Tibor's space

Domestic & Foreign Wisdom
Tibor R. Machan
Tod Gitlin chimes in brilliantly on foreign policy for the United States
of American when he writes that “For the most part, when the United States
has set out, on its own and absent direct provocation, to overthrow a
government, and to think that, having installed a new one, it could tinker
with the effects and bring about a happy outcome, disaster has been the
result. To be sure, the frequently cited counterexamples of Grenada and
Panama may, to varying degrees, be conceded. But, again, unilateral
American intervention has done considerably more harm than good over the
past decades. It is worth revisiting this sorry lineage for a moment not
because it tells the whole story of American foreign policy—it does
not—but because it underscores some of the profound risks of reckless
intervention.” (Todd Gitlin, “On Liberalism and Force,” World Affairs
[Summer, 2008], p. 43)
Julian Gough, in turn, supplies the wisdom concerning domestic policies
for a free society when he writes: “Capitalism is seen as arrogant, but
that is merely the rage of Caliban* on seeing his reflection. The
extraordinary thing about capitalism is its humility and refusal to judge.
It will give us what we want; it will not force on us what it thinks we
need. Often we are disgusted by what we discover that we want--but that
reflects on us, not on the servant who brings us our fetish gear and
saturated fats. It would bring us organic turnips just as happily. If we
cease to desire a product, the product changes or ceases to exist. There
is nothing more powerless than a corporation.” (Julian Gough, quoted in
THE WEEK, 12 July 2008, p. 10.)
Detractors, such as Noami Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, The Rise
of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books, 2007), argues precisely the
opposite, blaming virtually all maladies in the world on free market
capitalism and its champions (such as, and especially, the later Milton
Friedman). Who comes out more credible in this dispute is not my task here
to establish. Jonathan Chait, in The New Republic (July 30, 2008) has
accomplished figuring that out brilliantly already, showing that Klein
fabricated much of her evidence and besmirched the Chicago Boys utterly
unfairly, relying on reams of prevarications.
My focus here is the fact that a debate such as this one can actually
still be held in the better sectors of the American media. Both World
Affairs and The New Republic are competent, well edited publications, with
superb writers and editorial policies that bend over backwards not to
violate journalistic ethics. And that, I believe, is something to rejoice
about.
In the United States of America and in Great Britain there is civilized
debate and disputation on vital issues of the day, the month, the year and
the decade are widely circulated, with the contributors largely restrained
and polite without being at all dull. This form of exploration of
important human topics began back in ancient Greece and was carried on in
Rome, more or less consistently, although often surrounded by overt
violence and intimidation. And, of course, in many parts around the globe
today discussions of such vital topics has a hard time being carried out
in a civil tongue--the threat of bayonets and bombs is altogether real,
should someone in the minority annoy an opponent too severely.
However, the influence of modern classical liberal ideas, especially as
regards public affairs, has been to at least compartmentalize the
conflicts so that where ideas are discussed, weapons are barred. The
progress this exhibits must not be over nor underestimated. A few steps
forward can easily be obliterated by a few backwards.
Although some genuine jewels of ideas can thus surface and have a chance
of influencing public policy, there is never any guaranteed that the good
one’s will triumph. But when a few precious morsels such as the two I
quoted above do get some run for their money, I believe we should all
cheer and make the most of it. As that saying I have quoted before put it:
Notice the good and praise it! It will encourage some more good, I am
willing to bet.

Encouraging Dishonesty
Tibor R. Machan
Recently I have become a genuine frequent flier. My miles keep
accumulating at various airlines and I am making good use of them
upgrading to first or business class on some of those very long trips I
have been taking of late.
As anyone can imagine, flying after 9/11/01 hasn’t become very enjoyable,
even when one is fortunate enough to get upgraded or well enough off to
buy the expensive seats. A most annoying part of flying is the wait in
those security lines, especially if one has any kind of malady involving
standing or ambling about. (I do!) OK, perhaps it is no big deal to
experience such inconveniences and displeasures. Things could be worse or,
as the Hungarians have been saying since the 16th century, “Több is
veszett Mohácsnál” (“More was lost at Mohacs”), the place in southern
Hungary that got wiped out by Turkish forces partly so as to demonstrated
to the Austro-Hungarian leadership that the Turks had muscle.
Anyway, as I was standing around in Frankfurt some days ago, on my return
trip to the US, I noticed something that had escaped me thus far. Airline
personnel routinely lie about when the plane will be leaving, when
boarding will begin, and other scheduling matters. On several occasions in
Frankfurt it was announced that our flight will be ready to board in five
or ten minutes when, in fact, thirty or fifty minutes went by before any
passengers could make a movement toward the plane.
As we stood cooling our heels--a practice I am not very good at--I noticed
that there were dozens of children among the passengers, some too young to
know what was happening but quite a few able to tell that the
announcements made by airline personnel were very far from the truth.
Repeated claims about how in a moment we will be moving aboard were simply
followed by more such claims but no movement forthcoming. This couldn't be
missed by the kids, I am certain.
I was personally annoyed with the delays, of course, but it occurred to me
that here is an instance of adults seriously influencing children to
accept prevarication as the norm. Why, if it is OK for these uniformed men
and women to keep misleading hundreds of people should a child take it
seriously when implored to tell only the truth?
Come to think of it, such setting of bad examples surrounds children in
many areas of their lives, all the while they are being urged to be
honest. Doctors order them to come to their offices at a given time only
to make them wait at least a half an hour before they get to be seen. And
not just children. We are all taught to tell the truth, at least in church
and by various people who preach at us about how we ought to act. Yet we
are also clearly aware that the very people who give us these instructions
make a practice of not living up to what they say. Maybe a good many folks
are willing to give these liars a break, consider that circumstances may
not make full honesty possible, punctuality a reasonable expectations. But
many could well get the impression that honesty itself is simply
unimportant to many who speak to us. And these folks tend to be ones in
positions of responsibility, even authority, like the airline personnel
who unhesitatingly tell us lies. Maybe they, in turn, are being influenced
by politicians who make it a habit to lie to us!?
Well, you might say, what can they do. After all, they are facing
situations of uncertain information all the time. Yet I don’t think this
will do as any kind of excuse since such situations can be noted--there is
no great difficulty in adding to what one announces that these are simply
estimates and it is quite possible that the delays will be longer. It
appears, however, that airline companies haven’t yet figured out just how
to communicate honestly and effectively with their customers. They
probably do not want to fully disclose it when something delays a flight
that requires mechanical repair or supervision--such information, they may
be thinking, will only upset fliers. So let’s lie to them, instead. (The
Frankfurt-to-Dallas/Forth Worth flight was delayed, I later learned,
because on the flight over from the US an emergency landing had to be made
in Bangor, Maine, after smoke started pouring from the fuselage. Turned
out, it was only some trouble with the audio-video system, nothing major,
but from what I gather this was not deemed to be suitable information for
the waiting and increasingly irritated passengers.)
As technology races ahead and we eagerly embrace it for all the help it
can offer us, it is not always easy tell just how to keep up with ethics,
too. Cell phones, answering machines, voice mail, etc., and so forth--all
these require us to apply the ethical principles of human life
intelligently and competently. Even if we are making announcements to
waiting passengers at airline terminals.

A Visit to RFE-RL

Tibor R. Machan

Prague, Czech Republic. In 1953 I was smuggled out of Hungary by a
professional "flesh peddler" (as TIME magazine called these extremely
helpful people) and landed, for three years, in Munich, Germany. That's
because my father was working at Radio Free Europe there, as a director of
sports coverage. My stepmother was doing some acting gigs for the
Hungarian sector and even I got to do a few lines in various plays that
had a character in his teens. I used to hang out a lot at the facilities
in the English Garden and befriended a lot of expatriates from the various
Iron Curtain countries who helped the effort to inform listeners in those
countries about what went on in the world and whatever else they were
supposed to be doing. (Prior to leaving Hungary I used to listen to RFE,
when I could--because the reception was awful and transmissions were also
being blocked by the commies--mostly to hear my dad on the air.)

Later, when I began to think more carefully about political matters, I had
some trepidations about whether RFE and similar ventures carried out by
the United States government could pass my libertarian test for what
amounts to proper public policy. Should American citizens be forced to
fund this kind of undertaking--including Voice of America and, later,
several others, beaming news and, let's face it, propaganda to victims of
Soviet and Soviet bloc oppression? Can this be construed as legitimate
foreign policy for a bona fide free society? Why or why not?

But back in the mid-fifties I had no problem accepting RFE as a sound
effort, seeing how little information the Soviet satellite countries would
allow their citizens to gather from their state run media. There was
little doubt in my mind that the Americans and their Western allies were
far better, freer countries than those under Soviet rule and whatever
reasonable effort was made to thwart the power of the USSR was Ok by me.
Of course the big question for me turned out, later, to be what amounted
to reasonable in such efforts.

In our time it would appear to be clear enough that there is no longer any
plausible rationale for Radio Free Europe and its sister, Radio Liberty.
Yet, on my visit to Prague, where I was asked to give a short presentation
to the staff about the situation in mid-fifties and what I could recall
about RFE then, several folks argued that there are sound reasons to
continue what RFE/RL liberty had been and continues to be doing, which is
to "provide uncensored news and information to countries where a free
press is either banned by the government or not fully established." As a
died in the wool "defensivist" on matters of public policy, I have my
doubts that such efforts on the part of a government of a free country
qualify as proper public policy. A defensivist, you see, holds--following
the political science sketched in the Declaration of Independence--that
governments are instituted to secure our basic human rights. They are,
therefore, only justified in conducting defensive public policies and it
is unclear whether broadcasting propaganda, however honest and truthful,
into "countries where a free press is either banned by the government or
not fully established" qualifies as defensive public policy. Arguably
such an effort is more about defending the liberty of those in such
countries, not of the citizens of the United States of America whom the
government is sworn to serve.

Yet perhaps a more nuanced take on the foreign affairs of a free society
would not so readily dismiss what RFE and RL are doing as overstepping the
proper authority of a free government. Educating people in countries
where people have no chance to encounter discussions of the principles and
policies of relatively free societies may arguably amount to an element of
defense, given how ignorance about liberty can generate often deadly
hostility toward free societies. Moreover, engaging in this kind of
educational foreign policy may also be a rather preferable substitute for
more militaristic efforts to secure the liberty of citizens of relatively
free societies in today's world.

I am not proposing to resolve these matters here but it is worth
reflecting on them, I think, since the defensivist foreign policy that's
appropriate for free countries can take a variety of forms and, moreover,
isn't something to be decided upon a priori. My own experience with RFE
was an instructive part of my early life, helping me to come to terms in
time with the principles and problems of proper, free governments. I
suspect that investing in the peaceful propaganda efforts of which RFE and
RL are a part is highly preferable to embarking on various military
missions so as to defend liberty for American citizens and also to spread
it around the world in ways that do not produce hostility and acrimony.

The Scope of Public Choice Theory


Tibor R. Machan


Prague, Czech Republic. In October 1985 (I think it was) Professor James
Buchanan, now at George Mason University's Department of Economics,
received the Nobel Prize in his discipline for his pioneering work—in
collaboration with Professor Gordon Tullock—in what came to be called
public choice theory. The gist of this theory is that those who work in
government, often referred to in the honorific terms as doing "public
service," are, contrary to widespread impression, just as much motivated
by personal or self-interest as are people in the market place. In other
words, politicians and bureaucrats pursue their own agendas, not those of
"the public," just as people in business do. And from this a number of
interesting insights follow about the nature of government policy.

What makes this idea quite credible even at first inspection is that
politicians and bureaucrats would have a very hard time, even if they
wanted to, to serve the public interest. The reason is that the public is
a huge group of individuals with a great variety of different interests
and just a few common ones. All those people in centers of power who
lobby for support from various branches and divisions of government—those
folks so scornfully dismissed as looking out for mere "special
interests"—are, in fact, the only ones who can provide politicians and
bureaucrats with some clue as to what the public's interest amounts to.
They tell them, actually, about a lot of highly diverse private and
special interests, not any kind of public interest at all.

This fact is very important to keep in mind, especially in the midst of
political campaigns during which there is an inordinate amount of rhetoric
about the special interests versus the public interest, the goals of
different people versus the will of the people. Of course, the special
interest groups are nothing other than the people, so the will of the
people is really nothing else but the sum of the special interests all
those nasty lobbyists are promoting.

Even beyond all this, public choice theory also alerts us to the fact that
the most recent effort to shore up the case for government meddling in our
lives, namely so called libertarian paternalism—or nudging—is infested
with the problem that behavior that may be desirable from certain citizens
will not be so from others. What the politicians and bureaucrats choose to
nudge us to do—which is really a form of insidious manipulation even at
its best—is rarely what all of us being so nudged really ought to do. The
assumption of one-size-fits-all is blatant and public policies that follow
from it must of necessity misfire.

Suppose there is a problem in a society, say, environmental pollution.
What everyone ought to do about it is quite impossible to say. One
person or family may have to address it one way, another very differently,
and so on down the line. To believe, for example, that everyone who owns
an SUV ought to get rid of it because of pollution is the height of
ignorance and presumption. What one person or one family or one company
ought to do to address the problem will be quite different from what
another ought to, in light of the different circumstances and needs and
possibilities of all these different human agents.

Because this is so, the effort to address the problem by politicians and
bureaucrats is invariably going to misfire. Those so called public
servants, in short, have no clue at all what needs to be done by you, me,
our friends, colleagues, neighbors, and the rest, so they will promote
policies they happen to prefer, never mind whether they help solve the
problem. They will, as customary, feel the urge to "do something," even
if there is no demonstrable connection between it and any solution to the
problem that is supposedly being addressed.

The same goes for those doing the nudging being promoted these days as
ways to get us to behave properly. Right conduct is highly contextual. It
depends on highly particular conditions that people face. Only those close
to us have a decent chance of knowing the best way for us to act, so
public servants will necessarily be off base.

Sadly in their eagerness to impose their so called solutions, politicians
and bureaucrats are not likely to relinquish their power over us, never
mind how misguided they are in doing so.

Human Rights Were Not Invented

Tibor R. Machan

Professor Lynn Hunt's recently published book is titled Inventing Human
Rights and though it is full of very useful information about the
emergence of the idea of basic human, individual rights, it also
perpetuates, perhaps entirely unconsciously, a very serious error.

Moral and political ideas are not all that different from ones in the
various sciences. Based on better and better information about the world,
various new concepts need to be formed. Electrons, for example, hadn't
been identified until after atoms were. The prefrontal lobe wasn't known
until instruments were created that helped to search the brain thoroughly
enough to take a comprehensive inventory of its innumerable parts.
Initially all that was known is that there is a brain and only gradually
did its busy life and large number of attributes and properties come into
focus.

In morality something similar happens. From early times it has been clear
enough that some kinds of conduct are morally wrong and that some are
right. Broadly speaking, whatever promotes the human life of an individual
is right, whatever thwarts it wrong. But the details were slow to come to
light. Politically, too, the concept of justice was in place quite early
in human history—an institution or policy is just if it secures what is
deserved among human beings. But this isn't enough to take account of the
many details of the idea of justice. In time—starting quite a long time
ago, actually—it gradually became clear that human beings have certain
rights, based on their nature, which then provided a fuller understanding
of justice.

But, of course, there is a problem with all this. Unlike in the physical
sciences, in normative spheres there is a great deal of disagreement, some
if not most of it stemming from the input from those who want to undermine
the very notion of basic norms of human life. So even if at some point
human rights had been discovered—not invented—there were many who didn't
welcome this fact and mounted all sorts of ways to obscure it. A little of
this can also been detected in even the hardest science, such as physics,
chemistry or astronomy. But in the area of morality and politics it is far
more prevalent since the basis of these areas of focus are more
complicated and widely disputed.

One way to undermine a moral concept, of course, is to maintain that it is
merely an invention, a fabrication that serves not to help us understand
how to lead a human life but merely to further some special interest.
Accordingly, for example, Karl Marx and his followers argued that the
human right to private property was invented so as to aid the ruling
bourgeois classes to obtain and hold control of other people.

Judging by her book I doubt that Professor Hunt had this same agenda up
her sleeve. I am sure, however, that the claim that human rights are an
invention plays into the hands of those who would just as soon dismiss
these rights as being without any basis in facts of reality but simply a
concocted myth—or, as Jeremy Bentham characterized them, "nonsense upon
stilts."

In the case of Dr. Hunt, who teaches history at UCLA, there is another way
that the status of human rights is undermined. She makes a lot of the fact
that the Declaration of Independence associates our basic rights with
self-evidence. If they were self-evident, as she claims the Founders said
they were, then they need not be argued for. A self-evident fact needs no
proof. Thus the fact of the existence of the universe needs no proof—any
effort to prove it would already acknowledge that it is true. That's why
it is a self-evident truth.

What the Declaration states, of course, is that "We hold these truths to
be self-evident," not that they are self-evident. And for purposes of a
brief, succinct, inspiring announcement—a declaration—that's all that is
needed, namely, to treat those truths as if they were (that is, to hold
them to be), self-evident. In fact, however, they are anything but. Just
as John Locke and all of his followers who have labored long and hard to
prove that these rights knew this well and good. The existence of our
rights must be demonstrated, shown. It's not enough to assume them.

Dr. Hunt, however, claims that the Founders believed that it is
self-evident that we have these rights and proposes that they function,
therefore, as religious truths based on faith, not as discoveries—as
inventions not as something real. But this will not wash. Over the
centuries basic human rights were gradually identified, as a result of a
better and better knowledge of human community life and its role in human
affairs. So by now we know that all of us have these rights in our
communities, apart from some rare cases of crucially incapacitated people.
And we can therefore confidently state, for example, that a country in
which these rights are not acknowledged and protected fails at being fully
just.

It would have been only prudent for Dr. Hunt to have seen the matter along
such lines. As it is, she is aiding and abetting those who want to support
regimes wherein human rights are violated, left and right. If they are a
mere invention, what could be wrong with that?