King Crimson - Elephant Talk

King Crimson is one of my very favorite bands, on a short list with Yes, ELP, and of course, Rush. I played drums when I was a kid, and I was viscerally drawn to the intricate texture and rhythmic complexity of Robert Fripp's imagination. The group evolved dramatically over time, but this tune is from my favorite period: the Fripp-Belew-Levin-Bruford era.

Just Take the Blue Pill, Lady

The newspaper headlines today declared the new recommendation. A typical woman should start breast cancer screening only at fifty years of age instead of forty. This new guideline, issued by the federal government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, is ostensibly intended to prevent harm from “overtreatment.”

Not for an instant do I trust this recommendation.

My mistrust has nothing to do with the medical evidence, of which I have no opinion, one way or the other. The guidance might be correct, or it might not be. I have no specialized knowledge in that field, so I cannot judge the matter directly.

The reason I do not trust the recommendation is that it comes from the federal government. No specialized knowledge is required to observe that Congress and the Obama administration are taking over the American health care industry, one piece at a time. It is currently dismantling what remained of private medical insurance, and in doing so, will essentially control the purse strings of what is already a heavily regulated medical industry. With the fathomless complexity typical of a mammoth bureaucracy (particular one that wishes to conceal the nature of its intentions), the federal government will in the end fix the prices that doctors, hospitals, and drug companies may charge for products and services, and will control the distribution of those medical services.

History and logic indicate that such freedom-suffocating activities have a one hundred per cent chance of driving American medical care into the ground, and the Obama administration seems to be at least dimly aware that it must anticipate some drastic cost cutting. After all, one cannot stride so confidently and blindly in the dark like Barack Obama has without bumping one’s shins into reality from time to time. We have already seen Mr. Obama qua medical dictator blithely prescribing the blue pill instead of the red pill.[Note 1.] It is not hard to imagine this Chicago political boss “persuading” his government panel to significantly reduce the recommended number of mammograms required by American women; all the panel had to do was change one little number. The next step will be to use this recommendation to set the maximum number of mammograms that will be paid for by Obama’s national health insurance plan, which in turn will make it impossible or illegal for an ordinary woman to get a yearly mammogram. Such services, considered basic in relatively free countries, will thus become luxuries in America, available only to those who have an “in” with a politician or to those wealthy enough to travel to another country for the service.

It has always amazed me how much trust the general public puts in government recommendations of this sort. The group in this case, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, is characterized as an “independent panel of experts in prevention and private care appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.”[Note 2.] But what exactly is this group independent of? The implication is that they are independent of individuals and corporations that have a vested interest in the guidelines. However, what the panel is entirely dependent upon for its existence is the federal government, an institution that has absolutely no incentive to meet consumer demands. The panel is independent of responsibility and accountability.

This naive trust in government is equalled only by the distrust in private individuals and corporations. Considering the incalculable life-advancing benefits that freedom has made possible, I would find the suspicion of unfettered men and the general anti-corporate sentiment of the public to be completely incomprehensible but for one fact: Americans obviously spend far more time watching movies and television than they spend studying history and economics. In a free market, the very existence of a business requires it to exert every effort to please its customers. Companies cannot, with impunity, make promises or recommendations that are not consonant with reality.[Note 3.]

If Americans want to stop the hemorrhaging of liberty in this country, we will do well to stop demonizing the businessmen who treat us like customers and start questioning the motives of the politicians who treat us like serfs.

NOTES

1. In an ABC News interview with Dr. Timothy Johnson, Mr. Obama said, “What I've proposed is that we have a panel of medical experts that are making determinations about what protocols are appropriate for what diseases. There's going to be some disagreement, but if there's broad agreement that, in this situation the blue pill works better than the red pill, and it turns out the blue pills are half as expensive as the red pill, then we want to make sure that doctors and patients have that information available to them.”

The sheer dishonesty of this short passage is manifest. Obviously, if an individual deems a particular pill to be both better and cheaper than an alternative, he does not need the government to jam it down his throat. Mr. Obama’s obvious intention is to soften resistance to the prospect of government panels making these decisions.

2. “Panel Urges Mammograms at 50, Not 40,” The New York Times, 16 Nov 2009.

3. Of course, when companies in a mixed economy like our own mingle or collude with the government, the free market is surrendered, along with its prosperity and justice.

UPDATE

I fixed a minor typographical error: The phrase "number of mammograms" was supposed to be "recommended number of mammograms."

Gounod - Sanctus from Saint Cecilia Mass

I recently did something I have never done before or ever expected to do: I joined a Christmas choral group. I am completely over my head - I can read music and sort of carry a tune but I don't know how to sing and have never done so outside of my home or my car. But life is short, so why not try it? Besides, Lynne is in the group too (and is also over her head!), so it's fun to sing with her.

Among the songs we are singing is the Sanctus from Charles Gounod's Saint Cecilia Mass. On YouTube, I found this stunning rendition with tenor Michael Fabiano.

Massacre at Fort Hood

I like the “Today’s Headlines” email feature that the New York Times provides free for the asking. The daily post starts with links to three top stories and a quotation of the day, this last of which is generally intended to pique interest in one of the headline stories.

So, I find it interesting that on a day when more and more alarming details emerge about the connections between the Fort Hood murderer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, and virulently anti-American Muslims, the daily quote that the New York Times chose to present was this:

“Whether it’s self-medicating, anger or violence, these are the consequences of war, and you have to think about all the people affected by soldiers coming home, the parents, spouses, children, brothers, sisters, aunts and cousins.” - Cynthia Thomas, an Army wife who runs a private assistance center for soldiers in Killeen, Tex., called Under the Hood Café.[Note 1.]

Are we supposed to infer that this is the source of last week’s massacre at Fort Hood?

Obviously, there are very real troubles related to suicide and violence among returning soldiers, who have undergone stresses unimaginable to those of us who have not seen combat. These are serious problems that deserve attention, and it is perfectly appropriate for a newspaper to run an article on the topic. But the presence of this quote on this day, along with the accompanying story, “At Fort Hood, Some Violence Is Too Familiar,” leaves little doubt that the Times is pressing hard to scatter some chaff, the purpose being to direct attention away from Hasan’s Muslim connection and to make this atrocity seem like just one more in a series of violent acts by American soldiers.

Is Nadal Malik Hasan really the typical troubled soldier with post-traumatic stress, as the Times would have us believe? Maj. Hasan had not returned from combat; he had never been deployed. He was himself a psychiatrist. While his fellow American soldiers were fighting in the field, Hasan was busy surfing radical Islamist web sites urging Muslims to kill U.S. Troops; he had been in occasional contact (“10 to 20 times”) with an Islamist spiritual leader in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who had previously been the imam of Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center, the Virginia mosque attended by Hasan. (Awlaki, who knew three of the September 11 hijackers, had “drawn the interest of law-enforcement officials in several terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.”[Note 2.])

Hasan did not quietly and desperately commit suicide as tragically ten American soldiers have done this year alone at Fort Hood. He did not kill his wife and then turn the gun on himself, as happened in one awful incident at Fort Hood last year. He did not kill a fellow member of his division in a moment of violence at a party, as did a soldier last July.

No, Maj. Hasan systematically shot forty-three of his fellow American soldiers, killing thirteen of them while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

Because there is no indication that Maj. Hasan was part of a conspiracy - and perhaps also out of obedience to political correctness - the incident is not being classified as a terrorist attack. But his actions, with their apparent jihadist motive, the plodding pre-meditation, and the sheer casualties of his final fury, have much more in common with say, the attack on the USS Cole than with the violence of a distraught soldier. In fact, if one looks clearly at the matter, Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan acted much less like a soldier (no matter how troubled) of the United States Army than as an enemy of the United States.

If the New York Times had wanted to capture the essence of the Fort Hood massacre, they would have done better to select for the daily quote the words of the imam that Hasan had contacted. Anwar al-Awlaki wrote on his web site, following the incident, that Hasan was a “hero”:

“He is a man of conscience who could not bear living a contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people . . . The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.” - Anwar al-Awlaki.[Note 3.]

NOTES

1. From the “Today’s Headlines” email distribution, The New York Times, 10 Nov 2009.

2. “Hasan, Radical Cleric Had Contact,” The Wall Street Journal, 10 Nov 2009.

3. “U.S. Knew of Suspect’s Tie to Radical Cleric,” The New York Times, 9 Nov 2009.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall - Twenty Years Later

To commemorate the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 Nov 1989, here is an interview with Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate.

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 11

(Note: This is Part 11 in the series started here. The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #11:

Without God nothing is holy. This is definitional. Holiness emanates from a belief in the holy. This explains, for example, the far more widespread acceptance of public cursing in secular society than in religious society. To the religious, there is holy speech and profane speech. In much of secular society the very notion of profane speech is mocked. [Note 1.]

If Mr. Prager is speaking of the strictly religious definition of the word holy - namely, revered due to association with God - then as he says, it is a matter of definition. Without God nothing is holy. Also true: Without man nothing is manly, without fruit nothing is fruity, without red nothing is scarlet, etc. The point is trivial.

However, his elaboration and example - sacred speech versus profanity - indicates he is speaking of the more general concept of reverence, which is not necessarily religious. I’ll return to this point in a moment, but first I have a couple of points to make about profanity itself, since he introduced the topic.

The reason that public cursing has much more widespread acceptance in secular societies than in religious ones is that only secular societies are free. That is, societies that accept public profanity are societies that permit profanity, along with all other forms of speech.

There is an irony here: The very respect for individual freedom that is required to defend freedom of speech is the quality that unmuzzles the vilest disrespect for everything, including religion, freedom, or any other thing that one may hold as a value. But so be it. One may disdain gutter talk, loathe four-letter words, and regard profanity as offensive or even blasphemous - but in a free country, the recourse is to change the channel, leave the theatre, put the magazine back on the shelf, or tell the foul-mouthed offender to leave your house. Barring direct threats, which are a form of force, one has the right to say whatever one wishes - provided it is on his own property and on his own dime.

Furthermore, cursing and swear words do not exhaust the field of offensive language. Hearing an occasional four-letter word from a fan in the bleachers at Fenway Park is far less offensive to me than hearing a mufti spew invective against the Jews and deny the Holocaust, or hearing a Christian minister blame the September 11th atrocity on the United States government and shout, “God damn America!”

Many of us may dislike public cursing (and for good reasons), but for those that dislike the acceptance of public cursing, as Mr. Prager put it, it may be instructive to look at the alternatives. In Islamist countries, I have no doubt that the prevalence of public cursing is far less than in the West, and in communist countries, other forms of speech (possibly including cursing), would be suppressed. Does this indicate that Islamist or communist societies that cow their citizens into holding their tongues are superior to Western civilizations that permit freedom of expression? Certainly not. Paradoxically, though widespread cursing itself may be a symptom of cultural deterioration, the fact of its presence indicates political superiority.[Note 2.]

The profanity that Prager attributes to secular societies tends to be of a disintegrating nature. Habitual curses vary in degree and are usually not malicious. Nevertheless, they can never elevate; they can only tread upon values, tear down, shock, trivialize, humiliate, mock. This brings me back to his main point (i.e. his general point of reverence, not his tautological point of holiness). What Prager should be damning (though perhaps he would choose another word) is not secularity but subjectivism and its irrationality.

If God is the proper source of reverence, then the objects of reverence are to be obtained from authorities. What is holy is what the shaman or priest or imam or rabbi says is holy. (Less traditional religions may replace scriptural authorities with one’s own whims and feelings - establishing one's own "personal Jesus," as it were - but it amounts to the same thing since scripture itself is the collection of the whims and feelings of ancestors.)

If, on the other hand, one is guided by reason, then the objects of reverence are determined by the facts of reality. One will respect and revere things that are good - which is to say, things that are beneficial for one’s life.

I can tell you first hand that I hold as solemn a reverence for my values - for reason, individual rights, capitalism; the Founding Fathers; heroes of sport, science, and industry; my favorite authors, composers, artists - as the holiest of the faithful does for his saints. The source of that reverence is my own judgment; no authority is or could be higher. I cannot conceive of admiring a hero that was chosen for me by somebody else; a reverence based in faith or obedience is counterfeit. True reverence requires an unshakable commitment to living a human life; it is profoundly selfish.

If one looks up the word honor in the American Heritage Dictionary [Note 3.], the definition of the word is followed by a list of synonyms and their connotations. To illustrate the meaning of reverence, the dictionary turns not to some ancient icon of faith, but to mankind’s arch-defender of reason:

Reverence is a feeling of deep respect and devotion: “Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man” (Ayn Rand).

(Note: The next installment in the series is coming soon.)

NOTES

1. Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2. The fate of America hangs in this struggle. Will this cultural deterioration continue to erode the values that make America and the West superior? Or will we manage to preserve reason and liberty - and indeed, not only preserve but establish them explicitly as never before?

3. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MA, p. 843.

Weather Report - Teen Town

I noticed that my blog has become even more one dimensional than usual lately, so I thought I would start adding some short, easy, and light posts on a variety of topics, such as some music that I like. (It's nice to do a post that doesn't require eight hours of writing and editing.)

Below is Weather Report playing "Teen Town" live in Germany in 1978. It's strange that I don't know too much about the band because when I was about sixteen, I immediately fell in love with the Night Passage album, which I had taken out of my local library. It would have been like me to go to the used record store and buy all the Weather Report I could get my hands on, but for some reason I never did. I own only a couple of their albums.

Anyway, the lineup in the video is the one I am most familiar with: the incomparable bassist Jaco Pastorius, Peter Erskine on drums, and of course, Wayne Shorter on sax and Joe Zawinul on piano.

Too Big to Fail - Addendum

A comment to my last post reflected a view that at first blush seems like plain common sense: When a company accepts money voluntarily from the government, it is henceforth beholden to that government. In effect, the company is no longer private, and thus it ought to accept the government’s decrees as the price of having been helped with public money.

As reasonable as this may seem on the surface, I think it is profoundly mistaken. In fact, it is precisely this logic that the government uses to ratchet its hold on private citizens. My view is that though this state of affairs may be sensible for voluntary transactions between free, civilized individuals, it does not pertain to parties that initiate force – of which governments are the most dangerous examples.

For one thing, the money that the government uses to bail out businesses is not theirs, the government’s, to give away; they have seized it by force from citizens who earned it (including the very businesses they are bailing out). Thus, the government can no more justly claim that it is “owed” something in return than could a gangster who demands money in return for “protection.” Some may object here that even if the government is not owed concessions in exchange for a bailout, the public who footed the bill is. But there is no collective “public” that pays for bailouts; it is productive individuals who suffer the loss in uncountable ways. There is simply no practical way to equitably restore the wealth that was taken. The only way to solve the problem is to remove the government from the economy, not to increase its role with further rules.

Another consideration is indicated by a word I used in the first paragraph, which I deliberately preserved from the original comment: voluntarily. How are we to know if a company accepted money voluntarily? What does that even mean when the government holds all the cards - which is to say, holds all legal use of force? This is the equivalent of saying that the victims of a holdup, faced with the “choice” of “your money or your life,” handed over their valuables “voluntarily.” I submit that the adverb “voluntarily” cannot apply to the charade of government handouts. The distortions introduced by government interference in the economy apply force in so many direct and indirect ways, it is impossible to untangle the layers of complicity or resistance.[Note 1.]

Sure, there exist immoral businessmen that overtly cozy up to the government, lobbying for favors, actively seeking to use the government to block out competitors (e.g. via anti-trust laws), or urging regulations that will open up a new “market” for them (e.g. the “cap-and-trade” vultures). The executives at such companies deserve to burn in hell, if I may borrow the religious image to emphasize my point. Nevertheless, I still cannot consent to that hell being delivered to them via ever-increasing government controls. The businessmen that sought government favors surely deserve to be destroyed by the monster they nurtured . . . but the rest of us don’t!

Nearly every company - especially those in the heavily regulated industries such as automobile manufacturing, finance, energy, and medical - can quite plausibly argue that they would not have taken a government handout if they had not been hampered by the government in the first place. The one detail I remember from Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, which I read some twenty-five years ago, is his claim that all things being equal, he would not have sought the government bailout of Chrysler, but did so only because the government-imposed burdens (such as environmental regulations and union support) had rendered Chrysler unable to keep up with Japanese competitors.

The bottom line is that the logic of quid pro quo, when applied to compulsory transactions, is a blank check to increase government control by degrees until freedom is extinguished. We must never sanction increased government controls, even when there is a superficial “logic” to it.

To see this process at work, let us look at the TARP handouts. These funds were foisted upon the nine major American banks, whether they wanted them or not, and when several banks wanted to hand the TARP money right back, they had to get special permission to do so.[Note 2.] This TARP money was used as the excuse for the government to limit the wages of executives at financial companies that received TARP funds. Going forward, this restriction will obviously cause a “brain drain,” a flight of talented executives from companies saddled with a salary cap to companies that are still free in that respect. So what is the next “logical” step? Seeing that the free companies have an “unfair advantage” over financial companies that have a salary cap, the government will then impose the salary cap on all financial companies, whether or not they ever received government funds. This will cause executives to flee to other industries, which will invite further controls to fix the problems caused by previous controls, and on and on.

Ayn Rand encapsulated this self-perpetuating power-grabbing technique, writing, “One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism, consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.”[Note 3.] Let us not compound the failures and injustices of intrusive governments by ascribing logic and common sense to their actions as they pull the noose tighter around our necks.

NOTES

1. A case in point is Treasury Secretary Paulson’s forcing of banks to accept TARP funds in the October 13, 2008, meeting behind closed doors in Washington. True, Secretary Paulson (probably) did not literally brandish a baseball bat as he walked around the conference table, as did Robert De Niro’s Al Capone in The Untouchables, but his “talking points” amounted to an implicit threat. Here was an agent of the federal government (in this case, the Bush Administration) presenting private citizens with an offer they could not refuse – literally not letting them out of the room until they complied. Quoting from the document obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act, Paulson's threat was subtly veiled: “’We don’t believe it is tenable to opt out because doing so would leave you vulnerable and exposed. If a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware your regulator will require it in any circumstance,’ the document said, citing Paulson talking points.” (Source: “Paulson Forced Banks to Take TARP Money: Documents,” CNBC, 14 May 2009.)

2. One of the banks was BB&T, and as an aside, I strongly recommend listening to the wonderful lecture by the retired BB&T CEO John Allison, available here at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

3. “The Lessons of Vietnam – Part II,” The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. III, No. 25, 9 September 1974.

Objectivist Round Up #120

Check out the latest Objectivist Round Up at 3 Ring Binder!

Too Big to Fail?

The federal government’s blitz on private property continues with the latest move out of the Obama playbook. The headline: “U.S. Considers Reigning In ‘Too Big to Fail’ Institutions.”

Congress and the Obama administration are about to take up one of the most fundamental issues stemming from the near collapse of the financial system last year – how to deal with institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to rescue them when they get into trouble.[Note 1, emphasis mine.]

Notice that the Times article did not state that the government believes it has no choice; it states as if it were a matter of fact that the government has no choice. Such is the mentality of the left; it cannot even conceive of a civilization in which people stand on their own feet.

Even the term “too big to fail,” which has become all too common in this bailout era, is deliberately deceptive. The concept really means “too big to allow to fail.” Discounting the very idea that failure could be allowed makes it seem like government intervention is a necessity, a metaphysical fact of nature, as opposed to a set of choices (and bad ones at that) made by politicians. “Too big to fail” bypasses the necessity to think; there is no question of whether a company should be left to reap the consequences of its own actions or be artificially propped up with taxpayer money. The modern politician does not pause to consider his self-appointed role as meddler. Ham-handed interference comes so naturally, it would not occur to him to think about the rights he tramples and the destruction he wreaks.

We have already seen the Bush-Obama federal government shower taxpayer money upon private companies as an alleged “rescue” from a crisis the government itself created, in some cases forcing the companies to accept the loot against their wishes. This “gift” was used as a means of exerting pressure on them days or weeks later. Now, the Obama administration claims the prerogative not only to decide which companies are “too big to fail” and what constitutes “being in trouble,” but seizes the power to “throw out management, wipe out the shareholders and change the terms of existing loans held by the institution.”

This power-grabbing strategy is simple in the extreme, and is as ancient and common as gullibility, fear, and hatred itself. The government exerts force upon its citizens, which invariably creates a problem; this problem is blamed on a resented group (foreigners, Jews, corporate executives), which is used by the government as the pretext to grab more power, creating more problems, etc. This vicious cycle is precisely the means by which the protection of individual rights has been whittled away in the United States for more than a century. It is not hard to see that the technique is self-perpetuating, if the public is willing – or forced – to fall in line.

This trend must be checked and reversed now, before it is too late. We are not yet in the thrall of dictatorship; we are not yet at the point of being fully silenced by force. True, there are ominous threats to free speech (to name just a couple, the White House snitch line and the FTC threat against bloggers), but I can still publish this blog post without fear of direct punishment by the government. The time to hide typewriters and printing presses under the floorboards has not yet come. Nevertheless, the acceleration of the federal government’s grasp of power under George Bush and Barack Obama is frightening. Mr. Obama’s “shock and awe” campaign against American citizens is intended to numb and inure us to complete government control.

The federal government (with the nearly full cooperation of the mainstream media) obtains the consent of the public by obscuring the nature of their increasing grip on us. Private businesses are demonized as predatory and compulsory, while government activities are characterized as “offering more choices” and “protecting the consumer.” Politicians and journalists count on Americans either not understanding what freedom is, or simply going along with the pretense that this is just business as usual. For instance, in the Times article I quoted, assistant Treasury secretary Michael S. Barr characterized the takeover as “market discipline”; the difference between private citizens judging how to handle their own affairs voluntarily and the government forcing citizens to act against their own judgment is supposed to be disregarded by the public as a superficial technicality.

Americans must not let the government pull this legerdemain without naming its nature. Government actions are not “market mechanisms,” but are anathema to free markets. Governments are institutions not of free trade but of force, and as such, must be strictly limited to their only appropriate role: safeguarding the rights of its citizens to deal with each other peaceably and voluntarily as each sees fit. Contrary to his own opinion, President Obama is not in charge of every company in America; in fact, he should have far less say in the operations of businesses than any floor-sweeper or hamburger-flipper. Not only should the president not preside in board rooms, but he ought to be respectfully thrown out. Capitalism requires the complete separation of the economy and the state.

The fact that the president and his team of czars think they can fire executives, defy shareholder contracts, and set wages to what they deem fit, is shocking and outrageous. It is not merely un-American but anti-American. Mr. Obama has demonstrated conduct befitting South American dictators and Chicago gangsters, not the President of the United States - and it deserves every bit of indignant protest from the Americans who are still alert enough to cry foul amid the masses dazzled under the president’s spell.

Despite the endless insistence by the media and politicians, it is plainly not true that any company is “too big to fail,” or that “the government has no choice but to rescue them.” In fact, when any company, big or small, goes out of business in a free market, it constitutes justice; it indicates that the company judged something wrong and the failure sends accurate signals to the rest of the market. People who did not make mistakes are not forced to pay for those who did.

It is only the unfree market - government meddling, such as we have under Bush and Obama - that causes distortions that destroy wealth and trample upon justice.

NOTES

1. “U.S. Considers Reining In ‘Too Big to Fail’ Institutions,” The New York Times, 25 Oct 2009.

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 10

(Note: This is Part 10 in the series started here. The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #10:

Without God, there is little to inspire people to create inspiring art. That is why contemporary art galleries and museums are filled with "art" that celebrates the scatological, the ugly and the shocking. Compare this art to Michelangelo's art in the Sistine chapel. The latter elevates the viewer -- because Michelangelo believed in something higher than himself and higher than all men. [Note 1.]

I do not dispute Mr. Prager’s denigration of modern art as “the scatological, the ugly and the shocking,” but he misidentifies the root of this cultural phenomenon. The disgraceful procession of trash that has passed for art in the last century or so is not a symptom of the rejection of God but of the rejection of values, which itself has a deeper cause: the rejection of reason. In this, paradoxically enough, the religious have a philosophical root in common with the modern artists who not only generally reject the mind in favor of primal emotions, but spit upon the specific symbols and icons held sacred by the faithful.

This is not to equate the religious with the nihilistic, of course. There is no comparison between civilized, respectful, and thoughtful religious people (like Dennis Prager himself) and the “artists” who see the urinal, with or without a crucifix immersed in it, as a suitable means of expressing their view of mankind. My point is that the antidote for the disgusting bile that is vomited forth from the unfocused minds of modern artists is not faith but reason. Faith unfastens the human mind from the moorings of reality. This is relatively harmless, to be sure, in the average modern citizen, who at most fingers the rosary for an hour on Sundays but otherwise leads a civilized, productive life. But faith also gives rise to other manifestations, including purportedly secular ones, that are destructive. The irrationality that leads some to the Bible or the Zodiac leads others to Dada and the shock-value of sacrilege.

Mr. Prager invokes a popular formulation to indicate the requirements of the great artist - that he “elevates the viewer” because he believes in “something higher than himself.” I am sympathetic to this idea and there is a certain plausibility to it; after all, great art must somehow escape from the trivial, the day-to-day. It should expand to epic scale; it should endure through the ages. The naturalistic banality embodied by modern works like Duane Hanson’s Tourists, for example, sneer at greatness. The random smears of Mark Rothko and drips of Jackson Pollock are so empty of content, they elevate the viewer only in the contortions of logic that they require of him to pretend they belong on a gallery wall.

However, the phrase “something higher than oneself” carries with it two connotations that miss the mark as a proper requirement for works of art. First, there is a suggestion of sacrifice, the idea that men owe their lives and efforts to “something higher”: a god, the state, or one’s fellow men. The phrase also contains a hint of Platonic duality, a severing of the mind and body. The physical, in this view, holds an inferior status to the contemplative. It suggests a disdain for the material needs of man, for his efficacy, for the pursuit of practical values. Both connotations are perfectly consistent with Prager’s religious viewpoint - specifically, the altruist morality and the philosophic intrinsicism of religion, respectively - but are not properly held as prerequisites for great art.

In contrast to Mr. Prager’s formulation, I hold that an artist's works can be great when he is able to express something universal about men. This is not the same thing as “something greater than oneself.” Universals are not “transcendent” in the supernatural sense; properly conceived, they are objectively real abstractions. The pages and canvases of great works of art depict particular characters, events, and images that represent high-level concepts and universal truths. They depict men’s actions and capabilities, his victories and follies.

For religionists, the realm of universal truth is some supernatural dimension; for modern artists, there is no universal truth (with the exception, perhaps, of man’s depravity, misery, and helplessness). Neither perspective is correct. Great art should convey man’s rationality, not his superstitions; it should present his suitability for living in this world, not his dismissal of reality for a mystical paradise.

Figure A - Christ Washing the Feet of St. Peter; (top) from Gospel book of Otto III, ca. 1000 AD, (bottom) from Sadao Watanabe, 1992. Does either of these “elevate the viewer”?

Dennis Prager’s choice of example actually serves to subvert his point. He cites Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel as being great art - which, of course, it is. But does Michelangelo represent a truly Christian viewpoint or the opposite?

My claim is that from a broad historical perspective, the effect of Christianity on art is the same as its effect on all cultural matters, and for the same reasons: namely, it was detrimental and corrupting. “More than any other form of human expression,” wrote Leonard Peikoff, “art is the barometer that lays bare a period’s view of reality, of life, of man.”[Note 2.] The rise of Christianity signaled the turn of men away from reason to faith, from rationality to mysticism, from earth to heaven... and European art reflects this.

In Greece of the 5th-century BC (with particular emphasis on before Christ), man was a virtuous, noble, thinking hero. It is here that great art was born, along with philosophy, history, and science. Christianity interrupted and reversed this development, consigning man to his divine status as a puny, groveling slave. Then, in the Renaissance, man was reborn as a rational, efficacious hero once more. The Renaissance was, in philosophic terms, a throwing off of the chains of feudal Christendom and a restoration of the pre-Christian Greek ideals. Sure, the exemplary figures of the Renaissance had the superficial vestiges of Christianity - how could it be otherwise after a thousand years of Christian domination? - but the essence of the Renaissance was a rediscovery of reason.

If Mr. Prager wanted to demonstrate art inspired by God, why did he choose a Renaissance artist - arguably, the greatest Renaissance artist - and not choose art from a period that was informed uniformly by religious devotion? There are countless examples of great historical and artistic significance to be found from medieval architecture, sculptures, mosaics, tapestries, and paintings. Why choose the Adam of the Sistene Chapel (Figure B) instead of the Adam of the Hildesheim Cathedral (Figure C)? Surely the latter conveys the cringing humility that is expected of the pious. Mr. Prager ought to regard Michelangelo’s Adam as demonstrating a blasphemous equality with God, bursting with the Promethean qualities that Prager condemns in point #12 as “hubris.”

Figure B. Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam. (Image credit below.)

Figure C. Adam and Eve Reproached by the Lord. (Image credit below.)

Of course, my questions are rhetorical. Mr. Prager chose Michelangelo precisely in order to artificially prop up his religious argument with the creations of a reasoning genius. The ambiguity of who created whom in The Creation of Adam is a product not of Christian devotion but of the rebirth of reason. The figure of Michelangelo’s David (Figure D) cannot be squared with a religious viewpoint; deference, humility, and obedience are utterly absent from its aspect. It is impossible to imagine this figure with a bowed head or bent knee. This titan could serve neither man nor god; he is his own master. We see in David independence, competence, thoughtfulness - a profound and serene confidence. If there were ever a phrase that David would not accept it would be this: that something is "greater than himself" or "higher than all men."

Figure D. Michelangelo, David. (Image credit below.)

It is plainly not true that without God, there is “little to inspire people to create inspiring art.” The subject and inspiration of great art is properly man and his reasoning mind. True, God - or more specifically, man’s relationship to his gods - has been the subject of many great works of art. But many more great works have nothing to do with God. Revolution, war, leadership, industry, productivity, justice, and revenge have inspired great works of art. And let us not forget romantic love, filial love, fraternal love, and maternal love (not to mention hatred).

If faith is the inspiration for great art, we should expect the greatest art to have emerged from the periods and locations in which faith or anti-reason dominated: the Dark and Middle Ages in Europe, the Orient, the Weimar Republic, and today, from Iran and Afghanistan. If, on the other hand, reason is the inspiration for great art, we should expect the greatest art to have emerged from those places and times in which reason was valued: ancient Greece, and Europe of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

History has given us the answer.

(Note: The next installment in the series is here.)

NOTES

1. Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels, Penguin Putnam, Inc., New York, 1982, p.161.

IMAGE CREDITS

Figure A. (top) Christ Washing the Feet of St. Peter, from the Society of Clerks Secular of Saint Basil, http://www.reu.org/public/Iconholy/Jesus/ChPeterFeetOtto.jpg.

(bottom) Sadao Watanabe, Christ Washing the Feet of St. Peter, from the Scriptum Modern Japanese Prints, http://www.japaneseprintart.com/images/prints/watanabe%5Fchrist%5Fwashing%5Fpeters%5Ffeet%2Ejpg

Figure B. from Wikipedia entry for “The Creation of Adam,” Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/God2-Sistine_Chapel.png

Figure C. from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Adam and Eve Reproached by the Lord, http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/91/3991-004-E18BF0E9.jpg

Figure D. from Wikipedia entry for “Michelangelo,” http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Michelangelos_David.jpg

Note to the Republican National Committee

I sent this note to Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican National Committee. It’s a little too long, I know, but I wanted to drive home my assertions with enumerated details that emphasized just how far the Republicans have strayed from defending limited government. I’m hoping a couple of things mitigate the defect of the letter’s length. First, I sent it by “snail mail,” which may earn the letter slightly more attention than would an email or blog comment. Second, the bold type may help highlight the essence of the idea, even if the bulk of the text is glossed over by the intern who is likely to be reading it.

Dear Mr. Steele:

The leftist attack on individual rights led by Barack Obama is unquestionably a disaster for America. However, the Democratic hold on the White House and Congress does have one benefit: it has unshackled the opposition, leading, as you said, to “the rising mood of freedom-loving Americans across this country.” The spontaneous rise of the “Tea Parties,” the indignant opposition to the government takeover of industries, and the exploding sales of Atlas Shrugged simply would not have happened with the Republicans in power.

Why not? The reason is certainly not that John McCain would have been much better than Barack Obama. Freedom lovers are being heard now because Republicans had silenced defenders of American principles more effectively than the Democrats could hope to have done.

Precisely because Republicans are supposed to be the guardians of freedom and limited government, they have rendered the true defenders of liberty impotent. When Republicans pursue the policies of a bloated, paternalistic state, as they have for decades, their failures are blamed on freedom. When Republicans expand the federal regulatory grip with ever-increasing rules and restrictions, the inevitable failures are blamed absurdly on “deregulation” and the “free” market. Republicans have outspent Democrats for almost half a century; they dealt the killing blow to the gold standard, imposed price controls, meddled ceaselessly with the monetary system, and expanded the welfare state. It is primarily Republicans who have ushered religion into government affairs and legislation. Republicans are behind compulsory health insurance, corporate bailouts, TARP, funding of religious groups, and the prescription drug bill. Republicans have prosecuted a weak and sacrificial war, putting our fathers and sons in harm’s way not to crush an enemy but to hand out food. With Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?

For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have been the active enemies of freedom. Thanks to the Republicans alone, freedom has taken the blame.

In the last presidential election, despite my overwhelming disgust at the prospect of an explicitly un-American socialist presiding in the White House, I voted for no one. (I handed in an empty ballot.) If John McCain or any Republican had been elected, he would have eroded liberty in more or less the same manner as Barack Obama and his predecessors. His administration would have been a continuation of the Bush “compassionate conservatism,” replete with pleas for sacrifice and national service, capitulation to environmentalists, religious groups, and multiculturalists, and heavy-handed, pragmatic meddling in the economy. Republicans are simply weak, “me too” Democrats; they offer 75% the socialism of their opponents, with the identical moral underpinnings: altruism.

All my life, I had voted exclusively for Republicans... until recently. I refuse to vote for a Republican again until they explicitly, in word and deed, hold individual rights as the fundamental principle of the United States. Republicans must recognize anew that the sole purpose of government - the founding principle of our republic - is to safeguard the rights of every individual to his life, the property he earns, and the pursuit of his own happiness for its own sake.

Republicans must heed this message: They were booted out of office because they were too religious and gave mere lip service to freedom. They will return to office when they embrace the principle that makes America the greatest nation in history: the defense of individual rights.

Sincerely,

Stephen Bourque

The Treachery of Unintegrated Facts

or The Audacity of Hoping No One Connects the Dots

Freedom is eroding at the hands of the government at an alarming rate. Of course, this is not news; the individual rights that were identified by America’s Founders and safeguarded with the institutions they established have been whittled away for more than a century. But we are clearly in the midst of a particularly virulent rush to serfdom that accelerated during the George W. Bush administration and has reached full boil under Barack Obama. It is a bipartisan attack, and until recently, has been virtually unopposed by more than a handful of voices. Both major parties (and to a worse degree, all the minor “third” parties) completely ignore individual rights; they simply bicker over to which degree and in what manner Americans are to be forced to comply with government’s demands. The “compassionate conservatism” of Republicans and the “Organizing for America” of Democrats are both explicitly statist, programmatic calls for national servitude.

I am struck, though, by one characteristic of the government’s power grab: its openness. All the facts are completely on the surface. There is no hidden agenda. Contrary to absurd conspiracy theories, government officials do not conceal their true intentions; they boast of them. The egregious particulars of “recovery” and “reinvestment” and “reform” laws are often not buried surreptitiously in bills, but are announced with press releases. When a president (Republican or Democrat) shakes hands warmly with a foreign dictator, it is not a clandestine betrayal; it is a photo op. When Mr. Obama’s subordinate dictators are installed to issue edicts, nobody bothers to assign friendly-sounding names like “comrades” or “citizens”; they are frankly called “czars.”

This openness indicates either an astonishing brazenness or naïveté on the part of the politicians.

To seize power without opposition, presidents and legislators count on the majority of the population having a certain type of mentality - they must be relatively educated, some highly educated, but with an inability to think critically and integrate their knowledge. This is best achieved with an education of a certain sort, and fortunately for politicians, it is exactly the sort that has been imposed upon students for generations: a compulsory, increasingly centralized, government curriculum that emphasizes the group over the individual, that denies the possibility that answers can be fully right or wrong, that stuffs students’ heads with a barrage of state-approved aphorisms (e.g “selfishness is wrong,” “recycle plastic,” “greedy capitalists cause poverty,” etc.) which are to be held as if they are perceptual-level truths, and above all, that presents every piece of information to the students as a succession of disparate facts, unconnected and unconnectable.

This education churns out students - and hence, adults - whose minds are filled with facts and opinions, yet who are unaccustomed to thinking for themselves. The mind of the typical student emerging from school is well-practiced in collecting, but is stunted in other faculties: integrating, classifying, determining similarities and differences, identifying the essence of a set of particulars. As such, the modern American (especially a young one) simultaneously feels that he knows quite a lot and yet views the universe as intractably complex. He is the perfect subject for a benevolent dictatorship. Politicians want voters to be “informed” - to listen to NPR, read the New York Times, watch television - and to believe what they are told. They expect their constituents to regard the endless stream of terrorist attacks, military conflicts, economic reports, natural disasters, and crimes as constituting a complexity too difficult for individuals to grasp, and thus to passively surrender their judgment to a smiling, reassuring, omnipotent government that knows best.

After Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. (This is not a pipe.)

Americans are expected to be familiar with the words “tyranny” and “socialism,” but not to recognize tyranny or socialism when they are in its midst. The young professional today righteously places a “Question Authority” bumper sticker next to the “Obama/Biden” label on the trunk of his hybrid car, blissfully unaware that he accepts every government directive and politically-correct norm without question.

This confidence of politicians that Americans will fall in line with their expectations represents an opportunity for us to defend freedom. Since politicians openly admit the particulars of their policies and deny only their meaning, our task is simply to connect the dots. It is not so much a matter of educating the public, but one of getting people to think about the facts that are already before them. Americans already have two and two in view; they just need to practice putting two and two together to make four.

Let’s look at a few examples. When Sarah Palin warned that the Obama administration’s health care “reform” would result in “death panels,” she was pilloried by politicians and the media with an unrestrained and decidedly uncivil hostility. Now, if the reader does not already know it, I am unambiguously opposed to Sarah Palin’s political ideas and regard her as anathema to liberty, particularly because of her religious views. But on this particular issue she was absolutely right. Her exact words were:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost... The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.[Note 1.]

In an earlier essay, I wrote of these “death panels,” “What else shall we call a central committee of bureaucrats who make ‘recommendations’ that must be obeyed, meting out from a dwindling pile of loot every treatment, therapy, medicine, test, doctor visit, and hospital stay?” This is not crazy hyperbole. “Death panels” are a completely apt characterization of this particular aspect of Mr. Obama’s health “reform.” Palin (and I) properly drew conclusions from the facts that the president and lawmakers themselves provided. Politicians and the media do not deny the facts, but only the conclusions. They resist evaluation and judgment. They refuse to connect the dots.

In my note to the White House, in which I turned myself in to the authorities at the informant hot line, I pointed out how in the very same breath that the Obama administration denied its intent to eliminate private health insurance coverage, it listed as evidence its eight directives that constitute the complete government takeover of the health insurance industry. In this blog post called, ironically, “Facts Are Stubborn Things,” a White House official accuses opponents of making “it look like the President intends to ‘eliminate’ private coverage, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.”[Note 2.] Two sentences later, the post lists the official “Health Insurance Consumer Protections.” These “protections” dictate the terms under which the government will permit insurance companies to exist. They will clearly be “private” in name only. As a means of showing how ridiculous are the rumors that Mr. Obama wants to eliminate private health insurance, the White House submits its list of rules for private health insurance companies, telling them who they shall accept as “customers,” how much they will charge, and what services they shall cover! It is an astonishingly distilled example of the point I am conveying here - the confidence of politicians that the public is incapable of thinking.

In my essay “The Reluctant Dictator,” I noted that the president denies that he wants to be in the car business. “What we are not doing, what I have no interest in doing, is running GM,” the president assures us.[Note 3.] As evidence of this, Mr. Obama fired the CEO of General Motors and his administration has effectively nationalized the company by seizing a majority stake in shares. No doubt, the White House and media could construct a long list of facts to show that the president’s outrageous abuse of power was technically legal, that the word “nationalization” is not exactly the correct term for the government takeover of a private company, and in any case, the government does not intend to use the powers that it seized to direct the operations of the company. All of these details distract from the obvious: President Obama nationalized General Motors. The president is counting on citizens to defer to his expertise and authority, to appreciate that the complexity and nuance of the economy is surely beyond their grasp, and to not be so simple-minded as to draw a parallel between his actions and those of tin-pot South American dictators.

When President Obama denies being a socialist, when the media scoffs at the “right-wing nuts” that call him a socialist, when avowed socialists themselves claim that the president is not “one of them,” shall we simply take their word for it? Or shall we consider the essence of socialism - that it is “the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”[Note 4.] This is the essence of the Obama administration (as it was the essence of the Bush administration and would have been the essence of John McCain’s administration, had he won the election). This is the driving principle behind the prescription drug program, compulsory medical insurance, corporate bailouts, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, and the Community Reinvestment Act, “cap-and-trade” legislation, pay restrictions for executives, the virtual enslavement of medical professionals, and the grotesque “I Pledge” video.

The United States has not yet descended to point where naked force is directed against the population at large. Today, all that is needed to defeat this growing tyranny is to name it. Americans, who have been taught not to judge, must judge. Individuals, who have been taught to place their trust in governments because the world is too complex to fathom, must think for themselves.

I am somewhat heartened by signs in recent months. Perhaps the tide is turning. There are indications that at some level, people are adding things up, identifying the nature of the government’s actions. Indeed, this is reflected in the growing panic and shrillness of the left-leaning media. Their confidence that individuals will accept their pre-digested assertions at face value without extracting their true meanings has been shaken - hence, the name-calling, the inarticulate, spitting hatred, the fear of “Astro-turf” movements. The tea parties that spontaneously arose over the spring and summer, the booming sales of Atlas Shrugged, and recently, the open revolt of the president’s speech to children returning back to school, may signal a positive trend toward Americans’ best defense against tyranny:

Thinking!

NOTES

1. Sarah Palin: Statement on the Current Health Care Debate, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434.

2. “Facts Are Stubborn Things,” Macon Phillips, White House blog, 4 Aug 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/.

3. “The Government and GM: How Reluctant a Shareholder?” The Heritage Foundation, 1 Jun 2009.

4. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual, Signet, 1961, p. 43. [Emphasis in the original.]

Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 9

(Note: This is Part 9 in the series started here. The previous installment is here. In each post, I comment on one of the fourteen points made by Dennis Prager in his article, “If There Is No God.”)

Dennis Prager’s Point #9:

If there is no God, humans and "other" animals are of equal value. Only if one posits that humans, not animals, are created in the image of God do humans have any greater intrinsic sanctity than baboons. This explains the movement among the secularized elite to equate humans and animals. [Note 1.]

I share Dennis Prager’s disdain for the “secularized elite,” which we have come to understand as being the left-leaning, subjectivist intellectual establishment. But I must point out that once again, he is conceding all ground to his enemies.

To claim, as Mr. Prager has, that men deserve special consideration only if they are created in God’s image is to imply that there is no natural reason - there are no facts - that justifies distinguishing men from other animals. This is exactly the position maintained by the subjectivists that he reviles. The only difference is that religionists, wishing to rescue mankind from being relegated to the status of lowly animals, proceed to invent a supernatural pretext; they regard men as divine beings, created and chosen by God as the stewards of the earth. Subjectivists refrain from fabricating this pretext, and thus regard men as mere animals, crass beings driven by their appetites and whims.

To see how both sides are mistaken - and to arrive at the correct perspective - it is instructive to recall the arguments of the “intrinsic/subjective/objective” trichotomy that I have written about elsewhere and is one of Ayn Rand’s important identifications.[Note 2.] Mr. Prager is precise in his term “intrinsic sanctity.” It is exactly the intrinsic value of man that he seeks to preserve - a value that is somehow an attribute of every man, apart from his relationship to the real world. It is a “sanctity” unsullied by the coarse considerations of the requirements of survival, and of living the life of a man qua man. In essence, the intrinsic value of man that Prager is attempting to secure is a divine one: eternal, other-worldly, inaccessible, akin to a Platonic Form.

A proper perspective is neither subjective nor intrinsic but objective. In this, we regard value as relating to all living organisms, and only to living organisms, for it is living entities that will exist or perish according to their natures and actions. For a living organism, its basic value is life, and each of its derivative values reflects this fundamental value in its capacity to contribute to or enhance the life of the organism. Crucially, it is from the perspective of each organism that value is determined.

In this last statement we see the sharp distinction between Prager’s “intrinsic sanctity” and objective value. In Prager’s view, the value of human beings exists as an intrinsic attribute - a value in itself, apart from any consideration of a valuer. It is a sort of reified universal imposed by a supernatural Creator, a stand-alone fact of the universe. As an implicit consequence, not only should a man recognize his superiority over animals, but a baboon (or lizard, worm, amoeba, tree) would necessarily defer to it; thus, built into each of God’s lower creatures would be a “sanctity” of its own life that was somehow less than that of a human.

Of course, that is nonsense. The value of human beings is not intrinsic; it is objective. For every living organism, from single-celled microbes to Homo Sapiens, its own life is the standard of value. A man’s regard of his own life as having sanctity is derived not from some divine proclamation - from the lucky chance of having been born among God’s chosen species - but from his nature as a living being. (To be more precise, a man’s value itself follows from his being a living organism; his regard of his own value follows from his being an organism with the ability to think and to be self-aware.)

Perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Prager left a clue that revealed how anti-scientific and anti-reason his perspective actually is. In the phrase “humans and ‘other’ animals,” Prager put quotes around the word “other,” as if humans are not animals at all. How deeply does he hold this idea? Can he really think that humans are not to be classified as part of the animal kingdom?

Humans are the rational animals. We have a perceptual apparatus that is similar to many of the higher mammals, but we also have a faculty that, as far as can be discerned, is utterly unique among all living things: a rational, reasoning mind that operates with free will.

The abilities to abstract and conceptualize, and to choose our actions, are far and away the most significant attributes of our species. Our conceptual faculty accounts not only for our survival, but for our ability to seek happiness. Human minds have created philosophy, science, mathematics; crop rotation, the printing press, the automobile, and the computer; Hamlet, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Parthenon, Falling Water, and the Empire State Building. By any objective standard, the human species is amazing and remarkable, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”[Note 3.]

If subjectivists - seeing humans as automatons determined by social conditions and slavishly compelled by emotions - evade men’s true nature and consider us to be equal (or even “less than equal”) to other animals, they should be defeated on rational grounds. There is absolutely no reason to reach into the supernatural realm, as Mr. Prager has done, to find an excuse to shout the merits of man. As I have indicated, doing so has quite the opposite effect: it implicitly concedes that men have no value in reality.

(Note: The next installment in the series is here.)

NOTES

1. Dennis Prager, “If There Is No God,” http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/08/19/if_there_is_no_god.

2. To capture the relevant idea, it is necessary to quote a relatively lengthy passage from Ayn Rand’s essay, “What is Capitalism?”

There are, in essence, three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. The intrinsic theory holds that the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of “good” from beneficiaries, and the concept of “value” from valuer and purpose - claiming that the food is good in, by, and of itself.

The subjectivist theory holds that the good bears no relation to the facts of reality, that it is the product of a man’s consciousness, created by his feelings, desires, “intuitions,” or whims, and that it is merely an “arbitrary postulate” or an "emotional commitment.”

The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness; the subjectivist theory holds that the good resides in man’s consciousness, independent of reality.

The objectivist theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of values. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man - and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man.

Ayn Rand, “What is Capitalism?” from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, pp. 21-22. [Italics are in the original.]

3. To be sure, it is the human mind that is behind the worst atrocities of history as well - slavery, the wars of conquest, inquisitions, persecutions, pogroms, and People’s States. But this consideration only emphasizes the importance of philosophy, and of getting our answers right.

Cash for Clunkers

The three billion dollar Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) program, known affectionately as “Cash for Clunkers,” is coming to an end on Monday because it is running out of money.  After the program burned through $1 billion dollars in its first week, Congress approved an additional $2 billion that has now apparently followed the first billion down the drain.

The fact that this money has been scooped up so eagerly seems to have taken some by surprise, though when it is given a moment’s sober thought, the prospect that a lot of consumers would snatch the “free” $4500 giveaway is about as shocking as a pound of raw meat disappearing when dropped into a school of piranhas.  President Obama spun this unexpected evaporation of taxpayer dollars as an indication of the program’s success - a success “beyond anybody’s imagination,” as he put it.  “We’re slightly victims of success because the thing happened so quick, there was so much more demand than anybody expected, that dealers were overwhelmed with applications.”[Note 1.]

In the media, Cash for Clunkers is portrayed as being wildly successful; the implication is that the program is a magnificent example of the ability of the government to stimulate the economy.  When the additional $2 billion funding was approved, the president lauded Congress for using the Recovery Act funds to extend the CARS program, so that “the American economy will continue to get a much needed boost.”[Note 2.]  “This program has been a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.  He characterizes the program as “the best economic news story in America.”[Note 3.]  “According to some estimates,” a CNN report stated, “the total of $3 billion in the Cash for Clunkers program could result in an $18 billion boost to the overall economy.”[Note 4, emphasis mine in all quotes.]

Well, that’s a pretty good deal.  If the federal government can put $3 billion into a hat, wave a wand, and pull out $18 billion, then who can blame Americans for being tempted to hand over the reins of their lives to their trusty politicians? 

Despite the general euphoria, though, it may occur to a few people that something doesn’t seem quite right about this account.[Note 5.]  And a handful of Americans might even be suspicious of the notion that a government is able to “stimulate” anything at all.  (In this set of critically-thinking individuals, of course, I exclude nearly all economists, the “expert analysts” who are so immersed in a Keynesian fantasy world and in the results churned out by their computer models that they believe in their own magic.)  Skeptics of the government’s story may not be able to put a finger on the problem; they may not be able to identify which rapid move in the shell game, which sleight of hand, which gesture to the pocket or the sleeve, is the one that explains the trick.  But they know something doesn’t add up.

For these honest people, I submit the following questions that might help give them the confidence to expose the “experts” and the government policy-makers for what they are: emperors with no clothes.

(1)  How can Cash for Clunkers “run out of money,” as is reported?

If CARS really does provide a net benefit to the economy, as is claimed  (or at least implied) by its supporters, why is the program being stopped for want of funding?  How can something that is profitable be running out of money?  

The fact that the program cannot be sustained without a continuous influx of tax dollars indicates that there is a cost associated with it.  And where there is a cost for something, there are producers who pay for it.

Characterizing the program as being beneficial for America is dishonest at best.  Cash for Clunkers does not make money; it costs money.  It is necessary for the president and lawmakers to hide this fact because the cost is borne by Americans.  Inevitably, for every $4500 that Cash for Clunkers puts into someone’s pocket, it takes more than $4500 away from the Americans to whom that money belongs.  The program is not a “stimulation” of anything; like all government “stimulation,” it is a carefully disguised welfare package.

(2)  How would Cash for Clunkers work on a smaller scale?

When dealing with complex abstractions, it is often helpful and instructive to adjust the scale of a concept to isolate certain characteristics.  For instance, when considering the workings of a free market, one can identify some of the same principles operating in a child’s lemonade stand as in a multinational corporation.  The trader principle remains constant both for the man agreeing to mow his neighbor’s lawn in exchange for babysitting services and for the bank lending a hundred million dollars to a pharmaceutical company.  

So, as an exercise, let us consider how the economic stimulation of Cash for Clunkers would work in a household.

Suppose Johnny and Mary Smith are a married couple with three kids.  To make ends meet, both Johnny and Mary work, and for this purpose they each own a car.  Unfortunately, Johnny gets laid off, so they suddenly depend entirely on Mary’s income and a little bit of savings while Johnny looks for another job.

According to the principles of the Cash for Clunkers program, the ideal thing for the Smith household to do at this point is to have Mary give Johnny $4500 out of their children’s college savings account in exchange for his car.  Next, Mary should drain the oil and pour a water-silica-sand solution into the engine so that it will seize when the car is next turned on.  (This is what the “clunker” dealers are instructed to do.)  This will make it necessary for Johnny to buy another car so that he can drive to his job interviews.  To keep our example a closed system so that we can trace every step, let us say that he must now buy Mary's car.  He returns to Mary the $4500 in exchange for her car, which she will now have to share with her husband, making it difficult for her to get to work on time.  

The net result of this series of transactions is that nothing has changed for the Smith’s except that one of their two vitally important automobiles has been destroyed.

The important thing to notice in this scenario is that without an injection of money from an outside source - a source that gets nothing in return - the Cash for Clunkers program fails utterly.  It can only destroy wealth; it cannot create it.  

This is another demonstration of why it is necessary for the president and Congress to dissemble when advancing “economic stimulus” as providing a net gain for Americans, as opposed to being a simple welfare program.  In order to prop up the facade of “stimulus,” it is necessary to conceal the source of real wealth that pays for it.

(3)  Injustice aside, are participants in the program better off now?

There is no justification whatsoever for ignoring the monstrous injustice incurred by the millions of hard-working Americans who were compelled to pay for Cash for Clunkers in exchange for absolutely nothing.  However, as a mental exercise, let us momentarily set aside that injustice to consider a question.  Did the consumers who took advantage of the program benefit?  That is, did the federal government’s moral atrocity at least provide an economic benefit to the consumers that they claimed to be helping?

Since “clunkers” are cars that had to meet certain criteria for consideration - not the least of which is to be worth no more than $4500 in an open market - we can make a guess that many of the participants in the program were ordinary Americans, most of whom were not likely to replace their soon-to-be-demolished car by paying cash for a new Mercedes Benz or Maserati.  It is likely that the typical beneficiary of Cash for Clunkers used about half of the $4500 windfall to pay off some of their credit card debt and the other half to buy a new vehicle.  Significantly, it is also likely that any loans that had been used to buy the beneficiary’s “clunker” had been paid off for some time, while the purchase of the new vehicle required the beneficiary to take out a four- or five-year loan (since he had only a couple thousand dollars for a down-payment).  Considering all this, it should be clear that it is a stretch to call the typical participant a “beneficiary” of the program when he is probably worse off now than he was before.  Sure, he may feel a surge of excitement when he starts the engine of his brand new F150, but this fleeting benefit is more than offset by the troubles he faces burdened with the $300 or $400 per month car payment that he did not have before. 

Now, politicians will undoubtedly point to all these new vehicle purchases as being good for automobile manufacturers, which in turn is good for the American economy.  But we have already identified this as a diversionary tactic intended to draw attention away from the fact that other people are compelled to pay for it.

So, even if we set aside the injustice, the sheer economic ignorance of the plan is stunning and can be comprehended only by recognizing the persistence of politicians and “expert” economic analysts to misunderstand the nature of their meddling.  Consider: It is obvious, or at least it should be, that a significant cause of the current financial crisis was the direct and indirect force applied by the federal government upon banks to issue mortgages to Americans so they would buy homes they could not afford.  In the wake of this self-made disaster, for the government to try to fix the problem by enticing Americans to now buy cars they cannot afford is simply beyond the pale of reason.

(4)  If destroying a few hundred thousand cars can stimulate the economy, then why stop there?  

In “A Kerquillionty Dollars,” Doug Reich, referring to the topic of government “stimulus” programs in general, asked a similar question:

The logic behind the stimulus program is that the government needs to steal money from some taxpayers (or borrow from bond investors under the presumption that it will be stolen from future taxpayers) and give it to other people...  If their logic is correct, and expropriating the wealth and capital of some and redistributing it to others will somehow generate economic growth... it appears to be a huge mistake that they only spent $787 Billion.  Why did they stop there?  Under their reasoning, wouldn’t $788 Billion have been more stimulative?  Wouldn’t $1 trillion have been really, really stimulative?[Note 6.]

One might ask the same question about the Cash for Clunkers program.  The question exposes its nature - that it is a disguised welfare program that cannot create wealth but can only destroy or redistribute it.

Recall that enthusiasts claim that Cash for Clunkers gave the American economy a much needed boost, a desperately wanted stimulus, a shot in the arm.  If such a “lifeline” to the economy, constituting the “best economic news in America,” can be invoked by simply using tax dollars to pay people to destroy cars, why could this principle not be extended?  Why not introduce a government program to pay Americans to throw out their cell phones and computers, thus using the “power of the market” to generate new cell phones and computers?  Why not entice citizens to burn down their houses, thus generating new houses?  Why not provide an incentive to tear down every garage, gasoline station, pizza place, bagel shop, bodega, grocery store, department store, warehouse, and factory?

Why not create infinite prosperity by wrecking everything?  According to the principles of "economic stimulus," all this taxpayer-backed destruction should put Americans back to work, boosting the economy beyond our wildest dreams and creating an unprecedented era of good times.

Naturally, most Americans (with the possible exception of latent jihadists, eco-terrorists, and some university professors) would be aghast at the suggestion of such wholesale destruction.  Yet the principle holds at every scale.  The same irrationality at the heart of Cash for Clunkers fuels many of the absurdities of the economic thought of the last century (for example, the idea that war is beneficial to a free economy, or that paying farmers to destroy their crops enhances prosperity).

The error of this idea is described by Henry Hazlitt as the “broken window” fallacy.  In his scenario, a hoodlum throws a brick through a baker’s shop window.  A little crowd gathers in front of the shop, discussing the implications.  From a certain perspective, note some in the crowd (i.e. consistent with that of the Obama administration), “the misfortune has its bright side.”

It will make business for some glazier... The glazier will have $250 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $250 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum.  The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles.  The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.[Note 7.]

If Hazlitt’s scenario seems artificially exaggerated or preposterous, I remind the reader of the report I quoted earlier, which CNN delivered without a trace of irony, as if it were an incontrovertible fact: “According to some estimates, the total of $3 billion in the Cash for Clunkers program could result in an $18 billion boost to the overall economy.”

Unlike today’s economists, Hazlitt goes on to trace the remainder of the effects introduced by the hoodlum.  The glazier would indeed have $250 worth of new business:

But the shopkeeper will be out the $250 that he was planning to spend for a new suit...  Instead of having a window and $250, he now has merely a window... The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business.  No new “employment” has been added.  The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier.  They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor.  They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene.  They will see the new window in the next day or two.  They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made.  They see only what is immediately visible to the eye. [Again, note 7, emphasis mine.] 

(5)  Why is force needed?

Even if a politician or economist produced a ready answer for all of the above questions, citing this or that statistic, interest rate, wise saw, or modern instance, with the exasperated air of one unaccustomed to having his authority questioned and with an irritation reserved for those stubborn few among us who do not surrender their lives and livelihoods to him without first asking a few questions - even if such a one could manufacture this many excuses, there is one question that he will find to be devastatingly unanswerable.  Or rather, it is answerable only by giving the game away.

The question is: If the program benefits everyone, why must the government compel some people to comply?

Of course, the answer is that protestations to the contrary, the program does not benefit everybody.  Force is required because that is the means to get someone to act against their interests.

The simple fact is that nothing that President Obama or Congress can do will stimulate the economy in any real sense - that is, no government can create real wealth.  It can only make itself appear to have done so, by focusing public attention on only part of the picture.  

The only power a government has in the economy - and it is a formidable power indeed - is to make some people pay for things that are consumed by others.

The power that philosophers have in the economy - equally formidable - is to convince people that they are morally justified in making some people pay for things that are consumed by others.

We have seen that politicians have an inestimable advantage in staging the legerdemain required to prop up farces like “economic stimulus plans” and the Cash for Clunkers program.  As in Hazlitt’s scenario, when the earnings of individuals are taken and redistributed to others, it is quite impossible to count how the money would have been used otherwise, precisely because those free actions never came about.  It is easy to add up the numbers for press releases - for instance, to boast that Cash for Clunkers put $1.9 billion in participants’ pockets through 457,000 transactions - but we will never know what the people who paid for the program would have done with the money if it hadn’t been seized from them.  

What we do know for sure is that the fact that it was seized is an unpardonable injustice. 

As a final comment, I’ll mention that I think a lot of ordinary Americans feel helpless to contradict the “experts” on CNN, Nobel Laureates such as may be found on the editorial page of The New York Times, and the brain trusts of the federal government.  I for one am not an economist; I fully concede that they know far more than I will ever know about academic economics.

But it is a mistake to surrender one’s mind and morals to “experts” in any field.  I cannot even begin to fathom the economic complexities, for instance, of Bernard Madoff’s fraudulent schemes, but I do not need to be an expert to identify those schemes as fraudulent, i.e. as violations of individual rights.  The same principle applies to the lawful violations of rights perpetrated daily by the Obama administration and Congress.  The complexity of federal programs - a complexity that makes it difficult or impossible for even the lawmakers themselves to understand (even when they bother to read the bills they sign) - does not change their nature.  Abrogations of rights are in essence the same whether they are delivered in one hundred pages of the Federal Register or with one squeeze of a trigger. 

NOTES

1.  “Government Will End Clunker Program Early,” The New York Times, 20 Aug 2009.

2.  “Statement by President Barack Obama on Senate Passage of Cash for Clunkers Extension,” Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, 6 Aug 2009.

3.  “Secretary LaHood Announces Wind Down to Hugely Popular CARS Program,” Department of Transportation Press Release, DOT 126-09, 20 Aug 2009.

4.  “Analysts predict billions in benefits from ‘Cash for Clunkers,” CNN, 7 Aug 2009.

5.  The general euphoria was not shared by some of the dealerships who are experiencing delays or hassles with application forms.  It is not surprising that such problems would be encountered when dealing with the federal government, but I am ignoring this detail in my post because it is a non-fundamental side issue.

6.  Doug Reich, “A Kerquillionty Dollars,” The Rational Capitalist, 2 Aug 2009.

7.  Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Arlington House, NY, 1979, (orig. Harper & Brothers, 1946), p. 23 - 24.