Thoughts Aloud

Archive for February 2nd, 2009

Dr. Michael Berliner, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, has a nice short and succinct bio of Ann Rand published in Capitalism Magazine on the occasion of her birthday entitled, “Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Reason and Freedom.” A couple of paragraphs covered her philosophy rather well:

Her philosophy–Objectivism–upholds objective reality (as opposed to supernaturalism), reason as man’s only means of knowledge (as opposed to faith or skepticism), free will (as opposed to determinism–by biology or environment), and an ethics of rational self-interest (as opposed to the sacrifice of oneself to others or others to self). The only moral political system, she maintained, is laissez-faire capitalism (as opposed to the collectivism of socialism, fascism, or the welfare state), because it recognizes the inalienable right of an individual to act on the judgment of his own mind. Your life, she held, belongs to you and not to your country, God or your neighbors.

Ayn Rand understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism,” she wrote in 1971, “but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.” This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual’s right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian.

The longer I live and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I am an objectivist through and through; and wonder why I still accept the label libertarian or classical liberal. I suppose it is because so few people have even heard of objectivism. ◄Dave►

That sounds like an oxymoron to me. As a thinker, I try not to spend too much time feeling and libertarians are supposed to be cold and heartless; but Professor John Hasnas of Georgetown U. has penned a remarkable commentary on “What It Feels Like To Be A Libertarian.”:

…I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with a level of frustration that is nearly beyond human endurance. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events.
[...]
Libertarians spend their lives accurately predicting the future effects of government policy. Their predictions are accurate because they are derived from Hayek’s insights into the limitations of human knowledge, from the recognition that the people who comprise the government respond to incentives just like anyone else and are not magically transformed to selfless agents of the good merely by accepting government employment, from the awareness that for government to provide a benefit to some, it must first take it from others, and from the knowledge that politicians cannot repeal the laws of economics. For the same reason, their predictions are usually negative and utterly inconsistent with the utopian wishful-thinking that lies at the heart of virtually all contemporary political advocacy. And because no one likes to hear that he cannot have his cake and eat it too or be told that his good intentions cannot be translated into reality either by waving a magic wand or by passing legislation, these predictions are greeted not merely with disbelief, but with derision.

It is human nature to want to shoot the messenger bearing unwelcome tidings. And so, for the sin of continually pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, libertarians are attacked as heartless bastards devoid of compassion for the less fortunate, despicable flacks for the rich or for business interests, unthinking dogmatists who place blind faith in the free market, or, at best, members of the lunatic fringe…

Does that “feel” familiar, or what? The piece is short and worth the read just to get to the final prophetic paragraph. ◄Dave►

Human Events has a profound article entitled the “John Galt Effect.” The thesis is that although the thinkers and doers on whose shoulders our technological civilization stands seldom actually quit, today they are watching our march toward tyranny with trepidation. Instead of focusing their efforts on their work, which benefits us all, they are distracted by thoughts of survival for their loved ones:

What is the cost of the distraction of our real leaders — of the men of the mind — of the John Galts among us? I estimate that it is greater than the trillions of dollars being lost on government printing presses. Call this Y2009K — and this time it is very real.

That is a profound observation, and almost impossible to quantify; but intuitively we know it rings true. I had not thought of the notion of a lot of little shrugs being perhaps more devastating than a few big ones.

Of one thing we can be certain. When the essentials of our civilization begin to seriously falter and this causes real harm, those who would be our masters and their fellow travelers in the media, academia, business, and politics will cast blame upon some of these men of the mind — and drag them before us for punishment. Our John Galts know this, too, and it is a further distraction for them.

Some of these people are leading great enterprises. Others are in the basements of our power plants and other heavy industries. Some are closeted away in universities quietly at work on the next generations of possible advances in science and engineering. They are easily recognized — by their genius and by the love of their work that permeates their whole beings.

One way to recognize them is that they constantly talk about their work to anyone who will listen.

Now they are distracted.

What are they talking about today?

Indeed. When one hears the Usurper in Chief himself pronounce that the recovery will take years and that now is not the time to make profits, the message to the achievers is that now is not the time to dream, invent, innovate, advance, excel, or even try to achieve – now is the time to hunker down and weather the storm. All a serious thinker, who can see the big picture and notice how ugly it really is, can rationally do is hope for an early and spectacular failure of the Progressive agenda; to hasten the time when capitalism returns.

Socialist government can make temporary work; but it cannot create real jobs. That requires a capitalist with a mind tuned to a frequency utterly beyond the range of a socialist. One cannot compel such a mind to produce; one can only provide an environment conducive to its best efforts, and then get the hell out of the way and let it improve the lot of mankind. ◄Dave►