A Corrupt Profession

Tibor R. Machan

There are those who believe that business is inherently
corrupt--communists would be among those, and socialists. The very idea
of striving to make a profit is treated by these people as morally
objectionable. Of course, some even think medicine fits the bill, or
military service. And there are animal rights advocates who believe the
entire meat industry is morally base.

For my money the one profession that has indeed become completely, utterly
morally irredeemable is politics. Not that even this is necessarily the
case--politics could be an upstanding profession in a genuinely free
country where those practicing it did what the American Founders believed
should be their task: to secure our rights, period. But that has never
been the way most people in government viewed their job. Instead these
days politicians are hired extortionists. They run for office by promising
voters that they will successfully expropriate resources from others and
hand it to voters if they only manage to be elected.

Voters, of course, are fully complicit in this--kind of like people who
hire killers to do the murder they want done for them. Voters are mostly
bent on sending those people to state and national capitols who promise
them to use the power of the police to take the wealth of some and hand it
to them. For this they will be paid and be able to wield power. Never
mind that in the end the only winners are the politicians and bureaucrats
because nearly all voters get their comeuppance by being at the losing end
of the extortion process. But, just like all those folks who flock to Las
Vegas, Monte Carlo, or other gambling centers, voters keep hoping that
they will end up winners instead of the house!

In a free society politicians would be like the sheriff in those fictional
Westerns who want the job so they can maintain peace and fight crime.
They earn themselves a good resume or CV when they achieve this goal and
not by being year-round Santa Clauses to the citizens of their towns. For
this they receive payment which is collected from something like user
fees, funds the citizens contribute by some sort of peaceful, voluntary
fashion. That is how freedom works, namely, by systematically precluding
all kinds of aggression--brutality, theft, extortion, coercion--from how
society works. Taxation, a relic of feudal times, would be banned just as
serfdom is, or slavery, however difficult it may be for a while to live
without it. But such are the meaning and implication of taking individual
rights seriously, seeing them as genuinely unalienable.

But that conception of politics is admittedly the best that's possible and
doesn't resemble at all what politics has been throughout human history.
Things have gotten a bit better, here and there, by the restraint outright
thuggery on the part of rulers--the king or queen, Pharaohs, tsar, Caesar,
Sheik or whatnot--and making it a matter, mostly, of the rule of the
majority. Yet, of course, majorities can be just as ruthless as
dictators. And in such democratic countries, ones in which the rule of
law and individual rights haven't gained serious respect, representatives
of majorities take what they want from disarmed minorities.

The usual excuse given is that, well, the wealthy or lucky need to help
the rest but this is completely misguided because political largess isn't
help but loot! When you extort other people's resource--which may have
come from luck but more often from a life productively lived--and hand
this over to others, that is the farthest thing from generosity or
compassion. It is the using of some people, against their will, for the
sake of others. And that is exactly what must not be done in a free and
just human community. That's because people's lives belong to them, they
and not others have a right to it unless they themselves chose to share it.

America's greatest holiday, the Fourth of July, will perhaps some day be
celebrated with full understanding of what it stands for. Unfortunately
it isn't now. All the pomp and noise surrounding the Fourth seems by now
to have lost its point, which was to celebrate the revolutionary insight
that politicians are supposed to protect the rights of the citizenry.
Instead politicians work in a completely corrupted profession by hiring
themselves out as thugs in nice garb. In comparison, people in the
business world, even in a messy one which is infected with a lot of
politics, are heroes.

Ayn Rand's Anthem

Tibor R. Machan

In 2007 there were several celebrations focused on the 50th anniversary of
the publication of Ayn Rand's blockbuster novel, Atlas Shrugged. It is a
monumental work in which Rand shows, dramatically, how vital the active
human mind is for our survival and flourishing and how one crucial
precondition for this is political-economic liberty. A mind must be free
so it can explore and create and thus lead to a productive and happy life.
And in large measure America is evidence of this fact, both in its
achievements and its follies--the most evil thing about slavery is that
human beings are being used by others without their consent, without their
free choices recognized as necessary in their lives.

Another less well known work of Miss Rand, the novella Anthem, has
recently been rendered as a budding stage presentation. This gem
chronicles the life of a man in a totally egalitarian society where human
innovation and initiative are prohibited and everyone is regarded as part
of a huge collective without even a scintilla of personal identity. The
protagonist eventually comes across an abandoned dwelling containing books
and manuscripts from an earlier time which no one is allowed to mention,
let alone study. He summons the courage to check out his discovery and
comes to learn that a most important, fundamental absence is plaguing his
community, namely, the systematic, official denial of human individuality,
of the "I" or "self" or "ego." The climax of the novella is the
protagonist beautiful affirmation of the "I"--it is a riveting hymn that
Rand has forged that honors the human self. (Later Ayn Rand's major
student, Nathaniel Branden, wrote a book developing this point, titled
Honoring the Self.)

There was a showing the other day of this new staging of Anthem and I was
privileged to be among those in the audience. Although still in an early
phase of development, the staging does capture, with great power and
beauty, the theme of the novella and as I saw this unfold it occurred to
me that Anthem is perhaps one of the best celebration of the spirit of the
American Revolution. After all, what that revolution was all about is the
liberation of the human individual from the centuries of oppression by
monarchs and other rulers. That is the meaning of the Declaration of
Independence's focus on everyone's unalienable rights to life, liberty and
pursuit of happiness. Your life is no one else's but your own, the
Founders made clear, and only if you give others permission do they gain
the authority to intervene in it, as when a doctor or coach gains such
permission by a patient or team member, respectively.

Detractors have tried to derail the American Revolution by caricaturing it
as promoting an unrealistic "rugged" individualism, that is to say, the
silly idea that we are separate from everyone and can survive entirely on
our own, self-sufficiently. That is simply not what the Founders nor Ayn
Rand had in mind. Our social nature is granted but it needs to be freely
affirmed by each of us instead of imposed upon us by various self-anointed
thugs or even democratic majorities. Other detractors are more
sophisticated and have advanced the absurd idea that we do not exist as
individuals at all, that "I" is a fabrication. In a recent issue of
Science News--a supposedly scientific publication--the editors saw fit to
highlight in a special sidebar the views of Douglas Hofstadter, author of
I am a Strange Loop, arguing that "The 'I' we create for each of us is a
quintessential example of ... a perceived or invented reality...." Others,
in the field of neuroscience, have been claiming that human beings have no
free
will nor, indeed, a conscious mind. Instead, we function automatically and
only believe, ignorantly, that when we act we do so guided by our
thinking. Instead, they argue, we areentirely pre-programmed to act!

These attacks on the human self are only the latest in the history of
human reflection being put into the service of dictators and other rulers
who want us all to agree that we are inconsequential as individuals and
that only the collective matters, only the "we" is important in human
affairs. Even though a little reflection shows how transparently
misguided is this notion, many are not inclined or equipped to address
the idea and this makes it simpler for those who want to anoint themselves
as the representatives of "we" to lord it over the rest of us. Because all
such "we" talk is, in fact, nothing but the "I" talk of those who want
there to be just a few ruling egos.

One cannot emphasize enough how significant this dispute really is. After
centuries of oppression a larger and larger segment of humanity has
finally begun to realize that what is really important politically, even
ethically, is the human individual. The rest is not unimportant but its
importance is derivative, secondary. If this is denied, the result is that
just a few will rule the rest because there really is no "society," a
"we," other than a great many egos in one another's company. Once this is
acknowledged, those would be rulers will have lost their phony rationale
to rule. So clearly they are not going to simply give up.

So as to give these points their dramatic impact one could do much worse
than read or reread Ayn Rand's Anthem. It is a riveting celebration of
the individual human spirit.

Sentimental Reflections
Tibor R. Machan
My job in writing columns, as I see it, is to attempt to work out how the
original American experiment could be extended and improved upon and made
to serve the purpose of addressing various emerging political-economic
problems. I do not confine myself to just this task but it is one of the
more pressing ones for me. I guess one reason I took it on is that I
experienced what I take to be the direct opposite way of social life when
I was young, namely, Soviet style socialism. Having managed to escape it,
I decided I would like to make sure there is no chance for it to reassert
itself, especially in America.
Well, this task of mine is important and noble enough but there are times
that I simply feel very, very sad about how few Americans find the ideas
that distinguish their society from others appealing. Instead of
championing and practicing initiative, inventiveness, ambition, adventure,
enterprise, and the like, it now seems to me that most Americans have
become belated dependents, people who care far more about what others
should do for them, how the government should take care of them, how their
problems should be solved by politicians and bureaucrats, than about
maintaining a system of community life that supports human liberty, the
kind of liberty that serves as a framework for personal and community
initiative and rejects altogether the notion that people are owed a living
by their fellows. And this is really a very sad situation.
For the first time in human history the American founders managed to
establish a community the basic principles of which acknowledge individual
sovereignty. They began rejecting, officially, the idea that inhabitants
of human communities are subjects, subservient to the will of some special
bunch of people with fancy titles. This was an extraordinary development
and sadly by now most people have no appreciation for it. Instead some of
the cleverest and most erudite people in America are hard at work to
return the country to its former subservient position, whereby governments
made all the decisions, whereby elected officials openly brag about
wishing to rule, to run everything, and ordinary folks seem willingly to
place themselves at the disposal of these would be rulers.
That really is a very sad thing. It doesn’t have to be but it seems very
much the way most folks want it. Await for the state to figure out how one
should live and provide various securities and guarantees instead of
simply make sure our liberties aren’t trampled upon so we can proceed to
help ourselves, alone or with the willing cooperation of others. No, this
quintessentially American notion, however incompletely realized so far, is
no longer even much of a notion. It is actively demeaned, ridiculed by the
literati. Snide comments come from the well educated, and even the not so
well educated like those in Hollywood, whenever such American ideas and
ideals get some airing--as if what the American Founders began were some
kind of silly joke instead of the most important and genuine human
revolution in history.
It baffles me why this wonderful conception by the Founders and their
followers is derided so much by the self-anointed fancy people--artists,
professors, social scientists, and others--who see themselves as so
superior to those infantile American Founders who thought every individual
is a sovereign being, not beholden to anyone but his or her own
conscience. Why is this notion so frightening to so many people so that
they spend their lives writing books and essays knocking it? Why would
such a wonderful thought become the target of so much sophist aced
denigration?
This is a very big country and it has innumerable educated folks living
off taxpayers in hundreds, even thousands of colleges and universities and
instead of showing gratitude for being able to pursue careers they
supposedly love, most of these people appear to be bitter, angry and nasty
toward the very folks and system of ideas that provide their support. They
never turn down a contribution to their institution from a successful
entrepreneur and yet they hold these entrepreneurs in near total contempt!
I shall continue to attempt to inject a different idea into the culture,
albeit in venues that are less than prominent. Still, I cannot desist, not
while I realize that the American experiment is the most noble one in
human social and political history. Perhaps I will be able to pave a bit
of the way for a few among the next generation to not give up on the
effort, to remain vigilant, so that in time the defeatists, the cynics
will become the minority and will not rule the publishing houses,
magazines, and higher education. It may happen.

Soros' Follies Again
Tibor R. Machan
In the late 60s I was invited to listen to a fellow Hungarian refugee in
Los Angeles discuss communism. I nearly walked out when he began with the
refrain about how communism is such a wonderful ideal but, sadly,
unattainable in practice. What wonderful ideal? The prospect of a
worldwide intelligent ant colony, bound together completely with no
individual initiative in play anywhere, all automatically serving
humanity--is that some wonderful ideal? It is hell, so far as I can
discern.
Well, I tell this story to give you a little idea how it strikes me
whenever that famous financier George Soros, himself a Hungarian refugee
from the Nazis and Communists, comes out with various political-economic
pronouncements. He isn’t by any means someone deluded about the idealism
of communism but he does, quite mistakenly, favor a widely regulated
pseudo-capitalism.
Soros was interviewed recently in The New York Review of Books and
presented his version of the late Karl Popper’s middle way politics, one
that’s neither socialist nor capitalist. (Popper was a famous 20th century
philosopher of science and political theorist.) As Soros put it,
“Now, we should not go back to a very highly regulated economy because the
regulators are imperfect. They’re only human and what is worse, they are
bureaucrats. So you have to find the right kind of balance between
allowing the markets to do their work, while recognizing that they are
imperfect. You need authorities that keep the market under scrutiny and
some degree of control. That’s the message that I’m trying to get across.”
(TNYRB, 5/15/08, p. 10).
This is a mess. First it tries to build some kind of coherent
political-economic idea on the Popperian view that all our knowledge is
imperfect, fallible, merely probable; nothing certain. OK but what follows
from this? What justification is there for drawing any conclusion at all
from such a position since that conclusion will itself only be uncertain,
probable, iffy? Second, if the regulators, bureaucrats all of them, are
especially imperfect--which is what public choice theory teaches, noting
their institutional disorientation as
persons-with-power-and-no-rational-restraints--why trust them at all?
These “authorities” will only cause trouble and will not help at all with
any mishaps in the market place where mishaps tend to be self-correcting,
at least over time. (It’s no different in markets from what it is in life:
freedom may not work the impossible dream of perfection but it enhances
self-responsibility!) Third, of course, “markets” don’t do anything--they
are but spheres of human activity, in this case mostly commercial,
business or economic, and as such they are homes to innumerable forms of
human conduct. No one can possibly control them except to cause them to
experience distortions far worse than free men and women ever produce.
Finally, how will this “right kind of balance between allowing the markets
to do their work” and government regulation come about? Who will do this
“allowing”--some king or other “authority” who is wiser than market
agents? (This interview is replete with reference to this mythical
“authority” that will fix things for us all!)
George Soros no doubt has a knack for global finance--he has proved it big
time--although even that applies mainly to highly regulated state
financial markets. He has never been tested in a fully free market of
money and banking. But this knack gives absolutely no hint of wisdom
concerning the broader sphere of political economy, of understanding how
human beings think and act as citizens, as friends, as professionals, a
vacationers, and as social and economic agents. For instance, while some
of us are no doubt ill informed about some matters we ought to know
better, it is silly to make a broad generalization that our knowledge is
always imperfect. Well, some of if may be but in some other matters we are
pretty knowledgeable and certainly this would not be improved upon by
having a bunch of “authorities” barge in to mess with our decisions and
actions wherever these “authorities” decide to do so.
One can, of course, read Soros’s mentor Karl Popper more generously to
mean only that people know well enough but never in some final, timeless
fashion. The world is constantly developing, changing, and knowledge will
always need to be modified by new information. But nothing from this
implies that we need authorities to regulate us--and, oddly, Soros himself
seems to realize this when he sees the hazards of bureaucracy. Why he
doesn’t draw the right conclusions form that beats me.

No Miracle at All
Tibor R. Machan
For 20 years I drove a little Volvo P 1800 and I enjoyed the car
immensely. It served me and my family very well. At times I would pat it
and silently thank the engineers who designed it and the entire team of
producers who made it. I was emotional about it, actually. What a nice
thing to have and how wonderful to benefit from the works of these people,
as well as from the socio-economic system that enabled me to purchase the
car.
This morning I was checking out the news on my TV and watched some
devastations wrought by this thing many people admiringly refer to as
“nature”--actually, the wilds--in various parts of the country,
particularly in Texas, where tornadoes reeked havoc and destruction. There
was only one known fatality from several of these storms and the announcer
mentioned how this was such a miracle. As I heard this piece of
information announced, I was looking at aerial views of the regions where
the tornadoes struck and it occurred to me that the fact that few injuries
occurred was not at all a miracle, not by a long shot.
What is most responsible for the lack of widespread injury and death in
these regions? Well, that widely detested element of human society,
namely, technological and economic development. You know, those developers
who always get derided for producing rows of homes and other structures
throughout the country. And all those who manufacture the materials from
which these are built. And science and technology in general, all of that
is what produces “the miracle” the TV announcer was talking about.
Whenever one learns about earthquakes and other destructive acts of nature
in far away regions of the globe, and learns of all the human casualties
these produce, it is important to consider how little developed these
regions are? How much has science and technology influenced the living
conditions in these human habitats? The plain fact is that in most of the
regions where acts of nature bring devastation and huge human casualties,
development is meager and people live much “closer to nature,” to the
wilds, than they do in most regions of America. Even rescue efforts are
far more effective in societies with advanced technologies than where
people are living “close to nature.”
Whenever I encounter environmentalists who decry the extensive development
throughout advanced civilizations, especially America, I focus in on what
they are actually favoring as an alternative. Going back to nature. Going
back to eras when medicine was primitive, when food supplies barely
sustained the small populations, when engineering and building were all at
their beginning and the political economic conditions made progress
virtually impossible. Even the fact that these environmentalists--for
instance Alan Weisman in his disgusting book, The World Without Us
(2007)--keep taking full advantage of modern science and technology--by,
for example, using the publishing industry’s tools to propagate their
vicious message--clearly suggests that there is something very wrong with
what they advocate. Just consider all the technology it took to get Al
Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on thousands of movie and TV screens across
the world! Back to nature my foot!
So you can imagine why I found the spectacle of the television anchor and
reporter babbling, about the miracle of the minimal human casualty from
the tornadoes, so offensive. The offended are, of course, all those folks
who have made the buildings, roads, bridges, etc., sturdy enough to keep
the devastation to the minimum. But, as the saying goes, “No good deed
ever goes unpunished.” The punishment here is, of course, the utter
failure to give credit where credit is due!
I am planning to buck this shameful trend, though. I am planning to drive
my SUV today and say a not so silent thanks to the company that produced
it so that I can roam about safely doing my errands. And if one of these
technology, engineering. or marketing folks happens to be reading my
missives, I want it known that I am very, very grateful indeed.

Egalitarianism Redux
Tibor R. Machan
Just to demonstrate that there is but little difference between Democrats
and Republicans, President George W. Bush plans to sign a piece of
legislation that aims to deny certain unavoidable facts of reality so as
to satisfy the sentiment of fairness. As reported by Amy Harmon in the May
2nd issue of The New York Times, “Democrats and Republicans alike cited
anecdotes and polls illustrating that people feel they should not be
penalized because they happened to be born at higher risk for a given
disease.” So, we are told by Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat
of New York, who first proposed the legislation, that “People know we all
have bad genes, and we are all potential victims of genetic
discrimination.” The measure passed the House on Thursday 414-to-1 and in
the Senate 95-to-0 the week before.
Just to be clear what this means, insurance companies will be prohibited
from taking into considerations their clients’ potential for illness when
they sell them a policy. They must pluck out their eyes and ears and numb
their brains and pretend that everyone is risk free, thus proceed to waste
the resources of their owners, the investors and shareholders who have
decided to earn some income from underwriting policies for clients who
want to insure themselves.
Genetics is, of course, a crucial fact of life and health is by no means
the only feature of it that it influences. For example, genetics pretty
much determines one’s height, eye color, and many other physical
attributes, not the least of which is one’s aesthetic--and, yes,
sex--appeal. Yes, to a very large extent genetic differences influence who
is going to appeal to whom, sexually, even romantically. That famous
“chemistry” that so many folks care about and which figures so heavily in
the match making industry is mostly determined by people’s genes.
If the bipartisan legislation that the president intends to sign into law
makes sense, then surely it should immediately be followed by legislation
that prohibits us all from considering the looks of our dates and
potential mates. The law might begin by banning the use of photographs on
all those Internet dating sites.
Indeed, the law ought to follow the egalitarian spirit of that famous Kurt
Vonnegut’s play, “Harrison Bergeron,” in which differences of physical
appearance are all abolished. And it should make us all get used to
abandoning considerations of looks and other favorable differences between
people from the earliest age. Parents must be penalized for being
delighted when their babies look cute! Certainly all beauty contest must
be forbidden. Modeling must certainly be banned. Casting directors in
Hollywood must not consider the appearance of the actors and actresses
they select to play parts in movies.
But we can all go beyond this. For example, all books must have the same
cover as they are sold in bookstores or on line. Reviewers must avoid
mentioning the qualities of the books or movies they review since this can
definitely lead to selectivity from potential readers or viewers,
something that promotes that insidious practice of differentiation.
None of this is to say that those with inherited medical disadvantages
should not attempt to find good deals in the insurance market or that
insurance companies should not find some way to ease their burdens. In a
genuine free market of health care that would be a natural development.
What it does make evident is that trying to use the law and government to
deny facts of reality is absurd. Throughout nature there are differences;
the same is true of human societies.
The late and brilliant Murray N. Rothbard, with whom I do not always
agree, penned a very good book on all this. Perhaps members of Congress
ought to be required to read his Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature
and Other Essays (1977).

Should We Elect a Problem Solver?
Tibor R. Machan
In his long interview with Chris Wallace on Fox TV on Sunday April 27,
Senator Obama asserted that “The American people, what they are looking
for is somebody who can solve their problems.”
Wow, have I been wrong all these decades. I thought what the American
people were looking for is someone who will protect the Constitution of
the United States. Isn’t that what the president swears to when he or she
is inaugurated? Does that entail that the president is to set about
solving our problems?
I have a bunch of problems. I buy too much stuff, so much at times I
haven’t enough funds to cover it. I also have periodic sinus infections.
And my neighbor has a huge weed--looks like a regular tree--that blocks
the view from my living room and he will not cut it down. And I also have
nagging sciatica, as well as a numb left thigh, both of which make it
difficult for me to get about.
Oh, but there is more. Sometimes it gets very hot up here in the canyon,
where I live, and not even air conditioning cools down my place and I
detest working while I am sweating like a horse. And there is no one I
know hereabouts with whom I can have an occasional beer or go out to the
movies. It’s a bummer all around--so many problems (I’ve only just started
the list).
So, I take it, if and when Senator Obama gets to be president--or indeed,
anyone else--my problems will be solved for me. Hurrah! I can’t wait. But
then I really don’t believe he or anyone else can solve my or anyone
else’s problems, actually, since he has to solve his own problems and he
doesn’t know me and he lacks the skills needed to even begin to help
Americans solve theirs.
Furthermore, if some of the work done by various political economists, for
which one has received the Nobel Prize, tells it like it is, politicians
and bureaucrats are not really even inclined to try to solve our problems,
no matter what they profess. They have agendas of their own, or so public
choice theory tells us, which will occupy their attention quite fully
throughout their tenure. And that makes very good sense--these folks are
much more familiar with their own problems, with what concerns them, with
what they would like to accomplish, than with the problems of the American
citizenry.
You see, public choice theory teaches us that just as anyone else in
society, so politicians and bureaucrats are pretty much bent on furthering
the goals they have rather than other people’s goals. Those goals may well
be fine and dandy, don’t get me wrong. But when politicians and
bureaucrats attend to them, they do so with funds and resources that are
not their own and so the ordinary restraints of prudence that tend to
guide private citizens and groups of them are easily overlooked. In short,
these government folks are spending other people’s money to further the
goals they favor and know enough about to help to achieve. So they are
naturally more likely to solve their own problems, further their own aims,
than those of the American people, and also to overspend in the process.
Then there is the additional problem that the American people are a highly
diverse and immense lot, with a great many different problems they would
like solved. They are, therefore, less likely to be helped out by people
far removed from their lives, living in Washington, DC, for example, or
some state capitol. And when the American people do receive some help from
these folks, it is usually some special group that benefits, not at all
the entire public. These special groups--often called special
interests--may be helped out by politicians and bureaucrats so as to
secure their political support but not because of brotherly love,
fraternity, or some other fellow feeling. And the help is very likely to
stop once the political payoffs have been delivered.
What Senator Obama and all the others aspiring to political office should
learn is that the American Founders had a very good idea when they
identified the function of government to be the protection of our
unalienable rights, nothing more. This is the way to restrain politicians
to working on what they have at least a chance to succeed at. That is the
wisdom in the idea of limited government. But this wisdom doesn’t even
come up any longer during election campaigning, not from the media, not
from the candidates, and, sadly, not even much from the American people.

Revisiting Anti-Americanism
Tibor R. Machan
From the time I was a kid and read a lot of American fiction in Hungarian
translations, I had a great fondness for what I took to be the American
spirit of individualism and love for life. Zane Grey was my favorite, but
I was also very fond of Erle Stanley Gardner’s numerous Perry Mason
novels. Then there was Mark Twain, Max Brand, and a host of others,
although I was also an avid reader of the German tax evader, Karl May, who
wrote numerous novels about the American West as well as the Arab world.
When in time I finally reached these shores, I had no illusions that
American was just what these fictitious works depicted. But inspired by
the fictional renditions I certainly started out with a favorable attitude
toward this country. Not that I was unaware of problems, including some
very dark patches of history. But all in all, compared to the places I was
familiar with, such as communist Hungary, Nazi Germany, the Soviet bloc in
general, what America had to offer both actually and in its promise--by
means of the crux of its political and legal systems--certainly very much
appealed to me.
I came here when Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was president and followed his
1956 contest with Adlai Stevenson and while my sophistication left much to
be desired, I liked Ike more than his rival, mainly because even then I
noticed that those supporting Stevenson had a good deal of underlying
hostility toward what I took to be central to America, namely its
essential individualism and largely free socio-economic system. Compared
to other places with which I was familiar America seemed to me to be quite
a humane, just, and free society.
Ever since then I had my eyes and ears on those Americans who seemed to me
to dislike the country precisely for the reasons I saw so much promise in
it. When I entered college and, later, the world of university education,
I noticed to my dismay that a great many educators were rather avidly
opposed to the country that I found so basically sound, though by no means
perfect. Over the years that I have mingled with the higher education
crowd I found more and more evidence of a steady hostility among people
teaching college and university students, doing research in the
humanities, and in the social sciences. To them one could add many
journalists and entertainers, I began to realize, and I have dedicated
part of my life to studying whether they had a case against America that I
was missing and to refuting their allegations which I saw to be
essentially groundless.
Just the other day I was perusing the Sunday, April 27, 2008, New York
Times and ran across a very typical example of the attitude that I have
found so distressing. In an essay titled “The Short End of the Longer
Life,” penned by one Kevin Sack in the Week in Review section, reporting
on various life expectancy and longevity statistics, I ran across the
following opening sentence: “Throughout the 20th century, it was an
American birthright that each generations would live longer than the
last.” This very same point was then used as a blurb later in the piece,
indicating that not only the writer but the editor found the idea valid.
But is it?
Are Americans really thinking of a growing life expectancy as a
birthright? Do they believe that just because they are born, they have a
right to expect to live long? The piece gave no evidence of this at all.
The numbers had nothing to do with such a finding. No, this was merely a
snide little put down of Americans, contending that they are stupid enough
to have come to see a statistical trend as a natural necessity, even a
right! If that were true, it would, in fact, indicate that Americans are
silly. But nothing in the piece serves to demonstrate it and the only
explanation I can think of is that both writer and editor simply wanted to
demean Americans.
Why? Why is there this need by so many elite organizations, individuals,
institutions to put down a country that is not only comparatively the best
for its citizenry but is in fact best for the very people making such
snide unfounded observations? Go figure!

Multicultural Nonsense
Tibor R. Machan
As an avid reader of Science News magazine I never miss anything offered
up by the editors. I often purchase a book they recommend and peruse the
letters of the editor routinely. (I’ve had several of my own published
over the years.)
In the April 12, 2008, issue a letter appears that puzzled me quite a bit,
both for its content and because it was published. Here is what it said:
“I feel that Rachel Ehrenberg was entirely too glib in ‘Digging that Maya
blue” (SN:3/1/08, p. 134). The description of an ancient Mayan religious
ritual as ‘plucking the hearts from humans and tossing the bodies into the
sacred cenote’ is disrespectful. I am sure that Science News would never
describe any contemporary religious ritual in this manner. Here is hoping
that the editors and writers adopt a more dispassionate eye.”
So now human sacrifices are supposed to be dealt with respectfully! Give
me a break. Next we will read from some multicultural fanatic that
slavery, female circumcision and other atrocities from the past, and
perhaps even the gassing of the Jews by the German authorities just a few
decades ago, need to be handled respectfully. Or perhaps just because the
Mayan atrocity was at the behest of a religious sect it deserves our
respect. Why? Can religions not manifest gross evil just as ideologies
often do?
Not all matters from the past can easily be evaluated, that is true.
Sometimes the context and circumstances are complicated and the behavior
being examined may not fit clearly within moral categories. But human
sacrifice? Come on, surely here we can say, with sufficient confidence,
that those folks back there did something utterly contemptible. If not,
then I suppose the multicultural thesis would imply that we must not pass
judgment on anything, including the practice of chattel slavery in the not
so far off past of the United States of America.
The irrationality of this viewpoint is obvious just from the fact that
advocates of the multicultural viewpoint endlessly moralize about those
who refuse to accept their position. Just consider the Science News letter
writer who freely chided the editors instead of regarding their stance,
well, an alternative cultural stance, one that freely condemns various
religious practices of the past. If these editors can be criticized for
what they did, so can the Mayans, otherwise what is being done is actually
insulting to the latter. Mayans and others in the past were human beings,
ever bit as we are, and various moral standards are applicable to
understanding how they conduct themselves, just as such standards apply to
the editors and writers of Science News.
The intellectually fascinating feature of multiculturalism is just how
incoherent it quickly becomes. If one fails to accept multiculturalism,
well then one is acting badly; but if one accepts multiculturalism, then
no one can be blamed for anything at all since from some, however obtuse,
cultural standpoint any conduct can be “justified.”
It would be far more enlightened to figure out some basic standards of
human morality and then apply them to any society and culture carefully.
The nihilism of refusing to judge is simply unavoidable to us--even that
refusal is a judgment and in need of rational support.
The multicultural stance exhibited by the Science News letter writer is
not the only one that has the problem of incoherence, of course. All
relativist positions face it, as do subjectivist ones. Implicit in all
such purportedly tolerant and nonpartisan ethical positions is an
intolerance of making moral judgments. Yet for some reason those who
advocate these doctrines do not seem to realize it or hope that others
won’t notice the problem.
I agree with one thing in the letter from Science News. Being glib can be
dangerous when it comes to judging people. But it is also understandable
that journalists would toy with glibness--after all they need to make
their copy a good read, not simply accurate and relevant.

Wesley Snipes, A Victim
Tibor R. Machan
The actor Wesley Snipes, known mostly for so called “action pictures,” was
reportedly sentenced to three years in prison, on tax evasion charges, on
Thursday, April 24th. This was deemed to be victory for prosecutors by
some in the media--so much for objective reporting--because prosecutors
“sought to make an example of the action star by aggressively pursuing the
maximum penalty.”
And there are those who argue that taxation is voluntary! Bah. It’s
extortion and Snipes’ case demonstrates this quite clearly. “If you don’t
pay us some of what you earn, we will destroy you.” That’s how
extortionists announce themselves as does the tax man.
Of course Snipe is guilty of something. That is being naïve and imprudent.
No one who isn’t it dire straits ought to go up against the government
blindly, given how powerful it is (mainly because it can arm itself easily
with all that money it has extorted from us). If you oppose taxes you are
especially misguided to fail to pay up since you are likely to be watched.
(Some of us of course don’t matter since we earn too little. Snipes
obviously isn’t among those.)
The sentence handed down wasn’t anything related to justice, needless to
say. It was a warning by the extortionist to all those who might be
considering resisting the extortion. And this is clear from the
prosecution’s reported intention to “make an example of the action star.”
Justice isn’t about making examples of the guilty but about punishing them
for their crimes. If Snipes were really a criminal--if he were guilty of
having violated the rights of some innocent people--there would be no
concern about making an example of him. Genuine crimes need to be
punished, lesson or no lesson. The role of criminal prosecutors isn’t to
make examples of anyone but to convict people who are bona fide criminals.
That is the end of it. Snipe’s case goes to show how arrogant are these
folks who have the power and legal rationale backing their mendacious
conduct.
My advice to the likes of Mr. Snipes is to keep paying but also start
supporting all efforts to abolish taxation. As I have been pointing out
for a long time, that public policy is akin to serfdom and belongs, with
serfdom, in the age of feudalism where kings, queens, tsars, and other
thugs lay claim to a country and everyone who lived there. Taxes were
collected as payment for the “generous” privilege of living and working in
these regions ruled by the thugs.
What has changed is that now the narrative laid out in support of
governments extorting us is that we are paying it voluntarily, to
ourselves (the government is, you see, us!). Sheer sophistry! In fact
nothing but the form of rule has changed. Now it is “democratic,” meaning
the majority gets to extort from anyone they want to. (If the majority
were only interested in paying its way, there would be no need for
taxation--those in the majority are plenty and could easily pay what they
think they should.)
Every revolution is costly. Abolishing serfdom was, as was abolishing
slavery. These all involved some people confiscating the lives and
earnings of others too weak to defend against the thugs. Abolishing
taxation will also take some sacrifices. And just as the lords of the
serfs and the masters of slaves had to find some other way to get the work
done that their victims were made to perform for them, so all of what
taxes go to fund will need to be funded in proper, peaceful ways, without
resort to extortion. Are there such ways? Well, when serfdom and slavery
got abolished it was quickly discovered that paying people got the job
done. Free labor amounted to paid labor. And productivity improved, too.
Taxation supports some functions of governments that are proper, even
though paid for in criminal ways. Those functions can be funded without
those criminal ways. Fees and such can cover the cost, as I have argued in
several places (see my “No Taxation With or Without Representation,
Completing the Revolutionary Break With Feudalist Practices” in Robert
McGee, ed., Taxation and Public Finance in Transition and Developing
Economies [New York: Springer, 2005]).
If a way to do something important is a moral abomination, a new way
that’s not must be found. Sorry Mr. Snipes that you got caught up with all
this. Most of the rest of us haven’t escaped either.

Wandering About the East Village

Tibor R. Machan

It was a very mild, pleasant Sunday afternoon and my older daughter and I
were spending a couple of hours walking about in her New York City East
Village neighborhood. After a bite of lunch we took in some of the shops,
not so much to spend the required $20 I heard everyone is likely to part
with once leaving home in this part of the world but to do what I like to
call museum cruising. Yes, even when I have no interest in shopping, I do
enjoy checking out all the goodies offered for sale in the hundreds of
places that feature thousands of items that come from the commercial
motives of people. Not just commercial motives, of course. A goodly
portion of what's for sale is probably born out of a sense of creativity,
with the idea of selling following as more of an afterthought. Like all
those paintings and sculptures in Soho. Or the jewelry on display in the
umpteen boutiques.

While I have no objection to malls and often use them, as I do other
places of commerce, for purposes of spying on the creative genius of
humanity, these little neighborhood market places in New York's
innumerable corners are especially user friendly. I once lived in the
City, back in the winter of 1965, when the great black-out occurred and I
had to walk nearly a hundred blocks to attend classes at NYU every day of
the week. Ever since then I have realized that New York's alleged tough
guy reputation was a crock. Yes, when riding the subways few people smile
at one another. Who has time and emotional energy for spreading oneself
thin among the mass of humanity rushing about on the subway system?!

But when you visited small stores next to your apartment house in the West
80s or East 70s, a distinctive atmosphere of village life emerged and
still does. Folks talk to each other easily, pleasantries are by no means
shallow but specific to the interests of those who encounter each other
while breakfasting, lunching, dining, shopping, looking for knickknacks or
necessities.

At a plant store we entered, for example, the man who was helping my
daughter find some herbs spotted the wristwatch I was wearing, a huge,
black face/white hands Chottovellie e Figu number, made in Torino , so he
brought out to show me his $18,000.00 diamond studded wristwatch he
received from his girlfriend recently. We, total strangers, chatted it up
a good bit and then said a friendly good bye.

One of the main objections to commerce, voiced by the likes of Karl Marx
and his contemporary fans is that commerce is vile, or as Baudelaire says,
"satanic," because it is egoistic, because it is motivate from
self-interest. Commerce is also supposed to involve exploitation,
alienation, fraud, trickery, and such, lacking in anything ennobling.
What a crock all that is!

Instead, of course, even at its most ferocious commerce is mostly
peaceful, civilized, and even friendly, albeit focused more on fulfilling
one's own rather than other people's interests. Sure we all want to make
a deal. But just as in competitive sports everyone would like to win even
as most parties are good natured--"sportsmanlike"--so in the market place,
unlike in politics and diplomacy, folks tend to keep in mind they are
engaged with others human beings who share their own concern for getting
ahead in life, for making a decent living. And this does not usually lead
to resentment but to empathy.

On our walk about the East Village I just found it very encouraging that
while Senators Obama and Clinton were showing the nasty fallout of even
the most democratic of national politics, the commerce being conducted
seems to have nothing of that kind of acrimony about it, quite the
contrary. Not that there aren't people who can undermine the utter
humanity of the free market place. No human institution is free of
villains. But contrary to how the literati among us depict it, commerce
does not seem to be filled with the least appealing of human tendencies,
quite the contrary.

What Are Taxes?
Tibor R. Machan
In the April 15th edition of The New York Times Richard Conniff suggests
that what the government collects from us each year on or about this date
be called "dues" instead of "taxes" ("Abolish All 'Taxes'”). As he puts
it, "we need language to remind us that this is our government, and that
we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other
services that exist only because we have joined together."
Nice try but it won’t fly. First, many of those services would easily
exist without government and in fact do. But, unlike with government’s
“services,” they aren’t paid for by means of extortion. You know about
extortion, at least from the movies, no? It is when someone promises you
that unless you pay him or his organization a certain sum, you will be
killed or maimed or your property will be burned down. And this was called
by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “the price of civilization”!
Second, government tends to establish monopolies, so one reason it is
difficult to get its “services” elsewhere is that it makes sure no one can
provide them. Take first class mail! Only the US Postal Service may
provide this! Or the issuance of passports.
Third, when one pays dues to, say, Costco, Sams, the health club or the
gym, one may exercise the exit option--that is, stop going and
paying--anytime one so decides. There may be some provision one needs to
fulfill but only because one has agreed to do so in the first place. Taxes
must be paid with no consent involved, with no exit option. One is born in
a country and unless one stops being its citizen and leaves it, one must
pay taxes. In fact, one must pay if one merely visits to do some business
there.
Fourth, consider how taxes came to be in the first place. The ruler of the
realm--king, tsar, Caesar, whoever--imposed it on those under his or her
command in payment for the privilege of living and working what that ruler
owned, namely, the country! “You live and work here, so you pay me!” That
was when it was widely but mistakenly believed that the powerful who
conquer a place are its rightful owners. But what the American revolution
was about is the abolition of this ridiculous myth, that the government
owns the country. Instead, it is private citizens who do--they have the
right to private property (just as it is clearly implied in the U. S.
Constitution). Government, in turn, is supposed to protect this among some
other of the citizenry’s rights. Government is like a hired body guard,
not a ruler, not in a free country at any rate.
In times when monarchies were the political norm--which is still the case
in many places around the globe--ordinary people (“subjects”) lived by
permission of the government! They had no right to their lives, liberty,
pursuit of happiness, property or freedom of speech. Serfdom was
widespread, meaning people were legally tied to the lands where they
lived--they belonged to the ruler.
Renaming taxes “dues” isn’t going to change its nature as a form of
legalized extortion. Mr. Conniff should know that a rose by any other name
is still a rose and taxes by whatever euphemistic label one were to attach
to them would still be taxes, the expropriation of resources by the rulers
of the realm.
What other means could the few legitimate services of government be paid
for? By the voluntary system of contract fees! All contracts, which are
backed by law, would have a fee attached. But no one would be forced to
get this backing, only it would be unwise not to do it. So there could be
plenty to fund the strictly limited government that a free society should
have. Not, of course, the bloated leviathan that we now have, one that has
departed from the American Founders’ idea that governments are instituted
to protect our rights!
What renaming taxes “dues” would accomplish is to prolong the time it will
take to finally abolish this brutal feudal device from what is supposed to
be a free country. The price of civilization my foot!

Two Stupid Ideas
Tibor R. Machan
Time for morning exercises! One will involve repairing some bad thinking
on Barack Obama’s part, another trying to fix the mental mess on the part
of a columnist for the New York Times who wants to fix the housing mess
with a $25K federal grant to first time home buyers.
As to Senator Obama, he told a Pittsburgh audience that when he gets to be
president, he will not be working for special interests and lobbyists but
for the people. Talk about confused elitism--are those special interests,
like farmers, union members, doctors, patients, students, professors,
truck driver and such not among the people? Are they frogs or geese or
what? For the umpteenth time: the people are made up of all those who
belong to the special interest groups, period.
Now it is not entirely Senator Obama’s fault that he gets away with this
kind of doubletalk. His audience gave no sign of protest, no criticism of
his silly ideas but just sat in awe of him, never mind what he said. With
that kind of constituency why should a candidate work hard at making any
sense at all? Just babble on, without rhyme or reason, in a tone of
know-it-all, and they’ll gobble it all up, the gullible bunch that they
are. They may even elect you precisely because you sound so bright as you
befuddle them all with your nonsense. Maybe that’s what the people believe
we need for the presidency.
Now as to the suggestion that the feds provide a $25K grant to first time
home buyers, how about making it clear that the feds do not have any funds
to give out. No, they must first extort the funds from citizens, take a
good chunk of it for themselves--do folks even have a clue now many perks
those guys in Washington get--and then hand a bit of it back to some of
the people. The feds have no funds they do not first take, or that they
borrow against the work of members of future generations. None!
But columnists and journalists across the country keep writing and talking
as if the federal government were some kind of productive and rich person
or organization that made lots of money and now has the option to give
some of it away, like Bill Gates. All that is a fraud. The feds confiscate
that money and keep some and then give it to people who they hope will
keep them in office.
Are these notions too difficult to grasp? I cannot believe that. Many of
my college and university students over the last four decades have been
able to understand this take on how government works--it is one among
several that we cover in the political philosophy course I teach. And they
know well enough that this is one interesting, probably even correct, way
to see politics in our day. But then why do they become blinded when they
read the apologists for reckless federal largesse?
Similarly, I have had many students who understand that there is no such
entity as “the people” but only a bunch of individuals and groups of
individuals with various agendas they’d like politicians to support at
other people’s expense. Yet maybe after they learn that idea in college
they become afflicted by stupidity, by the crazy hope that they are both
part of “the people” as well as members of the evil special interest
groups, carrying on some endless fight between the two parts of themselves.
Of course, there are many ideas students encounter during their higher
education, including the post-modernist notion that logic and reason are
obsolete methods by which to figure out the problems people face and that
it is best to just embrace some form of magical thinking. Yes, you can be
both “the people” and a member of one of those nasty special interest
groups. You can both be and not be, all at once, all the same way.
Nonsensical thinking is ancient--folks like Heraclitus and Cratylus
promoted it in ancient times and today it’s certain European and American
pseudo-philosophers who peddle it fast and furious. So is it any wonder
that our leading politicians get away with laying such stuff out for the
voting public?

Blaming Freedom Again
Tibor R. Machan
It happened, of course, with the Great Depression. Instead of seeing it as
a result of government intervention and mismanagement, that calamity was
supposed to have occurred because of the free market. Free adult men and
women in America and in time elsewhere supposedly produced a colossal
downturn in various economies--massive unemployment, bank failures, fall
in productivity, you name it. All the fault of freedom, none that of
government meddling.
We are back to this once again. Peter S. Goodman wrote, on Sunday, April
13, in that great journal of economic history, The New York Times, that
our current “downward spiral of the economy is challenging a notion that
has underpinned American economic policy for a quarter-century--the idea
that prosperity springs from markets left free of government
interference.” So it is freedom, people working for other people who want
them to work for them, earning incomes they can then use to buy goods and
services as they judge fit, that’s responsible for the downward spiral.
This is then what makes Hillary Rodham Clinton’s call for an economic
tsar--“a commander-in-chief of the economy”--so attractive and even
necessary. Yes, it is freedom that must be stopped, at all cost, and in
its place what is needed is more government, with all of those wise and
virtuous politicians and bureaucrats who of course know so much better and
will force--or as two academics at the University of Chicago would have
it, "nudge"--us all to do better.
But it is all a ruse. Sadly, however, neither Democrats and Republicans
will straighten out this story.
Democrats love government meddling--they tend all to believe that once
they are in power, they will whip us into shape in no time. Their ideal,
going back to the economic philosophy of the New Deal and its hero John
Maynard Keynes, is the command economy. (Keynes himself said, in his
preface to the German edition of his famous book The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money [1936], that the Third Reich was best
positioned to put his ideas into play!)
Republicans like top-down economic management no less than Democrats, only
they tend to favor business more than their political opponents, but not
with policies of freedom but protectionism, subsidies, bailouts, and other
approaches that are anything but what the late Milton Friedman--the
ostensible subject of Mr. Goodman’s essay--and other libertarian political
economists advocated. So do not hold your breath waiting for a letter to
The Times from John McCain denouncing the smear of the free market by Mr.
Goodman!
With the silence of the Republicans and the distortions in the attacks of
the Democrats, the victim in all this is human liberty! The myth that we
have had a free market system in place over the last 25 years is being
spread indefatigably by the likes of Goodman and, especially, Paul Krugman
who promotes it in his regular column for The Times.
As Allan H. Meltzer, the free market economist at Carnegie Mellon
University (quoted in Mr. Goodman’s piece) put the point, “Now we’ve come
into a crisis that has dampened enthusiasm for those [free market]
policies, and we’re headed back into a period of more regulations that
will do the same bad things as in the past.” The only mistake in this
remarks is its implicit acceptance of the idea that Professor Friedman’s
free market philosophy did in fact guide the American government’s
economic policy for the last quarter century. Greenberg claims, for
example, that when “Ronald Reagan entered the White House” he commenced
“elevating Mr. Friedman’s laissez-faire ideals into a veritable set of
commandments.” Not so. Reagan didn’t really implement too many free market
policies and he barely managed to cut back some government economic
regulations. Moreover, with the massive borrowing he perpetrated in order
to help end the Cold War, Reagan didn’t achieve turning American economic
policy toward freedom. (Of course, he was working with a Democratic
Congress much of his time in office, so he alone cannot be blamed for
that.)
But none of this will be pointed out in The Times since that newspaper is
eagerly supporting returning to Keynesian economic top-down management,
never mind that this ideas has been discredited far more than have
Friedman’s free market views. The faith of the editors of The Times and
Mr. Goodman in handing people’s economic lives over to a bunch of
politicians and bureaucrats is blind. And it seems to induce them toward
rewriting economic history as well.

A Fallacy of Collectivism
Tibor R. Machan
Be it the gargantuan or minuscule kind, human collectives face an
insurmountable obstacle in their governance. There simply is no way for
everyone in the collective to get proper representation.
Communitarians, for example, who are today’s version of people who believe
the tribe is the most fitting group for people, always show their
inability to provide all members with proper representation when their
leaders and spokesmen keep using the pronoun “we” as they talk of their
system and the policies they recommend for it. Even though “we” refers to
everyone on the community, the people making use of it are clearly not all
but just the self-anointed leaders. “We will pursue peaceful lives,” said
by one or two people who have decided to speak for everyone just will not
count as a promise from all to do so. “We will take care of everyone”
similarly fails to be convincing since only the defenders of
communitarianism give voice to the sentiment.
Individualism is unavoidable because when sentences are spoken, they are
spoken by individuals not choruses. Sure, now and then the mob is forced
to shout out slogan together but these aren’t at all convincing. I recall
when I was about 12 years old, all the school children in Budapest had to
gather almost every Saturday at a huge place called Heroes’ Plaza where
Stalin used to show up on his visits to Hungary. And we are all forced to
shout together, “Our dear father Stalin.” But no one believed this
nonsense, if was a farce and the only reason we stuck it out for the
duration of the parade is that if we bolted, our teachers would dock our
grades.
Even in North Korea, where they still force people to come together in
these humongous parades, it only appears they are all together, one! The
clothing they wear appear the same, all blue denim, but in fact those in
charge get to wear silk blue pajamas while the garb of the rest is made of
progressively less fancy fabric!
Still, there are people who keep up the propaganda in favor of “the
community” and against the individual, spreading the lie that
individualism means some kind of isolationism or, as one world famous
Canadian critic calls it, “atomism.” (This critic is Charles Taylor, a
philosopher from McGill University who quite bizarrely received the highly
coveted and hefty Templeton Prize a few months ago!)
Now if communitarianism is so obviously false to the facts of human
community life, why is to promoted to avidly by some pretty high level
academics in philosophy and politics? Well, I don’t know most of these
folks personally but the few I do know seem clearly to be intent upon
becoming leaders of the community. In short, they see communitarianism as
a means to furthering their own ends, ends that may not be so awful but
are, nonetheless, just their ends and few others in the community share
them.
Indeed, whenever the public or common or community interest of good is
being promoted, one can be reasonably certain that what is really being
advocated is that members of the community accept the agenda being pushed
by one or two blokes. “The community supports” or “We pursue” means that
these leaders support or pursue, nothing more. Yes, they will usually have
a few others on their team but hardly ever all those who make up the
community. But pretending that they speak for the community can intimidate
the rest and remove effective resistance to the alleged will of the group
or collective.
Plain fact is human beings are individuals, first and foremost, once they
reach adulthood. They have minds of their own and unless these minds are
shut down by force or its threat, they tend to think up different goals
for them to pursue. A just human community is one in which the goals of
all the members can be pursued provided they are peaceful, non-aggressive.
All this talk of the community, the public, we and so forth amounts to
some people’s efforts to obscure that fact and secure for themselves
control over others. Maybe the intent behind it is benign but the outcome
is a disaster.

Did '96 Bill Force People to Work?
Tibor R. Machan
As The New York Times would put it, when in 1996 “President Bill Clinton
delivered on his pledge to ‘end welfare as we know it’...he signed into
law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on
cash assistance.” Back then this supposedly cruel deed was one “Hillary
Rodham Clinton supported.” The Times says that “some accused the Clintons
of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes
as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.”
Now just consider the way The Times words all this. By ending parts of the
welfare state, the bill amounted to “forcing recipients to work, etc.”
That is like claiming that when one no longer provides support to certain
people who become accustomed to getting it, one is “forcing them to fend
for themselves.” In fact, of course, it was the government that was
forcing all those it taxes to support the recipients in the first place
and with the bill in 1996 it finally lessened the load on them. Taxation
is what amounts to deploying force against people. Welfare is a form of
coercive support. But support should never be coerced but provided only
voluntarily by fellow citizens to those who are in need of it.
But for The New York Times--and this is in a news report, not an editorial
opinion--withdrawing some of this forced transfer counts as forcing people
to work! But nothing forces anyone to work other than the fact that one
needs to earn a living, needs to feed and clothe oneself. It is, to put it
bluntly, reality that applies the force. It wasn’t Bill Clinton, Congress,
or the supportive First Lady.
Here is a good case of journalistic bias which is disguised within a so
called straight news report. By wording the “report” as The New York Times
did, the newspaper’s editors and writers tried to make it appear that
those who aimed for the contraction of the massive welfare system were
perpetrating some kind of oppressive action against welfare recipients.
But just isn't so.
In the welfare system it is politicians and bureaucrats who are forcibly
confiscating funds from citizens, by means of taxation, in behalf of
prospective welfare recipients. It may well be true that these welfare
recipients are in need of help but what they ought to do is solicit the
help, not take part in extorting it, from other people. It is not charity
or generosity when government agents zoom down upon us every year on April
15th or so, and forcibly take from us what is no one else’s resource but
our own. If we decide to send some of these resources to needy people,
that’s charity, that’s generosity, that’s kindness. But if Congress and
the President of the United States hand over the loot they have taken, to
welfare recipients, that’s something entirely different--forcible
confiscation and redistribution, that what.
Some people tend to think of Robin Hood when they consider the nature of
the welfare state but they are mistaken in doing so. What Robin Hood did
was to retake resources confiscated in taxes from those who took them and
return these to the victims. That part of the legend is rarely
acknowledged.
Thus, the government is anything but akin to Robin Hood, quite the
opposite--it is the culprit or villain in the legend.
This is something The New York Times might have reported instead of
insisting on making it appear that in 1996 Bill Clinton & Co., including
the supportive Hillary Rodham Clinton, set out to oppress welfare
recipients. Granted, the entire policy may have been a scam to gain Bill
Clinton support from American voters who believed that the welfare state
needs to be cut back, perhaps even abolished. Given Mrs. Clinton’s belief
in “a commander-in-chief of the economy,” I have little doubt that she has
no principled objection to such a state and is probably bent on expanding
it now that she believes most Americans no longer find much wrong with
coercive wealth redistribution.
What The Times ought to have done is gone on record, on the editorial
page, arguing that such coercive redistribution is just fine so far as it
is concerned, not try to hoodwink readers in a news story into thinking
that the force is applied by those who want to cut back welfare rather
than those who support it.

The Nudging Illusion
Tibor R. Machan
No sooner does one line of defense of statism fall into disrepute, another
is invented by people who insist that they and others with special virtues
and qualities have the moral and should have the legal authority to meddle
with other people’s lives. Socialism and fascism have pretty much been
discredited, so outright top down management of people’s lives, whether
economic or spiritual, is now out of fashion. Except for some dyed in the
wool enthusiast for running people’s lives by means of coercive force,
most meddlers are now urging the deployment of less Draconian measures by
which to carry out their interventions. (Such folks like to point to
China's communist rulers who are far from Stalinist thugs.)
Ri