Huh?

I just read "Man and His Self-Interest" by Froma Harrop on RealClearPolitics. Actually, I read it twice, at least.

All I'm left with is.... what. the. hell. is. this? I read it twice... some sections three times... and I have no idea what she is saying. I think she has NO idea what the concept of self-interest is, and thus any discussion in favor or against it ends up completely muddled.

She tries to discuss the primary challenge to Pennsylvania Senator, Arlen Specter, and says

Specter would have probably lost that primary, since many of the Republican moderates who formed his support have left the party. Thus, he has declared himself a Democrat, a convenient label for the general election.

Specter is not unacquainted with self-interest. He's pretty strong on self-regard, as well.

But when Specter's jockeying for advantageous position threatened Toomey's happiness, Republican right-wingers predictably portrayed the senator's self-interest as selfishness. Betrayal is another word that comes up. [bold added]

I usually bold parts of quotations to highlight particularly cogent arguments. Here, I bold things that MAKE NO SENSE. I have NO idea what the hell this writer is trying to say.

Her horrible article just gets worse and worse as it goes along. In the end, I believe she is trying to say that Republicans like Toomey shouldn't be so harsh in pushing a fiscal conservative agenda, because it's hurting the feelings of people like Specter and forcing them out of the party. I don't know enough about Harrop to guess why she cares. I read the article solely because of the headline, and ended up reeling from the barrage of shallow, nonsensical arguments and the gossipy, sniping tone.

A Culture War of Attrition

Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute, writes in today's Wall St. Journal that "The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism."

There is a major cultural schism developing in America. But it's not over abortion, same-sex marriage or home schooling, as important as these issues are. The new divide centers on free enterprise -- the principle at the core of American culture. [bold added]

Brooks describes the road to socialism the Left is pushing the country down, after the Right did much the same over the past decade by paying "little more than lip service to free enterprise." He notes that under Obama's tax plan, nearly 50% of Americans will have little or no tax liability, and instead will benefit from massive redistribution of wealth.

Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority are net recipients of the "sharing economy." They are fighting a culture war of attrition with economic tools. Defenders of capitalism risk getting caught flat-footed with increasingly antiquated arguments that free enterprise is a Main Street pocketbook issue. Progressives are working relentlessly to see that it is not. [bold added]

This is simply an extension of the way the country has been trending for a century, but naming the real culture war as one between capitalism and socialism? Well, it is heartening to see in the mainstream media, even if it is an op-ed. And we are certainly in a war of attrition, being waged on all fronts in the culture.

Seizing the issue of the tea parties and the grassroots opposition they represent, Brooks names what Objectivists have been saying and acting on for years; that this is a moral issue and to win the fight, it must be framed as such.

Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It's also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don't have without regard for our children's future. [bold added]

Brooks is right, as far as he goes. But sadly, he doesn't make such a moral case, and simply states that it is a moral issue as if what constitutes the moral and immoral is self-evident. If I were not an Objectivist, I might read the op-ed and tend to agree with him about "freedom and entrepreneurship" or I might tend to disagree with him and like the track the country is on now. Nothing he says would help me to see why I should side one way or another, and I would be left relying on my predispositions.

But because Objectivism shows that the moral case is one of defending individual rights and the freedom of individuals to act in their own rational self-interest, and that any coercive government action that infringes on those rights in any way is immoral, it can do more than appeal to the default American sense-of-life or the groundswell of "tea party sentiment."

Brooks' attempt to give the proper grounding for the fight against socialism is appreciated, but until those who support fully free market capitalism can defend their position from the appropriate philosophical base, they will ultimately be susceptible to the same arguments that have been used in the 100 year cultural war of attrition. When defenders of the free market accept that the war between capitalism and socialism is in truth the battle between egoism and altruism, between life and death, and are willing to fight for individual rights consistently and proudly, then and only then will they be able to present a convincing moral case.

Brooks recognizes the role such defenders have, saying "intellectual organizations like my own have a constructive role in the coming cultural conflict. As policymakers offer a redistributionist future to a fearful nation and a new culture war simmers, we must respond with tangible, enterprise-oriented policy alternatives." As I have mentioned previously, George Reisman has a lot to say on this topic. As an introduction to a set of proposals for how to bring about capitalism over the course of time, he said:

Instead of merely attacking the socialistic proposals of the "liberals" and then yielding to them and abandoning the fight once the proposals happened to be enacted, as is the almost invariable practice of the conservatives, they would always strive to move in the direction of capitalism. ...

The program ... to follow is both political and educational in nature. It is political in that it centers on the offering of specific political proposals, which, if adopted, would move the country toward capitalism. It is educational in that it views the basic problem that we face as one of explaining to the people of the United States and other countries the value of a capitalist society and the value of the specific steps required to achieve it. What people do is determined by what they think. If we want to change the political practice, there is no other way but to change people's political philosophy and economic theories. Accordingly, every political proposal that I suggest is itself intended to serve as a vehicle for educating the public and for attracting talented individuals to our cause who in turn will become capable of educating still others to the value of our program. ...

The political proposals I make are short- and intermediate-range, as well as long-range in nature. I believe that it will take several generations to achieve a fully capitalist society, mainly because of the time required for the educational process. It will not be enough just to present our long-range goals. It will be necessary to advocate a whole intervening series of short- and intermediate-range goals whose enactment will represent progress toward our long-range goals. The major political task in the years ahead will be continuously to formulate such short and intermediate range goals, and to keep the country moving in the direction of full capitalism by means of their successive achievement. The short- and intermediate-range goals I offer are intended to illustrate principles of strategy and tactics and thus to serve as a pattern.

In the light of the preceding, it should scarcely be necessary to say that at no time should the advocacy of sound principles be sacrificed to notions of political expediency, advanced under misguided ideas about what is "practical." The only practical course is to name and defend true principles and then seek to win over public opinion to the support of such principles. It is never to accept the untrue principles that guide public opinion at the moment and design and advocate programs that pander to the errors of the public. Such a procedure is to abandon the fight for any fundamental or significant change--namely, a change in people's ideas--and to reinforce the errors we want to combat. [bold added]

There is nothing wrong with taking intermediate, even small, steps toward laissez-faire, as long as no ground is conceded the other way, and it is stated explicitly and repeatedly that laissez-faire is the ultimate goal. So as long as Brooks and organizations like AEI put forth policy alternatives that meet this standard, they will be supporting the good fight. Even if they don't fully meet the standard, they can be a good starting point which prominent Objectivist intellectuals can use to provide the philosophical foundation needed.

Such is the promise of the "tea parties"; the opportunity to give those who still hold the American sense-of-life, the intellectual ammunition to stand up for capitalism, and thereby stand up for themselves.

------------------
Update: Added longer Reisman quote and other edits. (04/30/09)

WSJ on Pragmatism

The Wall St. Journal editors have provided their analysis of Barack Obama's presidency so far, and it's a wishy-washy account that goes from being somewhat laudatory to slightly more negative, making some good points, but for superficial reasons.

Still, I found it interesting to read their assessment of Obama's domestic policy, especially in light of yesterday's post, Pragmatism, Social Justice, and the Failure of Conservatism. The editors write:

On the home front, there can no longer be any such doubts. Mr. Obama talks the language of pragmatism, but his program has revealed a man of the left. He clearly views the financial crisis and the liberal majorities in Congress as a rare chance to advance the power of the state in American life. The only two comparable moments in the last century were 1965, which gave us the Great Society, and 1933, which bequeathed the New Deal. Mr. Obama's goals are at least as ambitious, resuming the march toward the European welfare state that was stopped by what Democrats like to call the Reagan detour. [bold added]

Overall, they have grasped the direction in which Obama is taking the country and why. It is good to see that they call a spade a spade, and give voice to the fact that the country is ratcheting up (not resuming... it never stopped) its march toward the European welfare state.

But the editors have swallowed the idea that pragmatism is somehow above ideology -- and by 'ideology' I use their meaning of partisanship of one flavor or another -- and that it would be a great tool if people wouldn't tarnish it with politics. In reality, pragmatism's a-philosophical nature leaves nothing to help one decide what "works" except for whim, faith, or prepackaged ideology. If you fully abandon reason, principle, and the certainty of knowledge of the world, from where else can such a "practical" judgment come? And as I discussed yesterday, Obama's flavor of pragmatism has a purposeful, and purposefully obfuscated, progressive agenda.

The editors also buy into the false promise of the conservatives being those who would not use the crises and the solidification of party power "as a rare chance to advance the power of the state in American life." They would just use the power of the state to control different aspects of American life. Eight years of George W. Bush should be enough proof of that.

The editorial ends with the following:

Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, and sooner or later the twain shall meet. For now, we are living in another era of unchecked liberal government. The reckoning will come when Americans discover how much it costs.

I believe, based on the rest of the editorial, that they are referring only to monetary costs such as taxes and deficits. But the statement applies equally well, if not better, when considering the cost to American individual liberty and economic freedoms. There will certainly be a reckoning, but it is unclear if Americans will discover the true costs before it's too late.

Paging Dr. Shortage

"Where have all the doctors gone?" asks Juliet Lapidos at Slate.com. She notes that "Obama-administration officials have reportedly become alarmed by doctor shortages" and then goes about explaining why, in her mind, there is a looming shortage of primary care doctors.

Her answer? Baby boomer doctors are retiring, and baby boomer consumers (say that 5 times, quickly) are getting old and increasing demand.

While she is right that the baby boomer generation has certain impacts on the overall health care picture, she doesn't adequately address why there has been such a drop in medical students planning on going into primary care. She also seems to assume, incorrectly, that while there is increasing demand, the declining number of doctors entering primary care is the fundamental cause of the shortage. On a free market, doctors would go where the demand was, but while demand for the service is in fact increasing, the producers (doctors) are not increasing supply. Why not?

In her opening paragraph which I already partially quoted, she started down the trail of the real cause of the shortage without realizing it.

Obama-administration officials have reportedly become alarmed by doctor shortages, especially since millions of previously uninsured people would gain coverage—and therefore increase demand—if the president manages to pass national health care reform. [link dropped, bold added]

All one has to do is look at the artificially inflated demand for care caused by these planned policies as well as existing subsidized care through Medicare and Medicaid, and add to the equation the imposition of price controls brought about by those programs, and we have a classic price control/shortage/reduction of supply situation. For details, let us consult George Reisman and his fascinating study of the destructive nature of price controls in "The Government Against The Economy." (all of which was later included in CTIE)

When one looks at health care services, not as some magical thing that transcends markets, supply and demand, and price, but just like any other good, it should be easy to see how Reisman's example translates to the "doctor shortage":

A shortage is an excess of the quantity of a good buyers are seeking to buy over the quantity sellers are willing and able to sell. In a shortage, there are people willing and able to pay the controlled price of a good, but they cannot obtain it. The good is simply not available to them. Recalling the gasoline shortage of the winter of 1974 should make the concept real to everyone who experienced it. The drivers of the long lines of cars all had the money that was being asked for gasoline and were willing, indeed, eager, to spend if for gasoline. Their problem was they they simply could not obtain the gasoline. They were trying to buy more gasoline than was available.

Without price controls, prices would have gone up, demand would have gone down, and a shortage would not have occurred. The market would have leveled out, people would have made other arrangements or paid the higher price for gas. In other words, because those who would have been willing and able to pay for gas could have done so. No shortage.

With price controls, there was artificially inflated demand because everyone could afford gas at the much-too-low controlled price, and supply ran out. Shortage.

Substitute the availability of appointments with a primary care doctor (supply) and Medicare/Medicaid-controlled prices for the supply of and price controls on gasoline, and the clear picture emerges.

The preceding discussion showed how price controls create shortages by artificially expanding the quantity of a good demanded. To the degree that the controlled price is below the potential free-market price, buyers judge that they can afford more of the good with the same monetary wealth and income. They judge that they can carry its consumption to a point of lower marginal utility. In this way, the quantity of the good demanded comes to exceed the supply available, whether that supply is scarce or abundant.

What this means is that no matter how much gas, or how many primary care doctors you have, if the price is controlled, there will be shortages. Even without the retiring of large numbers of baby boomer doctors, we would still face long waits and shortages, especially as prices are controlled more drastically and demand skyrockets due to new universal health care programs.

Still, there is demand, even if the prices are controlled. Why are doctors fleeing from primary care?

Price controls also reduce supply, which intensifies the shortages they create.

In the case of anything that must be produced, the quantity supplied falls if a price control makes its production unprofitable or simply of less than average profitability.

It is not necessary that a price control make production unprofitable or insufficiently profitable to all producers in a field. Production will tend to fall as soon as it becomes unprofitable or insufficiently profitable to the highest-cost or marginal producers in the field. These producers begin to go out of business or at least to operate on a smaller scale.

A marginal producer is defined as an "individual producer who is just barely able to remain profitable at current levels of price and production." With the advent of "universal coverage," increased red tape, price controls, and everything else, more and more primary care physicians will fit this definition. Why would someone going into medicine want to live like that if they could go into the relatively unregulated field of plastic surgery?

Returning to Slate, Lapidos concludes her article with a nearly perfect example of how government intervention in the market -- specifically the attempts at central planning -- wreak havoc on the actions and plans of rational individuals and institutions responding to the conditions of a free market.

Ironically, just a little more than a decade ago, there was a doctor surplus. In 1996, a committee of the Institute of Medicine warned that the United States had a surfeit of doctors caused by foreign-trained physicians coming here to work and recommended freezing med-school class sizes and limiting first-year residency positions. A year later, Slate ran an article on an alternative strategy for reducing the number of doctors approved by the federal Health Care Financing Administration. Under the Graduate Medical Education Demonstration Project, 41 teaching hospitals received $400 million in exchange for not training between 20 percent and 25 percent of the medical residents they would otherwise have trained over the next six years. [bold added, links dropped]

While she sees the irony in this tragicomedy, Lapidos' article demonstrates that she suffers under the same profound misunderstanding of free markets and government intervention as do the majority. While she sees how poorly this plan worked, she and the Obama administration and nearly all politicians in this country on both sides of the aisle, take away only the lesson that "if they had just picked the right plan, it would have worked!"

Instead, the solution is not picking the right government plan, nor is it manipulating the market in the false interests of social justice. The only solution is the total separation of economy and state, establishing the only moral economic system that leaves doctors and patients, producers and consumers, free to trade value for value on an open market without government coercion; laissez-faire capitalism.

Pragmatism, Social Justice, and the Failure of Conservatism

In an upcoming May edition of The Weekly Standard, Peter Berkowitz discusses the nature of pragmatism as practised by Barack Obama and his administration. Berkowitz does a good job of describing how Obama operates, and relates it to the pervasive pragmatism that has infected academics and law, among other fields.

He correctly defines the anti-philosophical nature of pragmatism, and then explains how people like Richard Rorty brought the ideas into the academic mainstream and tweaked them to push a leftist agenda.

At its most extreme, philosophical pragmatism denies the very existence of objective truth, arguing that opinions we declare true are merely those that have proved useful to one interest or another.

In the 1980s and 1990s, philosophy professor Richard Rorty... infused pragmatism with a decidedly partisan meaning. Or perhaps, as Rorty suggested, he brought out the original pragmatism's latent partisanship. His synthesis proved popular in philosophy departments, among political theorists, and in law schools. While Obama may never have read a word Rorty wrote, the new pragmatism permeated the atmosphere of the university world Obama inhabited. It proclaimed that philosophical questions were subordinate to political questions, and that the proper political question in America is how to promote progressive ends. [bold added]

Berkowitz then discusses the nature of the "new pragmatism" and how well it describes Obama's actions.

To realize its utopian dreams, the new pragmatism makes use of a fundamental deception. Purporting to focus on practical consequences, it equates what works with what works to increase government's responsibility to promote social justice in America. Although it reduces morality to interest and dismisses the distinction between true and false as a delusive vestige of an obsolete metaphysics, it treats the progressive interpretation of America as, in effect, good and true. Under the guise of inclusiveness, it denigrates and excludes rival moral and political opinions.

So too it seems for Obama's pragmatism: It appears to be another name for achieving progressive ends; flexibility is confined to the means. ... Judging by his conduct--as pragmatism officially instructs--Obama appears to have concluded that the best way to maintain public support for progressive programs is to divert attention from the full range of their consequences and, where possible, to refrain from making progressive principles too explicit. [bold added]

This is spot on concerning the diversionary tactics employed to misdirect public attention away from the real causes and effects of the administration's actions. It's like institutionalized evasion. But what I found especially interesting was the Rortian concept of employing pragmatism to systematically promote leftist goals. "Purporting to focus on practical consequences, it equates what works with what works to increase government's responsibility to promote social justice in America." That is a powerful identification, and should be remembered every time anyone in government or the media speaks glowing of Obama's pragmatism.

When a reporter on NPR speaks of foreign policy shifts and praises them for their pragmatic nature, recall that Obama's pragmatism has a distinct nature designed to foster a social justice agenda. Instead of just "finding something that works," his administration's pragmatism is focused on finding what works to promote progressive goals, using a method laid out by philosophers like Rorty.

This, of course, follows the progression of pragmatism from the original meaning of dispensing with standards and principles and just doing what works, to what Ayn Rand termed "Kantian Pragmatism."

A later school of more Kantian Pragmatists amended this philosophy as follows. If there is no such thing as an objective reality, men’s metaphysical choice is whether the selfish, dictatorial whims of an individual or the democratic whims of a collective are to shape that plastic goo which the ignorant call “reality,” therefore this school decided that objectivity consists of collective subjectivism—that knowledge is to be gained by means of public polls among special elites of “competent investigators” who can “predict and control” reality—that whatever people wish to be true, is true, whatever people wish to exist, does exist, and anyone who holds any firm convictions of his own is an arbitrary, mystic dogmatist, since reality is indeterminate and people determine its actual nature. - "For the New Intellectual" via ARL.

Our current administration, and the leftist academics they sprang from, see themselves as the "special elites... who can 'predict and control' reality," and are applying these techniques to the political realm to control our freedoms, using evasive and "soft" nudges.

Despite the insightful commentary about the nature of this "new" pragmatism, there are some real problems with Berkowitz's article. There is a decidedly Christian conservative bent to it, for one thing. For instance, Berkowitz uses as an example of the negative effects of Obama's pragmatism, the lifting of the ban on embryonic stem cell research on the grounds of Christian morality.

But the biggest problem with Berkowitz is that he never condemns pragmatism directly, but only the Rorty-inspired new pragmatism that pushes social justice. He mistakenly claims that "A truly postpartisan pragmatist--or a pragmatist in the ordinary, everyday sense--would pay attention to the long-term economic consequences of massive government costs and expansion." On what basis would a pragmatist judge long-term consequences? One needs reason and principle to do such a thing, and Berkowitz has already conceded that pragmatism purposefully tosses those out the window. Perhaps he should go back and read the first half of his piece, and decide if it squares with his conclusions.

In a classic conservative move, Berkowitz undercuts the force of his original argument by pandering to the philosophical base of the Left. And despite the fact that he had correctly identified the anti-philosophical qualities of pragmatism earlier, he shows that he seriously misunderstands its true destructive nature.

The problem is not partisanship, but a deceptive form of pragmatism, where pretending to be nonpartisan is a pragmatic strategy for imposing far-reaching progressive policies on an unwary public. This pragmatism is unpragmatic because it suppresses inconvenient consequences, and disrespectful of citizens because it obscures its governing principles and ultimate intentions. [all emphasis added]

Because pragmatism denies the existence any objective truth, this sounds as if Berkowitz is simply upset that the ideology being pushed by this "flavor" of pragmatism is not the ideology he wants pushed. He doesn't argue in favor of the objective nature of individual rights and thus against policies that violate them, but instead that Obama is using a "deceptive form of pragmatism" to promote social justice, presumably instead of the religious conservatism he favors.

Still, despite the shortcomings of his article, it is an interesting read. Most importantly, it serves to highlight the destructive nature of pragmatism, the sneaky political machinations of the Left, and the crippling philosophic ineptitude of conservatism.

Atlas on CNN

Yaron Brook is quoted in this piece in the entertainment section of CNN.com. As far as today's journalism goes, it's a pretty fair and balanced article. It does perpetuate the myth that Alan Greenspan was in favor of free markets in the past 20 years, but it also featured a very good quote from Brook:

The Rand Institute's Brook points out that, to Rand, selfishness did not mean disengagement from the world or sociopathy. "Rational self-interest, egoism, in Ayn Rand's perception is not being Bernie Madoff, not thinking short-term and satisfying just whims, and cheating and lying and stealing," he said. "It is about pursuing what's truly in your rational, long-term self-interest, figuring out what's good for you, without exploiting, taking advantage, without stealing from other people, without sacrificing from other people to yourself.

"But also," he added, "without sacrificing yourself to other people."

It's that debate over shared sacrifice that will likely continue to fuel Rand's critics, as well as her admirers. At bookstores, it will likely keep cash registers ringing, which could only have made the dollar-sign-wearing author very happy, indeed.

What a great thing it is to see this type of article published by the mainstream media.

[HT: Chris]

New Newel

My weekend project was installing a new starting newel post. And yes, I picked the nicest, sunniest weekend since last summer to do it.

What's a newel post, you ask? And why did I need a new one? Newel posts are the main posts at the top and bottom of a run of stairs that the railing connects to ¹. The starting newel is usually bigger than the post at the top of the stairs, especially in old houses. And this is why I needed a new one.

The newel post at the top of the staircase is original to my 120+ year old house. It's 4 inches square, and custom turned with nice detail. See photo (taken last year while I was installing new oak flooring):
The starting newel, however, was not original to the house. Perhaps the original broke, but I'm inclined to think that some previous owner replaced it so they could install a curved bottom step. Anyway, the following is what the wimpy little newel looked like when we bought the house (note the wallpaper and carpet, which are now gone as the renovation of the stairs and hall moves along).
This awful thing was 3" square, and devoid of any interesting detail, which means it was noticeably smaller than the 2nd floor post. My wife said she never noticed it, but I couldn't see anything but this abomination. So I found a wood shop in Canada that would make custom turnings based on photos and measurements.  I took a bunch of photos of the 2nd floor post with a tape measure next to it, and had a 6-inch square starting newel made to match. That was just over a year ago, and it had been sitting in my basement since then, taunting me. Here it is, upstairs and waiting to begin its life securing the railing of my staircase.

Finally, a few weekends ago on a dreary day, I said to hell with it and cut out the skinny piece of junk and ripped out the bottom stair. Then -- as projects in a house with kids so often do -- it sat that way, with a temporary board as a step, for two weeks until I could get to it again. On Saturday, I started prepping for installing the post, and by midday Sunday, this is what it looked like.

This, needless to say, was a royal pain in the ass. Retrofitting anything like this is difficult, and it was complicated by the very tight spaces caused by the radiator. Note the big hole under the stair -- cut in the ceiling of the basement stairwell to provide easier access -- and the rectangular hole in the flooring to the left, which I cut so that I could feed part of the newel down through it to be bolted to the floor joists below... or so I thought.

Newels installed like this, spanning two steps, need to be notched to fit over the riser and stringer (see diagram below). If you look at the tread on the second step, you'll see a notch I cut in it as well. Imagine a 6" square block of wood with a 3" x 3" notch cut out of it, resting on the second step. Confusing? You'll see what I mean in a minute.

My circular saw has only a 2 3/8" cutting depth, so getting the notch cut was another royal pain. After I got the initial cuts made and realized I had no way of finishing them (none of my hand saws were long enough) my wife saved me by suggesting that I use a drill to take out enough material to get most of the block out. It worked, and I cleaned the rest of the notch out with a wood chisel.

Back to the whole passing part of the post through the floor thing... turns out I miscalculated when I ordered the post, and the post wasn't long enough to go all the way through. So it only goes about 3/4" below the surface of the oak flooring. Oh well.

Surprise of surprises, the damn thing fit on the first try. I didn't need to make any additional adjustments. The post was plumb, it lined up with the cut I made in the railing, and the notch fit perfectly. Three lag screws in the base, one from the railing into the top of the post to connect them, a few brackets and wood screws in the base for extra stability, and voila! (and please excuse the stairs... I said the whole thing is a work-in-progress)
Staining and finishing it is going to be a pain, especially because of the tight space behind the radiator. I'll sand the finish off the railing and the other post and try to get a consistent stain across old and new. I may have to resort to a paint or shellac or something though, because the new post is pine and all the old wood is oak, and thus will take stain differently. And of course I need to rebuild the bottom step. I haven't yet decided whether to make a rounded one, or a squared one. I'm leaning toward rounded, so that will be another fun project, that I'll get to... next week? Next year? I hope my wife doesn't read this...

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1. If you're interested in what all the parts of a staircase are, see the following diagram:

It's Good To Be Right... Or Is It?

I'm sure many bloggers have experienced this situation, and I have before as well.  You see something happen and write a post about it, drawing conclusions from it that you haven't seen anywhere else.

Then, a few days or weeks later, you see a prominent journalist make the same argument.

This is most definitely not to say that such journalists are necessarily stealing ideas.  The likelihood that my small blog would have such an impact is slim to none. And I'm also not making innovative breakthroughs in philosophy or science. This isn't rocket surgery.

But I do look upon such situations with a bit of wry humor, as well as a sense of validation and satisfaction.  Even if it's not me who is getting the ideas out to the wider audience, at least someone is. 

It was in this context that I read Kimberley Strassel's opinion column in the Wall St. Journal, Global Warming Overreach.  In it, she discusses how the Democrats are pushing too hard for global warming-related legislation, and goes into great detail about the political implications.  Though I'll be glad if they fail, this isn't my concern here.

Near the end of the piece, she discusses Cap'n Trade vs. the EPA "dangerousness" ruling of CO2, and I saw my argument right there in black and white.  A couple of days ago, I said:

In October of last year, I wrote about the concept of "greenmail," where, if elected, Obama would wait to see if Congress would pass Cap'n Trade^TM, and if they didn't within 18 months, he'd have EPA declare CO2 a pollutant. Well, it appears that the Obama administration has decided to use the greenmail first, as a means of scaring the Congress into passing Cap'n Trade. [bold added]

Today, after discussing all the political battles around the issue and the difficulty ahead for the president's agenda, Strassel said to sum up: 

The Obama team is aware it has trouble, which explains last week's well-timed Environmental Protection Agency "finding" that carbon is a danger. The administration is now using this as a stick to beat Congress to act, arguing that if it doesn't the EPA will. (Reality: Any EPA actions will be tied up in court for years.) It also helps explain EPA's Monday analysis claiming the legislation won't cost all that much. (Reality: The agency could only make this claim by assuming an endless recession.)  [bold added]

It's good to be right, as it confirms the reasoning in which I was already confident.  But at the same time... I wish I wasn't right about this. Hopefully Strassel's wider readership will get more people to see this for what it is, and work against it¹.

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1. See this site for instructions on submitting comments on EPA's ruling that CO2 is a "dangerous pollutant."  Scroll down to "Written Comments" and the instructions are in a linked EPA PDF.   Make sure to reference Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0171.  [HT: Paul Hsieh]

 

Can a Federalism Amendment Lead to Liberty?

Some states are trying to fight back against the ever-menacing growth of the federal government by passing "Sovereignty Resolutions," but as Randy Barnett mentions in today's WSJ.com opinion pages,

While well-intentioned, such symbolic resolutions are not likely to have the slightest impact on the federal courts, which long ago adopted a virtually unlimited construction of Congressional power.

Barnett is a constitutional law professor at Georgetown, and he continues, describing one way in which the states really could assert their influence; by "petition(ing) Congress for a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution." The apparent goal of his proposal is to "restore a healthy balance between federal and state power while protecting the liberties of the people."

Any restriction of federal power at this point would be welcome, but what specific proposals is Barnett advocating?

One simple proposal would be to repeal the 16th Amendment enacted in 1913 that authorized a federal income tax. This single change would strike at the heart of unlimited federal power and end the costly and intrusive tax code. [bold added]

Repealing the federal income tax is perhaps one of the most important things that could be done to increase liberty, and would be a major win for individual rights. But is the ultimate goal of Barnett's proposals fully free laissez-faire capitalism, or an incremental, even pragmatic, change? He doesn't say, but his next suggestion indicates it's the latter:

Congress could then replace the income tax with a "uniform" national sales or "excise" tax (as stated in Article I, section 8) that would be paid by everyone residing in the country as they consumed, and would automatically render savings and capital appreciation free of tax. [bold added]

Barnett then goes on to detail proposed language that a "Federalism Amendment" could have. While he has some interesting ideas that would, in fact, reduce some federal influence on individual lives, the problem with such a proposal is that it does not explicitly defend individual rights. "States Rights" is not only a difficult concept to rally around, it misses the fundamental point that simply checking federal power over the individual with state power over the individual does not change the fact that individual rights are being violated.

Of course, we can't just "flip a switch" and abolish rights-violating government. But as George Reisman wrote in Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, those who are working for a fully laissez-faire society must do so consistently and explicitly, without wavering in their pursuit of their long-range goals. This doesn't mean that interim steps are not valuable or necessary. But they cannot be made pragmatically.

Chapter 20 of his book is available in printable form on his website, and details "a basic outline of the long-range political program [a capitalist movement] would have to follow, including a description of how the most difficult steps in the program might actually be accomplished." It is a must read for those who wish to achieve such a society.

In this light, Reisman's words are both instructive and inspirational. Under the heading, "The Importance of Capitalism as a Conscious Goal," he writes:

The first thing that those in favor of capitalism must do is to make the conscious, explicit decision that they seriously want to achieve a fully capitalist society and are prepared to work for its achievement. We need to view ourselves as active agents of change, working toward a definite goal: laissez-faire capitalism.

The advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, indeed, of capitalism in any explicit form, has not been present in the political spectrum. In the United States, the political controversies of the last several generations have been carried on between the "liberals," who stand for socialism, and the "conservatives," who stand for nothing except what other groups, including the liberals, have managed to establish as the country's tradition.

The success of the liberals/socialists in enacting their program shows that what we need is a group of educated and articulate individuals who adopt the achievement of capitalism as their goal. Such individuals, dedicated to maintaining constant progress toward capitalism, would constitute a de facto capitalist political party, even if the name of such a party never appeared on a ballot. By virtue of constantly offering their own definite program for political change, they would seize the political initiative. Instead of merely attacking the socialistic proposals of the "liberals" and then yielding to them and abandoning the fight once the proposals happened to be enacted, as is the almost invariable practice of the conservatives, they would always strive to move in the direction of capitalism. As an essential part of the process of doing so, they would never tire of assaulting intellectual targets as far behind enemy lines as possible--such as social security, antitrust legislation, and public education. Never would they accept the existing state of society as immutably given and deserving of preservation merely because it exists. Always they would seek to change the existing state of society until it represented laissez-faire capitalism.

Laissez-faire capitalism would represent their fixed star so to speak. To the extent that present conditions departed from it, they would be radical in seeking to change present conditions. To the extent that conditions in the past had approximated laissez-faire capitalism, they would be reactionary in seeking to reestablish such conditions. To the extent that present conditions were consistent with laissez-faire capitalism, they would be conservative in seeking to preserve those conditions. [all emphasis added]

How does Barnett's "Federalism Amendment" proposal stand up in this context? It's difficult to say based on just the WSJ article. In it, he does not provide a principled defense of his ideas based on capitalism or individual rights, and instead simply seeks to balance federal power by referring to the Founders' original intent in the Constitution. It has been said that, for the Tea Parties to be successful, they must fight for something positive, not just reduced government spending and taxation, and I fear that calls for "States Rights" or originalism in Constitutional interpretation will also fall flat as a rallying cry.

With that said, could not his proposal be used to move the country closer to laissez-faire, as long as it was accompanied by a principled, wide-ranging effort? Could it fit into what Reisman describes below?

The political proposals I make are short- and intermediate-range, as well as long-range in nature. I believe that it will take several generations to achieve a fully capitalist society, mainly because of the time required for the educational process. It will not be enough just to present our long-range goals. It will be necessary to advocate a whole intervening series of short- and intermediate-range goals whose enactment will represent progress toward our long-range goals. The major political task in the years ahead will be continuously to formulate such short and intermediate range goals, and to keep the country moving in the direction of full capitalism by means of their successive achievement.

I think the "Federalism Amendment" idea could be employed in this fashion, even with the transfer of an income tax to sales/excise taxes, as long as it accompanied a reduction in welfare state expenditures, and an overall significant reduction in the tax burden on all individuals. If the shift to sales taxes ends up taking the same amount of property as the income tax, and if the program is enacted without the explicit long-range intent of defending individual rights and moving toward a fully free market, then Barnett's proposal will simply serve as a temporary stop-gap at best, and a dispiriting, Tea Party-killing debacle at worst.

Barnett concludes by saying,

Could such a Federalism Amendment actually be adopted? Stranger things have happened -- including the adoption of each of the existing amendments. States have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making this Federalism Amendment the focus of their resistance to the shrinking of their reserved powers and infringements upon the rights retained by the people. And this Federalism Amendment would provide tea-party enthusiasts and other concerned Americans with a concrete and practical proposal by which we can restore our lost Constitution. [bold added]

Note the focus on state's rights, and the mention of "rights retained by the people," and ask whether this is really worth working toward. Are we trying to restore our "lost Constitution," including its original flaws, or to stand proudly, as individuals, confident in a government sworn to protect those rights? Are individual rights inviolable, or should state or federal governments dole out whatever is left after their power grabbing and regulating?

I appreciate his attempt to check federal power, and a return to the old Constitution would be better than what we have today, but it is not enough. All Barnett needs now is a principled defense of individual rights at the core of his argument, with capitalism as the ultimate goal, and we could have an important first step on the road to liberty.

18 Months? Try the First 100 Days

I was looking back at my old posts about environmentalism in honor of earth day, when Doug Reich gave me the idea of post recycling. As Doug said, "I want you to conserve your own energy and not have to waste extra electricity on the key strokes so I am reprinting them." In the spirit of green blogging that he has so boldly championed, I too will recycle. Think of all the keystrokes I saved by not typing another post? The mind reels.

In October of last year, I wrote about the concept of "greenmail," where, if elected, Obama would wait to see if Congress would pass Cap'n Trade ^TM and if they didn't within 18 months, he'd have EPA declare CO2 a pollutant. Well, it appears that the Obama administration has decided to use the greenmail first, as a means of scaring the Congress into passing Cap'n Trade.

From Obama's Greenmail..., 10/20/2008

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If Barack Obama is elected President, within 18 months of his inauguration he intends to use the EPA and the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions as a "dangerous pollutant," according to a recent Wall St. Journal article. He'll push this plan forward if by then, Congress hasn't passed a cap-and-trade plan that he likes. Thus, the "greenmailing" of Congress.

Jason Grumet is ... one of Mr. Obama's key policy aides. In an interview last week with Bloomberg, Mr. Grumet said that come January the Environmental Protection Agency "would initiate those rulemakings" that classify carbon as a dangerous pollutant under current clean air laws. That move would impose new regulation and taxes across the entire economy, something that is usually the purview of Congress. Mr. Grumet warned that "in the absence of Congressional action" 18 months after Mr. Obama's inauguration, the EPA would move ahead with its own unilateral carbon crackdown anyway.

The article also draws attention to a similar plan that the EPA is already investigating. This is the same one that John Lewis and Paul Saunders are currently fighting. The EPA has published a draft plan to use the Clean Air Act to effectively regulate our economy out of existence in the name of fighting a fictitious global warming problem, and Lewis and Saunders are leading an effort to get EPA to abandon the idea.

Apparently, blocking it now may have no impact on what Obama decides to do once elected. This is disheartening, to say the least. The WSJ piece speculates that Obama is considering this greenmail move because of concern that he won't be able to convince enough people in his own party to pass cap-and-trade:

Thus Messrs. Obama and Grumet want to invoke a political deus ex machina driven by a faulty interpretation of the Clean Air Act to force Congress's hand. Mr. Obama and Democrats can then tell Americans that Congress must act to tax and regulate carbon to save the country from even worse bureaucratic consequences. It's Mr. Obama's version of Jack Benny's old "your money or your life" routine, but without the punch line.

The strategy is most notable for what it says about the climate-change lobby and its new standard bearer. Supposedly global warming is the transcendent challenge of the age, but Mr. Obama evidently doesn't believe he'll be able to convince his own party to do something about it without a bureaucratic ultimatum. Mr. Grumet justified it this way: "The U.S. has to move quickly domestically . . . We cannot have a meaningful impact in the international discussion until we develop a meaningful domestic consensus."

Normally a democracy reaches consensus through political debate and persuasion, but apparently for Mr. Obama that option is merely a nuisance. It's another example of "change" you'll be given no choice but to believe in. [bold added]

My Boy's First Ballgame

I took my 3-year-old son, R., to a Red Sox game on Sunday afternoon. The weather, despite being a bit chilly, was quite nice, and even though game time was right when he normally goes down for a nap, we both had a blast.

A friend had two tickets he couldn't use, so he offered them to me. I wouldn't have thought to take my little guy to a major league game -- too many people, too much difficulty getting to the park -- but since the opportunity presented itself, and because when I mentioned it, R. got really excited and told everyone about it, I figured it was worth a shot.

Now, the logistics of getting to a game at Fenway are not simple, even for adults. You must take into consideration traffic, parking, subway and train schedules, etc. The first rule is that, unless you want to spend $50 on parking and wait in traffic jams, you'll want to park somewhere else and ride the T to Fenway. That's what we intended to do, parking in Back Bay. But as anyone who has tried to walk with a tired 3-year-old knows, their little legs just don't want to walk very far. Luckily, we had just started out when I happened to see a guy on a bicycle with a seat "trailer" like a rickshaw, and he offered us a ride for "open pricing... whatever you feel like paying." So we were pulled through fully stopped traffic in much less time, confusion and crowding than if we had taken the subway. And R. loved it.

R. was a little nervous about the crowds and the big city, but once I got him the kid's meal -- hot dog, juice box, cotton candy (only $4.50!) -- and we found our seats, he was fine. He used the binoculars to watch the game and whatever else he felt like looking at, he talked to the people sitting around us, and was fun and cute the whole time.

He made it through 5 innings. That's quite a lot, when you're that young and have no idea what's really going on. We saw the only two runs the Sox scored (they ended up beating the Orioles 2-1) and walked around and got a closer view of the players. At the top of the 6th, he was done, and we started home. There was a bike-rickshaw thing waiting outside the gate, so we got door-to-door service back to the parking garage.

As we got on the road, I asked him if he wanted to stop for an early dinner and he said "yes." Ten minutes later, when I got to the highway, I asked him where he wanted to go, to no response. I turned around, and he was passed out cold. I smiled all the way home. It was a good day.

"Food is surely a right"

It's Time to Nationalize Grocery Stores, says Richard Ralston at Capitalism Magazine. He makes as good a case for it as proponents of socialized medicine make for seizing the health care industry.

Some of his proposals include a new regime of "electronic food purchasing records," so that government can effectively monitor caloric intake, and a "Comparative Calorie and Taste Administration" to battle the scourge of unnecessary potato chip and beer brands.

Obama's Grand Rail Plans

"The president is envious of Europe's speedy railways," the story at ABC.com begins. He looks longingly at the public works projects of Europe, China and Japan, and yearns for the ability to bring high-speed rail travel to America.

Many are quick to point out the bad timing of such a project considering the economy, or the fact that the distance between America's large cities makes such plans unrealistic.

But consider for the moment the specific nature of the countries Obama looks to for guidance and hope, specifically China. This "investment" in high-speed rail is comparable to the public works projects of China for reasons deeper than just similarities in "government infrastructure spending."

To illustrate this, take a look back at a previous post about delays in rebuilding on Ground Zero. New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger lamented, in an NPR interview, that "commercial interests" were delaying both the memorial and general rebuilding efforts.

[NPR's] Siegel then compared the slow progress at Ground Zero with, of all things, the "enormous numbers of structures" erected by the Chinese government since 2001 for the 2008 Olympics, apparently with the point that the act of building shouldn't take that long. Goldberger replied that he was in Beijing too, and that it made him think that "democracy isn't always such a good thing for architecture." Then he laughed, caught himself, and tried to explain, as if he knew he had revealed too much.

It’s a good thing in general, and of course, we don’t want to lose it or trade it, {oh, of course!} but one of the prices we pay is that big projects take a long time. They create a huge amount of dissent in terms of public dialogue and so forth. In China, there was no discussion. It was simply ordained. And this is what would be, and it was. {bold added}

So there we have it. In essence, both men admire and yearn for the type of brutal, deadly steamrolling possible in a totalitarian society. The leftist who wants the state to employ force in the name of "the good" inherently assumes that the state would pursue the same good as he sees it.

Does this sound familiar? This perfectly describes the attitude behind Obama's proposal. He views "the societal good" as government providing high-speed mass transit for the unwashed proletariat citizenry, and sees himself as the Public's Heroic Steamroller. (Is that a steamroller for the public, or of the public?)

Going back to the ABC.com piece, they quoted him saying, while in Europe:

"I am always jealous about European trains," Obama said April 3 in Strasbourg, France. "And I said to myself, 'Why can't we have high-speed rail?' And so, we're investing in that as well."

He's jealous, realizes he can wish it into existence with the power of the state, and on whim says "let it be so." Back to the architecture critic and China's awesome power over the individual he so covets:

Rather than celebrating the fact that the World Trade Center was, and should be again, a thriving center of capitalism and productive energy, and that this would be the greatest monument and memorial possible, Goldberger wishes that we could be more like China. Rather than identifying government involvement as the problem, getting rid of the Port Authority and "public ownership", and then seeing what the real "timetable of the commercial world" is when private property rights are upheld, Goldberger wishes for the absolute power of the government to simply ordain a solution, bulldozing all buildings, objections, and individual rights that stand in its way.

Goldberger and Siegel unintentionally provide us with a clear picture of the conflict, and it's not the one they think it is.

On one side stands the founding principles of our Republic, chief among them the individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of our own happiness, the political system of capitalism that springs from those rights, and the blinding and unlimited wealth and progress that it all makes possible.

On the other side stands the admirers of the all-powerful State, those who long for the use of government force to crush all opposition and impose their own jaded view of the "public good" whether we like it or not.

Which side do you think is best equipped to build a proper memorial for the victims of the 9/11 attack and a monument to American greatness?

And which side do you think is best equipped to evaluate whether high-speed rail is a viable enterprise, and to make it actually work if it is? Capitalists left free to judge the market and invest of their own free will, without the crushing regulatory burden of the state? Or Obama and his magical vision of Amtrak II: No Seriously, It Will Work This Time, I Promise, and the inevitable steamrolling of private interests and rights that will result?

When you hear that the president is looking enviously to Europe or China as a beacon of progressive change, that's when the alarm bells should go off.  Being envious of China's public works projects really means being envious of the dictatorial power China holds over the individual.

Tea Party Roundup

Lots of updates are coming in from Objectivist bloggers about their experiences at Tea Party protests around the country. They're both inspiring and informative, so I'm going to collect as many as I can find and post them here.

I didn't attend the event here in Boston, though I would have liked to at least stop by. I've been debating whether this whole Tea Party "movement" will be successful at all (see yesterday's post). However, Myrhaf made a comment on the post about the Dallas event (see link below) that is interesting food for thought. He said:

Robert Tracinski says protests are important because they send politicians a message that is not being heard. If that is true, then given the liberal bias of the MSM, the Tea Party protests are the most important demonstrations of our time. They are far more important (and more moral) than the idiotic, nihilist violence of the anarchists who want to destroy capitalism.

Myrhaf is dead on with this statement of the moral superiority of these protests. Time will tell if his speculation about their historical importance is correct, but for now, let's focus on some of the good stuff that happened yesterday.

OBloggers at Tea Party Protests:

1. (Cleveland and Canton, OH) Tea Party Summary: Brian describes highly successful outreach efforts at two protests in Ohio, with photos and some good anecdotes. Summarizing his group's successes, he says, "In all, we handed out over 20 copies of Atlas Shrugged, over 40 copies of our booklet, and dozens of business cards. We got on a couple radio shows, one local TV news segment, and were interviewed by a small local newspaper, all to spread our name. And it’s working - the emails are already pouring in, with people interested in future meetups, book reviews, etc."


2. (Boise, ID) My 3.5 Minutes of Fame at a Tax Day Tea Party Protest: Greg Perkins from Noodlefood was the lead-off speaker at the Boise event! Only the last bit of his speech was captured in the video clip, but I recommend watching it if only for the cheer that goes up when he mentioned Atlas Shrugged. I never thought I'd hear something like that.


3. (Atlanta, GA) Tea Party Speech: Jenn attended the huge rally in Atlanta (note the pictures of her young ones) and a videotaped speech she gave was shown to the whole crowd.


4. (Dallas, TX) Atlas At Dallas Tea Party: Blogger dismuke attended the Dallas protest and noted that the speech of the even organizer "concluded by quoting John Galt’s oath: “I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” I was a little stunned that I was actually watching it."


5. (Denver, CO) Denver Tax Day Tea Party: Ari Armstrong has a series of posts about the protest in Denver, a lot of photos, and he says he'll have audio and/or video up soon.


6. (New York City, NY) Raising a teacup for freedom: Stella Daily was there, as said, "It was great to see that, even in this liberal-packed city, there were at least a few thousand people turned out to protest the government's outrageous spending spree."


7. (New York City, NY) New York Tea Party: Galileo Blogs carried signs in NYC, and said, "I was pleased overall by the event. It was remarkably secular. There were few references to God and the conservative Republicans only showed themselves in a tentative manner." I wonder if the events in the Midwest and South had the same secular quality? The Northeast is the most consistently secular area of the country, so I'd guess that was the reason few religious conservatives showed up. There just aren't very many of them in NYC.


8. (Denver, CO) Denver Tea Party: Diana showed up at the Denver protest with her willing assistant, Conrad.


9. (Boston, MA) Tax Day Tea Party '09: Jared Rhoads of The Lucidicus Project went to the second of two Boston protests. The first was around noon on Boston Common, and then there was a late afternoon protest at Christopher Columbus Park on the waterfront. This one was sponsored by (or at least promoted by) conservative talk radio station WTKK 96.9. I'm curious which protest had a bigger turnout.


10. (San Jose, CA) San Jose Tea Party: Kyle and Anne took photos of the San Jose rally, and took a number of good photos. Kyle also echoes what many are saying, namely that people are "very unhappy with where they see the country going, but they lack ideas to explain why the country is going that way. Lots of outrage, little reasoning." which of course highlights how important it is for Objectivists to provide the right ideas.


11. (San Jose, CA) T.E.A. Party: Beth has posted photos and comments about the San Jose protest, too.


12. (Tallahassee, FL) Tallahassee Tax Day Tea Party -- Report: Ardsgaine has lots of photos and comments about the event in Tallahassee, and he estimates roughly 1,500 people were there.
    


13. Take a look in the comments for updates from San Francisco and St. Louis.

I'll update this post if I find more write-ups. Leave a note in the comments if you find one I've missed.

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UPDATE: Doug Reich at The Rational Capitalist posted a reaction to the pitiful media coverage of the protests. He began the post with a sentence that I think should be the standard intro to any piece that catalogs the sad state of our biased media:

The news that the news doesn’t take the news seriously is not news.

Perfect!

What Would TJ Do?

It's obvious that the Founding Fathers would have more than just technological advances to be amazed at, if they were to see the United States today. They would barely be able to comprehend the role the federal government plays in our lives.

Many protesters will be out today, Tax Day, for the so-called "Tea Parties." Some will present a consistent moral case against the income tax and other government abuses of individual rights, but most will be lacking in that department. Jeff Scialabba at Voices for Reason said, "What unites the protesters is not a consistent intellectual outlook–they appear to hold a hodgepodge of viewpoints–but rather their anger at the alarming expansion of our government. To have real impact, they’ll need a consistent intellectual framework."

In the blog post quoted above was a link to a speech titled, “Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence,” given in March of 2007 by Onkar Ghate. At roughly the 9-minute mark, Ghate asks some hypothetical questions that really bring all of these issues into focus.

I call it the "What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?" argument. What follows is a brief transcription of a minute or so of Ghate's talk:

The Founding Fathers’ achievement is eroding. They would be shocked by the power that is now concentrated in the hands of the American government at the expense of the individual.

Can you imagine [Thomas] Jefferson submitting to building inspectors who would decide if Monticello is up to code? Or pleading with FDA officials to take an experimental drug that, according to his scientific judgment, is beneficial? Or allowing Social Security administrators to dictate how much he has to save for his retirement and where he has to invest it? Or, patiently watching the tax collector as he takes his money away and pours it down the aid drains of Africa?

Can you imagine him prostrating himself before the FCC who would determine if his broadcast content is obscene? Can you imagine Thomas Jefferson seeking government’s permission to smoke a cigarette in a restaurant, eat irradiated spinach, screw in an incandescent light bulb, or buy a trans-fatty french fry?

In the video, when Ghate asked whether Jefferson would submit to building inspectors at Monticello, he got a good laugh from the crowd. But as the examples continued, examples of outrages that we allow daily in our lives, the contrast between Jefferson's time and ours became more serious.

It is obvious that Jefferson would rage against such injustices because they are as wrong and as evil now as the tyranny he knew so well and fought so bravely against.

What Bastiat Might Say to Our Politicians

In a comment on a recent post, Holdren Channels Mr. Burns, commenter C. Andrew (no relation!) linked to a chapter from Frederic Bastiat's Economic Sophisms. Chapter I.7 A Petition is a biting argument from absurdity against protectionism, wherein Bastiat suggests that candlemakers and other industries around artificial lighting are suffering from unfair competition from the sun.

I took particular note of the first two paragraphs. There, Bastiat addresses his mock petition to his fellow members of the French Legislative Assembly in words that could easily, and should be leveled at our politicians and intellectuals of today:

You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for applying your—what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, and, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice—your practice without theory and without principle. [bold added]

How little things have changed since 1845. Bastiat was writing as his country was rushing headlong toward socialism, and was confronting men who refused to think in principle. We have plenty of that type in government now, and too few Bastiat's to stand up and challenge them.

Bottle Shock

The movie opens with panoramic scenes, zooming over the endless rolling hills of Napa Valley, the neat rows of vines strict, clean, neat, and yet curving sensuously with the contour of the hills. But whereas this common scene in movies -- the fine geometry of agricultural production seen from a distance -- usually sets the stage for a farm tale of the rural drudgery of food production, this is different. Think of acre upon acre of carefully tended vines, tied, pruned, watered and fed with painstaking effort, all for the goal of producing a sublimely unnecessary thing: wine, the bottled essence of human enjoyment.

So perhaps it isn't unnecessary at all, but a testament to man's capacity for joy and need for celebration of it. The undulating rows of vines spilling over the hills of Napa are the precise, harsh, calculating product of a man's mind dedicated to the creation of joy in a bottle.

This is what went through my mind as I sat watching the opening of Bottle Shock this weekend, though I realized I was setting myself up for disappointment with such romanticized thoughts.

The story starts with two converging plotlines. Napa winemaker Jim Barrett, who left a life in business (banking?) to pursue his dream of making wine, makes a good product, but has seen little commercial success and has multiple mortgages on his venture. It's presented that this season is his "last shot."

Meanwhile, a Brit named Steven Spurrier is shown in a small wine store in Paris as his business stagnates. An American friend says to him, "Part of being a business is that you actually have to sell wine." It's 1976, and American wines are the joke of the French establishment. Spurrier, holding the same opinion, nevertheless has a spark of inspiration and decides to hold a blind taste test competition in Paris, letting the best Napa wines compete with French wines. He travels to California to pick wines for the competition.

What follows is a light, sometimes funny, and nevertheless inspiring story of American ingenuity and commercial success. As a means of reviewing the movie, I'll go the unconventional route of using another review as a foil. It was reviewed at CineScene last year, and though it was a middle of the road positive review, some comments were enlightening.

...the spirit of Bottle Shock, a film by Randall Miller, ...seeks to present a wholly upbeat feel-good narrative. Beware, this is a movie that operates principally in the land of myth, where details are shifted to make a jauntier, tidier story. Bottle Shock isn't by any stretch a great film.

The reviewer accurately portrays that this is not a faithful documentary. It "operates in the land of myth," which means in this case that it is a selective re-creation of reality. I disagree that it was done only to make a "jauntier" story, however. The film is relentlessly positive about the value of hard work, innovation, pride, and business success. Ayn Rand said about art:

By a selective re-creation, art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. Out of the countless number of concretes—of single, disorganized and (seemingly) contradictory attributes, actions and entities—an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that represents an embodied abstraction.

In our culture, however, it's no surprise to hear the view that idealized, romanticized stories cannot make "great film." Instead, "realism" or more appropriately, naturalism, is prized. Again, from the CineScape review:

Bottle Shock works best if you look on its overdrawn characters, who have nothing of the depth of Sideways, as mere window dressing for the "historical" narrative--an attitude which, luckily, the story-arc justifies.

If you recall, Sideways was a giant indie-film hit, one that was full of neurotic, morally disgusting characters, a rambling pointless "plot" and awful sense-of-life. This is what passes for "depth." However, let me again mention that the review I'm quoting seems oddly sympathetic to what it would probably view as a naive outlook on life.

The virtue of the film is that it's not about the people so much as about Limousin oak, tapping casks, wine color, the wine-maker's art--and the most educated palates of France revealing that when they couldn't see the label, they found wine from the Napa Valley second to none. To trample on the movie's celebration of that triumph--even if its tone is a bit jingoistic-- would be rather unkind, especially if you're writing an hour's drive from where most of the action happens. [bold added]

It seems as if the reviewer secretly resonated with the life-affirming values portrayed in the film, but had to get in a dig just for good measure. "Jingoistic" here must be a code word for "too American and therefore hokey," or just simplifies everything down to a rivalry with France. Nevertheless, a perhaps grudging respect for the film's message comes through the review.

This movie was of the kind that could only be told in America; the entrepreneur chases a dream and knocks off the Old World establishment in a shocking and unpredictable (to the Old World) way.

My sense of what the movie could and should be, from the opening scenes, ended up being pretty much spot on. Yes, it was light fare, and some of the characters and plot threads were tied up too quickly, but as a fun, inspiring tale of the American sense-of-life, Bottle Shock was well worth the price of admission. My only frustration was that I didn't have a bottle of wine on hand to open up and enjoy while watching.

Holdren Channels Mr. Burns

I first heard about John Holdren's "climate hacking" ideas on NPR a few days ago. The short bit on Morning Edition described Holdren as saying that "we're near a tipping point" of catastrophic climate change, and we might have to take radical action. The two things listed were fake trees to vacuum up carbon and store it somehow (I thought real trees did that?) and shooting sulfur particles into the atmosphere, emulating a volcano, to block the sun's rays. There are some risks, such as burning off the ozone layer, but it's still an option that we must look into. Makes sense, right? Sure, we can't predict the weather accurately, even a few days out, but we have enough certainty to know that global warming is like being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

A couple Objectivist bloggers have weighed in on this topic already. Brian at Reality Talk notes the absurdity of it all:

In light of recent evidence suggesting that some part of global warming has been caused by cleaner air, which allows more sunlight to hit the Earth’s surface and the oceans, it should come as no surprise that President Obama’s new science advisor, John Holdren, would seriously consider pumping the atmosphere full of pollution particles. [links dropped, bold added]

Yup, the air is now too clean and we need to pollute it, on purpose, to save the planet.

Doug Reich digs deeper and finds fascinating parallels between the unfathomably irrational programs of brutal dictators like Mao -- the "Kill a Sparrow Campaign," and handing out fly swatters? -- and Holdren's radical geoengineering ideas. Read his whole post.

And this morning, James Taranto of the Wall St. Journal captured the pure insanity of the whole situation in his "Best of the Web" column. Under the heading, "Life Imitates The Simpsons," he writes:

Smithers: "Well, sir, you've certainly vanquished all your enemies: the elementary school, the local tavern, the old age home. You must be very proud."

Burns: "No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy the sun. Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing--block it out!" [bold added]

I can picture the crazed professor, John Holdren, cackling with spittle on his beard, as he cries, "Prepare to ignite the Holdren Volcano-izer! On my mark!... FIRE!"

Yes, this is a very serious issue, but sometimes gallows humor or a good quote from The Simpsons helps to retain sanity.

Survey of Obama's Critics on the Left

Camille Paglia at Salon.com

Responding to letters from readers, Paglia discusses Obama's first days in office, the brain trust around him, and his early "painful missteps." A reader asked about Paglia's earlier statement that Obama has been "ill-served by his advisors" and suggested that "the responsibility for their failures should be laid at the feet of the person who was ultimately responsible" for selecting them. Paglia responded:

You are absolutely correct! The buck stops with the top executive. ... For better or worse, Obama is learning as he goes -- and surely most fair-minded people would grant him reasonable leeway as he grows into the presidency, one of the hardest jobs in the world.

At a certain point, however, Obama will face an inescapable administrative crux. ...

Obama's staffing problems are blatant -- from that bleating boy of a treasury secretary to what appears to be a total vacuum where a chief of protocol should be. There has been one needless gaffe after another -- from the president's tacky appearance on a late-night comedy show to the kitsch gifts given to the British prime minister, followed by the sweater-clad first lady's over-familiarity with the queen and culminating in the jaw-dropping spectacle of a president of the United States bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia. Why was protest about the latter indignity confined to conservatives? The silence of the major media was a disgrace. But I attribute that embarrassing incident not to Obama's sinister or naive appeasement of the Muslim world but to a simple if costly breakdown in basic command of protocol. [emphasis added]

Paglia is ultimately too soft on Obama -- despite later mentioning the "bungled handling of the grotesquely swollen stimulus package" -- but it was interesting and refreshing to see a prominent figure from the Left call him out for his disgraceful dhimmitude.

Even more interesting is the flood of vitriol leveled at her by Salon.com commenters. For instance:

go away for God's sake
This is just too freaking much. Is this some sort of performance art? Are you a 'literary' Tony Clifton? 'Painful missteps'? THE GUY HAS 66 PERCENT APPROVAL and just conquered Europe! The onmly people in pain are Salon readers subjected to your crap and of course, your life-force jazz-musician-of-language, Limbaugh. Joan -- PLEASE stop this madness!!!
-- tangerine

Excuse me?
Who is this stupid woman, Camille, and why does she get to write such sophomoric drivel? My God! Having an opinion is one thing, but basing everything with a grade-school mentality is another. Let the grown-ups play here ....
-- Renman [misspelling and grammar from original comments]

Those were some of the comments without swearing or inarticulate ranting. I gather from some of the comments that Paglia is not seen as an ideal representative of the Left.

Steven Stark at the Boston Phoenix

At the Boston Phoenix blog, Stark Ravings, Steven Stark looks at the question of whether voters picked a Harvard Law grad (Obama) when the country needs a Yalie (Clinton). Responding to a New Republic article by Noam Scheiber about the same topic, Stark presents the options thusly:

He argues that different institutions produce different kinds of leaders, just as the military produces a different leadership style than, say, the political world. In a unique crisis like the present one, it makes all the difference what a leader's intellectual instincts are. And, taking off from where Scheiber began, it may well be that, at least now, Obama has exactly the opposite instincts we need.

It all has to do with how each of these two major institutions structures its approach to legal education and public policy. According to Scheiber, the much smaller Yale sees its mission ... to encourage its students to be more creative — "to unlock students' innate brilliance in an atmosphere of freedom, intimacy, and intellectual ferment."

In contrast, Scheiber wrote, Harvard was more formulaic and traditional, priding "itself on instilling discipline . . . [It] was, in certain respects, a three-year hazing ritual." And Obama "absorbed the dispassionate, conservative, relentlessly logical mode of analysis a Harvard legal education was meant to convey."

Stark accepts this thesis and justifies it in the following way:

What's needed is something new, dramatic, and unusual. All things being equal, a group of Yale Law graduates is likelier to come up with something outside the box than their Harvard counterparts.

That, in fact, is the lesson of the early days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration. At that time, Columbia Law School was the Yale of its era. In the 1920s and early 1930s, it was the center of the Legal Realist movement, with future New Dealers... on the faculty. ... Vastly oversimplifying, the Realists believed that the law was not something determinate but whatever any particular individuals (judges, legislators, etc.) decided at a particular time.

FDR, a fellow Columbian, relied heavily on a Columbia "Brain Trust"... when he constructed the largely experimental programs of the early New Deal. ...

Experimentation or the tried and true? Creativity or discipline? The truth is we need a mixture of both. But if one is to be preferred to the other, when the Democrats had a choice this past spring between a graduate of Harvard Law and a graduate of Yale Law — namely Hillary Clinton — did they pick the wrong school? [bold added]

So Stark's lesson from history is that FDR followed the "radical," "creative," and "dramatic" model, and that Obama's Harvard-ish "dispassionate" and "relentlessly logical mode" is the opposite of what the country needs right now.

I suppose he's right, that the Obama administration is following a "more... a LOT more... of the same old same old" model -- though it's anything but logical -- and is simply trying to crush the country with a dramatic expansion of the same programs that have been around for decades. But what Stark is suggesting is that the Left yearns for leadership that will come up with new, innovative, and "dramatic" ways to rip the beating heart of the country right out of its chest.

Apparently recycling New Deal ideas isn't enough. I'm left wondering, while shuddering... what would be enough?

Objectivist Roundup #91

Welcome to the April 9, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Roundup, your weekly dose of intellectual fuel and ammunition.

This roundup features posts by blog authors who are advocates of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. She called it a "philosophy for living on earth" -- as opposed to religious mysticism focused on some non-existent other world, or an ivory tower mishmash of conflicting ideas disconnected from reality and the lives of men.

The breathtaking scope of attacks on freedom and individual rights by the government of these United States, as well as similar attacks in other nations across the globe, is reflected in the content and tone of the posts listed below. As disastrous current events pile up, it's good to remember that ideas drive history and progress, and that is also reflected below. To quote Ayn Rand:

There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. ... If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice.
--Capitalism: The Unknown Idea (quoted in ARL)

History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating).
--Philosophy: Who Needs It (quoted in ARL)

With that in mind, we have both quality and quantity, so enjoy Objectivist Roundup #91!

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1. Rituparna Basu presents A Tax on the Pursuit of Happiness posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "President Obama’s first tax increase went into effect yesterday, in the form of the single greatest federal tax increase ever levied on cigarettes. Is it proper for Obama to discourage or encourage certain behavior through legislation?"


2. Zev Barnett presents Going John Galt and the Need for a Moral Defense for Capitalism by Zev Barnett -- Capitalism Magazine posted at Capitalism Magazine, saying, "For America to rise again she must fight the moral code that led us here. Altruism and its monstrous progeny, socialism, must be explicitly rejected. Rational selfishness and its freedom loving economic system—Capitalism—must be inviolably upheld. Do that and some day, looking in a mirror, we each of us may have an answer to that all important question, who is John Galt?"


3. Lucy Hugel presents National service bill makes 'volunteerism' compulsory - Midstate Editorials | Our Views and Yours with The Patriot-News posted at The Undercurrent Blog, saying, "The National Service Bill, recently passed by both house of Congress, will produce an explosion in the number of service programs. The goal of this legislation is profoundly un-American–-to instill an ethic of servitude in every citizen."


4. Ifat Glassman presents Jealousy and Self-Esteem posted at Psychology of Selfishness.


5. Rajesh Dhawan presents Growth of corruption equals decline in freedom posted at Objective extrospection, saying, "The discretionary powers given to government officials which violate the basic tenets of Capitalism have increasingly resulted in the chaotic economic mess the world finds itself in."


6. Tom Stelene presents Obama: By Interfering in Your Lives I Fulfill Mine posted at The Audacity of Independence, saying, "So where exactly, Comrade President, does your 'fulfilling' of your life by 'nobly' 'making a difference' in mine end, and my liberty to live my (not-boring) life begin?"


7. C. August presents Obama's Dream Team, Our Nightmare posted at Titanic Deck Chairs, saying, "An article in Time magazine details how behavioral economists - Sunstein, Thaler, Ariely, et. al - who helped nudge Obama into office, are now whispering in the ear of power. Prepare to be nudged, America."


8. Noah Stahl presents Broken Windows, Broken Principles posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "Our leaders in Washington have reacted to the economic downturn by enacting a flurry of new government spending initiatives including bailouts, "stimulus packages", and a vast new federal budget. The ultimate success of these policies–and the security of our economic futures–rest on a single premise, a wager made on a massive scale: that government spending can "stimulate" the economy and spark the renewed creation of wealth."


9. Diana Hsieh presents Good Calories, Bad Calories posted at NoodleFood, saying, "If you're interested in a detailed survey of the history and science of nutrition -- including the serious corruption introduced by government interference -- Gary Taubes' "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is the book for you."


10. Rajesh Dhawan presents Carbon footprint -bigger the better posted at Objective extrospection, saying, "America should be happy about its carbon footprint and say this with pride -mine is bigger than yours."


11. Roberto Sarrionandia presents The Prometheus Initiative posted at Tito's Blog, saying, "Announcing my new free books project in the UK"


12. Flibbert presents Sociopaths Against "Intuitionism" posted at Flibbertigibbet, saying, "The NY Objectivists started listening to the Ghate/Huemer ethics debate on Monday and part of our discussion was around the use of "intuition" as evidence or support for particular ethical claims. In this post, I discuss some of the ways we can attack this position when it is presented -- and sociopaths can help. No, really."


13. Gus Van Horn presents Gettin' Write with Jesus? posted at Gus Van Horn, saying, "What has happened to the 'science' in 'science fiction', anyway?"


14. Ari Armstrong presents Woods '05: 'Nothing to Apologize For' posted at FreeColorado.com, saying, "Thomas E. Woods, author of Meltdown and an associate of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, also used to belong to and write for the racist and theocratic League of the South. To what extent has he distanced himself from his older views?"


15. Brian presents Atlas Shrugged, Paine, Shlaes at Record Sales posted at Reality Talk, saying, "Some might say that people are simply impulse buying based on media recommendations, and won't seriously consider the book. Well, there is some evidence that that is not the case."


16. Grant Jones presents Ayn Rand: Objectively Speaking posted at The Dougout, saying, "This post is a short review of a recently release collection of interviews of Ayn Rand."


17. Ryan Krause presents You Want I Should Exchange Our Convertible Bonds for Equity, Boss? posted at The Money Speech, saying, "See who's been put in charge of manhandling your pseudo-capitalist companies."


18. Paul Hsieh presents FROG Media Output: Winter 2008-2009 posted at NoodleFood, saying, "Front Range Objectivist Group (FROG) members had a good past few months with respect to spreading our ideas in the mainstream media - including 18 published OpEds, 27 LTEs and 7 radio/TV appearances."


19. Miranda Barzey presents Expanding the ARC's Reach posted at Ramen & Rand, saying, "A quick run-through of how I think multimedia visuals can be effectively used by the Ayn Rand Center to expand the reach of Objectivism."


20. Daniel presents Objectivist Blog Directory posted at The Nearby Pen, saying, "This post briefly reviews the sites of 20 (active) Objectivist bloggers--hopefully increasing click-throughs to their sites and sending the curious to the most frequently updated blogs..."


21. Grant Jones presents Obama Hits New Low posted at The Dougout, saying, "One more, Obambi hits new low, refuses to visit Normandy Beach."


22. Stella presents Poison pen letters from the FDA posted at ReasonPharm, saying, "Google ads from pharma companies are now, effectively, banned. Thanks, FDA."


23. Monica presents Unfortunately, NOT an April Fool's Joke posted at FA-RM, saying, "The Brits have reached a new level of nanny state insanity: a door to door program to advise citizens on how to reduce food waste for mitigation of "climate change." Let's not let this happen in America."


24. Edward Cline presents Of Obama and Obeisance posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "More disgusting than former President George W. Bush holding the hand of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (when the latter was but a “crown prince”) on Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch years ago, was the signature demonstration of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy when he bowed before the king at the G20 meeting in London and presumably kissed that same hand. This was an uncalled-for gesture on the part of a man who poses as a friend of the “unwashed masses” but who apparently experiences a “high” when hobnobbing with the rich and powerful."


25. Adam Reed presents Collaboration: Getting Ayn Rand 180-Degrees Wrong posted at Born to Identify, saying, "Ayn Rand wrote: "In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins." What is one to make of wannabe-"Objectivists" who would collaborate with the likes of Michelle Malkin?"

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That concludes this edition of the Objectivist Roundup. Next week's host is Tito at Tito's Blog. Submit your blog article to the Objectivist Roundup using our carnival submission form.

Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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