the current crisis has vindicated Ayn Rand's warnings. And the policies of the current administration are about to do so yet again and perhaps more fully than ever before, by sacrificing more and more of the nation's productive minds to provide handouts for the beggars.
Far from facing growing rejection, Ayn Rand's ideas are the mostly unnamed fuel giving fire and confidence to people like Rick Santelli. There are many people who have a detailed practical knowledge of the superiority of markets and of the values behind free markets—but they are cowed and neutralized by the conventional altruist morality which signs our lives over to all of those moochers with their hands out. Even if they don't fully accept Ayn Rand ideas, their encounter with her writings gives them the confidence to embrace their suppressed knowledge and act upon it. She gives them the confidence to declare that they have earned their wealth and that they have a right to keep it and enjoy it.
That's the Ayn Rand factor that we are observing now—and we need more of it.
If we're going to have an ideological Boston Tea Party, a rebellion against the whole theory behind state management of our lives and wealth, then Ayn Rand is the ideal philosophical hostess.
(TIA Daily is a daily news analysis from an objectivist viewpoint written and published by Robert Tracinski. Click on link to subscribe. SCB)
The Ideal Hostess for an Ideological Boston Tea Party
by Robert Tracinski
Last week, in his now-famous rallying cry against the Obama administration's march toward socialism, CNBC financial commentator Rick Santelli called for a "Chicago Tea Party" to protest against the rapid expansion of government.
The idea of a Boston Tea Party-inspired tax protest had already been percolating, if you will, and when Santelli gave voice to it, it emerged as a new movement. A group that calls this the "New American Tea Party" has set up a website to coordinate protests across the nation this Friday, including in Washington, DC.
The comparison to the Boston Tea Party is appropriate, because it is a reminder that the American Revolution began with a revolt against taxes—and against a government that was much smaller and less intrusive than the one we have now.
It is also appropriate because it captures the sense that the political class has been acting without our consent. The ever-changing bailout plans have been hatched by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve on their own apparently unlimited authority, backed by a blank check rammed through Congress last year with little debate. Or consider the automakers' bailout, which the Bush administration decreed after Congress had specifically refused to approve it. Or take the stimulus bill, the final version of which was pushed through the House with only ten hours to read through a thousand-page preserve of leftist giveaways and insidious new regulations.
It has been said that freedom is indivisible, and since the beginning of the financial crisis we have seen that in taking away our economic freedom, our leaders in Washington are also increasingly giving unchecked power to unelected bureaucrats and turning Congress into a mere rubber stamp.
A backlash has been brewing against this rapid expansion of government power, and this week's tea party protests are just the beginning. The American people as a whole are still largely giving President Obama the benefit of the doubt, and his approval ratings are still relatively high. But what will happen in a year or so, when it is likely that his interventions in the economy will have made things worse, rather than better? The new administration's policies have already driven the stock market down to levels not seen since 1997, wiping out more than a decade of wealth-creation. What happens in 2010, when the public finds that they're still afraid of losing their jobs, and their personal savings haven't recovered? I think we will see these protests grow and spread.
But we will need more than just a political rebellion against the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. We will need to engage in an ideological struggle, a battle of ideas. Columnist Monica Crowley named it best early last week when she called for a "21st century Boston Tea Party" and said that we needed a "second American revolution of ideas," "of getting back to the ideals of limited government, of constitutional parameters on government power, of individual liberty, and of the free market."
But such an ideological revolution would need to be more extensive than Crowley realizes, because we have to ask: where is the intellectual ammunition for this battle of ideas going to come from? It is important to remember that a Republican administration started us down this plunge into socialism. President Bush started the bailout frenzy, and John McCain pointedly refused to defend capitalism when Barack Obama tried to make the presidential election into a referendum against free-market economics.
For the right, this taxpayers' rebellion should be seen, not merely as a way to regain some of the political power they have lost, but also as a means for the Republican Party to reform itself and revive its ability to defend the free market after a decade of Bush-style "big-government conservatism." For too long, the right has neglected the case for free markets, and they need to re-learn it. That's the revolution we need most of all.
In praising Rick Santelli, conservative author Roger Kimball asks a very good question: "do we really need to go back to economic kindergarten and relearn" the lessons of the failure of statism and the superiority of capitalism? The answer is that we never learned the fullest, deepest, philosophical reasons for the moral and practical superiority of capitalism.
Fortunately, we know where to find the free-market ideas we need, and this source is already indirectly driving the new taxpayer revolt. It's time to bring it fully out into the open.
Note that in defending his stance against the bailouts, Rick Santelli referred to himself as an "Ayn Rander"—a reference to the great 20th-century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who is most famous for her ideological defense of laissez-faire capitalism. (That's not Santelli's first reference to Rand; TIA Daily reader Bill Sims found an earlier one.) Similar references seem to be lurking behind nearly every expression of resistance to big government. Rush Limbaugh—whose coining of the term "porkulus" helped galvanize the right's resistance to the so-called "stimulus" bill—has frequently recommended Ayn Rand's magnum opus Atlas Shrugged in recent months, as has conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.
In January, Stephen Moore caused a stir by arguing, in the Wall Street Journal, that the current crisis is turning Atlas Shrugged "from fiction to fact." References to Ayn Rand have even popped up at such unlikely sources as Human Events—a magazine for religious conservatives that recently published a surprisingly friendly article referring to the atheist philosopher—and even from the New York Times's safely timid in-house conservative David Brooks, who is the farthest thing from an "Ayn Rander" that you could imagine. And those who are warning that increased government restrictions will cause the nation's most productive workers to withdraw their talents have taken to calling this the "John Galt Effect," a reference to the hero—and the main plotline—of Atlas Shrugged.
It is no coincidence that the strongest resistance to a government takeover of the economy is coming from people influence by Ayn Rand. She has functioned as a stiffener of resolve and as the fountainhead of pro-free-market ideas.
I have written about this at greater length, but Ayn Rand's contribution to the philosophical defense of capitalism can be summed up in one central idea: individualism. Ayn Rand demonstrated that the ultimate source of all wealth—everything from steel mills to microchips—is the individual reasoning mind. Thus, a society that wants to prosper has to ask what is required by its thinkers and producers, the "prime movers" who originate and implement new ideas. And the first requirement of these thinkers is that they be free from coercive interference by bureaucrats, by blowhard legislators, or by federal "czars."
Ayn Rand was an individualist in the fullest sense: she regarded the unfettered individual, not just as a source of wealth, but also as an end in himself with the right to pursue and enjoy his own happiness, without being forced to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the collective. The issue, as she once put it, is not whether or not you give a dime to a beggar. The issue is whether you have a right to exist if you don't—and whether you have to buy your life, one dime at a time, from every moocher who comes along asking for a handout. She gave the clearest and most consistent "no" to that standard of morality, and clearest and most consistent "yes" to the moral rights of the creators and producers.
There has been some recent crowing about how the current financial crisis has discredited Ayn Rand's defense of the free market, as demonstrated by the defection of Alan Greenspan, who has now gone so far as to advocate the nationalization of failing banks. But Greenspan actually rejected Ayn Rand's philosophy decades ago, and he did it during the triumph of free markets in the early years of the Reagan Revolution. In reality, the current financial crisis does not demonstrate the failure of Greenspan's alleged pro-free-market ideas; rather, it demonstrates the failure of his presumption that a talented "maestro" can ensure prosperity by setting himself up as the monetary central planner of the economy.
In fact, the current crisis has vindicated Ayn Rand's warnings. And the policies of the current administration are about to do so yet again and perhaps more fully than ever before, by sacrificing more and more of the nation's productive minds to provide handouts for the beggars.
Far from facing growing rejection, Ayn Rand's ideas are the mostly unnamed fuel giving fire and confidence to people like Rick Santelli. There are many people who have a detailed practical knowledge of the superiority of markets and of the values behind free markets—but they are cowed and neutralized by the conventional altruist morality which signs our lives over to all of those moochers with their hands out. Even if they don't fully accept Ayn Rand ideas, their encounter with her writings gives them the confidence to embrace their suppressed knowledge and act upon it. She gives them the confidence to declare that they have earned their wealth and that they have a right to keep it and enjoy it.
That's the Ayn Rand factor that we are observing now—and we need more of it.
If we're going to have an ideological Boston Tea Party, a rebellion against the whole theory behind state management of our lives and wealth, then Ayn Rand is the ideal philosophical hostess.
(TIA Daily is a daily news analysis from an objectivist viewpoint written and published by Robert Tracinski. Click on link to subscribe. SCB)
Sunday, February 22, 2009
The American FORM of Government
This video is a good presentation of context which has one distinguish the American form of government. My post yesterday was not about the form but about the execution. Clearly the avenues for the plunder taking place today were seeds in the Constitution that have now grown and are bearing bitter fruit.
The American Form of Government (This is 10.5 minutes long)
The American Form of Government (This is 10.5 minutes long)
Private Property - Your Life, My Life
We live in a time when government has exceed its powers and no longer protects individual rights. The means to this end is the idea of public property and the regulation of private property. Consequently to strip the government of its power to do anything other than protect individual rights and private property, it can own no property nor have the power to tax. It must exist within the system of privately owned property and it must raise the money it needs by providing the value of protecting individual rights. Just as any man has to earn what he needs to live, so shall the government earn what it needs to exist. It provides a value which is evident to anyone who has use for those values.
It is government control over property that is the achilles heel of a free society and thus to bring the government under the control of the people for whom it is designed to protect, it can have no access to a means whereby it can usurp the rights of individual people.
This is going to require some new thinking - some entirely new thinking. Never before has such a system existed, but the facts are in on government's that can take people's property or in any way have use and disposal, i.e., regulation of, private property: it doesn't work. By this means, it becomes the master of slaves and places the entire population on its plantation.
It is this unilateral power over property which governments up to this time have had that allow a double standard to exist. With such power, the government lives by a standard that any private individual or group of individuals cannot. An individual cannot steal, the government can. An individual cannot violate another's rights, the government can. An individual cannot pollute his neighbor's property, the government can. An individual cannot lie and cheat his way to power over you, the government can. In other words, because the government can take and control private property, we have unleashed a criminal in our midst. And, this criminal class grows to the point where it must be destroyed lest it destroys the entire fabric of society and ultimately the lives of the people it was created to protect.
We are seeing all of this come to pass at this time. The government is now completely upside down. There is nothing rational about it. It plays deuces wild. There is nothing valuable about it. It has even lost the veneer of value. It has become the apotheosis of lawlessness. It is nothing more than a means for some men to have power over other men and has become a scourge upon the nation.
This process has been ocurring for over a hundred years. Only for the first hundred years was America a free society and a free country. But with the inception of the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, the anti-trust laws and some other such devices, the government became the problem, not the solution. Just as King George became the bane of the new colonies such that they had to declare their independence from the British Crown, we are approaching a repeat of this this scenario.
We are now witnessing a coup d'etat, an overthrow of legal government in a stark and startling way. President Obama has never pretended to have the distinction of individual rights and in fact has professed "positive rights" - meaning the taking of property from those who earned it and distributing it to those who have not. President Obama has appointed his czars to handle various segments of his government thus overriding the cabinet system and its approval by the Senate. He has funded ACORN, his henchmen in the field who can take to the streets at a moment's notice and who can overthrow the democratic process. He used threats of legal problems that could result in TV and radio license removal to cut off any speech that questioned his past during the campaign. He's considering The Fairness Doctrine to throttle the speech of talk radio. He chose immoral people for his advisors and various posts so he can easily control his "compromised" people. He placed critically important legislation in his stimulus package so it doesn't come up for debate. He has used executive order to bypass debate. In other words, the man is a dictator - pure and simple.
Now it is time for us to face this fact and start thinking how we are going to handle such a circumstance. It is upon us.
The United States is different than any other country that preceeded it. It was founded on Individual Rights. That means that each of us has a right to his own life in society - just as he would have were he living on a desert island. And it means that the government has no right to it nor any part of it. So long as we don't use our life to damage that same right of another person, then we are free to live as we see fit.
Whenever the government takes over a business or sticks its hand into a business, it violates an individual's right to HIS life. At that moment, the business is the property of the government not the individual even though the deed and contracts still have the individual's name on it as if he owned it. Use and disposal of property is the sine qua non of ownership. Since the government can tell that business what it should do when and it does so at the point of a gun, it is the final authority when it comes to use and disposal. The government has no business there. There is no right the government has to do that. It has usurped individual rights. And until this lesson is learned loud and clear across this land, this scourge will not end. It will continue until we and our children live in poverty. Such is the progression of a voracious, evil government.
So start thinking about what we are going to have to do. This problem is not going away. It's here to stay until we - all the private individuals - handle it.
It is government control over property that is the achilles heel of a free society and thus to bring the government under the control of the people for whom it is designed to protect, it can have no access to a means whereby it can usurp the rights of individual people.
This is going to require some new thinking - some entirely new thinking. Never before has such a system existed, but the facts are in on government's that can take people's property or in any way have use and disposal, i.e., regulation of, private property: it doesn't work. By this means, it becomes the master of slaves and places the entire population on its plantation.
It is this unilateral power over property which governments up to this time have had that allow a double standard to exist. With such power, the government lives by a standard that any private individual or group of individuals cannot. An individual cannot steal, the government can. An individual cannot violate another's rights, the government can. An individual cannot pollute his neighbor's property, the government can. An individual cannot lie and cheat his way to power over you, the government can. In other words, because the government can take and control private property, we have unleashed a criminal in our midst. And, this criminal class grows to the point where it must be destroyed lest it destroys the entire fabric of society and ultimately the lives of the people it was created to protect.
We are seeing all of this come to pass at this time. The government is now completely upside down. There is nothing rational about it. It plays deuces wild. There is nothing valuable about it. It has even lost the veneer of value. It has become the apotheosis of lawlessness. It is nothing more than a means for some men to have power over other men and has become a scourge upon the nation.
This process has been ocurring for over a hundred years. Only for the first hundred years was America a free society and a free country. But with the inception of the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, the anti-trust laws and some other such devices, the government became the problem, not the solution. Just as King George became the bane of the new colonies such that they had to declare their independence from the British Crown, we are approaching a repeat of this this scenario.
We are now witnessing a coup d'etat, an overthrow of legal government in a stark and startling way. President Obama has never pretended to have the distinction of individual rights and in fact has professed "positive rights" - meaning the taking of property from those who earned it and distributing it to those who have not. President Obama has appointed his czars to handle various segments of his government thus overriding the cabinet system and its approval by the Senate. He has funded ACORN, his henchmen in the field who can take to the streets at a moment's notice and who can overthrow the democratic process. He used threats of legal problems that could result in TV and radio license removal to cut off any speech that questioned his past during the campaign. He's considering The Fairness Doctrine to throttle the speech of talk radio. He chose immoral people for his advisors and various posts so he can easily control his "compromised" people. He placed critically important legislation in his stimulus package so it doesn't come up for debate. He has used executive order to bypass debate. In other words, the man is a dictator - pure and simple.
Now it is time for us to face this fact and start thinking how we are going to handle such a circumstance. It is upon us.
The United States is different than any other country that preceeded it. It was founded on Individual Rights. That means that each of us has a right to his own life in society - just as he would have were he living on a desert island. And it means that the government has no right to it nor any part of it. So long as we don't use our life to damage that same right of another person, then we are free to live as we see fit.
Whenever the government takes over a business or sticks its hand into a business, it violates an individual's right to HIS life. At that moment, the business is the property of the government not the individual even though the deed and contracts still have the individual's name on it as if he owned it. Use and disposal of property is the sine qua non of ownership. Since the government can tell that business what it should do when and it does so at the point of a gun, it is the final authority when it comes to use and disposal. The government has no business there. There is no right the government has to do that. It has usurped individual rights. And until this lesson is learned loud and clear across this land, this scourge will not end. It will continue until we and our children live in poverty. Such is the progression of a voracious, evil government.
So start thinking about what we are going to have to do. This problem is not going away. It's here to stay until we - all the private individuals - handle it.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Diabolical?
The alarm considering the diabolical nature of the Obama Administration is growing. People are now beginning to distrust Obama's motives. Does he want to take down the United States because he hates what is unique about the United States? It is, after all, the only country on the face of the earth founded on the fact that a human being is the source of value and is unique and individual. No one except the individual can seek to live his life and all human energy is individual human energy which is why the critical formulation in our Constitution is the protection of Individual Rights.
To socialize a nation is to disregard the nature of human being and attempt to annihilate him by recognizing him only as part of a group - racial, gender, sexuality, ethnic, or class. It is without doubt one of the most evil actions any man can advocate or take action to install. This idea is the root of failure of most modern governments and marks the downward direction of a society. Socialism ties up the energy of a person by requiring him to have permission to initiate any of his ideas. The parasites are the only ones who feel empowered. To install this idea over and at the expense of individuals is what I say Obama and his henchmen are up to.
This was apparent to anyone who bothered to investigate Obama during his campaign. I've yet to find a single Obama voter who cared enough about himself or his country to investigate him. Never has such lying and duplicity masqueraded in such an "attractive" form.
The question is increasingly going to become: What now? When?
This article is from Robert Tracinski's TIA Daily. SCB
A Principled Minority
Over the weekend, I got an e-mail from Jack Wakeland pointing out an error in the focus of my commentary on Judd Gregg's withdrawal as Obama's Secretary of Commerce. And it was not just that I incorrectly identified Gregg as a Senator from Connecticut (he's actually from New Hampshire). Here is Jack's comment:
"The story of Senator Judd Gregg is not a story about the incompetence of hot-house leftist Barack Obama.
"It is a story about Judd Gregg's integrity. Senator Gregg naively accepted a nomination to the cabinet by the president of the United States—uncritically accepting the idea that it would be a great honor to serve the top man in American government, because this is America. But after taking one good quick look at the shackles for our incremental enslavement being fashioned in the White House, he recoiled and said 'No!'
"No one quits a cabinet post one week after being nominated. No one quits after making a complex series of state and federal arrangements about who the Democratic governor of New Hampshire will appoint in his place (so as not to seal in more firmly the left's 60-vote steamroller-majority in the Senate). No one quits before hearings for his confirmation can even be scheduled. No one says no to a newly elected president so bluntly and unceremoniously—not without a substantial and very public provocation.
"Whatever faults he has (and I'm sure he has them), in quitting, Senator Judd deserves the best words of praise that can be penned.
"And one of the reasons why Senator Judd quit is the census. The census? That is one subject that should never be the object of partisan debate—not in a republic that has spent the past 80 years decaying towards democracy.
"The story of Rahm Emanuel's attempt—with the obvious approval of President Barack Obama—to take over of the census invites a retelling of the story of Joe Stalin's order that the head of his census bureau be shot for reporting that the population of the Soviet Union had decreased—thus giving evidence of the millions who were murdered in his purges and in his starvation of the Ukraine. It invites a reference to one of Stalin's best-known quotes: 'He who votes decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything.'
"The American people have handed the reins of our country over to a bunch of incompetent Chicago patronage hacks. They're deliberately planning to steer the whole nation into a ditch just to get the kickback for awarding the towing contract to their cousins. That is the whole dirty little extent of their idea for 'a change in direction.'"
A few weeks ago, I wrote that TIA Daily would respond to the bleak news of the Obama years by "looking for and highlighting the story of the people who are supporting and defending civilization. That is always more important than any other news, because in the long run, that is the story that actually explains the state of the world." That is why Jack is right that Senator Gregg's integrity is a more important story than the Obama administration's bumbling.
In fact, one of the bright spots of the current situation is the unaccustomed sight of Republican integrity on the issue of big government. A Washington Post analysis describes the battle over the "stimulus" that is just beginning: the battle over who gets the credit or the blame from its results. The most interesting fact from the article: "Rep. Eric Cantor, the House minority whip who led the fight to deny Obama every GOP vote for the plan, is studying Winston Churchill's role leading the Tories in the late 1930s, a principled minority that was eventually catapulted into power over the Labor Party." A "principled minority" that is rewarded by being "catapulted into power"? Sounds like a good plan to me.
I will resist the temptation to ask why the Republicans weren't more principled when they were in the majority, because we should still acknowledge that, even while Bush was still office, it was Republicans who offered the only glimmers of resistance to the bailout frenzy.
Jack points to another example of the new stiffening of the Republican opposition.
"Republican Congressman Tom Price (Chairman of the Republican Study Committee) was so furious with the non-objective vote on the 0.8-trillion-dollar Pelosi-Obey 'stimulus package,' that he couldn't wait for a news conference. So on Friday morning, while the vote was being rushed through, Rep. Price did a little one-minute video on the fact that no congressman or congressional staff member could possibly know what was in the 1073-page document that was to be voted on within 10 hours of its being marked up in the House-Senate Conference Committee. In the video, he shows two of the arbitrary and unaccountable scribbles in the margins of the thick document—one pencils out accountability for one of the thousands of appropriations in the bill and another pencils in the number $150 million in place of the number $100 million that had been typed in ink."
(In a similar vein, TIA Daily reader Ashley King asks a very good question: "I'd like to know when we will see a budget. We are going from one ad hoc monstrosity to the next. So I say again, where is the budget?")
The bracing effect of standing on principle is beginning to have more appeal to right-leaning intellectuals in the media, as well. The Wall Street Journal has just carried a second article by Judy Shelton advocating a return to the gold standard as the solution to the monetary central planning that helped cause the current financial crisis—and which now threatens to cause runaway inflation.
So all of that is good news. Unfortunately, it is happening in an evil context. Remember the Broken Culture Fallacy. The Republican Party trying to transform itself into a "principled minority" is a bit like the industrious glazier busy at work repairing a window broken by a vandal. It's good that he's repairing the damage—but everyone would have been better off if the vandal hadn't tried to smash everything to pieces in the first place.
Just to make sure that you are appropriately un-reassured, let's take a look at some of the things that were in the "stimulus bill," tucked away in those hundreds of pages that reporters and the public are just now getting around to reading.
We know that the bill authorized the federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of money it doesn't have. But in addition, the Democrats in Congress couldn't resist exploiting the financial panic to add other statist elements. Thus, there is a cap on executive pay for companies that have taken bailout money under the TARP plan:
The pay restrictions resemble those that the Treasury Department announced this month, but are likely to ensnare more executives at many more companies and also to cut more deeply into the bonuses that often account for the bulk of annual pay.
Even the Obama administration thought that this provision "went too far and would cause a brain drain in the financial industry during an acute crisis."
One observer on Wall Street offers an ominous observation:
At some point, you begin to wonder: has the government given up on these companies anyway? Why would the government or White House want to go along with that unless they have come to the conclusion they will have to nationalize these firms anyway?
The flip side of punishing bank executives for the crime of being promoted to high-ranking jobs is to reward workers for losing their jobs. Thus, I have seen several reports indicating that the pseudo-stimulus undermines key provisions of the 1996 welfare reform that encouraged state-level "welfare to work" programs to move millions of people off of dependence on the government dole.
According to an overview in the London Times,
Robert Rector, a prominent welfare researcher who was one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill, warned last week that Obama's stimulus plan was a "welfare spendathon" that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history.
Douglas Besharov, author of a big study on welfare reform, said the stimulus bill passed by Congress and the Senate in separate votes on Friday would "unravel" most of the 1996 reforms that led to a 65% reduction in welfare caseloads.
Several TIA Daily readers sent me an excellent article detailing how the Democrats loaded into the "stimulus" various provisions for increased government control of medicine. The whole article is worth reading, but here is just one sample:
One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and "guide" your doctor's decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis." According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and "learn to operate less like solo practitioners."
The bill takes its cue from Daschle in more than one way.
Daschle supported the Clinton administration's health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. "If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it," he said. "The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol."
If a principled minority rises to oppose this unprincipled government takeover, they will be the heroes of the story of the next few years, because if anyone halts the renewed march toward socialism, it will be them. But let's not forget how grave the dangers are and how great the evil is that they will be struggling to save us from.—RWT
To socialize a nation is to disregard the nature of human being and attempt to annihilate him by recognizing him only as part of a group - racial, gender, sexuality, ethnic, or class. It is without doubt one of the most evil actions any man can advocate or take action to install. This idea is the root of failure of most modern governments and marks the downward direction of a society. Socialism ties up the energy of a person by requiring him to have permission to initiate any of his ideas. The parasites are the only ones who feel empowered. To install this idea over and at the expense of individuals is what I say Obama and his henchmen are up to.
This was apparent to anyone who bothered to investigate Obama during his campaign. I've yet to find a single Obama voter who cared enough about himself or his country to investigate him. Never has such lying and duplicity masqueraded in such an "attractive" form.
The question is increasingly going to become: What now? When?
This article is from Robert Tracinski's TIA Daily. SCB
A Principled Minority
Over the weekend, I got an e-mail from Jack Wakeland pointing out an error in the focus of my commentary on Judd Gregg's withdrawal as Obama's Secretary of Commerce. And it was not just that I incorrectly identified Gregg as a Senator from Connecticut (he's actually from New Hampshire). Here is Jack's comment:
"The story of Senator Judd Gregg is not a story about the incompetence of hot-house leftist Barack Obama.
"It is a story about Judd Gregg's integrity. Senator Gregg naively accepted a nomination to the cabinet by the president of the United States—uncritically accepting the idea that it would be a great honor to serve the top man in American government, because this is America. But after taking one good quick look at the shackles for our incremental enslavement being fashioned in the White House, he recoiled and said 'No!'
"No one quits a cabinet post one week after being nominated. No one quits after making a complex series of state and federal arrangements about who the Democratic governor of New Hampshire will appoint in his place (so as not to seal in more firmly the left's 60-vote steamroller-majority in the Senate). No one quits before hearings for his confirmation can even be scheduled. No one says no to a newly elected president so bluntly and unceremoniously—not without a substantial and very public provocation.
"Whatever faults he has (and I'm sure he has them), in quitting, Senator Judd deserves the best words of praise that can be penned.
"And one of the reasons why Senator Judd quit is the census. The census? That is one subject that should never be the object of partisan debate—not in a republic that has spent the past 80 years decaying towards democracy.
"The story of Rahm Emanuel's attempt—with the obvious approval of President Barack Obama—to take over of the census invites a retelling of the story of Joe Stalin's order that the head of his census bureau be shot for reporting that the population of the Soviet Union had decreased—thus giving evidence of the millions who were murdered in his purges and in his starvation of the Ukraine. It invites a reference to one of Stalin's best-known quotes: 'He who votes decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything.'
"The American people have handed the reins of our country over to a bunch of incompetent Chicago patronage hacks. They're deliberately planning to steer the whole nation into a ditch just to get the kickback for awarding the towing contract to their cousins. That is the whole dirty little extent of their idea for 'a change in direction.'"
A few weeks ago, I wrote that TIA Daily would respond to the bleak news of the Obama years by "looking for and highlighting the story of the people who are supporting and defending civilization. That is always more important than any other news, because in the long run, that is the story that actually explains the state of the world." That is why Jack is right that Senator Gregg's integrity is a more important story than the Obama administration's bumbling.
In fact, one of the bright spots of the current situation is the unaccustomed sight of Republican integrity on the issue of big government. A Washington Post analysis describes the battle over the "stimulus" that is just beginning: the battle over who gets the credit or the blame from its results. The most interesting fact from the article: "Rep. Eric Cantor, the House minority whip who led the fight to deny Obama every GOP vote for the plan, is studying Winston Churchill's role leading the Tories in the late 1930s, a principled minority that was eventually catapulted into power over the Labor Party." A "principled minority" that is rewarded by being "catapulted into power"? Sounds like a good plan to me.
I will resist the temptation to ask why the Republicans weren't more principled when they were in the majority, because we should still acknowledge that, even while Bush was still office, it was Republicans who offered the only glimmers of resistance to the bailout frenzy.
Jack points to another example of the new stiffening of the Republican opposition.
"Republican Congressman Tom Price (Chairman of the Republican Study Committee) was so furious with the non-objective vote on the 0.8-trillion-dollar Pelosi-Obey 'stimulus package,' that he couldn't wait for a news conference. So on Friday morning, while the vote was being rushed through, Rep. Price did a little one-minute video on the fact that no congressman or congressional staff member could possibly know what was in the 1073-page document that was to be voted on within 10 hours of its being marked up in the House-Senate Conference Committee. In the video, he shows two of the arbitrary and unaccountable scribbles in the margins of the thick document—one pencils out accountability for one of the thousands of appropriations in the bill and another pencils in the number $150 million in place of the number $100 million that had been typed in ink."
(In a similar vein, TIA Daily reader Ashley King asks a very good question: "I'd like to know when we will see a budget. We are going from one ad hoc monstrosity to the next. So I say again, where is the budget?")
The bracing effect of standing on principle is beginning to have more appeal to right-leaning intellectuals in the media, as well. The Wall Street Journal has just carried a second article by Judy Shelton advocating a return to the gold standard as the solution to the monetary central planning that helped cause the current financial crisis—and which now threatens to cause runaway inflation.
So all of that is good news. Unfortunately, it is happening in an evil context. Remember the Broken Culture Fallacy. The Republican Party trying to transform itself into a "principled minority" is a bit like the industrious glazier busy at work repairing a window broken by a vandal. It's good that he's repairing the damage—but everyone would have been better off if the vandal hadn't tried to smash everything to pieces in the first place.
Just to make sure that you are appropriately un-reassured, let's take a look at some of the things that were in the "stimulus bill," tucked away in those hundreds of pages that reporters and the public are just now getting around to reading.
We know that the bill authorized the federal government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of money it doesn't have. But in addition, the Democrats in Congress couldn't resist exploiting the financial panic to add other statist elements. Thus, there is a cap on executive pay for companies that have taken bailout money under the TARP plan:
The pay restrictions resemble those that the Treasury Department announced this month, but are likely to ensnare more executives at many more companies and also to cut more deeply into the bonuses that often account for the bulk of annual pay.
Even the Obama administration thought that this provision "went too far and would cause a brain drain in the financial industry during an acute crisis."
One observer on Wall Street offers an ominous observation:
At some point, you begin to wonder: has the government given up on these companies anyway? Why would the government or White House want to go along with that unless they have come to the conclusion they will have to nationalize these firms anyway?
The flip side of punishing bank executives for the crime of being promoted to high-ranking jobs is to reward workers for losing their jobs. Thus, I have seen several reports indicating that the pseudo-stimulus undermines key provisions of the 1996 welfare reform that encouraged state-level "welfare to work" programs to move millions of people off of dependence on the government dole.
According to an overview in the London Times,
Robert Rector, a prominent welfare researcher who was one of the architects of Clinton's 1996 reform bill, warned last week that Obama's stimulus plan was a "welfare spendathon" that would amount to the largest one-year increase in government handouts in American history.
Douglas Besharov, author of a big study on welfare reform, said the stimulus bill passed by Congress and the Senate in separate votes on Friday would "unravel" most of the 1996 reforms that led to a 65% reduction in welfare caseloads.
Several TIA Daily readers sent me an excellent article detailing how the Democrats loaded into the "stimulus" various provisions for increased government control of medicine. The whole article is worth reading, but here is just one sample:
One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and "guide" your doctor's decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis." According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and "learn to operate less like solo practitioners."
The bill takes its cue from Daschle in more than one way.
Daschle supported the Clinton administration's health-care overhaul in 1994, and attributed its failure to debate and delay. A year ago, Daschle wrote that the next president should act quickly before critics mount an opposition. "If that means attaching a health-care plan to the federal budget, so be it," he said. "The issue is too important to be stalled by Senate protocol."
If a principled minority rises to oppose this unprincipled government takeover, they will be the heroes of the story of the next few years, because if anyone halts the renewed march toward socialism, it will be them. But let's not forget how grave the dangers are and how great the evil is that they will be struggling to save us from.—RWT
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
King of Shade
Obama is turning his administration into a Monument to Shade. Shady, compromised, crooked characters populate Obama's entire life and his administration is no exception.
Why should you pay your taxes if two people in his administration didn't think it was important? Why should you not be a racist if his minister didn't think it was important? Why should you not be a terrorist if his friend did not think it was important? Why should you not worry about our government being bought by Arabs if the husband of your Secretary of State didn't think it was important? Why should you be straight when the defenders of Fannie and Freddie aren't worried about their being straight? Why should you be respectful of people if his Chief of Staff thumbs his nose at President Bush at the inaugural? Why should you care about doing anything right if your President doesn't think it is important?
What influence will this have on the country when the head of our government not merely has to deal with it because it pops up once in awhile, but picks and defends shady characters as a signature of his administration?
He will empower every immoral creep - the hustlers, the con men, the moochers - the world over and bring them out of the woodwork and to his and America's doorstep.
Why? They have a champion in the White House.
There will be no sunlight for the next four years.
Why should you pay your taxes if two people in his administration didn't think it was important? Why should you not be a racist if his minister didn't think it was important? Why should you not be a terrorist if his friend did not think it was important? Why should you not worry about our government being bought by Arabs if the husband of your Secretary of State didn't think it was important? Why should you be straight when the defenders of Fannie and Freddie aren't worried about their being straight? Why should you be respectful of people if his Chief of Staff thumbs his nose at President Bush at the inaugural? Why should you care about doing anything right if your President doesn't think it is important?
What influence will this have on the country when the head of our government not merely has to deal with it because it pops up once in awhile, but picks and defends shady characters as a signature of his administration?
He will empower every immoral creep - the hustlers, the con men, the moochers - the world over and bring them out of the woodwork and to his and America's doorstep.
Why? They have a champion in the White House.
There will be no sunlight for the next four years.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The Basic Question
This morning while driving I tuned the radio to Neal Boortz, an Atlanta talk show host who bills himself as libertarian. He said that although the liberal has an answer for many things, there is one question he cannot answer.
I post this here. I use "progressive liberal" rather than just "liberal" as there is a difference. Traditionally liberal has meant one who believes in liberty or being liberated - freedom to be oneself and freedom to be politically free. I think today, however, most liberals are progressive liberals who believe that the role of government is to redistribute property in order that all people have the same existential means to live their life. This is a new term for the old fashioned one: socialism.
Boortz: Do you think it is alright if I choose to give a homeless person $10?
Progressive Liberal: Yes.
Boortz: Do you think it is alright if you choose to give a homeless person $10?
Progressive Liberal: Yes.
Boortz: Do you think it is alright if I hold a gun with the shooting end touching your forehead and tell you to give $10 to the homeless person?
Progressive Liberal: Absolutely not!
Boortz: Then why is it alright if I go to Washington and ask the politician to hold that gun to your head to get that $10 for the homeless person?
Progressive Liberal: Hemming and Hawing. No answer.
We know Obama's answer: "It's fair." But is it? Is using force to get what YOU want fair? Is using force to get what a majority wants fair? By what standard?
I post this here. I use "progressive liberal" rather than just "liberal" as there is a difference. Traditionally liberal has meant one who believes in liberty or being liberated - freedom to be oneself and freedom to be politically free. I think today, however, most liberals are progressive liberals who believe that the role of government is to redistribute property in order that all people have the same existential means to live their life. This is a new term for the old fashioned one: socialism.
Boortz: Do you think it is alright if I choose to give a homeless person $10?
Progressive Liberal: Yes.
Boortz: Do you think it is alright if you choose to give a homeless person $10?
Progressive Liberal: Yes.
Boortz: Do you think it is alright if I hold a gun with the shooting end touching your forehead and tell you to give $10 to the homeless person?
Progressive Liberal: Absolutely not!
Boortz: Then why is it alright if I go to Washington and ask the politician to hold that gun to your head to get that $10 for the homeless person?
Progressive Liberal: Hemming and Hawing. No answer.
We know Obama's answer: "It's fair." But is it? Is using force to get what YOU want fair? Is using force to get what a majority wants fair? By what standard?
Monday, January 26, 2009
What's Happening to the American Spirit?
(When I read this article, I got excited. There is a lot wrong with the underpinnings of this man’s viewpoint and yet he is putting his finger on a crucial aspect of the energy and drive, and the resulting creativity of our culture at this point in history. Culturally we are bound to serve others and the government is only able to pass laws forcing us to do so because we accept that that is a proper goal for our society and, therefore, one’s life. When a man has produced goods and services which others have bought because they see the value in them and yet he is asked to “give back”, the underlying assumption is that the voluntary trade of value for value is actually immoral – lying, stealing, merely material, etc. This is a horrendous fallacy and injustice, and anyone who accepts it deserves the guilt he will experience from living his life as he must in order to survive. We live in the era of the New Slavery.
His title is true in one sense and not true in another. The laws bind us to being less powerful in our lives and at the same time, they can never bind us since ultimately we only accept the victim status psychologically if we say so. This distinction is crucial for the future of political freedom from the heavy hand of government force. My comments are in green.)
Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2009
How Modern Law Makes Us Powerless
The real barrier to Barack Obama's 'responsibility' era.
By PHILIP K. HOWARD
Calling for a "new era of responsibility" in his inaugural address, President Barack Obama reminded us that there are no limits to "what free men and women can achieve." Indeed. America achieved greatness as the can-do society. This is, after all, the country of Thomas Paine and barn raisings, of Grange halls and Google. Other countries shared, at least in part, our political freedoms, but America had something different -- a belief in the power of each individual. President Obama's clarion call of self-determination -- "Yes We Can" -- hearkens back to the core of our culture.
Cartoon by David Klein
But there's a threshold problem for our new president. Americans don't feel free (Because objectively they aren’t free) to reach inside themselves and make a difference. ("Make a difference" is one of those unobjective buzzwords that has come to mean "make a difference with other people as a purpose for living one's life." It is true that what one creates and produces can make a difference with other people but it can never be an authentic purpose for one's life. Making a profit means one is making a difference because people traded their money for what you produced.) The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices. All around us are warnings and legal risks. The modern credo is not "Yes We Can" but "No You Can't." Our sense of powerlessness is pervasive. Those who deal with the public are the most discouraged. Most doctors say they wouldn't advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can't even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.
The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom -- where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree. (Rather than the objective violation of a person’s right to his life and his property, the visible expression of his life.)
Daily life in America has been transformed. Ordinary choices -- by teachers, doctors, officials, managers, even volunteers -- are paralyzed by legal self-consciousness. Did you check the rules? Who will be responsible if there's an accident? A pediatrician in North Carolina noted that "I don't deal with patients the same way any more. You wouldn't want to say something off the cuff that might be used against you."
Here we stand, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, and Americans no longer feel free to do anything about it. We have lost the idea, at every level of social life, that people can grab hold of a problem and fix it. Defensiveness has swept across the country like a cold wave. We have become a culture of rule followers, trained to frame every solution in terms of existing law or possible legal risk. The person of responsibility (Responsibility is a function of reaping and experiencing the consequences of one’s actions. Government force erases responsibility. One cannot be responsible for that which he had no choice but to do.) is replaced by the person of caution. When in doubt, don't.
All this law, we're told, is just the price of making sure society is in working order. But society is not working. Disorder disrupts learning all day long in many public schools -- the result in part, studies by NYU Professor Richard Arum found, of the rise of student rights. Health care is like a nervous breakdown in slow motion. Costs are out of control, yet the incentive for doctors is to order whatever tests the insurance will pay for. Taking risks is no longer the badge of courage, but reason enough to get sued.
There's an epidemic of child obesity, but kids aren't allowed to take the normal risks of childhood. Broward County, Fla., has even banned running at recess.
The flaw, and the cure, lie in our conception of freedom. (And that lies in the understanding of man’s nature and the type of consciousness he has.) We think of freedom as political freedom. We're certainly free to live and work where we want, and to pull the lever in the ballot box. But freedom should also include the power of personal conviction and the authority to use your common sense. Analyzing the American character, Alexis de Tocqueville, considered "freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. . . . Subjection in minor affairs does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to sacrifice their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated."
This is not an ideological point. Freedom in daily choices is essential for practical reasons (and spiritual reasons) -- necessary for government officials and judges as well as for teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs. The new legal order doesn't honor the individuality of human accomplishment. (The new legal order doesn’t honor the existence of individuals.) People accomplish things by focusing on the goal, and letting their instincts, mainly subconscious, try to get them there. "Amazingly few people," management guru Peter Drucker observed, "know how they get things done." Most things happen, the philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote, through "the usual process of trial and error by which we feel (Really? I don’t think that captures it. He’s missing the mind’s cognitive role in our actions.) our way to success." Thomas Edison put it this way: "Nothing that's any good works by itself. You got to make the damn thing work."
Modern law pulls the rug out from under all those human powers and substitutes instead a debilitating self-consciousness. (Reality consists of what there is to be conscious of and also one’s own consciousness – that tool of survival in the world. The proper processing of information from one’s senses requires focusing out there and also being responsible for one’s mechanism by which one grasps and processes that information.) Teachers lose their authority, Prof. Arum found, because the overhang of law causes "hesitation, doubt and weakening of conviction." Skyrocketing health-care costs are impossible to contain as long as doctors go through the day thinking about how they will defend themselves if a sick person sues.
The overlay of law on daily choices destroys the human instinct (man does not possess instincts. He is a living entity and for man, he must choose to live. Nothing automatically propels him in that direction other than his nature as a living entity has built into mechanisms which indicate to him that he is doing that or not doing that. But what he does about the information he gets from his body – the pleasure or the pain – doesn’t tell him what to do. He has to discover that. Hence no instincts. An instinct is an automatic propensity toward life that works to sustain him. Animals have that, but not man. Man is quite capable of choosing suicide and often does.) needed to get things done. Bureaucracy can't teach. Rules don't make things happen. Accomplishment is personal. Anyone who has felt the pride of a job well done knows this. (This is the experience the unification of the mind and body in performing an Ego Unit. The Ego Unit is a discovery of mine which supports a person to grasp the nature of real accomplishment and consciously engage in that practice if he so chooses.)
How do we restore Americans' freedom in daily choices? Freedom is notoriously malleable towards self-interest. "We all declare for liberty," Abraham Lincoln observed, "but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing."
Freedom, however, is not just a shoving match. Freedom has a formal structure. It has two components:
1) Law sets boundaries that proscribe what we must do or can't do -- you must not steal, you must pay taxes.
2) Those same legal boundaries protect an open field of free choice in all other matters.
The forgotten idea is the second component -- that law must affirmatively define an area free from legal interference. Law must provide "frontiers, not artificially drawn," as philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it, "within which men should be inviolable." (Our Constitution is the document that is the means of carrying out The Declaration of Independence. In that it states that every man has a RIGHT to his life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, i.e. the freedom to be free of other men telling him what to do. This has been done. So what is the REAL problem? What is it that has taken us in the direction away from something that we already know works and releases the creative energy of men? This is the real question which this author does not answer. He keeps his argument at the level of laws and yet those laws are carrying out more fundamental beliefs. What are they?)
This idea has been lost to our age. When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school -- you name it. Law has poured into daily life. (This is why I no longer take on architecture in the way I once did. In my lifetime, the building code has gone from a small 5x8 book about an inch thick to a 4’ shelf of 9x12 binders specifying dimensions and layouts and surfaces and construction and everything. One can do nothing without consulting the building code and trying to figure out what is meant. Creative energy is sapped by bureaucratic energy. Working on big buildings thoroughly contained by all these laws and dictums which, by the way, are never finalized in the books since the government interpreters are constantly changing them, is to render oneself a drone for life. That’s not me and I’m not interested. So I shrunk my sphere of operation to small private creative projects that I am stimulated by and yet avoid the bulk of government regulation.)
The solution is not just to start paring back all the law -- that would take 10 lifetimes, like trying to prune the jungle. We need to abandon the idea that freedom is a legal maze, where each daily choice is like picking the right answer on a multiple-choice test. We need to set a new goal for law -- to define an open area of free choice. This requires judges and legislatures to affirmatively assert social norms of what's reasonable and what's not. "The first requirement of a sound body of law," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, "is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community." (We need to understand that no one has the right to tell us what to do and compel our action and at the same time none of us has the right to infringe the same right of another person. This in practice means the separation of economy and state in the same way that in our past we have separated church and state. This separation is breaking down too.)
The profile of authority structures needed to defend daily freedoms (So what is this concept “daily freedoms?” This kind of thinking is typical of a person who is stopped from thinking by wanting to please people, I say, rather than identifying the nature of things. This is why this article, although capturing the spiritual essence of our New Slavery is poor at identifying what has to be seen differently if things are to change and man is able to live free once again.) is not hard to imagine. Judges would aspire to keep lawsuits reasonable, understanding that what people sue for ends up defining the boundaries of free interaction. Schools would be run by the instincts and values of the humans in charge -- not by bureaucratic micromanagement -- and be held accountable for how they do.
Government officials would have flexibility to meet public goals, also with accountability. Public choices would aspire to balance (balance has nothing to do with the solution of this problem. Rather it has to do with acting from objectively true principles.) for the common good, not, generally, to appease someone's rights.
Reviving the can-do spirit that made America great requires a legal overhaul of historic dimension. (The legal overhaul cannot proceed without moral guidance as to which kinds of actions are consonant with man’s nature and need to be protected by the law. Thus the deeper problem is the re-examination of the dominant moral code and the assumptions about existence and consciousness upon which it depends. I’m of the opinion that the surrender of one’s mind to a higher authority – be it God or Society – must be thrown out lock, stock and barrel. Rather, people have to question all of these underlying structures and see whether they work and why or are they allowing them in their lives for other reasons – such as social acceptance.) We must scrape away decades of accumulated legal sediment and replace it with coherent legal goals and authority mechanisms, designed to affirmatively protect individual freedom in daily choices. "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing," Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, "and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical . . . ." The goal is not to change our public goals. (Well there is no such thing as a public goal. In fact there is no such thing as “the public.” “The public” is a collectivist floating abstraction. Anything said in the name of the public is total BS because the public is nothing more than a collection of individuals. So ascribing anything to the public means that the speaker wants his values and the rest be damned. Whoever those other people are at the moment of his speaking do not exist. He may think he speaks for the public, but that is a fat lie too.) The goal is make it possible for free citizens to achieve them.
(In today’s culture, no one with a public voice is speaking for individualism. All leadership, some faster and some slower, is leading us into the slavery of the individual to the collective. In this context, there were no good political candidates this year. The New Enslavement is speeding up)
Mr. Howard, a lawyer, is chair of Common Good (http://www.commongood.org/), and author of the new book "Life Without Lawyers," published this month by W.W. Norton & Co.
His title is true in one sense and not true in another. The laws bind us to being less powerful in our lives and at the same time, they can never bind us since ultimately we only accept the victim status psychologically if we say so. This distinction is crucial for the future of political freedom from the heavy hand of government force. My comments are in green.)
Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2009
How Modern Law Makes Us Powerless
The real barrier to Barack Obama's 'responsibility' era.
By PHILIP K. HOWARD
Calling for a "new era of responsibility" in his inaugural address, President Barack Obama reminded us that there are no limits to "what free men and women can achieve." Indeed. America achieved greatness as the can-do society. This is, after all, the country of Thomas Paine and barn raisings, of Grange halls and Google. Other countries shared, at least in part, our political freedoms, but America had something different -- a belief in the power of each individual. President Obama's clarion call of self-determination -- "Yes We Can" -- hearkens back to the core of our culture.
Cartoon by David Klein
But there's a threshold problem for our new president. Americans don't feel free (Because objectively they aren’t free) to reach inside themselves and make a difference. ("Make a difference" is one of those unobjective buzzwords that has come to mean "make a difference with other people as a purpose for living one's life." It is true that what one creates and produces can make a difference with other people but it can never be an authentic purpose for one's life. Making a profit means one is making a difference because people traded their money for what you produced.) The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices. All around us are warnings and legal risks. The modern credo is not "Yes We Can" but "No You Can't." Our sense of powerlessness is pervasive. Those who deal with the public are the most discouraged. Most doctors say they wouldn't advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can't even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.
The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom -- where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree. (Rather than the objective violation of a person’s right to his life and his property, the visible expression of his life.)
Daily life in America has been transformed. Ordinary choices -- by teachers, doctors, officials, managers, even volunteers -- are paralyzed by legal self-consciousness. Did you check the rules? Who will be responsible if there's an accident? A pediatrician in North Carolina noted that "I don't deal with patients the same way any more. You wouldn't want to say something off the cuff that might be used against you."
Here we stand, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, and Americans no longer feel free to do anything about it. We have lost the idea, at every level of social life, that people can grab hold of a problem and fix it. Defensiveness has swept across the country like a cold wave. We have become a culture of rule followers, trained to frame every solution in terms of existing law or possible legal risk. The person of responsibility (Responsibility is a function of reaping and experiencing the consequences of one’s actions. Government force erases responsibility. One cannot be responsible for that which he had no choice but to do.) is replaced by the person of caution. When in doubt, don't.
All this law, we're told, is just the price of making sure society is in working order. But society is not working. Disorder disrupts learning all day long in many public schools -- the result in part, studies by NYU Professor Richard Arum found, of the rise of student rights. Health care is like a nervous breakdown in slow motion. Costs are out of control, yet the incentive for doctors is to order whatever tests the insurance will pay for. Taking risks is no longer the badge of courage, but reason enough to get sued.
There's an epidemic of child obesity, but kids aren't allowed to take the normal risks of childhood. Broward County, Fla., has even banned running at recess.
The flaw, and the cure, lie in our conception of freedom. (And that lies in the understanding of man’s nature and the type of consciousness he has.) We think of freedom as political freedom. We're certainly free to live and work where we want, and to pull the lever in the ballot box. But freedom should also include the power of personal conviction and the authority to use your common sense. Analyzing the American character, Alexis de Tocqueville, considered "freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. . . . Subjection in minor affairs does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to sacrifice their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated."
This is not an ideological point. Freedom in daily choices is essential for practical reasons (and spiritual reasons) -- necessary for government officials and judges as well as for teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs. The new legal order doesn't honor the individuality of human accomplishment. (The new legal order doesn’t honor the existence of individuals.) People accomplish things by focusing on the goal, and letting their instincts, mainly subconscious, try to get them there. "Amazingly few people," management guru Peter Drucker observed, "know how they get things done." Most things happen, the philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote, through "the usual process of trial and error by which we feel (Really? I don’t think that captures it. He’s missing the mind’s cognitive role in our actions.) our way to success." Thomas Edison put it this way: "Nothing that's any good works by itself. You got to make the damn thing work."
Modern law pulls the rug out from under all those human powers and substitutes instead a debilitating self-consciousness. (Reality consists of what there is to be conscious of and also one’s own consciousness – that tool of survival in the world. The proper processing of information from one’s senses requires focusing out there and also being responsible for one’s mechanism by which one grasps and processes that information.) Teachers lose their authority, Prof. Arum found, because the overhang of law causes "hesitation, doubt and weakening of conviction." Skyrocketing health-care costs are impossible to contain as long as doctors go through the day thinking about how they will defend themselves if a sick person sues.
The overlay of law on daily choices destroys the human instinct (man does not possess instincts. He is a living entity and for man, he must choose to live. Nothing automatically propels him in that direction other than his nature as a living entity has built into mechanisms which indicate to him that he is doing that or not doing that. But what he does about the information he gets from his body – the pleasure or the pain – doesn’t tell him what to do. He has to discover that. Hence no instincts. An instinct is an automatic propensity toward life that works to sustain him. Animals have that, but not man. Man is quite capable of choosing suicide and often does.) needed to get things done. Bureaucracy can't teach. Rules don't make things happen. Accomplishment is personal. Anyone who has felt the pride of a job well done knows this. (This is the experience the unification of the mind and body in performing an Ego Unit. The Ego Unit is a discovery of mine which supports a person to grasp the nature of real accomplishment and consciously engage in that practice if he so chooses.)
How do we restore Americans' freedom in daily choices? Freedom is notoriously malleable towards self-interest. "We all declare for liberty," Abraham Lincoln observed, "but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing."
Freedom, however, is not just a shoving match. Freedom has a formal structure. It has two components:
1) Law sets boundaries that proscribe what we must do or can't do -- you must not steal, you must pay taxes.
2) Those same legal boundaries protect an open field of free choice in all other matters.
The forgotten idea is the second component -- that law must affirmatively define an area free from legal interference. Law must provide "frontiers, not artificially drawn," as philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it, "within which men should be inviolable." (Our Constitution is the document that is the means of carrying out The Declaration of Independence. In that it states that every man has a RIGHT to his life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, i.e. the freedom to be free of other men telling him what to do. This has been done. So what is the REAL problem? What is it that has taken us in the direction away from something that we already know works and releases the creative energy of men? This is the real question which this author does not answer. He keeps his argument at the level of laws and yet those laws are carrying out more fundamental beliefs. What are they?)
This idea has been lost to our age. When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school -- you name it. Law has poured into daily life. (This is why I no longer take on architecture in the way I once did. In my lifetime, the building code has gone from a small 5x8 book about an inch thick to a 4’ shelf of 9x12 binders specifying dimensions and layouts and surfaces and construction and everything. One can do nothing without consulting the building code and trying to figure out what is meant. Creative energy is sapped by bureaucratic energy. Working on big buildings thoroughly contained by all these laws and dictums which, by the way, are never finalized in the books since the government interpreters are constantly changing them, is to render oneself a drone for life. That’s not me and I’m not interested. So I shrunk my sphere of operation to small private creative projects that I am stimulated by and yet avoid the bulk of government regulation.)
The solution is not just to start paring back all the law -- that would take 10 lifetimes, like trying to prune the jungle. We need to abandon the idea that freedom is a legal maze, where each daily choice is like picking the right answer on a multiple-choice test. We need to set a new goal for law -- to define an open area of free choice. This requires judges and legislatures to affirmatively assert social norms of what's reasonable and what's not. "The first requirement of a sound body of law," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, "is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community." (We need to understand that no one has the right to tell us what to do and compel our action and at the same time none of us has the right to infringe the same right of another person. This in practice means the separation of economy and state in the same way that in our past we have separated church and state. This separation is breaking down too.)
The profile of authority structures needed to defend daily freedoms (So what is this concept “daily freedoms?” This kind of thinking is typical of a person who is stopped from thinking by wanting to please people, I say, rather than identifying the nature of things. This is why this article, although capturing the spiritual essence of our New Slavery is poor at identifying what has to be seen differently if things are to change and man is able to live free once again.) is not hard to imagine. Judges would aspire to keep lawsuits reasonable, understanding that what people sue for ends up defining the boundaries of free interaction. Schools would be run by the instincts and values of the humans in charge -- not by bureaucratic micromanagement -- and be held accountable for how they do.
Government officials would have flexibility to meet public goals, also with accountability. Public choices would aspire to balance (balance has nothing to do with the solution of this problem. Rather it has to do with acting from objectively true principles.) for the common good, not, generally, to appease someone's rights.
Reviving the can-do spirit that made America great requires a legal overhaul of historic dimension. (The legal overhaul cannot proceed without moral guidance as to which kinds of actions are consonant with man’s nature and need to be protected by the law. Thus the deeper problem is the re-examination of the dominant moral code and the assumptions about existence and consciousness upon which it depends. I’m of the opinion that the surrender of one’s mind to a higher authority – be it God or Society – must be thrown out lock, stock and barrel. Rather, people have to question all of these underlying structures and see whether they work and why or are they allowing them in their lives for other reasons – such as social acceptance.) We must scrape away decades of accumulated legal sediment and replace it with coherent legal goals and authority mechanisms, designed to affirmatively protect individual freedom in daily choices. "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing," Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, "and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical . . . ." The goal is not to change our public goals. (Well there is no such thing as a public goal. In fact there is no such thing as “the public.” “The public” is a collectivist floating abstraction. Anything said in the name of the public is total BS because the public is nothing more than a collection of individuals. So ascribing anything to the public means that the speaker wants his values and the rest be damned. Whoever those other people are at the moment of his speaking do not exist. He may think he speaks for the public, but that is a fat lie too.) The goal is make it possible for free citizens to achieve them.
(In today’s culture, no one with a public voice is speaking for individualism. All leadership, some faster and some slower, is leading us into the slavery of the individual to the collective. In this context, there were no good political candidates this year. The New Enslavement is speeding up)
Mr. Howard, a lawyer, is chair of Common Good (http://www.commongood.org/), and author of the new book "Life Without Lawyers," published this month by W.W. Norton & Co.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
President Obama
Watching the inauguration, I am again thankful that America is able to turn over power in a rational manner – for the most part.
I am thinking, though, about Obama being elected and now assuming President of the United States of America. When all is said and done, what is the meaning?
I say: This is the beginning of the end of black as victim and white as privileged.
Obama has, in effect, said – with his life – “I’m the one. I will be held ultimately accountable. I’m not willing to use my race to gain favor. Why? I can’t. It won’t work.”
If Obama has a good intention, by itself it won’t work. If he is not acting when he should or acting when he should not, it won’t work. And if he manipulates people as he did in the campaign, it won’t work. And above all, excuses won’t work.
Why?
Reality takes no prisoners. It is absolute. The facts are the facts. Men cannot change that. (Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan) Men can only change their relationship to the facts and the faster they correctly recognize the facts the more ably they can take actions that will work.
Among reality’s constituents are people. And they have a nature too. Fundamental to man’s nature is man’s form of consciousness – a conceptual consciousness. Every man must craft purposes and achieve them to survive and flourish. He has no choice.
In our nature we are all equal. That is where the equality ends. Each man has different capacities, different resources, different purposes. In his world each uses those to advance his life. Will Obama recognize this or will he try not? Whichever he chooses will determine his success.
Depending on his actions, Obama will forward the meaning of his election or not.
For my part whatever guilt I absorbed for being white,it is at an end. In the wake of Obama’s election I will treat my black “brothers” as I expect to be treated – accountable for my actions. It would be a step backward to not rise to this occasion and hold you to account if that is required given the new standard.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” -- Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963. (45+ years ago) That dream is now to be realized. In this context, I wish Obama great success and the country will prosper.
I am thinking, though, about Obama being elected and now assuming President of the United States of America. When all is said and done, what is the meaning?
I say: This is the beginning of the end of black as victim and white as privileged.
Obama has, in effect, said – with his life – “I’m the one. I will be held ultimately accountable. I’m not willing to use my race to gain favor. Why? I can’t. It won’t work.”
If Obama has a good intention, by itself it won’t work. If he is not acting when he should or acting when he should not, it won’t work. And if he manipulates people as he did in the campaign, it won’t work. And above all, excuses won’t work.
Why?
Reality takes no prisoners. It is absolute. The facts are the facts. Men cannot change that. (Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan) Men can only change their relationship to the facts and the faster they correctly recognize the facts the more ably they can take actions that will work.
Among reality’s constituents are people. And they have a nature too. Fundamental to man’s nature is man’s form of consciousness – a conceptual consciousness. Every man must craft purposes and achieve them to survive and flourish. He has no choice.
In our nature we are all equal. That is where the equality ends. Each man has different capacities, different resources, different purposes. In his world each uses those to advance his life. Will Obama recognize this or will he try not? Whichever he chooses will determine his success.
Depending on his actions, Obama will forward the meaning of his election or not.
For my part whatever guilt I absorbed for being white,it is at an end. In the wake of Obama’s election I will treat my black “brothers” as I expect to be treated – accountable for my actions. It would be a step backward to not rise to this occasion and hold you to account if that is required given the new standard.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” -- Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963. (45+ years ago) That dream is now to be realized. In this context, I wish Obama great success and the country will prosper.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
The Nitty-gritty of Race
This is from The Atlas Society, an alternative (alternative in the sense of different from, not equal to) objectivist-influenced organization (alternative to the Ayn Rand Institute, the organization charged with the intellectual consistency and furtherance of objectivism by virtue of Leonard Peikoff being the intellectual and financial heir to Rand's estate.)
Thoughts on Racial Thinking
By Edward Hudgins
January 17, 2009 -- January 2009 finds the issue of race front-and-center with the celebration of black civil rights leader Martin Luther King's birthday followed by the inauguration of Barack Obama as America's first black president, in Washington, D.C., a majority black city with a black mayor.
With Obama's election, discussions of race have tended to be framed in two ways.
First there has been an increased focus on values in black communities and culture. For example, comedian/actor Bill Cosby has received much attention for his strong pronouncements about the need for blacks in the lower class to teach their children personal morality, clean up the coarseness in their own culture, and focus more on self-improvement.
These sentiments have been expressed for years by a small but now-growing number of conservative blacks, sentiments that were often ignored by too many other blacks, who looked to government as a principal source of personal improvement. But the well-articulated message of personal responsibility from a high-profile liberal like Cosby is less easily ignored.
Second, because Obama ran as a candidate who wanted to "transcend" race, there has been concern among many old-school black leaders that the new president, as he tries to do what he sees as right for all Americans, will ignore what these leaders see as the unique needs of blacks. It's no surprise that these Leftists see more government handouts and preferences as what blacks "need."
But the issue of race should be framed in a more fundamental way, in terms of the individual versus the collective, in this case membership in the black racial group.
The individual is king
Martin Luther King was right in the hope he expressed in his famous 1963 civil rights speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
The reason we judge people by their character is that character is something over which individuals ultimately have control and for which they can rightly be praised or blamed. And one's own ideas and actions, even more than one's environment and upbringing, form one's character and support one's own survival and flourishing.
During the initial years of the Civil Rights Movement the goal of leaders like King was not only to change laws that discriminated against blacks but also to change the moral attitudes of many Americans. Whatever one thinks of Obama's policies today, his election with 43 percent of the white vote and 54 percent of votes from whites under the age of 29 shows how far the country and culture have come in the past half-century, from the days when the ideas of the Ku Klux Klan could command the attention of far more than a handful of fringe bigots.
Race to government
But in spite of King's focus on individual character, most black leaders after King-self-appointed, media- created, or otherwise-actively sought to keep the focus on racial identity rather than on the individual. This was in large part because they sought not simply equality before the law but also special government handouts and privileges based on race, ostensibly to make up for past wrongs.
Needless to say, special treatment did not raise blacks to the same economic level as whites; it's not handouts but personal enterprise and initiative that bring prosperity.
Worse, special treatment encouraged many blacks to think of themselves as helpless victims who had to depend on others for their wellbeing.
Further, to secure special privileges black leaders had to encourage whites, and especially politicians, to continue to think in racial terms as well. Even the majority of individual whites who might have had nothing to do with discrimination or the legal barriers to blacks had to see themselves as somehow collectively responsible for the plight of blacks.
Seeing the world in black and white
But by encouraging racial thinking, black elites opened a Pandora's box.
Most individuals aren't scholars. They often make judgments based on impressions rather than deep analysis. So consider an impression they might get by thinking in terms of race.
In 2005 there were 194 murders in Washington, D.C., a city that is 57 percent black. That year neighboring Prince Georges County had 173 murders; it is 66 percent black. The next highest number of murders in the Washington metropolitan area in 2005 was in Fairfax, Virginia, which had only 24 killings. That city is only 9 percent black. Go 30 miles up Interstate 95 to Baltimore, which is 65 percent black, and you have 269 murders. You see a similar pattern in metropolitan areas across the country.
While murder rates and rates for many other crimes have steadily declined in the D.C. area and throughout the nation over past decades, we can still ask, "What impression do we get from judging first in terms of race?" The answer: Avoid black neighborhoods. They are dangerous. Even black cab drivers are sometimes known to refuse to pick up other blacks in certain neighborhoods; these cabbies seem to have a rational prejudice since they see that the danger of becoming crime victims is higher in certain neighborhoods and from individuals of a certain race.
For years black elites and white liberals argued that it is poverty and economic differences that cause high crime rates. But over time and across other ethnic groups this pattern has not held. Poverty as such doesn't equal crime.
Further, most individual poor blacks are not criminals. Somehow their below-the-national-average incomes don't compel them to rob liquor stores.
Abandon the collectivist perspective and you see that factors like the moral character and personal responsibility about which King and Cosby spoke are more important determinants of who becomes a criminal and, more important, who lives a successful and happy life.
What's in a name?
Other black elites still blame racism and discrimination for the plight of many blacks, even though legal barriers were removed decades ago.
For example, in 2003 Marianne Bertrand, of the University of Chicago, and Sendhil Mullainathan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported on an experiment they conducted to determine whether employers react adversely to black-sounding names, which would indicate a tendency to discriminate. They sent out 5,000 resumes in response to 1,300 job advertisements. Some of the resumes contained black-sounding names-Keisha, Aisha, Rasheed- while identical resumes contained white-sounding names-Jay, Brad, Kristen. The researches found that the resumes with the white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to get a callback from prospective employers.
But rather than demonstrating the existence of an irrational racism, the study might really show that the collective identity promoted by black elites has had another sad affect. Why? Blacks have special privileges under a plethora of laws to sue for alleged acts of discrimination. Evidence of actual discrimination need not be proved against the employer; the twisted uses of statistics can substitute. Further, black elites have made an industry of promoting and financing such suits.
So employers who learn to think and see the world in terms of a racial group rather than individual potential and achievement will be reluctant to increase their chances of getting sued by hiring members of a litigious group.
They might also remember those high crime rates. And they might remember that out-of-wedlock births, with all the associated pathologies, for non-Hispanic whites is about 25 percent compared to nearly 70 percent for blacks. If one is thinking in terms of groups, the impression is that this one doesn't seem to be very responsible.
The colorblind mind
Of course, more important than what others think about us is what we each think about ourselves and the world in which we live; about our own goals and aspirations; about how we might best achieve those goals.
Many of our ideas, values, assumptions, and expectations ostensibly come from others, from parents and teachers, and the transmission belt of the culture in which we find ourselves. Thus those who are critical of particular ideas and values found in black culture are on the right track.
But when individuals tie their sense of identity and self- worth to membership in a group or culture, they are likely to have an immediate, negative, emotional, and thought-stopping reaction to any criticism of the group's values.
This is why it is crucial for every human being, and especially those who want to see the black pathologies of the past disappear, to hold up as high virtues the importance of critically examining all of one's values and ideas, and the importance of using one's own individual, independent mind to make such judgments rather than accepting ideas simply because they are found in one's group or culture.
During the presidential election Barack Obama came in for much criticism for his twenty-year membership in the Trinity United Church, presided over by Pastor Jeremiah Wright. Wright was a vocal purveyor of anti- Americanism, bizarre conspiracy theories, and a racist black liberation theology that was featured on the church's website. Obama said he missed the sermons containing Wright's wrong-headed rantings.
But what of the other members of this, the largest black church in Chicago? What of those thousands who over the years have screamed "Hallelujah" at such nonsense?
Wright has supposedly expressed the view that the government might have spread AIDS and drugs in black communities. These are views found among a number of black elites; indeed Rep. Maxine Waters, a black California Democrat and chair of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity, has for years gone after the CIA for supposedly being involved in drug trafficking in inner cities. What of those who, out of anger rather than evidence, walk around with such an improbably and unproven notion in their heads about who is behind the pushers? What about those who base their judgments about the source of black drug addiction on this notion, and who use this notion to guide to their political actions and thus continue to vote for Waters?
To think as an individual, to abandon group-think, requires calm consideration, not mind-blinding emotions. This is a crucial lesson that those who want to see America become a truly "transracial" country must learn.
Obama's D.C.
In Washington, D.C., President Obama will turn on the TV and every week, sometimes every day, see what he saw in Chicago and what can be seen in any major American city: tearful locals holding candlelight vigils for murder victims-too often children. They declare through their grief that, "This must stop!" But soon the sad scene will be repeated. The faces of the mourners and the victims are most often black. And when the killers are caught, they too are mostly black.
The problems of race today aren't those of the white bigotry which sadly was the rule through much of America's history. The problems are found in wrong ideas and wrong values.
Obama has an opportunity to help complete the American Revolution, which promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to each individual. But securing and enjoying these rights require a morality of individualism, independent, critical thinking, and a culture in which we each view one another as individuals to be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our characters.
------------Hudgins is executive director and a senior scholar at The Atlas Society, the Center for Objectivism.
Thomas Offers...[an objective view] on Social Safety Nets
William Thomas, TAS director of programs, answers questions on Objectivism that come in through our website. Appropriate for the first week of the new Obama administration, his topic is:
* "Social safety nets - Is it wrong to join them?" January 15, 2009
Even productive individuals can fall victim to illness, disability, and disaster. Thomas discusses self- interest and private safety nets.
The Atlas Society website contains over 170 questions and answers about Objectivism. You can view them all or ask your own question by visiting our Q&A section.
Thoughts on Racial Thinking
By Edward Hudgins
January 17, 2009 -- January 2009 finds the issue of race front-and-center with the celebration of black civil rights leader Martin Luther King's birthday followed by the inauguration of Barack Obama as America's first black president, in Washington, D.C., a majority black city with a black mayor.
With Obama's election, discussions of race have tended to be framed in two ways.
First there has been an increased focus on values in black communities and culture. For example, comedian/actor Bill Cosby has received much attention for his strong pronouncements about the need for blacks in the lower class to teach their children personal morality, clean up the coarseness in their own culture, and focus more on self-improvement.
These sentiments have been expressed for years by a small but now-growing number of conservative blacks, sentiments that were often ignored by too many other blacks, who looked to government as a principal source of personal improvement. But the well-articulated message of personal responsibility from a high-profile liberal like Cosby is less easily ignored.
Second, because Obama ran as a candidate who wanted to "transcend" race, there has been concern among many old-school black leaders that the new president, as he tries to do what he sees as right for all Americans, will ignore what these leaders see as the unique needs of blacks. It's no surprise that these Leftists see more government handouts and preferences as what blacks "need."
But the issue of race should be framed in a more fundamental way, in terms of the individual versus the collective, in this case membership in the black racial group.
The individual is king
Martin Luther King was right in the hope he expressed in his famous 1963 civil rights speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
The reason we judge people by their character is that character is something over which individuals ultimately have control and for which they can rightly be praised or blamed. And one's own ideas and actions, even more than one's environment and upbringing, form one's character and support one's own survival and flourishing.
During the initial years of the Civil Rights Movement the goal of leaders like King was not only to change laws that discriminated against blacks but also to change the moral attitudes of many Americans. Whatever one thinks of Obama's policies today, his election with 43 percent of the white vote and 54 percent of votes from whites under the age of 29 shows how far the country and culture have come in the past half-century, from the days when the ideas of the Ku Klux Klan could command the attention of far more than a handful of fringe bigots.
Race to government
But in spite of King's focus on individual character, most black leaders after King-self-appointed, media- created, or otherwise-actively sought to keep the focus on racial identity rather than on the individual. This was in large part because they sought not simply equality before the law but also special government handouts and privileges based on race, ostensibly to make up for past wrongs.
Needless to say, special treatment did not raise blacks to the same economic level as whites; it's not handouts but personal enterprise and initiative that bring prosperity.
Worse, special treatment encouraged many blacks to think of themselves as helpless victims who had to depend on others for their wellbeing.
Further, to secure special privileges black leaders had to encourage whites, and especially politicians, to continue to think in racial terms as well. Even the majority of individual whites who might have had nothing to do with discrimination or the legal barriers to blacks had to see themselves as somehow collectively responsible for the plight of blacks.
Seeing the world in black and white
But by encouraging racial thinking, black elites opened a Pandora's box.
Most individuals aren't scholars. They often make judgments based on impressions rather than deep analysis. So consider an impression they might get by thinking in terms of race.
In 2005 there were 194 murders in Washington, D.C., a city that is 57 percent black. That year neighboring Prince Georges County had 173 murders; it is 66 percent black. The next highest number of murders in the Washington metropolitan area in 2005 was in Fairfax, Virginia, which had only 24 killings. That city is only 9 percent black. Go 30 miles up Interstate 95 to Baltimore, which is 65 percent black, and you have 269 murders. You see a similar pattern in metropolitan areas across the country.
While murder rates and rates for many other crimes have steadily declined in the D.C. area and throughout the nation over past decades, we can still ask, "What impression do we get from judging first in terms of race?" The answer: Avoid black neighborhoods. They are dangerous. Even black cab drivers are sometimes known to refuse to pick up other blacks in certain neighborhoods; these cabbies seem to have a rational prejudice since they see that the danger of becoming crime victims is higher in certain neighborhoods and from individuals of a certain race.
For years black elites and white liberals argued that it is poverty and economic differences that cause high crime rates. But over time and across other ethnic groups this pattern has not held. Poverty as such doesn't equal crime.
Further, most individual poor blacks are not criminals. Somehow their below-the-national-average incomes don't compel them to rob liquor stores.
Abandon the collectivist perspective and you see that factors like the moral character and personal responsibility about which King and Cosby spoke are more important determinants of who becomes a criminal and, more important, who lives a successful and happy life.
What's in a name?
Other black elites still blame racism and discrimination for the plight of many blacks, even though legal barriers were removed decades ago.
For example, in 2003 Marianne Bertrand, of the University of Chicago, and Sendhil Mullainathan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported on an experiment they conducted to determine whether employers react adversely to black-sounding names, which would indicate a tendency to discriminate. They sent out 5,000 resumes in response to 1,300 job advertisements. Some of the resumes contained black-sounding names-Keisha, Aisha, Rasheed- while identical resumes contained white-sounding names-Jay, Brad, Kristen. The researches found that the resumes with the white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to get a callback from prospective employers.
But rather than demonstrating the existence of an irrational racism, the study might really show that the collective identity promoted by black elites has had another sad affect. Why? Blacks have special privileges under a plethora of laws to sue for alleged acts of discrimination. Evidence of actual discrimination need not be proved against the employer; the twisted uses of statistics can substitute. Further, black elites have made an industry of promoting and financing such suits.
So employers who learn to think and see the world in terms of a racial group rather than individual potential and achievement will be reluctant to increase their chances of getting sued by hiring members of a litigious group.
They might also remember those high crime rates. And they might remember that out-of-wedlock births, with all the associated pathologies, for non-Hispanic whites is about 25 percent compared to nearly 70 percent for blacks. If one is thinking in terms of groups, the impression is that this one doesn't seem to be very responsible.
The colorblind mind
Of course, more important than what others think about us is what we each think about ourselves and the world in which we live; about our own goals and aspirations; about how we might best achieve those goals.
Many of our ideas, values, assumptions, and expectations ostensibly come from others, from parents and teachers, and the transmission belt of the culture in which we find ourselves. Thus those who are critical of particular ideas and values found in black culture are on the right track.
But when individuals tie their sense of identity and self- worth to membership in a group or culture, they are likely to have an immediate, negative, emotional, and thought-stopping reaction to any criticism of the group's values.
This is why it is crucial for every human being, and especially those who want to see the black pathologies of the past disappear, to hold up as high virtues the importance of critically examining all of one's values and ideas, and the importance of using one's own individual, independent mind to make such judgments rather than accepting ideas simply because they are found in one's group or culture.
During the presidential election Barack Obama came in for much criticism for his twenty-year membership in the Trinity United Church, presided over by Pastor Jeremiah Wright. Wright was a vocal purveyor of anti- Americanism, bizarre conspiracy theories, and a racist black liberation theology that was featured on the church's website. Obama said he missed the sermons containing Wright's wrong-headed rantings.
But what of the other members of this, the largest black church in Chicago? What of those thousands who over the years have screamed "Hallelujah" at such nonsense?
Wright has supposedly expressed the view that the government might have spread AIDS and drugs in black communities. These are views found among a number of black elites; indeed Rep. Maxine Waters, a black California Democrat and chair of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity, has for years gone after the CIA for supposedly being involved in drug trafficking in inner cities. What of those who, out of anger rather than evidence, walk around with such an improbably and unproven notion in their heads about who is behind the pushers? What about those who base their judgments about the source of black drug addiction on this notion, and who use this notion to guide to their political actions and thus continue to vote for Waters?
To think as an individual, to abandon group-think, requires calm consideration, not mind-blinding emotions. This is a crucial lesson that those who want to see America become a truly "transracial" country must learn.
Obama's D.C.
In Washington, D.C., President Obama will turn on the TV and every week, sometimes every day, see what he saw in Chicago and what can be seen in any major American city: tearful locals holding candlelight vigils for murder victims-too often children. They declare through their grief that, "This must stop!" But soon the sad scene will be repeated. The faces of the mourners and the victims are most often black. And when the killers are caught, they too are mostly black.
The problems of race today aren't those of the white bigotry which sadly was the rule through much of America's history. The problems are found in wrong ideas and wrong values.
Obama has an opportunity to help complete the American Revolution, which promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to each individual. But securing and enjoying these rights require a morality of individualism, independent, critical thinking, and a culture in which we each view one another as individuals to be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our characters.
------------Hudgins is executive director and a senior scholar at The Atlas Society, the Center for Objectivism.
Thomas Offers...[an objective view] on Social Safety Nets
William Thomas, TAS director of programs, answers questions on Objectivism that come in through our website. Appropriate for the first week of the new Obama administration, his topic is:
* "Social safety nets - Is it wrong to join them?" January 15, 2009
Even productive individuals can fall victim to illness, disability, and disaster. Thomas discusses self- interest and private safety nets.
The Atlas Society website contains over 170 questions and answers about Objectivism. You can view them all or ask your own question by visiting our Q&A section.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A Constant and A Variable
Life consists of two parts: a constant and a variable. The constant piece follows from the nature of man as a particular kind of living entity. The variable piece follows from the myriad ways of fulfilling on the requirements of the constant.
A man is a living being. Life, at root, involves taking the actions which forward and maintain life otherwise life is over. It goes out of existence. Although the lower animals and plants have no problem with this issue in that they are programmed to maintain their life, that isn’t the case for man.
Why? He possesses volition, the capacity to choose.
Man doesn't know automatically what to eat and not eat. He knows he has to eat, the constant, but some things are good and nutritious, some things are bad and poisonous, the variables. He has to learn, i.e. use his mind to gain knowledge, the effects of various things in nature, the variables, on his life if he chooses to live and flourish.
He even gets to choose whether to live or not. We see many people who give up on living and drift or take actions which, short term or long, will end their lives. None of this is a given for man.
Key to all of this is man's means of survival: his reason, his rational capacity. He must live by that or die. A cheetah will catch him. An elephant will crush him. A bug will poison him. He cannot compete in life on the level of the animals.
So the first thing one has to assess is: "Where is my mind in regard to the using of it? Do I seek the facts so I may know them first hand or do I take someone else's word for them? Do I trust someone (in the form of a political speech or a quote from a philosophy or a religion) who says HOPE for the things I need and enjoy, or do I trust someone who says ACT for the things I need and enjoy? Do I trust someone who says the way to get what I need is through politics or the way to get what I need is to construct a plan and take the action to achieve those things?"
(I don't mean by HOPE the benign use of the word when one has constructed his plan, checked it twice, taken the actions to fulfill that plan to the limit of where he had control of events and then had to wait for the results to come in or not. If you need a job and have done everything you know how to do to get one - you have put together your resume, gone through the list of jobs in the paper and on Craig's List, contacted your friends and colleagues to let them know what you have to offer, gotten in the car and driven to the places where you would like to work and talked to them, written articles on the subject you would like to work in so that others who want you could find you, etc. and then you release all of that effort and listen for someone someplace to respond, that is not the kind of HOPE that I'm talking about in this or my previous post. This benign use of the word means the law of cause and effect sometimes takes time, you know it and you honor it. I am reminded of the Serenity Prayer used by AA. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. --Reinhold Niebuhr)
The great thing about the constant is it allows, actually it necessitates, one to induce principles which support one to live well and flourish. How does one do this? He observes human beings living. Life's requirements comes in the form of needs. Needs include the material things like food, clothing and shelter and they also include the needs of consciousness such as pleasure, beauty and knowledge. To fulfill needs one must take action.
Other people's observations can be a support in learning the eternal nature of human being and the principles that work for living, but the important thing is that one has to see for himself how these principles operate, i.e. they have to pass the muster of his own mind as to whether they correspond to reality. Without this standard, he destroys his mind and his capacity for happiness - the enjoyment of his success in living. If he does not do this, he is chained to other people's minds or his feelings - not a tool for knowing - and thus is left adrift. Following either will not give him happiness nor serenity. He's what is known as a lost soul.
When Moses carried the Ten Commandments down from the mountain top, what happened? Essentially, to his mind he had a good idea. He was thinking of the tribe of Jews that he wanted to give guidance to so they could survive. He knew they had to stick together so the requirements of the tribe was the standard. Individuals doing their own thing was out. When he promulgated the dictum "Thou shalt not kill," he wasn't thinking of exceptions or how to formulate a law that corresponds to reality. He was affirming the fact that they can't be fighting each other and keep survival of the group in mind. Insofar as the principle is concerned, there are times when it is appropriate and a requirement, if one wants to live, to kill - even someone else in the tribe.
It was only later that religious leaders discovered that a very effective way to control a group's behavior is to issue them a law that makes no sense to apply in every instance and then hold them in place with guilt - that corrosive feeling that is a powerful controller of a human being. All tribes - be they primitive or modern states - and religions based on faith at some level control their people through guilt and fear of tribal disapproval and ostrasization, i.e., eternal damnation. All tribes and all religions require you to sacrifice one thing - your mind, that which makes you YOU. This is the meaning of the story of Abraham and Isaac.
Ethics is actually a science grounded in the observation of human beings for the purpose of learning the principles, learning the nature of the constant, that govern human action which when applied work to insure one’s ability to gain the values that support, maintain, and further one’s life such that one flourishes and attains happiness. When one arrives at such principles, he incorporates them into a body of knowledge that he lives by. This is his code of morality – the moral principles that he lives by. His character is the result. This determines his soul and is the meaning of the fact that a man is a being of self-made soul.
Objectivity is not the following of some principle that sounds good and other people observe as a custom as if were true in and of itself. That is rationalism, not rationality nor objectivity. Rationalism is the negation of one’s mind and will be a source of frustration, anger and ultimately depression and death if one practices it or attempts to. It may even be a true principle in the sense that it corresponds to the nature of human being, but if one doesn’t see how it works and adopts it by his own volition, it will still destroy his mind and render him unhappy. Ultimately he practiced it because of others or his unexamined feelings (fears).
Happiness and the serenity that is an aspect of authentic happiness is, for the most part, because one lives independent of what others think of him and according to true principles which he sees are true. True means a statement which corresponds to reality. Living in such a way will produce over time the results he wants.
This approach to ethics is known as rational egoism. It applies whether one lives alone on a desert island or in society. It applies to people of the West and people of the East, to whatever culture you belong or whatever skin color you have and no matter if you are Muslim, Christian or atheist. None of those attributes of the particular human being matter for it is the eternal nature of human being that governs whether a particular principle works or not.
In our era, the constant is not only neglected but reviled. "Do whatever you want. Who are we to judge another’s actions. After all it is his life" – as if he were some entity free from the law of identity. "Whatever the culture says is true is true," they say. "One should be pragmatic," they say. "The only thing that can work is to reassess every moment and change one’s mind depending on what public opinion will accept." None of these people have learned the role of the mind nor the role of true leadership. They drive their lives looking in the rear view mirror. The reason that primitive tribes remain primitive and socialist principles do not work is because they both chain the mind to the group which ultimately means the individuals jettison their own minds in favor of those who have power over the group. No one is thinking.
The United States was an historic achievement. It was the first society that was formed recognizing that it is the individual human mind that must be free. The tremendous success of this nation and the tremendous attraction of it to people around the globe is because here it was possible that a man could be free to live according to his own purpose and according to the observations and conclusions of his own mind. That’s the essence of our greatness.
It is heartbreaking to see every public voice peddling the dictates of an opposite philosophy and peddling as fast as they can in that opposite direction. If when things are going bad and you don’t know what to do, I can countenance your hoping that God will reveal a way for you. Just remember, though, God is not out there. He is you. Essentially He, whatever that floating concept is, is a product of Your mind. Get rid of the dichotomy and embrace your mind, your life and its requirements, the constant, and I promise, things will start to look up for you. You will have given up the passive acceptance of life and that empty concept of HOPE.
A man is a living being. Life, at root, involves taking the actions which forward and maintain life otherwise life is over. It goes out of existence. Although the lower animals and plants have no problem with this issue in that they are programmed to maintain their life, that isn’t the case for man.
Why? He possesses volition, the capacity to choose.
Man doesn't know automatically what to eat and not eat. He knows he has to eat, the constant, but some things are good and nutritious, some things are bad and poisonous, the variables. He has to learn, i.e. use his mind to gain knowledge, the effects of various things in nature, the variables, on his life if he chooses to live and flourish.
He even gets to choose whether to live or not. We see many people who give up on living and drift or take actions which, short term or long, will end their lives. None of this is a given for man.
Key to all of this is man's means of survival: his reason, his rational capacity. He must live by that or die. A cheetah will catch him. An elephant will crush him. A bug will poison him. He cannot compete in life on the level of the animals.
So the first thing one has to assess is: "Where is my mind in regard to the using of it? Do I seek the facts so I may know them first hand or do I take someone else's word for them? Do I trust someone (in the form of a political speech or a quote from a philosophy or a religion) who says HOPE for the things I need and enjoy, or do I trust someone who says ACT for the things I need and enjoy? Do I trust someone who says the way to get what I need is through politics or the way to get what I need is to construct a plan and take the action to achieve those things?"
(I don't mean by HOPE the benign use of the word when one has constructed his plan, checked it twice, taken the actions to fulfill that plan to the limit of where he had control of events and then had to wait for the results to come in or not. If you need a job and have done everything you know how to do to get one - you have put together your resume, gone through the list of jobs in the paper and on Craig's List, contacted your friends and colleagues to let them know what you have to offer, gotten in the car and driven to the places where you would like to work and talked to them, written articles on the subject you would like to work in so that others who want you could find you, etc. and then you release all of that effort and listen for someone someplace to respond, that is not the kind of HOPE that I'm talking about in this or my previous post. This benign use of the word means the law of cause and effect sometimes takes time, you know it and you honor it. I am reminded of the Serenity Prayer used by AA. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. --Reinhold Niebuhr)
The great thing about the constant is it allows, actually it necessitates, one to induce principles which support one to live well and flourish. How does one do this? He observes human beings living. Life's requirements comes in the form of needs. Needs include the material things like food, clothing and shelter and they also include the needs of consciousness such as pleasure, beauty and knowledge. To fulfill needs one must take action.
Other people's observations can be a support in learning the eternal nature of human being and the principles that work for living, but the important thing is that one has to see for himself how these principles operate, i.e. they have to pass the muster of his own mind as to whether they correspond to reality. Without this standard, he destroys his mind and his capacity for happiness - the enjoyment of his success in living. If he does not do this, he is chained to other people's minds or his feelings - not a tool for knowing - and thus is left adrift. Following either will not give him happiness nor serenity. He's what is known as a lost soul.
When Moses carried the Ten Commandments down from the mountain top, what happened? Essentially, to his mind he had a good idea. He was thinking of the tribe of Jews that he wanted to give guidance to so they could survive. He knew they had to stick together so the requirements of the tribe was the standard. Individuals doing their own thing was out. When he promulgated the dictum "Thou shalt not kill," he wasn't thinking of exceptions or how to formulate a law that corresponds to reality. He was affirming the fact that they can't be fighting each other and keep survival of the group in mind. Insofar as the principle is concerned, there are times when it is appropriate and a requirement, if one wants to live, to kill - even someone else in the tribe.
It was only later that religious leaders discovered that a very effective way to control a group's behavior is to issue them a law that makes no sense to apply in every instance and then hold them in place with guilt - that corrosive feeling that is a powerful controller of a human being. All tribes - be they primitive or modern states - and religions based on faith at some level control their people through guilt and fear of tribal disapproval and ostrasization, i.e., eternal damnation. All tribes and all religions require you to sacrifice one thing - your mind, that which makes you YOU. This is the meaning of the story of Abraham and Isaac.
Ethics is actually a science grounded in the observation of human beings for the purpose of learning the principles, learning the nature of the constant, that govern human action which when applied work to insure one’s ability to gain the values that support, maintain, and further one’s life such that one flourishes and attains happiness. When one arrives at such principles, he incorporates them into a body of knowledge that he lives by. This is his code of morality – the moral principles that he lives by. His character is the result. This determines his soul and is the meaning of the fact that a man is a being of self-made soul.
Objectivity is not the following of some principle that sounds good and other people observe as a custom as if were true in and of itself. That is rationalism, not rationality nor objectivity. Rationalism is the negation of one’s mind and will be a source of frustration, anger and ultimately depression and death if one practices it or attempts to. It may even be a true principle in the sense that it corresponds to the nature of human being, but if one doesn’t see how it works and adopts it by his own volition, it will still destroy his mind and render him unhappy. Ultimately he practiced it because of others or his unexamined feelings (fears).
Happiness and the serenity that is an aspect of authentic happiness is, for the most part, because one lives independent of what others think of him and according to true principles which he sees are true. True means a statement which corresponds to reality. Living in such a way will produce over time the results he wants.
This approach to ethics is known as rational egoism. It applies whether one lives alone on a desert island or in society. It applies to people of the West and people of the East, to whatever culture you belong or whatever skin color you have and no matter if you are Muslim, Christian or atheist. None of those attributes of the particular human being matter for it is the eternal nature of human being that governs whether a particular principle works or not.
In our era, the constant is not only neglected but reviled. "Do whatever you want. Who are we to judge another’s actions. After all it is his life" – as if he were some entity free from the law of identity. "Whatever the culture says is true is true," they say. "One should be pragmatic," they say. "The only thing that can work is to reassess every moment and change one’s mind depending on what public opinion will accept." None of these people have learned the role of the mind nor the role of true leadership. They drive their lives looking in the rear view mirror. The reason that primitive tribes remain primitive and socialist principles do not work is because they both chain the mind to the group which ultimately means the individuals jettison their own minds in favor of those who have power over the group. No one is thinking.
The United States was an historic achievement. It was the first society that was formed recognizing that it is the individual human mind that must be free. The tremendous success of this nation and the tremendous attraction of it to people around the globe is because here it was possible that a man could be free to live according to his own purpose and according to the observations and conclusions of his own mind. That’s the essence of our greatness.
It is heartbreaking to see every public voice peddling the dictates of an opposite philosophy and peddling as fast as they can in that opposite direction. If when things are going bad and you don’t know what to do, I can countenance your hoping that God will reveal a way for you. Just remember, though, God is not out there. He is you. Essentially He, whatever that floating concept is, is a product of Your mind. Get rid of the dichotomy and embrace your mind, your life and its requirements, the constant, and I promise, things will start to look up for you. You will have given up the passive acceptance of life and that empty concept of HOPE.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Selling Hope, the Real Con
This morning I read in an article that no one, 20 days before Obama's inauguration, knows what to expect. All are in HOPE.
How does HOPE arise and what is its source?
Man, to survive, as does any living thing, does so by having beneficial, pro-his life results by which he can continue to live. There are two categories of benefits: Those where the beneficiary does nothing to enact its cause, and those where the beneficiary enacts the cause.
An example of the first kind is when Aunt Louise dropped off a casserole in the afternoon and you didn't have to do much to cook dinner that evening; or when a snow plow plowed your street and you didn't have to dig yourself out to a passable road; or when a rainstorm came in the night and you didn't have to water the lawn the next day.
An example of the second kind is when you got in your car, visited the businesses you would like to work for and landed a job; or you painted a painting you had been thinking about and now either enjoy it yourself or sold it.
Benefits beyond one's control, one can only HOPE for.
Benefits that one can cause, one can ACT for.
The latter are known as VALUES: "that which one acts to gain and/or keep." (Rand)
Obama sold HOPE as a VALUE - which it is not. And that is the con. HOPE is never, never a VALUE anymore that snake oil is a cure.
With the exponential, unbridled growth of government robbing us of our resources and regulations restricting the myriad solutions to the needs we must fulfill in order to live, isn't it clear that whatever we need in life is going to become increasingly something we can only HOPE for? With our power removed they become ever less something we can ACT for?
HOPE is for the powerless. ACTION is for the powerful.
Obama's appeal was to the powerless (and those that believe that the powerless have a claim on the powerful - a fallacious ethic) for the purposes of creating more of them. The powerless take what they can get. The powerful get to decide what they want and act to gain it. In Obama's case that includes deciding what he will give the powerless. He gained our nation's permission by means of his snake-oil charms and now we are going to get what we asked for - alms.
Say bye-bye to your vaunted standard of living. These are the sunset years for that. You are living in the afterglow of a dying fire - yours. Given this state of affairs your only alternative is to get yourself high - I mean high on the Powerful One's list so that some of the benefits you can only hope for gratuitously fall on you. (There is another alternative: become independent.)
Inside this society's system, we're all beggers now - as some of our vaunted businessmen and state governors are amply proving.
And this is why Obama is oh so, so evil - more evil than Bush ever was. Bush was a mixture of premises that still believed in your freedom and although his knowledge of what that means and what he needed to do to enact it was corrupt, his motive wasn't evil.
Obama doesn't even feign loyalty to your right to ACT for your VALUES - i.e., your freedom. He plans to substitute positive rights to benefits for the negative rights protecting your individual freedom to live in society. Obama turned the page. He is a watershed President for the United States and until we grasp what is going on, there is but one direction for us. DOWN. Now corruption will be a way to survive for all. Get out those knee pads.
( Thanks to Dr. Tara Smith in her book Viable Values, p. 84, for this distinction.)
How does HOPE arise and what is its source?
Man, to survive, as does any living thing, does so by having beneficial, pro-his life results by which he can continue to live. There are two categories of benefits: Those where the beneficiary does nothing to enact its cause, and those where the beneficiary enacts the cause.
An example of the first kind is when Aunt Louise dropped off a casserole in the afternoon and you didn't have to do much to cook dinner that evening; or when a snow plow plowed your street and you didn't have to dig yourself out to a passable road; or when a rainstorm came in the night and you didn't have to water the lawn the next day.
An example of the second kind is when you got in your car, visited the businesses you would like to work for and landed a job; or you painted a painting you had been thinking about and now either enjoy it yourself or sold it.
Benefits beyond one's control, one can only HOPE for.
Benefits that one can cause, one can ACT for.
The latter are known as VALUES: "that which one acts to gain and/or keep." (Rand)
Obama sold HOPE as a VALUE - which it is not. And that is the con. HOPE is never, never a VALUE anymore that snake oil is a cure.
With the exponential, unbridled growth of government robbing us of our resources and regulations restricting the myriad solutions to the needs we must fulfill in order to live, isn't it clear that whatever we need in life is going to become increasingly something we can only HOPE for? With our power removed they become ever less something we can ACT for?
HOPE is for the powerless. ACTION is for the powerful.
Obama's appeal was to the powerless (and those that believe that the powerless have a claim on the powerful - a fallacious ethic) for the purposes of creating more of them. The powerless take what they can get. The powerful get to decide what they want and act to gain it. In Obama's case that includes deciding what he will give the powerless. He gained our nation's permission by means of his snake-oil charms and now we are going to get what we asked for - alms.
Say bye-bye to your vaunted standard of living. These are the sunset years for that. You are living in the afterglow of a dying fire - yours. Given this state of affairs your only alternative is to get yourself high - I mean high on the Powerful One's list so that some of the benefits you can only hope for gratuitously fall on you. (There is another alternative: become independent.)
Inside this society's system, we're all beggers now - as some of our vaunted businessmen and state governors are amply proving.
And this is why Obama is oh so, so evil - more evil than Bush ever was. Bush was a mixture of premises that still believed in your freedom and although his knowledge of what that means and what he needed to do to enact it was corrupt, his motive wasn't evil.
Obama doesn't even feign loyalty to your right to ACT for your VALUES - i.e., your freedom. He plans to substitute positive rights to benefits for the negative rights protecting your individual freedom to live in society. Obama turned the page. He is a watershed President for the United States and until we grasp what is going on, there is but one direction for us. DOWN. Now corruption will be a way to survive for all. Get out those knee pads.
( Thanks to Dr. Tara Smith in her book Viable Values, p. 84, for this distinction.)
Saturday, January 3, 2009
The Problem with the Double Standard
When will the double standard finally kill us as a nation?
The problem with the government is that it is everything that we aren't or can't be. Madoff got the lesson as well as are many million others these days.
Let's see, haven't I heard this before? Where we are limited in our knowledge, God is omniscient. Where we are limited in our power, God is omnipotent. Where we are limited by time and place, God is omnipresent. So, is belief in the State to provide what we can't anything but another religion? Doesn't look like it.
And who spends oodles of time and money schooling people in this belief - this faith - whether it be in God or State? I don't see the difference between a liberal fundamentalist and a religious fundamentalist.
My experience of both is they are dogmatic, unreasoning and live a compartmentalized life. That brain has a fault line and is subject to biologic tremors. "Don't bother me with the facts, ma'am. They might upset my precious point of view which is here to protect me from discomfort, risk and well, you know, a life fully lived."
The root evil is initiatory force. Forcing the mind of another means the forced person cannot be moral because he cannot choose the forbidden whether it applies in a particular circumstance or not. Initiatory force thus lowers a man to a sub-human level. He cannot be responsible so he learns not to be. It doesn't pay.
This is the mental/psychological climate that allows a Madoff to get as far as he did. It is the mental/psychological climate of our country right now. As man jettisons his mind, Madoff's are really attractive.
Who is your Madoff?
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The Morality of Money
I saw this here and had to pass this on.
"When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket, and then that society vanishes in a spread of ruins and slaughter. Do you wish to know whether that day is coming?
"Watch Money. Money is a barometer of a society's virtue.
"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - then you may know that your society is doomed.
"Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot. Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection, and the base of a moral existence." ~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
_______________________________
Like it or not, this is exactly where we are. Force is now the standard. Individual rights (you know, those inadequate "negative rights" of the Constitution), any actions stemming from self-interest branded as unfair and selfish, money worth nothing if invested in government instruments, government thugs running every which way to scamper from the spotlight on their nefarious actions, government intrusion into healthy banks, welfare for the businesses that are incapable of surviving because they made poor judgments, ordinary unsuccessful local people calculating how they can get in on the government's largesse, laws more concerned to protect criminals and terrorists than the real victims, property expropriated and handed over to the man with political pull - all backed with the gun to force you, the taxpayer, to pay for it - are the "non-rules" of the game. Because the structure for men to deal with each other peacefully (voluntary, free trade) and resolve their differences by peaceful means (courts based on objective laws) has collapsed, it is every man for himself. And, this is exactly where we are in the process of our decline.
Obama, regarded by many as a god, marks the apotheosis of all of the negative, anti-life ideas that have ruined men through the ages. (I have yet to find an Obama voter who looked into his history insofar as the ideas, Marxism and religion - Islam and Christianity, that have fueled him for over 20 years and how he operated in the corrupt swamp of Chicago/Illinois politics. Not a single one!)
How can you stop it? Get rational. Find out how pro-life institutions, your agreements at your level, have to work and deal only with people who meet those standards. Protect your essential property and values the best way you can. Be mindful of your surroundings - the people and their mindset and attitudes - for a gauge of your physical safety. The rest of the herd will go over the cliff. Work to not be one of them.
"When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket, and then that society vanishes in a spread of ruins and slaughter. Do you wish to know whether that day is coming?"Watch Money. Money is a barometer of a society's virtue.
"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - then you may know that your society is doomed.
"Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot. Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection, and the base of a moral existence." ~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
_______________________________
Like it or not, this is exactly where we are. Force is now the standard. Individual rights (you know, those inadequate "negative rights" of the Constitution), any actions stemming from self-interest branded as unfair and selfish, money worth nothing if invested in government instruments, government thugs running every which way to scamper from the spotlight on their nefarious actions, government intrusion into healthy banks, welfare for the businesses that are incapable of surviving because they made poor judgments, ordinary unsuccessful local people calculating how they can get in on the government's largesse, laws more concerned to protect criminals and terrorists than the real victims, property expropriated and handed over to the man with political pull - all backed with the gun to force you, the taxpayer, to pay for it - are the "non-rules" of the game. Because the structure for men to deal with each other peacefully (voluntary, free trade) and resolve their differences by peaceful means (courts based on objective laws) has collapsed, it is every man for himself. And, this is exactly where we are in the process of our decline.
Obama, regarded by many as a god, marks the apotheosis of all of the negative, anti-life ideas that have ruined men through the ages. (I have yet to find an Obama voter who looked into his history insofar as the ideas, Marxism and religion - Islam and Christianity, that have fueled him for over 20 years and how he operated in the corrupt swamp of Chicago/Illinois politics. Not a single one!)
How can you stop it? Get rational. Find out how pro-life institutions, your agreements at your level, have to work and deal only with people who meet those standards. Protect your essential property and values the best way you can. Be mindful of your surroundings - the people and their mindset and attitudes - for a gauge of your physical safety. The rest of the herd will go over the cliff. Work to not be one of them.
Monday, December 22, 2008
It's Not that Diets Don't Work...
...it's that YOU don't work.
I discovered this fact this past summer. And this doesn't apply just to diets. It applies to everything. This post is about your (I mean you and me - us human beings) orientation to the world around you and yourself.
This discovery came in the form of reading a few paragraphs in a book entitled Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating by Geneen Roth. Ms. Roth had followed every diet known to man and had gotten nowhere except heavier. One day she had enough. She chose to give up dieting, to eat whatever she wanted and listen to her body. This was the beginning of orienting herself to how her body did with the foods she ate.
She began to learn because she focused not on wanting to be thin, but on the facts as they presented themselves. It wasn't that she didn't want to be thin in some kind of way, but rather that she gave up forcing herself to be thin. If what was natural for her was to be a little heavier than her picture of how she ought to be, then so be it. There are plenty of studies that show that those with a little fat live longer anyway.
But none of this is the thrust of this story. The crucial thing is the orientation to reality. And, one's body is a real thing in a real world. It works in a particular way because it has identity. One's body is unique but it is a specific unique existent within an unique class of existents known as human being.
Once you listen to your body, you start to see how it operates and what makes it hum like a finely tuned engine and what keeps it from doing that. At this point you come smack dab up against your habits, some of which may be good and some of which may be harmful. So now what do you do?
Do you listen to what the facts are telling you or do you continue indulging your habits? This is the question that separates the objectivists from the subjectivists - those that shape their lives related to the facts and those that indulge their feelings or follow what others say.
What I've found is that the more I am in harmony with the facts and use them to guide me, the more motivated I am. I may try something, but I don't give up a habit until I am motivated to give it up based on the evidence I have gathered. If I am not ready, there is more to be learned. I know that my life and its quality is kept in existence by my choice. There is a connection of the facts all the way down to this choice. I have discovered an integration of mind and body that I never knew before.
No longer do I need to read spiritual books or take spirituality courses. Those are evidence of the non-integration of the mind and body, known as the mind/body split. In an integrated existence one's spiritual life is never separated from living. It is always present and oh so gratifying and luscious that the unification of one's self is real. You know it because you live it. It's what I've always wanted.
Resignation, that deep feeling of having given up on something important, is not a part of this world. The important things come roaring back except they are now in a context of reality. Some of those things were a product of the split and when grounded in reality you know you are really not interested in them.
Of course it is always possible that you could have made a mistake in your identification of the facts. There are no guarantees. One has to do the work of thinking - i.e., using the mind, man's particular form of consciousness which is his basic means of survival. This means applying logic and integrating one's identifications with the rest of one's knowledge. It only works if the identification is consistent with reality and the rest of what you know to be true to reality.
Feelings, although providing valuable information in regard to your underlying values, are not a means of cognition. They will not help you live as you would, in your heart of hearts, like to live. (I'm thinking joyous and serene possessing the knowledge that you are fully capable to live as you want.) They can only be an indirect signpost, provided you correctly identify the value giving rise to them, of your values. And, the value that your feelings are telling you has either been threatened or supported may be rational, i.e. consistent with reality, or irrational, i.e., inconsistent with reality.
What I am doing, instead of spirituality courses, is taking morality courses to learn more about the principles of living that work for human being and why they work. In fact, I'm leading a workshop on the subject. Nine of us are engaged in this inquiry and learning process.
Once you begin to unravel the mystery that is yourself, you will find that you now have some real information upon which you can build your life. You can check to see if your values are rational given that you are a particular kind of existent. If so, then you are free to choose any of the zillions of ways of fulfilling on that value. And it will work for you and you will experience joy and happiness.
Joy is the emotion one feels when he achieves a value. One can feel joy even if the value he achieves is irrational, although it does not have the same full, rich, deep quality that it has if one achieves a life-sustaining rational value.
Happiness is the emotion one feels when he achieves a rational value and he knows it is rational. Happiness is fundamental and enduring, being in harmony with the nature of you as human being and is ultimately about one's character - the set of principles and habits which source one to act in life, in the fullest sense possible for human being, in a self-sustaining way. It is the reward for being moral.
Back to the diet saga. One day I ran out of my daily multi-vitamin tablets. I had long had a question about the value of those tablets since with the abundance of food it seemed to me that one's body would find what it needs in there someplace. I didn't replace them. One day I noticed that I wanted to eat tomatoes. So I did. I realized that the vitamin tablets had masked the information I needed to truly enjoy and savor my food. What a difference. Cooking has become so much fun.
The principles of this story have now become applied in every area of my life from politics to friends I choose to my budgeting to any of my activities where I wonder how it really works. I already know a lot. I was just using that info for the wrong reasons and I didn't get the payoff - happiness.
Happy Holidays.
I discovered this fact this past summer. And this doesn't apply just to diets. It applies to everything. This post is about your (I mean you and me - us human beings) orientation to the world around you and yourself.
This discovery came in the form of reading a few paragraphs in a book entitled Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating by Geneen Roth. Ms. Roth had followed every diet known to man and had gotten nowhere except heavier. One day she had enough. She chose to give up dieting, to eat whatever she wanted and listen to her body. This was the beginning of orienting herself to how her body did with the foods she ate.
She began to learn because she focused not on wanting to be thin, but on the facts as they presented themselves. It wasn't that she didn't want to be thin in some kind of way, but rather that she gave up forcing herself to be thin. If what was natural for her was to be a little heavier than her picture of how she ought to be, then so be it. There are plenty of studies that show that those with a little fat live longer anyway.
But none of this is the thrust of this story. The crucial thing is the orientation to reality. And, one's body is a real thing in a real world. It works in a particular way because it has identity. One's body is unique but it is a specific unique existent within an unique class of existents known as human being.
Once you listen to your body, you start to see how it operates and what makes it hum like a finely tuned engine and what keeps it from doing that. At this point you come smack dab up against your habits, some of which may be good and some of which may be harmful. So now what do you do?
Do you listen to what the facts are telling you or do you continue indulging your habits? This is the question that separates the objectivists from the subjectivists - those that shape their lives related to the facts and those that indulge their feelings or follow what others say.
What I've found is that the more I am in harmony with the facts and use them to guide me, the more motivated I am. I may try something, but I don't give up a habit until I am motivated to give it up based on the evidence I have gathered. If I am not ready, there is more to be learned. I know that my life and its quality is kept in existence by my choice. There is a connection of the facts all the way down to this choice. I have discovered an integration of mind and body that I never knew before.
No longer do I need to read spiritual books or take spirituality courses. Those are evidence of the non-integration of the mind and body, known as the mind/body split. In an integrated existence one's spiritual life is never separated from living. It is always present and oh so gratifying and luscious that the unification of one's self is real. You know it because you live it. It's what I've always wanted.
Resignation, that deep feeling of having given up on something important, is not a part of this world. The important things come roaring back except they are now in a context of reality. Some of those things were a product of the split and when grounded in reality you know you are really not interested in them.
Of course it is always possible that you could have made a mistake in your identification of the facts. There are no guarantees. One has to do the work of thinking - i.e., using the mind, man's particular form of consciousness which is his basic means of survival. This means applying logic and integrating one's identifications with the rest of one's knowledge. It only works if the identification is consistent with reality and the rest of what you know to be true to reality.
Feelings, although providing valuable information in regard to your underlying values, are not a means of cognition. They will not help you live as you would, in your heart of hearts, like to live. (I'm thinking joyous and serene possessing the knowledge that you are fully capable to live as you want.) They can only be an indirect signpost, provided you correctly identify the value giving rise to them, of your values. And, the value that your feelings are telling you has either been threatened or supported may be rational, i.e. consistent with reality, or irrational, i.e., inconsistent with reality.
What I am doing, instead of spirituality courses, is taking morality courses to learn more about the principles of living that work for human being and why they work. In fact, I'm leading a workshop on the subject. Nine of us are engaged in this inquiry and learning process.
Once you begin to unravel the mystery that is yourself, you will find that you now have some real information upon which you can build your life. You can check to see if your values are rational given that you are a particular kind of existent. If so, then you are free to choose any of the zillions of ways of fulfilling on that value. And it will work for you and you will experience joy and happiness.
Joy is the emotion one feels when he achieves a value. One can feel joy even if the value he achieves is irrational, although it does not have the same full, rich, deep quality that it has if one achieves a life-sustaining rational value.
Happiness is the emotion one feels when he achieves a rational value and he knows it is rational. Happiness is fundamental and enduring, being in harmony with the nature of you as human being and is ultimately about one's character - the set of principles and habits which source one to act in life, in the fullest sense possible for human being, in a self-sustaining way. It is the reward for being moral.
Back to the diet saga. One day I ran out of my daily multi-vitamin tablets. I had long had a question about the value of those tablets since with the abundance of food it seemed to me that one's body would find what it needs in there someplace. I didn't replace them. One day I noticed that I wanted to eat tomatoes. So I did. I realized that the vitamin tablets had masked the information I needed to truly enjoy and savor my food. What a difference. Cooking has become so much fun.
The principles of this story have now become applied in every area of my life from politics to friends I choose to my budgeting to any of my activities where I wonder how it really works. I already know a lot. I was just using that info for the wrong reasons and I didn't get the payoff - happiness.
Happy Holidays.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
The Madoff Mess
First of all I want to say that I haven't published for over two weeks because I have been very busy with business: Renting out a room, designing a house and producing a workshop on rational egoism. As these settle down, I expect to have more time for my blog.
I am reading the accounts of the Madoff fraud scandal with much interest. The Wall Street Journal has run accounts of the breadth and depth of those affected by the collapse of Bernard Madoff's investment fund. It was a Ponzi scheme that consistently paid 8 to 12 percent returns based not on his earnings from his investments but on the ability to attract new people who wanted to "be in on" what the fund had to offer - consistently high returns. When the economy went south and his customers wanted their money, he was unable to provide it because the new people who provided for his payouts were no longer coming online. He had swallowed his "Jonah" and now was sick and rolled over, belly up.
I say "be in on" because Mr. Madoff was very selective of his "customers." If they were loud about his fund, he might stop doing "business" with them. He was dictatorial in this respect. Also, Mr. Madoff operated under the radar. He lived modestly given his income. He was very private, not a big socializer. He was uncomfortable in social settings, especially large ones.
The thing that is amazing me is that his customers, besides having a lot of money to invest, seem to have one of three characteristics. Either they are in the money making business in the abstract world of finance or they want to "make a difference" through their charities and foundations or they want to show their "class" by having an exclusive investment which they "chat up" with those they are trying to impress.
Normally a business produces a service or product and it makes a profit based on whether the product is one people want and it keeps the cost of its means of producing the service or product less than its income. In this way, it is directly tied to reality. If it doesn't watch all the factors which enter into producing the product and lets any one of them get out of control, it is threatened with failure - loss of its assets and its profit making power.
But as one purchases financial instruments up the line from that base, it gets to be a more complex problem to know how the company(s) in which one invested are tied to reality. If one doesn't have a means of tying the abstractions back to their concretes, one loses control of his investment and he is now in the hands of someone else's behavior and judgments. He has lost his independence which is fundamentally his own ability to obtain and judge the facts.
Clearly character becomes monumentally important. Quickly, the basics of character are rationality, independence, honesty, integrity, justice, productivity and pride. Having someone with whom you are dealing meet these standards (the explanation of what these standards are is a whole other subject which I am not going into here. Read Ayn Rand's "The Objectivist Ethics" in her book The Virtue of Selfishness for an explanation and derivation of them. Essentially they are the attributes of a healthy mind) is the means of judging character.
Looking at the list of shattered investors, it is interesting to learn who they were and what was important to them. Clearly they were interested in the high returns. But they sacrificed their judgment in order to obtain those returns. Many were charities who are in the business of "doing good" by helping other people.
Doing good in today's culture is not a function of having a profitable business. In fact if you are a good and healthy business, you are suspect. We hear all the time that it is good "to give back" as if the product we offered which people wanted in order to better their lives is insufficient, even criminal, as a way of making a living. In order to gain moral credence, one has to give some of his profits to charity or give back by forming a fund that helps some lesser soul.
I assert that this fact blinds people. They have taken their eye off the ball and they do not judge people by the standards that work in reality. Their doing good is not objective. They don't judge the good they do by producing something that is a value for human life and that another person decided to buy. Instead, they "hope" they are doing good by their self-referential standard of how they feel giving money to someone else.
The financial people who were swamped in the scandal live in the rarified abstractions of earning money without knowing how and for what it was produced. This cuts them off from reality and proper judgment, i.e., the virtue of justice.
Beyond these two categories, there are those who love exclusivity and being on the inside when others are out. These are the really superficial people caught up in a bonfire of vanities fueled by a bogus idea of "class." The current conversation around class is such bullshit and in my mind, completely discredited. It is a conversation to stop learning and the onrush of life's events. If not that, we call it something else.
This altruistic view of the good is big, big, big in our culture right now. We have elected a president who played to the idea of being classy and being all things to all people. Specifically he supressed the details of his life just as Madoff did. There are many red flags around him once you begin to look at "the seams on the ball coming at you" rather than just the ball. Once you look at the details, the seams on the ball, and judge them by the moral principles above, the whole thing goes into slow motion. You can see where this thing is going.
Madoff's investors would not do that and they are paying the price. (They could have judged because they are capable.) For some it is a very, very heavy price: multimillionaire to broke in the blink of an eye.
When some of these investors go to the government asking for the taxpayers to bail them out, as are many others unwilling to be a judge of character, because they are such "good" people, don't support that. You will be supporting your own demise and culpability in this disease of our culture.
I am reading the accounts of the Madoff fraud scandal with much interest. The Wall Street Journal has run accounts of the breadth and depth of those affected by the collapse of Bernard Madoff's investment fund. It was a Ponzi scheme that consistently paid 8 to 12 percent returns based not on his earnings from his investments but on the ability to attract new people who wanted to "be in on" what the fund had to offer - consistently high returns. When the economy went south and his customers wanted their money, he was unable to provide it because the new people who provided for his payouts were no longer coming online. He had swallowed his "Jonah" and now was sick and rolled over, belly up.
I say "be in on" because Mr. Madoff was very selective of his "customers." If they were loud about his fund, he might stop doing "business" with them. He was dictatorial in this respect. Also, Mr. Madoff operated under the radar. He lived modestly given his income. He was very private, not a big socializer. He was uncomfortable in social settings, especially large ones.
The thing that is amazing me is that his customers, besides having a lot of money to invest, seem to have one of three characteristics. Either they are in the money making business in the abstract world of finance or they want to "make a difference" through their charities and foundations or they want to show their "class" by having an exclusive investment which they "chat up" with those they are trying to impress.
Normally a business produces a service or product and it makes a profit based on whether the product is one people want and it keeps the cost of its means of producing the service or product less than its income. In this way, it is directly tied to reality. If it doesn't watch all the factors which enter into producing the product and lets any one of them get out of control, it is threatened with failure - loss of its assets and its profit making power.
But as one purchases financial instruments up the line from that base, it gets to be a more complex problem to know how the company(s) in which one invested are tied to reality. If one doesn't have a means of tying the abstractions back to their concretes, one loses control of his investment and he is now in the hands of someone else's behavior and judgments. He has lost his independence which is fundamentally his own ability to obtain and judge the facts.
Clearly character becomes monumentally important. Quickly, the basics of character are rationality, independence, honesty, integrity, justice, productivity and pride. Having someone with whom you are dealing meet these standards (the explanation of what these standards are is a whole other subject which I am not going into here. Read Ayn Rand's "The Objectivist Ethics" in her book The Virtue of Selfishness for an explanation and derivation of them. Essentially they are the attributes of a healthy mind) is the means of judging character.
Looking at the list of shattered investors, it is interesting to learn who they were and what was important to them. Clearly they were interested in the high returns. But they sacrificed their judgment in order to obtain those returns. Many were charities who are in the business of "doing good" by helping other people.
Doing good in today's culture is not a function of having a profitable business. In fact if you are a good and healthy business, you are suspect. We hear all the time that it is good "to give back" as if the product we offered which people wanted in order to better their lives is insufficient, even criminal, as a way of making a living. In order to gain moral credence, one has to give some of his profits to charity or give back by forming a fund that helps some lesser soul.
I assert that this fact blinds people. They have taken their eye off the ball and they do not judge people by the standards that work in reality. Their doing good is not objective. They don't judge the good they do by producing something that is a value for human life and that another person decided to buy. Instead, they "hope" they are doing good by their self-referential standard of how they feel giving money to someone else.
The financial people who were swamped in the scandal live in the rarified abstractions of earning money without knowing how and for what it was produced. This cuts them off from reality and proper judgment, i.e., the virtue of justice.
Beyond these two categories, there are those who love exclusivity and being on the inside when others are out. These are the really superficial people caught up in a bonfire of vanities fueled by a bogus idea of "class." The current conversation around class is such bullshit and in my mind, completely discredited. It is a conversation to stop learning and the onrush of life's events. If not that, we call it something else.
This altruistic view of the good is big, big, big in our culture right now. We have elected a president who played to the idea of being classy and being all things to all people. Specifically he supressed the details of his life just as Madoff did. There are many red flags around him once you begin to look at "the seams on the ball coming at you" rather than just the ball. Once you look at the details, the seams on the ball, and judge them by the moral principles above, the whole thing goes into slow motion. You can see where this thing is going.
Madoff's investors would not do that and they are paying the price. (They could have judged because they are capable.) For some it is a very, very heavy price: multimillionaire to broke in the blink of an eye.
When some of these investors go to the government asking for the taxpayers to bail them out, as are many others unwilling to be a judge of character, because they are such "good" people, don't support that. You will be supporting your own demise and culpability in this disease of our culture.
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