On Health Care and Chicken Kiev

A British doctor asks in today's WSJ, "Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?" Although he is somewhat mistaken, or at least imprecise in the formulation of his answer, he covers some of the key essentials:

If there is a right to health care, someone has the duty to provide it. Inevitably, that “someone” is the government. Concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion. [bold added]

While I think adding the concept of "duty" and assigning it to the government muddies the central thrust of the argument, he correctly identifies that the only way government can live up to this "duty" is by "constant coercion." The problem I have with this particular line of reasoning is that by focusing on duty, he ignores who is being coerced, namely medical professionals primarily, as well as the individual customers, but in light of the rest of his article this is a minor criticism.

Theordore Dalrymple (a pen name) goes on to make some very good points, such as attacking the notion that health care is somehow a special class of good that is an essential precondition for human survival, by comparing it to food and shelter, saying, "everyone agrees that hunger is a bad thing (as is overeating), but few suppose there is a right to a healthy, balanced diet..."

Ultimately, his argument suffers because he does not define the nature of individual rights and why the assertion of a "positive" right to a good provided by someone else is a fundamental violation of individual rights. Still, his examples of the British system are instructional and foreboding considering the path America is on, and he also gets in some great pithy comments.

The government-run health-care system—which in the U.K. is believed to be the necessary institutional corollary to an inalienable right to health care—has pauperized the entire population. This is not to say that in every last case the treatment is bad: A pauper may be well or badly treated, according to the inclination, temperament and abilities of those providing the treatment. But a pauper must accept what he is given.

Universality is closely allied as an ideal, ideologically, to that of equality. But equality is not desirable in itself. To provide everyone with the same bad quality of care would satisfy the demand for equality. (Not coincidentally, British survival rates for cancer and heart disease are much below those of other European countries, where patients need to make at least some payment for their care.)

In any case, the universality of government health care in pursuance of the abstract right to it in Britain has not ensured equality. After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe.

There is no right to health care—any more than there is a right to chicken Kiev every second Thursday of the month. [bold added]

Again, not a perfect argument overall, but very good, and the simple statement that "there is no right to health care" is one that needs to be shouted from the rooftops. Now, we just need someone who knows Dalrymple to send him a copy of Leonard Peikoff's "Health Care is Not a Right." Imagine how much stronger this already good article would be if he could fully defend a free market in health care, and the individual rights upon which such a market depends.

Target's Free Market Health Care Innovation

Mark Perry at CARPE DIEM posted a photo he took at his local Super Target, which was advertising $29 physicals for kids' camps and sports. He writes:

So while President Obama and politicians in Washington dream up the latest grandiose government health care reform to address rising health care costs, the most effective, affordable and convenient health care solutions might be right around the corner at your local Target store.

He notes that the clinic is open nearly 70 hours per week, and then shows the list of other services provided, from minor illnesses like ear ache to stitch removal to vaccinations to TB screening, all ranging in price from $29 to $69. He then asks:

Q: In places like Canada and UK with government health care, would this type of affordable, convenient, walk-in, free-market alternative even be allowed?

The obvious implication is, if Obamacare is passed, will this type of alternative be outlawed?

And the not-so-obvious implication is, if we had a truly free market in health care, how much cheaper would such a clinic be than this, how many more services might it provide, what amazing new technologies and drugs might be available (portable, cheap MRIs, OTC cancer drugs genetically targeted to your tumor while you shop for t-shirts and garden supplies)...?

Basically, imagine the best, most amazing advances you can with prices lower than seems possible, and then go twice as far down that path. Target's small offering--likely based on Wal-Mart's moves in this market--is but a tiny taste of what America's health care could be like if the government got out of the way.

Smooth Seas Ahead for Somali Pirates

Mark Helprin writes a satirical letter to the Somali pirates, posing as a Washington-based consultancy, and advising the pirates on the potential threats to their "enterprises" posed by America and other Western nations.

It's a sadly true commentary on the pitiful, self-sacrificial state of our country's foreign policy, which has eroded beyond all recognition from the time of the Monroe Doctrine. Helprin lays out the full military capability that could be employed to eradicate the pirates, and then says, referencing Jefferson's war with the Barbary pirates:

As daunting as all this may seem, we believe that you may conduct your business relatively unimpeded for some time to come. When the United States had only a tiny fraction of the naval capability it now has, the small and vulnerable forces it sent to deal with pirates of equal or greater military power performed with legendary bravery and daring. That was then.

He later concludes with this excellently phrased and damning critique--though he doesn't name it explicitly--of an altruistic foreign policy.

The powers that should be a threat to you are caught in a paralyzing web of abstract legalities, deference to hostile opinion, and even in the clearest cases a perverse contempt for self-defense, which rules out the ability effectively to define, prepare for, justify, and execute it—and execute you. You would think that if you fire upon our ships we would fire back. But those days are over, and you have prosperous times ahead. [bold added]

Read the whole disappointing, disheartening thing. If you're like me, it will make you shake your head in disgust at the moral cowardice and unprincipled actions of those who guide our foreign policy.

Case Study: The Failure of a Conservative's Defense of Rights

A columnist at The American Thinker argued against the idea that health care is a right, and even attempted a definition of rights. That in itself, in a conservative forum, deserves notice. The author, Rich Hrebic, was then interviewed on the Rush Limbaugh radio show, and Rush applauded him for his definition of rights.

So what did he say?

Isn't the point of the Democrats' push to reform the health care system based on establishing health care as a right? That's what the politicians say of course. But in reality the result will be the exact opposite.

Part of the problem is that most Americans don't understand what a right is. A right is not a guarantee that the government (i.e., other people) will provide you something for free. ...

What makes something a right is not whether the government can force somebody else to pay for it. What defines something as a right is whether the government can or cannot prohibit you from doing it. ... If the government can't stop you from doing it, then it's a right. [emphasis in orig.]

Unfortunately, this simply doesn't cut it. The general thrust is good--health care is not a right--but the defense of individual rights is severely lacking. I and Ed Cline replied, and my first comment follows his; my #19 to his #18. Mine says:

Posted by: C. August
Jul 22, 11:33 AM

I applaud you for raising the question of "what is a right?" but your definition is not a satisfactory defense, certainly not in the face of ever-increasing violations of individual rights.

You said, "If the government can't stop you from doing it, then it's a right." But what is this based on? _Why_ can't the government stop you from doing certain things? I presume this refers to constitutionally guaranteed rights and/or laws on the books, but what happens when an amendment is passed that specifically violates individual rights, stopping you from doing something which you have a natural right to do? How would you fight that with your concept of rights?

Rather than being granted by the government or springing from society, individual rights are based on the nature of man as a rational, volitional being who must think and act to further his life, and who has sole claim to the product of those efforts. The fundamental individual rights from which all others are derived are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. The only proper role of government is the protection of those rights. (It should be quite obvious that the country has moved a long way from that proper role.)

As Ayn Rand wrote [aynrandlexicon.com]:

"The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness means man’s right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as he respects the same right in others. It means that Man cannot be forced to devote his life to the happiness of another man nor of any number of other men. It means that the collective cannot decide what is to be the purpose of a man’s existence nor prescribe his choice of happiness."

And in the _Virtue of Selfishness_ she wrote:

"[A man's right to his own life] is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave."

This is the formulation of the concept of individual rights that is needed to defend against the erosion of our liberties. Simply referring to what the government can't prevent you from doing opens the door for it to pass more laws that further restrict individual freedom.

To Ed's comment and mine, the author, Rich Hrebic, responded:

Posted by: Rich Hrebic
Jul 22, 04:34 PM

Thanks to all for their thoughtful comments.

In response to Kelly, Cline and August:

I happen to agree with the Objectivist definition of rights, but that is not the only accepted definition. A right can be defined in terms of a just moral claim, as Rand did. But it can also be understood as a just legal claim.

I chose to argue my point based on the legal rather than the moral context for several reasons. In my short essay I wanted to persuade people who were sitting on the fence. These people are typically unfamiliar with Objectivsm or Natural Law theory. And I didn't want to get into defending Rand's (or anyone else's) moral principles as that would divert me from my main point.

Arguing based on the legal formulation of rights has the advantage that I don't have to defend what we can legally do or not do. Those are questions of fact, not of opinion.

Furthermore in common parlance most people understand what winning or losing a right means in practical terms. For example women "won" the right to vote when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Everyone understands what that means.

However winning or losing a right in the Randian sense is meaningless. A right in this context is a just moral claim and still exists as such whether the government respects it or not. An African slave in the antebellum South would still have had the right to be free in the Randian (moral) sense, but clearly not in the legal sense.

Again I am in agreement with the Objectivist definition of rights. However as a tactical choice I felt that the legal definition could make my point more concisely and convince a broader group of people.

The main point of my article is that, contrary to what its proponents claim, universal health care is not a protection of our rights but rather an infringement of them.

Thanks again for reading.

- Rich

There was likely only minimal value in addressing the rationalistic arguments as presented, but as I had some free time, I decided that on the off chance that some active minds happened upon the discussion, I wanted to at least have an answer posted, no matter what other comments were added later.

This was my response:

Posted by: C. August
Jul 22, 06:44 PM

Rich, thanks for your thoughtful reply. I'd like to briefly address just a couple of your points.

You said you chose to make your argument "based on the legal formulation of rights" because it served your purposes better, and that any questions about this "are questions of fact, not of opinion." I fully understand the need to speak to your particular audience, and to tailor an argument appropriately; that is an admirable tactic. But, if I understand what you mean here, you are looking to the law of the land--the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and all legal precedent--as the "fact[s]" instead of referencing the fundamental nature of individual rights.

The problem with this line of thought is that, as anyone familiar with the Kelo decision could point out, the decisions of the various branches of government that comprise the law of the land can be quite arbitrary, and ultimately result in a horribly unjust action and violation of man's most basic rights. This is what I meant when I asked in my earlier comment, "what happens when an amendment is passed that specifically violates individual rights, stopping you from doing something which you have a natural right to do? How would you fight that with your concept of rights?"

Furthermore, "winning or losing a right in the Randian sense" is most definitely _not_ meaningless. Winning the *recognition* of a right from the government is a profound victory, and one that is as "practical" as you assert is "winning the right" itself. Plus, it has the benefit of reinforcing the idea that rights are _ours_, inalienably, and winning one just means getting the behemoth government to begrudgingly recognize it.

Moving on: "However as a tactical choice I felt that the legal definition could make my point more concisely and convince a broader group of people. "

Again, I appreciate the need to speak to your specific audience, but the problem with an argument from non-essentials like the "legal definition of rights" is that it doesn't give your new "broader group of people" the tools to understand _why_ healthcare is not a right, and why, to say it is a right, means that those who provide it are essentially slaves to the healthcare needs of others.

Instead, it just says "they say it is a right, and I say it isn't, but you should believe *me* because I'm pointing to laws." This does a disservice to those out there looking for substantial answers, and ultimately sabotages your goals of defending individual rights--which I assume is your ultimate goal (an admirable one, by the way).

A modification of an old saying is apropos here: "You can lead a man to knowledge but you can't make him think." Giving men a baseless answer without the proper grounding in political philosophy may suggest that there might be an answer somewhere, but it won't ultimately help them reach it.

Soon after this, a number of other commenters chimed in, ignoring the fundamental arguments that preceded them, arguing around the same non-defense of rights. No surprise there. But for anyone paying attention, with an active mind, they should notice which arguments pushed Hrebic to respond ("methinks he protesteth too much"). Such people might draw the conclusion that Hrebic implicitly conceded that the Objectivist position is the only right one, and he simply chose to make a compromise in the mistaken interest of practicality.

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UPDATE: added closing comments and minor edits - 7/23/09

Portland's Unholy Alliance of Evangelicals and Progressives

"Stereotypes simply don't apply these days in Portland, Ore.," writes a USA Today blogger. He describes a recent development where conservative Christian evangelicals--of the mega-church variety--have partnered with one of the most progressive cities in the country, for the "second annual Season of Service, a church-city partnership to serve the homeless and other suffering people."

To set the stage, he describes Portland this way:

This city, it would seem, is the last place where evangelical Christianity would show its brightest colors. The Rose City sports an ultrasecular reputation. ... Regional land and transportation planning is so progressive that conservative pundit George Will has likened the Portland ethos to a disease, worrying in a column about it "metastasizing" to other parts of the country. [bold added]

How has evangelical Christianity wormed its way into a secular city? The author spends much of the second half of his piece describing how the mega-church has done it, saying things like "history teaches that the church is often at its vibrant best in competitive, pluralistic environments," and attributing its recent success with its non-preachy outreach efforts. Before he gets into the boring details, however, he unwittingly touches upon the much more fundamental issue of why a progressive city could happily partner with their supposed cultural nemeses, the evangelicals, and what this means for the future of Christianity in our culture:

Although Portland is hardly the only place where evangelical Christianity is evolving (and making new friends in the process), there is little doubt that evangelicals here are on the front end of a deep-change trend that is taking Christianity into its new future. What's especially interesting is the "why?" — the strong likelihood that Christianity's best face is showing up here in the unchurched mecca not in spite of the city's secularism and skepticism, but because of them. [emphasis in original]

It should not be surprising that the moral vacuum created by the nihilism of the left--the "city's secularism and skepticism" noted by the author--is driving people to the only alternative they know of: Christian altruism. That the progressives in this example are already gleefully practicing altruists, added to the fact that man requires moral standards whether he recognizes that fact or not, means that the denial of any objective moral code by the progressives makes them ripe candidates to be subsumed by their more philosophically consistent brethren. Of course, the Christians don't offer an objective moral code grounded in the facts of reality and the nature of man--only rational egoism is such an objective moral code--but because progressives deny the existence of objective truth to begin with...

The author holds that Christianity's "best face" is consistent self-sacrifice, service, and "preaching through idealistic action rather than pious words," and that this is the current transformation Evangelicalism is undergoing. By being less preachy, they are more acceptable to secular skeptics. Because they both share sacrifice of the one to the many as the moral ideal, they are thus more willing to create "church-city partnership[s]."

Although this concept is similar to the government-church integration implicit in the "Faith-Based Organizations" introduced by George Bush, this "church-city partnership" is different in two crucial aspects: its grassroots, independent nature, and the fact that it is happening in one of the most leftist cities in the country. This phrase should chill the blood of anyone who values liberty. It shows the path to theocracy. When we add in the other trend of merging environmentalism and Christianity (the "stewards of the earth" idea), the picture that emerges is truly frightening.

Saxby v. Sunstein - He musta looked 'im in the eye

At the end of June, I posted a brief note about Senator Saxby Chambliss holding up the nomination of Cass Sunstein because Sunstein has advocated for animal rights and the outlandish idea that humans should be able to bring suit on behalf of animals, as well as against the right to bear arms.

I didn't hold out much hope for the block, however, because it was completely devoid of principle. I trust you're not surprised. As I said in that earlier post:

While I applaud Chambliss for blocking the nomination -- at least for now, because he said he wants to talk to him before lifting his blockade, as "He has not had the opportunity to look me in the eye," whatever good that will do -- because he has not done so in any principled fashion ... Chambliss' stand will very likely end in compromise (i.e. failure).

Such is the inevitable outcome of Republicans' inability to understand or stand for individual rights. Unless and until they do, they will continue to fail.

This was not a tough prediction to make. My only surprise is that it has taken over two weeks for Chambliss to compromise and fail (from CongressDaily):

Senate Agriculture ranking member Saxby Chambliss announced Wednesday that he is lifting a hold he placed on the nomination of Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, President Obama's pick to head OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

"I am not gonna keep him from confirmation and I intend to lift my hold," Chambliss said on the Senate floor.

Saxby and Cass had a nice sit down, apparently, which gave Cass the chance to "look him in the eye." Perhaps they even had a nice laugh, talked about the weather, and discussed their favorite sports teams. Oh, and Sunstein also wrote a letter disavowing all of his radical positions on the key issues that Chambliss and his pull peddlers lobbyists were concerned about. From the same CongressDaily piece:

[Chambliss] cited a letter from Sunstein pledging not to "take any steps to promote litigation on behalf of animals" and agreeing the law does not give animals such rights. Sunstein in the letter also says he believes the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms.

This reminds me of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings, and Myrhaf's comments about them. You should read the whole thing, but these snippets are particularly apt:

It’s remarkable to hear Sonia Sotomayor walk away from every postmodern/multiculturalist statement she has made....

It’s pretty obvious to critics from across the spectrum that she is lying. Like the President who nominated her, she will tell any lie in the quest for power. This seems to be SOP for the New Left, and is most troubling. Those capable of destroying the truth are capable of any enormity.

It’s fascinating to me how little integrity radical subjectivists have. If I were sitting before a hearing and I firmly believed a legal philosophy, there is no way I could disavow what I believe to win a nomination. ... But my beliefs are grounded in reality. I hold that there are absolutes, that A is A, and that reason can identify reality. Sotomayor, as a postmodern subjectivist, believes none of this.

Simply replace Sotomayor's name with Sunstein's, and it applies just as well. In fact, I'd guess that nearly every Obama nominee going through confirmation hearings uses the same playbook. What we then witness is the battle between the spineless, soulless, mindless conservatives, and the power-lusting, subjectivist, postmodern, "intellectual" leftists, with the ultimate result of compromise, glad-handing, meaningless theatrics, and the inevitable erosion of our liberties.

Ayn Rand's hero, John Galt, said in Atlas Shrugged that "in any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win." What happens when the compromise is between a little poison and a lot?

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UPDATE: 7/17/09 @2:00pm

A blog at the Atlanta Journal Constitution has the following juicy quote from Chambliss that is too telling, too fascinatingly horrific, to pass up:

Chambliss introduced Sunstein to several agbusiness groups. “Most of those folks have become satisfied that he didn’t really mean what he said,” Chambliss recounted, and that — if he did — the law professor did not intend to pursue his aims. [bold added]

Are you comforted? Sunstein said all of those things, many times, in many books, articles, and speeches, over the course of nearly two decades, but he didn't really mean any of them. This is just like he didn't really mean that we should have an Internet fairness doctrine, or that the Internet is a serious foe of democracy.

If there is anything else that makes you uncomfortable about Sunstein's positions, just have your Senator ask about it, and I'm sure Sunstein will confirm that he no longer thinks what you thought he thought, or that you misunderstood him, and he never thought that in the first place.

Debates on the Founding Era - Part 2

In the last post, a commenter asked why the "apparent omission" of mention of individual rights in the Constitution, which was also one of the questions Uttles asked all along. My reply was long, so I'm reposting it here (edited slightly). The quotes I pulled bear directly on many of the issues discussed previously, and though they are long, I think all of the text is relevant to the debate.

What follows is part of the political and historical context of what the framers thought and argued for. It is crucial also to keep in mind the explicit and implicit philosophical and moral context of the time, the climax of the American Enlightenment, and the following from Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallelssets that context well:

The Americans were political revolutionaries but not ethical revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism, they remained explicitly within the standard European tradition, avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty...

The American Enlightenment, like the European, came to an abrupt end. "Its ideas were soon repudiated or corrupted," writes Herbert Schneider, "its plans for the future were buried, and there followed on its heels a thorough and passionate reaction against its ideals and assumptions." It was a reaction prepared for by the Enlightenment itself, by its own philosophic deficiencies, by the seeds it had nourished and allowed to sprout—the seeds of an irrationalism it was not equipped to combat and an altruism it predominantly endorsed.

With this philosophical context, it is easier to interpret the historical context, and identify 1) what the framers thought about rights, 2) why they thought it unnecessary and perhaps even counterproductive to include specific protections in the Constitution, and 3) that even if they had written a rock-solid defense of individual rights it would have been a floating abstraction, and not a strong enough protection from undermining by their contradictory premises and the mounting philosophic war that was to soon come from Europe.

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I found some good historical quotes and notes in Miracle At Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May - September 1787 by Catherine Drinker Bowen.This book details the debates, including quotations from all the members of the Convention and other relevant items from the press and other quarters. The following quotes are from the chapter about the rejection of a Bill of Rights (Ch. 21, pp 244-248):

When the Constitution was published in the newspapers… and the Antifederalists gathered their strength for opposition, nothing created such an uproar as the lack of a bill of rights. What had the Convention been thinking of, to neglect a matter so elementary, so much a part of the heritage of free people?

The Convention’s stand, however, was reasonable, if mistaken. No delegate had been against such rights. Merely they considered the Constitution covered the matter as it stood. And when… Pinckney and Gerry moved for a declaration “that the liberty of the press should be inviolably observed,” Roger Sherman said at once it was unnecessary; the power of Congress did not extend to the press. Seven to four the states again voted no.

There is a fascination in reading the delegates’ later defense of their position. To Alexander Hamilton a bill of rights was more than unnecessary. It would be dangerous, he said. “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power [in Congress] to do?” Hamilton argued that bills of rights originally were stipulations between kings and their subjects, like Magna Carta, which was “obtained by the barons, sword in hand, from King John.” Whereas in the American government the people, having surrendered nothing and retained everything, have no need of particular reservations.

So here we see it put forth that the specific rights need not be enumerated because it was assumed that the Constitution was a strict bound for action that Congress could take, and nothing more. All rights not mentioned were held by individuals. This is essentially the argument given in the 9th amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The Constitution was, in their mind, was a basic list of instructions for creating the forms of government, and did not require more grand statements that, as Hamilton said, “would sound much better in a treatise of ethics than in a constitution of government.” Further quoting Bowen:

The new Constitution in [James] Wilson’s view was not a body of fundamental law which would require a statement of natural rights. Rather it was municipal law, positive law… Not a declaration of eternal rights but a code for reference.

Quite evidently the Federal Convention looked on its work as practical, everyday business; all along they had avoided high-flown phrases about the rights of man. Such rights, John Dickinson was to argue… “must be preserved by soundness of sense on honesty of hears.” Compared with these qualities, what, he demanded, are bills of rights? “Do we want to be reminded that the sun enlightens, warms, invigorates, and cheers” or how horrid it would be, to have his blessed beams intercepted, by our being thrust into mines or dungeons” Liberty is the sun of society, and Rights are the beams.”

Liberty is like the sun, and Rights follow naturally as beams of sunshine. They are in the very air, these men said, so why should we list them? The Constitution only describes the very few things that the government may do, and nothing else.

That being said, others did see something insidious afoot, or were prescient about the slow creeping of tyranny.

In Portland, Maine, a printer name Thomas Wait… maintained “there was a certain darkness, duplicity and studies ambiguity of expression running through the whole Constitution which renders a bill of rights peculiarly necessary. As it now stands, but very few individuals do or ever will understand it, consequently Congress will be its own interpreter.”

To this, Bowen says that arguments like this were only responses to ideas that were too new, and “minds offended by novelty are apt to complain of darkness or ambiguity in matters not yet digested.” Of course, we know that Wait was unfortunately very correct.

One of Patrick Henry’s fellow Virginians provides a good conclusion to this investigation. As Bowen writes:

With charity and much perceptive good sense, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, a congressman—no member of the Convention and fiercely anti-Constitutionalist—excused the Convention’s fault concerning a bill of rights. Lee said that when men have long and early understood certain matters as the common concerns of the country, they are apt to suppose these things are understood by others and need not be expressed. … The framers looked upon the Constitution as a bill of rights in itself; all its provisions were for a free people and a people responsible. Why, therefore, enumerate the things that Congress must not do?

In the end, they all thought that individual rights were as plain as the nose on your face, and the culture was such that it was inconceivable that there could come a time when the government would not protect them. Americans had made it out of Plato’s cave. Who in their right mind would go back in?

Of course they were wrong, but also, they simply lacked the knowledge to better ground the theory of individual rights in reality. Ayn Rand said (paraphrasing and recalling from memory… if anyone can find a reference please let me know) that she could not have developed her philosophy without the example of the Industrial Revolution. I take this to mean that seeing the example of near free market capitalism helped concretize the value of liberty that previous philosophers were only able to vaguely imagine.

So I come back to my initial assessment that the Founders accomplished something amazing and they deserve our thanks for the amount of freedom and prosperity their works afforded us. But now, armed with more complete knowledge, we need to carry on the fight if we are to fully secure our liberties.

Debates on the Founding Era

I had no idea posting the video of John Ridpath's talk about Patrick Henry would incite such a debate, but it did. For five days, a blogger named Uttles and I have been debating, sometimes contentiously, the merits of the Constitution and the motives of the men who wrote it.

I think it has been a very interesting exchange of ideas, and so I'm going to reproduce it here so it doesn't languish in the obscurity of buried comments. With some parts of the comments redacted -- where we sniped at each other a bit -- here are the (perhaps ongoing) C. August vs. Uttles debates.

[Update: see Part 2 of these debates]

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Uttles said... 7/9/09 5:28 PM
Patrick Henry is my hero. I watched this speech and I don't think it did Henry justice. Yes, it did tell about a lot of the great things he did, but it didn't focus on the great things he's not recognized for. The passage of the Bill of Rights is wholly due to Henry, this is true, but the constitution is still a flawed document that has allowed such things as the Sherman Act, The Federal Reserve Act, the Income Tax Amendment, etc, etc, etc. The constitution did not go far enough to protect individual rights and Henry knew it. He gave a great many speeches before, during, and after the Virginia ratification convention outlining the many reasons that the constitution was itself anti-federal, and why it destroyed individual rights. The great tragedy of our time is that we all think the constitution instituted liberty when in fact it destroyed it.


C. August said... 7/10/09 1:11 PM
Your statement about the Constitution has me wondering if you're not evaluating it in the correct historical and philosophical context. You said that people "think the constitution instituted liberty when in fact it destroyed it," but that statement is based on what I think are some major misconceptions. In my view, that notion ignores the facts of reality and the state of knowledge of the foundation and source of individual rights that the Founders had.

As Peikoff said, to paraphrase, America was founded with an amazingly good political system, but built on a wobbly foundation.

The Founders looked to the natural rights thought of Locke and others, who based their theory of natural rights on their supposed "god-given" existence. So they held an implicit individual rights-respecting philosophy in their politics, but explicitly advocated Christian altruism as the ideal. These contradictions -- ones that weren't resolved until Ayn Rand just 50 years ago -- also showed up in the Constitution.

You can't on one hand laud the Founders for establishing the first moral society and government on earth which sprouted unprecedented freedom and prosperity for generations, and on the other hand fault them for not having knowledge which wouldn't be available for another 200 years. Their accomplishments, Henry's and the rest, were the pinnacle of human achievement at the time. For that they deserve the justice of our deep appreciation.

Their contradictions and the insidious forces of anti-life philosophies proceeded to erode the wobbly base upon which the Founders built the political protections of our liberties, to the point where today they are under great peril. But their ideas and the government they created were vulnerable precisely because they lacked the knowledge that wouldn't come for 200 years.

I agree that this seems tragic... it was so close, so agonizingly close, and the success that did happen was a testament to how close to being right they were. But now we have the knowledge, and it's time to work to fully reclaim the liberties that Henry fought for.

All I'm saying, to sum up, is that we owe the Founders their due, including for the creation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but because we are armed with greater knowledge due to Ayn Rand's works, we can identify and fix the problems they couldn't solve.


Uttles said... 7/11/09 12:00 AM
First off, let me say that I do not have the time to study this enough to be considered an expert, but about 6 months ago I did read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and Son of Thunder (about Patrick Henry - my favorite anti-federalist.) It was at that time that I drew my conclusions about the Constitution.

Having said that:

You can't on one hand laud the Founders for establishing the first moral society and government on earth which sprouted unprecedented freedom and prosperity for generations, and on the other hand fault them for not having knowledge which wouldn't be available for another 200 years.

I disagree with this. The founders clearly had the knowledge or the Declaration of Independence wouldn't have been written the way it was. Sure, they didn't identify it as Objectivism and yes they did make reference to a creator but more importantly they identified our rights as natural, inseparable from our lives.

My theory on the chain of events is this: The new found wealth of the gentry class in the colonies was in jeopardy with the crown issuing more and more edicts governing trade, culminating in the stamp act. The ruling elite (who were not capitalists by any means, they were the pull peddlers and pull profiteers using the might of the British governors to their advantage) were fine with that silly college boy Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence because they had seen in the reactions of the people to "Common Sense" how that language got the regular folks all fired up and ready to fight, but when the war went on for years and the colonists actually won it the reality struck them that they were now faced with a country full of individualists who wanted to have complete control of their lives. This would mean that their most dreaded enemy, an able competitor free of the shackles of government, could take them down.

So a compromise was made. Instead of constructing a government for the sole purpose of protecting individual rights (as the Declaration states so succinctly) they decided to allow each one of the states full sovereignty so that they could in fact govern their people however they wanted to. This is when the Articles of Confederation were instituted. Those articles contained no language whatsoever about individual rights.

It then became apparent that the large monied interests in certain states were not able to effectively control their customers in other states. This was mainly the banks vs the farmers as the banks were using currency manipulation to put the farmers into a state of perpetual indentured servitude (kind of like how everyone in America is now an indentured servant to the government.) So then, they invented a crisis here and a crisis there along with imagined foreign crises to scare the people into amending the original Articles. Never let a good crisis go to waste, right?

Only they didn't amend the Articles. As is what happens in any compromise situation, evil always wins. They came back to the table and pulled a bait and switch. Neither Jefferson nor Henry were able to make it to the new convention, so they had little barriers for their new plan: centralized power completely overruling the state governments and having no specific protections of individual rights: The US Constitution.

To see what I'm talking about in all of its obvious glory, just look at these two intros:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

and

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Now, can you honestly say the constitution was created to protect our individual rights? I say it was created to erode them. Why else would they have had to add 10 amendments to the thing to outline certain rights that the people should have? Because they didn't want the people to actually have them, but they had to get Patrick Henry to shut up somehow, so they "let" us have a few derivative rights, but not the natural rights of free men.


C. August said... 7/14/09 6:38 AM
I have read arguments from both the Federalist and Anti-Federalist (Democratic Republican) sides, and I generally come down on the latter's side of the debate. However, as I have said before, they all suffered under a lack of knowledge of the metaphysical grounding of rights, of the understanding that rational egoism is the only valid and just moral system, and even of the science of economics and that laissez-faire capitalism is the proper political and economic system. Even Jefferson employed mercantilistic policies against the British, restraining trade and thus violating individual American's rights. This is because they didn't fully grasp the contradictions between their explicit (altruism) and implicit (egoism) moral codes.

Where you see some sort of grand plan by the authors of the Constitution (and apparently all the states that ratified it?) to actively destroy the liberties that they had all just fought a long and horrific war to secure, I see honest mistakes and a general context of knowledge that lacked certain fundamentals.

Philosophy and ideas shape history, and we're seeing today the failure of the culture to continue progressing from the contradictions present in the founding era, towards the full, proud embrace of rational egoism. Now that we know, because of Ayn Rand, the proper philosophical foundation for rights and what political system fully protects them, we can pursue it to secure those rights. But pointing to the difference between the Declaration and the Constitution and asserting that everyone should have grasped the true nature of individual rights by reading the Declaration is absurd. It took Ayn Rand, 200 years later, to figure that all out.


Uttles said... 7/14/09 10:17 AM
Your entire argument rests on the notion that the founders had nothing but good intentions and the only reason they didn't explicitly define and protect individual rights in the constitution is that they didn't understand objectivist philosophy and its ramifications.

To me, that argument is clearly false. Obviously they hadn't discovered Objectivism (I wish they had) but they had discovered the importance of individual rights, as well as the consequences. Evidence of this exists in the writings of the day, from Paine to Henry to Jefferson and on. There were many invocations of individual rights throughout the prominent pamphlets and essays of the time, including Brutus, the anonymous Farmer, etc.

So for some reason, the members of the convention that created the constitution decided to omit any such declaration or definition of individual rights (despite Jefferson's great work on the Declaration.) It is not factually correct to say they omitted this because of ignorance. So then why did they?

Look at the circumstances of the individuals who created the constitution and you will see.

Also remember that many scare tactics were used to get states to ratify the constitution, including threats of revolts, indian attacks, British reprisals, etc, etc. Also remember that it wasn't a vote of the individuals within a state that was required for ratification, and that the individuals in each state were represented by those who were voted in by a strictly limited electorate.

Again I am not sure of the mechanisms of this process... conspiracy, fear, lack of conviction, political expediency, debt pressures... I don't know. I doubt much written history of anything negative on the part of the Founders would have been allowed to survive this long anyway - history is written by the winners. The point is that the result, the product of the founders, tells you everything you need to know. The constitution had to be amended immediately to include the slightest notion of individual rights, a patronizingly short list of derivative rights from life, liberty, and property, and this is a tragedy that mere ignorance could not have afforded.


C. August said... 7/14/09 11:14 AM
I understand what you're saying, and you make good points about the conflicting pressures the founders had to address. I'd also add the concern they had in looking at how the ancients fared in creating their governments: they did not want to repeat the mistakes of the Greek city states, or of the Roman republic. And, they were concerned with the very real threat from Europe.

In this situation, the framers of the Constitution set out to figure out how to construct a government that would unite the states which were essentially at economic war with one another, and that would "secure the blessings of liberty." In that context, they held the moral truths of individual rights as self-evident, which means that they didn't need to be fleshed out... they were obvious and everyone agreed on them. Obviously, they were wrong.

They also operated under conflicting moral codes. I think you are simply not giving enough credit to this crucial fact. That is the "wobbly base" I mentioned earlier, and you'll see where I got that idea in the following quote.

Leonard Peikoff wrote, in the Ominous Parallels (p 118, end of Ch. 5):

Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.

The signs of the conflict and of the toll it was to exact from the distinctively American political approach were evident at the beginning. They were evident in Jefferson's proposal for free public education; in Paine's advocacy of a number of governmental welfare functions; in Franklin's view that an individual has no right to his "superfluous" property, which the public may dispose of as it chooses, "whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition"; etc.
...

Philosophically, America was born a profound anomaly: a solid political structure erected on a tottering base.

The Founding Fathers did not know that the era in which they lived and fought and planned was on the threshold of yielding to its antipode. They did not know that they had snatched a country from the jaws of history at the last possible moment. They did not know that, even as they struggles to bring the new nation into existence, its philosophic gravediggers were already at work, cashing in on the period's contradictions: in the very decade in which the Founding Fathers were publishing their momentous documents, Kant was publishing his.

Symbolically, this is America's philosophical conflict, running through all the years of its subsequent history. The conflict is: the Declaration of Independence, with everything it presupposes, against the Critique of Pure Reason, with everything to which it leads.

You may be right that some of the framers of the Constitution had bad intentions -- and here, I can only assume that you have Hamilton fixed in your mind as one of the villains -- but I think even Hamilton actually believed what he was doing was right. And in the absence of a better argument than "rights come from God and are unalienable," there was little more than a conflict of opinions.

Even had they asked Patrick Henry to write the Constitution with a full enumeration of rights, just like we might hope to have, the seeds of philosophical destruction were already sown in the wider culture. Because they could not ground individual rights in their proper metaphysical base and recognize egoism as the proper morality for man, they were vulnerable to attack. A better Constitution may have warded off the decline a bit longer, but that document in itself could not have protected the culture as a whole.

History has shown that calling individual rights self-evident is not a proper defense of them against their philosophic enemies. That "tottering base" is the cause, and we're now dealing with the effects.

More Thoughts on Scipio Africanus

Although the title of this post refers to Scipio, I'm more concerned now with his historians. In my previous Scipio-related post, I described B.H. Liddell Hart as "a good historian." Upon reading Dr. John Lewis' book review of another work on Scipio, I have my doubts as to how good he was.

Dr. Lewis reviewed Richard A. Gabriel's Scipio Africanus: Rome's Greatest Generalin the Michigan War Studies Review, and he has this to say about Scipio, Gabriel, and Hart:

Richard Gabriel, a retired U.S. army officer and a distinguished and prolific military historian, has set out to correct a historical injustice: the misunderstanding and neglect that is often the fate of great military commanders. There is a plethora of books on Hannibal, who launched a war of conquest and was defeated, but no current scholarly biography of the genius who defeated him. B.H. Liddell Hart's 1926 Scipio Africanus: A Greater than Napoleon was written in defiance of the anti-Scipionic, pro-Hannibalic works then flooding the market, but as Gabriel notes, that work is neither scholarly, accurate, nor comprehensive. ... Gabriel has crafted an energetic narrative that remains true to the evidence. He stresses Scipio's stature as "Rome's Greatest General," without falling into conjecture or unsupported encomium. [bold added]

So, while Scipio is still deserving of more positive treatment than he has generally received, it seems that the only historical work I have read about him was overly gushing and inaccurate in places.

Dr. Lewis notes that Gabriel's book "exposes inconsistencies in the major sources—Polybius gets some dressing down, while the poetic Punica of Silius Italicus is given a bit more credence than it deserves—and then presents commonsensical solutions to the problems that arise." I had intended to read Polybius next, but I think I'll get more out of Gabriel's treatment, and will then be better armed to tackle Polybius with a more critical eye.

Considering the positive review by a man I know to be an expert, it looks like I have another book to add to my reading list!

ARCTV - Ridpath on Patrick Henry

Thanks to Myrhaf for making me aware of a video posted to the relatively new ARCTV. (new to me, at least)

John Ridpath, in February of 2004, gave a speech detailing the history and many shining moments of Patrick Henry, one of America's greatest heroes. To paraphrase something B.H. Liddell Hart wrote about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus:

For proof of this claim look at the progressive and co-ordinated steps by which, starting from the valley in America's darkest hour as the storm clouds of the British menace gathered, Patrick Henry climbs steadily and surely upwards to the summit of his aims, and plants America's flag on the sunlit peaks of freedom. Henry is a mountaineer, not a mere athlete of liberty. The vision that selects his line of approach, and the oratorical gifts which enable him to surmount obstacles, are for him what rock-craft is to a climber.

This video by Dr. Ridpath is incredibly moving. He gets choked up speaking about the greatness of the man, and I got choked up watching it. Watch the video by clicking on the image below. You won't regret it.

Alan Reynolds, the Answer to CAFE is NOT Taxes

In his WSJ Opinion piece today, Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute gives proponents of free market capitalism whiplash, and in the headline and sub-head alone. "Fuel Standards Are Killing GM" ...he writes. Great! Get rid of CAFE! I'm on board with that, but then, in the next breath... "A higher gas tax is a better way to get green cars on the road."

No, no, NO! Just for a sanity check, I took a quick look at the Cato web site, and noted that Reynolds should probably review the tagline of his organization: "Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace." /shaking head/

Reynolds recognizes that CAFE as it stands does not work, and specifically for GM, it's disastrous:

...only those companies most successful in selling the smallest cars with the smallest engines will, in the future, be allowed to sell the more profitable larger pickups and SUVs and more powerful luxury and sports cars.
...

GM accounted for about 19% of vehicle sales so far this year, but the company had a much smaller share of the market for small cars and SUVs (which accounted for 20% of total sales through May). To continue offering a Toyota-like array of larger cars and trucks under ever-tighter CAFE rules, GM would have to capture a much larger share of the market for small and/or diesel-powered vehicles.

General Motors does produce competitive cars and trucks, but not one of them is small. [bold added]

GM's only competitive strength is in the type of cars 1) that American's want (go figure!) and 2) that politicians think are bad. Does this make Alan Reynolds question whether the government has any business at all in dictating fuel standards or anything else? Of course not.

But wait! He then says

General Motors is likely to become profitable only if it is allowed to specialize in what it does best -- namely, midsize and large sedans, sports cars, pickup trucks and SUVs. The company can't possibly afford to scrap billions of dollars of equipment used to produce its best vehicles simply to please politicians... [bold added]

Another ray of hope, soon to be dashed on the rocks of pragmatism (i.e. being a slave to the "practical" with no recognition that any kind of fundamental principle should be adhered to). Here it comes...

As a matter of practical politics, rescuing GM from strangulation by CAFE will require offering economically literate environmentalists a greener alternative, i.e., one that works. Luckily, the government has two policy tools that, with minor modifications, really could discourage people from buying the least fuel-efficient vehicles.

One is the federal excise tax on "gas guzzlers"...

Second... to stop distorting consumer choices, simply apply the same 24-cent-a-gallon federal tax to gasoline and ethanol as we do to diesel. [bold added]

This is a mind-blowingly stupid argument, especially coming from a senior fellow at an organization that is supposed to support free markets. It's clear that Reynolds supports nothing of the sort, and sees no contradiction between free markets and the interventionist, extortionist policies he advocates. It may also be interesting to pick apart that previous quote, simply because it is so rich in idiocy.

First is the obvious pragmatic focus on "practical politics" and doing what "works." I have attacked this method of thinking countless times in the blog. Just search for pragmatism if you're interested.

Second, he said "economically literate environmentalists." If that isn't an oxymoron, I don't know what is (sorry... couldn't resist)

Third is the part where he says that "government... policy... really could discourage people from buying the least fuel-efficient vehicles." Am I missing something, or did he spend the first half of his article discussing how GM's best competitive edge in the market are those same inefficient vehicles he wants government to discourage?

Is he assuming that, while GM may not be able to break into the small car market, they'll be able to profitably turn their larger, marketable vehicles into fuel-efficient ones, and yet retain the power and features that make Americans buy them in the first place?

And even worse, from someone who should defend free markets, why is Reynolds not questioning the absurdity and evil of the government making these dictates on the market in the first place?

Finally, look at this sentence: "To stop distorting consumer choices, simply apply the same 24-cent-a-gallon federal tax to gasoline and ethanol as we do to diesel." Here, Reynolds acknowledges that consumer choices are being distorted by oddities in which fuel is taxed at what rate, but he doesn't seem to grasp that what he is proposing is doing the same damn thing to car production and purchasing decisions!

Sorry, but this article has me quite frustrated and angry. I normally don't abuse the bold and italics buttons this much.... But let's end on a low note. If you're wondering what grand conclusions this guy reaches, here you go:

The bottom line is that CAFE standards are totally unenforceable and ineffective. Regardless of how much damage the rules do to GM and Chrysler, Americans can and will continue to buy big and fast vehicles from German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indian car companies. CAFE standards might just be another foolhardy regulatory nuisance -- were it not for the fact that they could easily prove fatally dangerous for any auto maker overly dependent on the uniquely overregulated U.S. market.

The bottom line is not the impracticality of CAFE standards, but that they have no right to exist in the first place because they violate the property rights of the auto producers.

He recognizes that if CAFE kills GM, we will still buy big cars from foreign companies, so he advocates raising taxes to nudge us away from it, thus violating our property rights.

And finally, he sees that the U.S. market is overregulated, and yet he proposes taxes to take their place, ignorant of the crucial thing that regulations and taxes have in common, that they both violate property rights.

This is one confused man, and he is no defender of free markets. In fact, under the auspices of a group like Cato, this type of thinking will do more harm to the cause of liberty and free markets than someone who openly argues for socialism.