Yaron Brook is on the front lines in the battle for freedom. . .and
the scariest part is not simply the long odds he confronts facing an
overwhelmingly entrenched opposition. The frightening thing is that he is practically
the only man on the front who is armed.
He is armed, of course, with ideas:
the ideas of Ayn Rand, the novelist and philosopher who championed reason. Rand
showed that the rights of man—the rights of every individual to his life, his
thoughts and actions, his property, and his selfish pursuit of joy and
happiness—are firmly rooted in the facts of reality. Rights are neither divine
gifts of supernatural deities nor arbitrary privileges bestowed by governments,
but are moral principles that follow from the facts of man’s nature as a
living, free-willed, conceptual organism.
On Friday, Lynne and I attended Dr. Brook’s lecture in Lexington United States
The book’s message is straightforward. The ever-increasing presence
of the government in our lives—the incomprehensively reckless borrowing and
utterly unsustainable spending by politicians—is not caused by widespread beliefs
that the free market doesn’t work. People know
that capitalism works. The issue, at root, is one of morality.
It is true that thanks to popular fallacies and myths, some
confusions and suspicions about the free market exist. (Brook and Watkins do a
good job untangling some of the alleged problems of the free market, showing
that invariably the ills are either caused by government intervention, for
which the free market receives the blame, or are not problems at all.) But for
the most part the book’s many and varied examples are simply pounding us with
what we already know. Capitalism works—and
unless you are a university professor or a Nobel Prize-winning economist
writing for the New York Times—you know
that. As Brook noted in his lecture, the evidence is in. The past two centuries
provide the overwhelming, undeniable evidence: where freedom prevails human
beings flourish, and where freedom is throttled misery and death reign. Every cudgel
and club of government intervention has been tried, from welfare programs to
price controls to concentration camps, and history has shown a standard of
living and general prosperity exactly in inverse
proportion to government controls.
So, knowing that, why do we continue to vote for politicians who
promise to intrude more and more into our lives? Why is it impossible for
politicians to cut spending even though it is plainly leading us to disaster?
Why are welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
considered to be untouchable “third rails”? Why do Americans universally
distrust businessmen who depend upon satisfying their customers, but blindly
trust “impartial” government bureaucrats?
Brook and Watkins make the case that the answer is fundamentally a
matter of morality. For the most
part, Americans want to do what they believe is right, and have tragically accepted a morality incompatible with the
requirements of liberty: altruism. As
long as we believe, as we’ve always been told, that sacrifice is good and noble—that it is right to put others before
ourselves—then we will be unable to defend ourselves against statists who ride
into power precisely on that platform. Even those “small government”
conservatives and “Tea Partiers” who passionately defend fiscal responsibility,
limited government, and the Founders’ vision of individual rights generally
crumble in the face of accusations that they are “heartless.” Conservatives who
would claim to defend free markets are the first to leave their posts, begging
to be seen as being compassionate.
If we are to restore liberty—or indeed, realize a freedom we have
never yet fully achieved—it will require the moral revolution described in this
excellent book. Read it.
And, of course, read Ayn Rand.
NOTES
I excerpted
some passages from this for my Goodreads and Amazon reviews of the book.
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