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.

AIG Bonuses and Retention Contracts -- A Proposed Solution

This morning on NPR's radio program, All Things Considered, host Steve Inskeep spoke with a law professor about the legal arguments in support of AIG's claim that they must honor the controversial 2008 retention bonuses. The key points raised were that

1. they have a binding contract to pay the bonuses,
2. retaining essential employees is crucial as they try to get out of the mess they are in,
3. letting people go could send a negative message to the market and make it harder to bring in other good people, and
4. one possible result is that losing key people can give customers a legal option to withdraw all of their funds, thus pulling the rug out from under AIG at the worst possible time.

It was even mentioned that the point of the retention bonuses is to keep the brainpower in the company.

The arguments on the other side -- in support of the government's contention that they should be able to keep AIG from paying bonuses -- essentially amounted to the fact that it's caused a political firestorm and looks really bad.

So AIG and the government are at loggerheads. The government feels that it can't allow the bonuses to go through because the "taxpayers are hoppin' mad," but AIG has to keep its key people, even if it could get out of its contract to pay them. What are they to do?

It struck me as I listened to the interview that there is a very easy solution: Force the AIG employees to stay in their jobs! Compel the best minds, under the threat of imprisonment, to stay at AIG and keep working. It's perfect! The bonuses can be "recouped", the politicians can save face, and AIG can keep its key people.

The first iteration of this new rule -- let's call it Directive 10-289 -- will have just two points, and should do a great job of keeping AIG in place and the politicians happy:

Point One. All workers, wage earners and employees of any kind whatsoever shall henceforth be attached to their jobs and shall not leave nor be dismissed nor change employment, under penalty of a term in jail. The penalty shall be determined by the Unification Board, such Board to be appointed by the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources. All persons reaching the age of twenty-one shall report to the Unification Board, which shall assign them to where, in its opinion, their services will best serve the interests of the nation.

Point Two. All industrial, commercial, manufacturing and business establishments of any nature whatsoever shall henceforth remain in operation, and the owners of such establishments shall not quit nor leave nor retire, nor close, sell or transfer their business, under pentalty of the nationalization of their establishment and of any and all of their property.

I wouldn't presume to tell people like Barney Frank what they should do, as I'm sure he has already thought of this measure and has his people working on a draft bill, but I thought I'd raise this option all the same.

Atlas Sales Track With Government Interventions

A recent article in The Economist discusses the rising sales of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and shows how they have been spiking when the government makes an assault on the free market.

Tellingly, the spikes in the novel’s sales coincide with the news (see chart). The first jump, in September 2007, followed dramatic interest-rate cuts by central banks, and the Bank of England’s bail-out of Northern Rock, a troubled mortgage lender. The October 2007 rise happened two days after the Bush Administration announced an initiative to coax banks to assist subprime borrowers. A year later, sales of the book rose after America’s Treasury said that it would use a big chunk of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme to buy stakes in nine large banks. Debate over Mr Obama’s stimulus plan in January gave the book another lift. And sales leapt once again when the stimulus plan passed and Mr Obama announced a new mortgage-modification plan.

The accompanying chart is perhaps even more compelling because the spikes are so pronounced:The article also mentions that Atlas briefly surpassed Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope in the Amazon best seller rankings. Right now, Obama's book is #49 and Atlas Shrugged is #61. But I wonder if these figures are truly indicative the the popularity of either book. They only rank specific versions of a book.

It is only the mass market paperback version of Audacity that is ranked #49. The hardcover edition is #1,017. The "nice paperback" edition (the bigger, nicer edition) is #4,087.

It is the nice paperback version of Atlas that is ranked #61. The hardcover edition is #130, and the mass market edition is #203. Think about that. Three different versions of the book are in (roughly) the top 200 selling books on Amazon. That is amazing.

I would be very interested to see Amazon combine the sales numbers of all the different formats for a book -- print, audio CD, Kindle, etc. -- because I think it would be a much more accurate accounting of the relative popularity of each title.

Amazon also has best-seller lists for different categories of books, and the "classic fiction" category is amusing. Three print versions of Atlas Shrugged are numbers 1-3, the Atlas Shrugged (Cliffs Notes) (by Andrew Bernstein) is #20, and yet another paperback version is #44. The Fountainhead is #6, #27, and #76.

It is a great testament to the ideas presented in these novels that not only are the sales of the books still so high (and they continue to climb) over 50 years after they were published, but also that people are turning to those ideas to understand what they sense is going wrong in the world. Perhaps they will learn that the dangers they see aren't new, but that they are the same destructive forces that have been plaguing mankind for millennia -- namely altruisim, mysticism, and statism -- and that any hope for a solution relies on the ideas of reason, self-interest, and laissez-faire capitalism.


[HT: Boaz Arad]

100 Books (plus 10)

Because I'm a stick-in-the-mud and a fuddy-duddy, I rarely do these types of lists. It's one of the reasons I don't really like FaceBook. Also, you kids get off my lawn!

That said, this list of 100 books was kind of fun and gratifying to do. I first saw it at RationalJenn and 3-Ring-Binder.

Here's how you play 100 Books:

• Bold those you have read.
• Italicize those you intend to read.
• Strike out those you will never, ever read. (my little addition to this exercise)

Note: watching the movie doesn’t count.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Currently reading for the first time with my 5 yr old)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Read some of both the old and new, using a historical – i.e. secular – study guide. It was moderately interesting.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Does reading most of them over the course of a few decades count?)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Oh how I wish I could un-read this book. Though for cultural knowledge of my enemies, I suppose it has some value.)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (This, plus the other 5 books in the series... I've probably read the whole series 4 times. I also read the "prequels" by Herbert's son, but they are really not very good.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (I tried to read it and got about 1/3 of the way on three different occassions, and have no intention of trying again.)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (I tried to read this a few times, forgetting each time why I stopped after the first 20 pages. Just pure crap.)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

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Not a bad showing, and I find it interesting that I have so few itallicized titles. From that list, I've read most everything I want to. And there are a lot I will never pick up.

Now, what of the glaring omissions and the overall weirdness of the list? I read in the comments on RationalJenn's post that this list is likely from The Guardian (UK) and that rings a bell. I detect a strong British slant in the list--way too much Dickens and Austen (though I can forgive the Austen). There are very few prominent American novels, and their absence is glaring in light of the fact that things like "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is there. I know this isn't a "100 Best Books of All Time" list, but seriously? Mitch Albom?

Where are (for good or for bad):

1) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
2) The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
3) For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
4) Sophie's Choice - William Styron
5) The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
6) Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
7) The Foundation Series - Isaac Asimov
8) Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
9) The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
10) The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

I'm sure I'm missing some other good/bad/important ones, but at the very least the addition of these ten would pad my numbers make a better list.

Nepal Has a Republic. Now What?

They have thrown off the yoke of tyranny. With almost no bloodshed, the Nepalese have removed their monarch from power, turned his palace into a museum, and have established a nascent republic. From an AFP article, we learn of these heroic words:

Veteran republican activist Ramraja Prasad Singh was visiting the sprawling palace grounds for a third time, but the first as a free man.

"I was here as a prisoner twice before," said the 73-year-old, who bombed royal statues in Kathmandu in 1985. "King Mahendra saw me when I was brought in as a prisoner in 1971. He tried to buy me off and I told him I was not for sale," said Singh.

For Singh, the event marked the end of a long road that began in the early 1960s when he started to campaign for Nepal to become a republic.

"My whole aim, my mission in life has been to overthrow the monarchy. I never wanted to be anybody's subject or slave," he said. "I never actually believed this day would come."

These are some noble words. Any student of American history might immediately see a kinship here. From the Times of India, we get this account:

"I had read a book that said there are upheavals when momentous changes take place," [Prime Minister] Koirala said, referring to Ayn Rand's influential novel 'Atlas Shrugged'. "I don't know whether the ground shook or not but all eyes are on Nepal for setting a unique example of instituting a republic without any bloodshed."

What's missing from this account, however, is what a republic means to the Nepalese. They have overthrown the monarchy and are going to replace it with... what, exactly?

By the Communist Party of Nepal -- backed by armed gangs of Maoist youth -- and 20 some odd other political parties, vying for power and control, trading barbs and blame. From another AFP article:

...Nepal's mainstream parties argue it is too early to hand over full power to the Maoists, and insist that the peace process has not been completed. Koirala's Nepali Congress, the second largest party in the constitutional assembly, has laid down a set of preconditions that the ex-rebels must meet before it will back them in government.

"They have to give back the land and property they seized during the conflict," senior Nepali Congress official Arjun Narsingh Khatri Chettri told AFP.

The Maoists' feared youth wing -- who face constant accusations of using mafia-like tactics -- "are an organised group of goons who have been creating anarchy," and must be disbanded, the politician said.

The result is that with the king ousted, Nepal is drifting along with an interim constitution, interim head of state and interim government.

Meanwhile, some former Maoists are hanging onto their guns until the situation clears. [bold added]

There appear to be no fundamental principles advocated by any of the players in this farce, except perhaps bad ones by the communists. The holdouts from the old government are hoping that the Maoists will give back the land they seized. The absurdity of this is amazing. The whole point of communism is full-scale seizure of all property to be redistributed to "the people". I predict that begging by the bourgeois to have their land back won't have much of an effect.

Instead of a true revolution and an establishment of an independent republic--a government of laws and not of men--founded on core principles of individual rights, the Nepalese "revolution" has as its prime movers those who might yearn for something closer to a Soviet-style "socialist republic". It doesn't take much of a stretch to predict it will soon after devolve into a totalitarian dictatorship led by a military junta much like Burma/Myanmar.

One can assume that there is very little real opposition to this, and the loudest contrary words are from those who beg for the return of seized lands. To whom they should be returned is unknown, because it's doubtful there was any form of property rights prior to the downfall of the monarchy.

Without a political philosophy founded on individual rights, as has been the case in all other "revolutions" in recent memory, I fear this situation will quickly be distilled to its essence: the rule of men, by thugs, for thugs. When that happens, unless "Veteran republican activist Ramraja Prasad Singh" is on the "right" side of the pull equation, he's going to face much worse than he did under the previous kings.

Atlas Shrugged 9th in Harris Poll

The 2008 Harris Poll is out, and Atlas Shrugged comes in at #9 in the list of "Favorite books of all time." The #1 book in America? You guessed it... the Bible. From a poll of 2,513 US adults, the list is:

1. The Bible
2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
3. Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
5. The Stand, by Stephen King
6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
7. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
8. Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
9. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
10. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The details of the Harris poll can be found here, including a breakout of the results by age, sex and race, education level, etc.

Considering the content of the the list, I am both heartened that Atlas Shrugged is ranked, and discouraged at the heavy leaning toward religion (see italicized items in the list) or fantasy. Should we be optimistic that Atlas made it despite the preponderance of religious mysticism, or disappointed that not only does the average American still think this way, but also that this viewpoint appears to be growing?

I suppose my answer to that either/or question is... yes.

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A note about the Harris poll and other polls like this... I wasn't able to find any lists from past years, either by Harris or other pollsters. I'm curious how this type of "favorite book" list has changed over time, so if anyone has any links to resources, please post them in the comments.