Dennis Prager: If There Is No God, Part 13

(Note: This is Part 13 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 #13:

Without God, there are no inalienable human rights. Evolution confers no rights. Molecules confer no rights. Energy has no moral concerns. That is why America's Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed "by our Creator" with certain inalienable rights. Rights depend upon a moral source, a rights giver. [Note 1.]

Here we see the lethality of a morality based in religion. This is why religious conservatives are unable to defend liberty against the “liberals” who are openly driving us headlong into collective slavery and death.

Mr. Prager is correct that rights derive from a moral source; rights are moral principles. (Ayn Rand defined rights with her usual clarity: “A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.”[Note 2.]) To place the source of rights outside of nature is to deny that men have natural rights. It is an admission by the religious that they believe individual rights do not exist in the real world; if the source of rights were natural, the religious would not need to reach into the supernatural realm to find it. Thus, in aiming to defend rights against those that deny them, the religious concede all fundamental premises to their enemies.

Contrary to Mr. Prager’s claim, there is no “rights giver,” natural or supernatural. Rights are not gifts bestowed by governments or gods. The very idea of a giver contradicts the inalienable nature of rights; a God that giveth rights may also taketh them away.[Note 3.]

Claims unmoored from reality are free to drift according to any whim. Some religious people assert that God gives us individual rights; others assert that God denies us individual rights. We have Dennis Prager on the one hand and the Taliban on the other. One is clearly civilized and one barbaric, but both parties stand on the same murky ground: faith. This is not to equate the two; Dennis Prager, who claims to stand for rights, happens to be on the correct side of the argument. But to be on the correct side for the wrong reason is at best unreliable, and at worst, weakens the case of those that have gotten it right. For actual defenders of individual rights (like me), the presence of Republicans and religious conservatives who combat the left by championing God-given rights is appalling. The old saying comes to mind: With friends like these, who needs enemies?

The best possible way for me to articulate a defense of individual rights based on the facts of reality is to insert, verbatim, the text of Ayn Rand’s essay, “Man’s Rights,” which is referenced in Note 2. Since the essay is available for free on the internet, I’ll assume anyone interested in such a defense will pause here to read it. Nothing else is needed.

Beyond Ayn Rand’s essay, I can add no content that is not mere repetition (and an impoverished repetition at that). However, since the intent of this series is to provide guideposts for the honest thinker who currently holds religious premises, I’ve added something that may be helpful. Figure 1 shows a sort of map that I constructed, representing a logical hierarchy. This chart is a recreation of my own work that I did years ago for my own satisfaction in validating individual rights.

Here is some background: Humans are capable of creating abstractions from direct observations, and beyond this, may create abstractions from abstractions. Such concept formation can continue to higher and higher levels with no particular limit. But in order to validate these abstractions, one must be able to work - that is to say, think - one’s way back to the bottom of the hierarchy, to fundamental axioms and direct observations. A break in the chain indicates an error; an ungrounded premise indicates an invalid argument (even if the conclusion is incidentally correct).

Without such a path from concepts to a foundation, abstractions are necessarily floating. Even for concepts like liberty, honesty, and justice, for instance, that are of such obvious value that they seem self-evident - indeed, especially for such concepts - it is necessary to be grounded in reality. Ultimately, it is a tragedy that America’s Founders expressly regarded such truths as a man’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness to be self-evident. These values are truths, but they are not self-evident. The Founders identified individual rights . . . but left the concept floating.

Figure 1. Logical hierarchy for individual rights.

Figure 1 is not a proof, nor is it a substitute for thinking; each proposition and branch requires careful thought on its own. I purposely retained a pencil-on-paper format to emphasize its informality. Its purpose is to provide a rough guide tracing individual rights from high level abstractions (at the top of the page) to axioms (at the bottom). “The source of man’s rights,” wrote Ayn Rand, “is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A - and Man is Man.” She formulated the unbroken connection between individual rights and metaphysical axioms.

I cannot vouch for the complete suitability of this type of map in representing logical structures. It strikes me as reasonable, and it appeals to my own personal organizing habits. (I am a circuit designer and firmware developer, so my professional success requires good hierarchical thinking.) I tried to retain all the major steps in the sequence, though there is always a trade-off between the level of detail and the encapsulation of particulars.[Note 4.] I am fairly certain that if I kept fiddling with the chart, I would find ways to improve it. My purpose is not to create an airtight graphical representation, but to illustrate the basic guideposts for the main point - that individual rights derive from the facts of reality.

(Note: The final 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. Ayn Rand, “Man’s Rights,” from The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, Penguin Group, New York, orig. 1964, p.110. This essay, which the Ayn Rand Center makes available for free here, is the most complete and concise articulation of reality-based individual rights I have ever seen.

3. The Founders were precise in their use of the term “inalienable,” meaning that rights could not be taken away, not even by God. They were students of John Locke and advocates of the political theory of natural rights. That being said, the Founders were not moral philosophers; they were political theorists who adopted, by default, the conventional moral theory that was available at the time. (For an excellent treatment of this material, I recommend Craig Biddle’s lecture, “Moral Rights and Metaphysical Law,” which will hopefully be made available soon at the Ayn Rand Bookstore.) The Founders acheivements are nonetheless remarkable. In the context of their time, it is impossible to expect them to completely throw off the vestigial superstitions that had so thoroughly infested moral thinking for centuries. One cannot blame Adams, Jefferson, and Madison for not being Ayn Rand.

4. To pick just one example, I’ll point out the step labeled “Pursuit of values must be chosen by organisms with free will,” which followed from humans having free will. One might object here that just because a person has free will, it does not follow that he must use it. Indeed, as I was constructing the chart, I had penciled in an intermediate step of “Pursuit of values may be chosen,” but it degenerated trivially into the “must be chosen” branch and an “is not chosen” branch that fed back into non-free-willed organisms. This intermediate step might be of interest to an anthropologist or primatologist tracing the development of a species that evolves from non-free-willed to free-willed, but it adds an unnecessary and distracting complication to this study. My purpose is to demonstrate that humans have individual rights, and Homo sapiens has unambiguously evolved to the point in which he must use his mind in order to survive.

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.]

The Absolutism of Principles

An article I read recently told an anecdote attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to G. Bernard Shaw. While at a dinner party one evening, Shaw asked the woman next to him if she would sleep with him for a hundred thousand pounds. She considered for a moment, then consented: “Yes!” Shaw continued, “Well then, how about for five pounds?” To this, she replied indignantly, “What kind of woman do you think I am?” “We’ve already established that,” said Shaw. “Now we’re merely haggling over the price.”

The anecdote is amusing, but more importantly it points to something crucially important: the absolutism of principles. Like a crack in a dike, a single breach of a principle is enough to collapse it. The tiniest compromise eventually becomes a gaping hole through which all the values that the principle once supported pour out.

Consider Barack Obama’s programs for “overhauling” American health care. In his press conference last week, the president promised millions of listeners that he would improve their health care and make only the very wealthiest Americans pay for it. I am not disheartened enough to think that nearly everybody would be taken in by this, but it is surely true that many Americans, probably millions of them, would vaguely (and some, enthusiastically) consider the president’s policy to be beneficial.

As the president himself urged his listeners to ask themselves the question, “What’s in this for me?” I am sure some Americans leaned forward a little, eagerly hoping to find out what they would receive. After all, isn’t it good to be healthy? And if the government can make other people (best of all, the greedy rich) pay for the health care that everyone else uses, doesn’t that benefit the common good? It’s a “win-win” situation; the majority gets the stuff that they want and they don’t have to pay for it.

The problem is that all Americans do pay for it - not with money, but with something more fundamental and precious: our freedom.

Americans who would applaud an explicit government policy of flaying the rich for the sake of a share of plunder do not value freedom anyway (though like any parasites, they need at least a modicum of freedom to exist in order to survive themselves). It is not to them that I direct this article; they are beyond reach.

But I believe many Americans sincerely do not understand what is at stake, and would not hold their liberty so lightly if they did. From politicians and the press, they hear the words “freedom” and “marketplace” and “efficiency” associated with the government’s actions, while individuals and corporations are characterized as “predatory,” “greedy,” and “wasteful.” They hear Mr. Obama assure them that it is the government that will “give you the security” of having health coverage while it it private companies that “force you to pay” for it “out of your own pocket.” And since they’ve been told for as long as they remember that selfishness is wrong, that private corporations are corrupt, and that something as complex as a modern economy cannot possibly operate properly unless it is managed by a cadre of “disinterested” geniuses such as may be found at the helm of the federal government, they nod assent to the president in a ill-founded trust that the “experts” must know what is best.

What those nods of assent grant to Barack Obama and Congress is permission - permission to direct the lives of all Americans as they see fit. (Whether or not they are well-intentioned is irrelevant; both parties now, Democrats and Republicans, are hell-bent on tightening the federal government’s grip on American citizens.)

How do politicians receive this permission from basically good people in a free country? It is simpler than it may seem. What the president and legislators know, and what most Americans do not know or evade, is that politicians need not ask citizens directly to surrender their lives and livelihoods. They would never get away with it. Instead, their approach is indirect. All they need to do is obtain the public’s assent to dispose of a relative handful of citizens.

This is particularly easy to do today for two reasons. First, the fact that America is a republic safeguarding the rights of every individual has been completely obscured and (through sheer repetition) supplanted by the false idea that America is a democracy that institutionalizes the “will of the majority.” The second thing that facilitates demagoguery is the ready availability of a group that is hated or resented. In other places and times, foreigners and Jews have served as suitable targets; in America today, it is businessmen that are the disposable minority. Mr. Obama rode into power fomenting this resentment with smooth eloquence, pitting “Main Street” against “Wall Street.” In his speech last week, after briefly pretending he didn’t know the exact details, the president reassured his listeners that only “families whose joint income is a million dollars” would have to “shoulder the burden” for his plan.

Once you have granted the president permission to dispose of millionaires, what stops him from disposing of anyone and everyone? Nothing. The only defense from enslavement is to stand on principle - the very principle that was cast away. Like the woman in the anecdote who gave away her honor for a hundred thousand pounds, the American public has, by giving Barack Obama the green light to throw the yoke upon a few millionaires, surrendered its moral ground. It has lost its ability to object to any conceivable command to serve. When the Obama administration raises taxes and inflates away the wealth of all working Americans (which it will), the Americans who nodded assent can blame no one but themselves. Surcharges? Tax increases? Rations? Waiting lists? Having established that individuals are expendable, all of this is “merely haggling over the price.”

If you want a thorough examination of the compromise of principles played out to its logical conclusion, I refer you to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. In the novel, as the once free nation collapses by excruciating degrees into dictatorship and ruin, the hero identifies the reason. “In any compromise between food and poison,” he says, “it is only death that can win.”

Obviously, such compromises by the American public did not begin with the ascent of Barack Obama; the freedom established by the Founders has been whittled away steadily for more than a century. However, the last decade or so has been an ominous one, a period in which Americans ushered into office presidents and legislators that apparently feel unlimited in their power to prescribe and proscribe the activities of individuals. They think they have a democratic mandate to do so, and with good reason: Americans as a whole have given them permission in the manner I described above. For the love of our lives and liberty, we must withdraw that permission.

Now.

NOTES

1. Transcript from “News Conference by the President, East Room, July 22, 2009,” Office of the Press Secretary, White House, 23 Jul 2009. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from the president were taken from this transcript. In two brief quotes, I applied italics for emphasis.

Yaron Brook’s Call to Action - July 2009

In a newly released video, Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute speaks out against the socialization of the medical industry (i.e. “health care reform”), reminding us that health care is not a right.

A Modest Proposal

My thanks go to C. August at Titanic Deck Chairs, who called attention to Richard Ralston’s satirical article, “It's Time to Nationalize Grocery Stores ;).”  In the article, Mr. Ralston, who is the Executive Director of Americans for Free Choice in Medicine, laces the chilling details of a government takeover of the food industry with tongue-in-cheek humor.  His purpose is draw a parallel between the industries of food and medicine, and to demonstrate, by the sheer absurdity of the prospect, that the claims of a “right” to health care are no more valid than claims of a “right” to food.

He is correct, of course, and as I read his article, I fully grasped the implications of his scenario.  I worry, though, that in this climate of unchecked government intrusions - in a culture that clamors for a kingly messiah that promises “change” in the form of a morsel of food dropped into outstretched hands - the absurdity will be missed by too many people.  Anyone who values liberty is sure to get the message of Mr. Ralston’s piece, but I fear that many Americans (i.e. citizens of America, though not American in spirit) would applaud the announcement that food “is surely a right, as it is necessary for human survival.  Therefore all groceries available in government commissaries will be free of charge.”  Are we so very far away from this now?

In a previous post, I wrote of my misgivings about the use of reductio ad absurdum with a public that is more likely to listen to the rumblings of their stomachs than to applications of logic:  

It wasn’t so long ago that I used the poor eating habits of Americans as an argument, in the form of reductio ad absurdum, to defend the tobacco industry in conversations with colleagues.  My case would go something like, “People choose to smoke, so they have no one to blame but themselves for the consequences.  To blame the tobacco companies is like blaming fast food restaurants for making people fat, which is ridiculous, right?”  At the time, it seemed completely absurd to think that legislators would come to assail restaurants for using “trans-fats.” 

Alas, in a society that has abandoned reason, a proposition that is plainly absurd one day becomes legislation the next.

When Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal in 1729, he could be certain that his sarcasm would not be lost on his audience, and the population of Ireland would not suddenly begin relieving their hunger pangs by stewing, roasting, baking, or boiling their children “in a fricasie, or a ragoust.”  I have no such confidence in the general public today, for whom the most egregious violations of individual rights is palatable with scarcely any seasoning at all.

An Inalienable Right to a Trust Fund

Boston Globe “Ideas” section columnist Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow recently penned an article about one of the innumerable bright ideas coming out of the woodwork in the recent orgy of government intervention:

[A] growing movement argues that every baby should be a trust fund baby: a modest trust fund should be a basic right, like education and adequate nutrition.  By opening a savings account for every American newborn, the thinking goes, the government would give all citizens a foothold in the financial system, as well as access to a nest egg, however small.  [Note 1.]

The first thing that jumps off the page in that quote is that education and adequate nutrition are not “basic rights” at all, so to append trust funds to the long list of these alleged “rights” is unwarranted right from the start.  Of course, parents should not be allowed to put their children in a box, depriving them of life-sustaining nutrition and mental activity, but that sort of abuse would be addressed by a proper set of laws that defends individual rights.  The implication of the article is that it is the province of the federal government to provide education and nutrition for its citizens - and by extension, it ought to provide universal trust funds as well.  With this logic, it is hard to imagine anything perceived as a value not being assigned the status of a “basic right.”

The reason that such values must not be regarded to be “basic rights” is that the enforcement of such “rights” necessarily violates actual rights.  There is only one fundamental right: an individual’s right to freedom of thought and action, admirably expressed by the Founders as the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  The government cannot provide education, nutrition, or trust funds - not to mention prescription drugs, food stamps, research grants, bicycle helmets, coupons for new television sets, condoms, etc. - without taking those things by force from somebody who has produced them.

But even if we set aside the immorality of seizing the work of some people to redistribute it to others, the logic of the “universal trust fund” camp is preposterous.  If their goal is truly to “foster a culture of savings,” how is this advanced by removing the responsibility of saving money from individuals and assigning it to the government?  That is like saying that since some children have trouble completing their homework assignments, the state will henceforth do the homework for all children - and this will somehow promote a “culture of doing homework.”  Obviously, the exact opposite is true.  Fewer children will do their own homework when it is done for them.  And for the same reason, fewer people will save their own money when it is done for them.  

If politicians are concerned about Americans’ lack of responsibility in saving their money for the future, they need look no further than the Social Security system that their legislative predecessors created.  This absurd Ponzi scheme, which promises every American great expectations for his retirement, was bound to discourage personal savings.  The deterioration of personal responsibility for retirement planning was manifestly predictable.

Even a cursory understanding of human nature reveals that shielding people from the consequences of their actions (or inactions) does not foster or invigorate an effort to improve.  On the contrary, it discourages improvement.  The people who were not lifting a finger to help themselves before will certainly not start to do so when the government steps in to relieve them of the pain that their apathy would have inflicted.  In fact, in a perverse reversal of apparent intent, many average citizens who would otherwise have cared for themselves will have an incentive to surrender that function to the government.  It will be only the very rare and remarkable individuals who will resist the suffocating intrusion of the government and attend to their own selfish interests.  The appalling injustice is that it will be only those exceptional people who will end up producing anything at all.  They will be the hosts to the parasites, whipped and bled as they toil for the rest.

It is bewildering to me how the bleated demands for a paternalistic government and a welfare state can be sustained in light of its most obvious illogic and its historical failures.  Whatever the modern “liberal” worldview can claim as being true in its fantasy universe, it certainly does not pertain to this world.  It’s puzzling, because there is no shortage of smart people involved.  I do not doubt that the progressive brain trust, the left-leaning intelligensia, has earned its haughty confidence - a confidence not harmed by the habit of attending cocktail parties populated entirely by like-minded comrades.  In constructing their social programs and their five-point plans, they have surely accounted for every psychological, physiological, sociological, and economic Ph.D. thesis written in the last hundred years (excluding only those that did not conform to their preconceptions, of course).  Still, it would have been better if they had simply accounted for actual human beings.

The Globe article manages to sneak in another shopworn idea, the falsehood of which should be plain to all: the notion that “wealth inequality” is a problem.  The author writes that universal trust funds “could help remedy the overlooked problem of wealth inequality, or disparity in assets, which dwarfs even the income gulf between rich and poor.”  The idea that my immediate wealth is made greater or less by my neighbor’s wealth is absurd.   What matters to a man is his own wealth, not the ratio of his wealth to that of rich people.  Many things in the universe may be relative - the motion of my body compared to that of the moon, for instance - but the requirements of a human being to live and flourish are not.  They are absolute.  

When I sit down to eat a meal that I have earned, I am not suddenly impoverished by the fact that someone in the world has produced a value.  My salary did not drop when Alex Rodriguez signed a contract to play baseball for $24 million per year.  The car in my garage was not suddenly worth less when Microsoft released its latest operating system, nor did my television set drop in value when Cypress Semiconductor introduced a new product.  If anything, the fact that people who are unimaginably wealthier than I am exist in the free world signals a great advantage for me, since it indicates a high level of productivity that will permit me to obtain more even with my lesser means. 

 

The complaint against “wealth inequality” suffers from at least three errors.  First, it is blatantly second-handed to judge one’s own success or failure by comparing oneself to others.  Second, it depends upon the false notion of static wealth - the idea that the world is one fixed pie, and to grab a piece constitutes taking it away from someone else.  Third, and the most immoral of the lot, to demand the equality of wealth distribution is to demand injustice, since it deliberately divorces efforts from rewards.

Finally, I’ll mention one more point in the article: a particularly galling comparison made by Ray Boshara, the director of the “asset building program” at the New America Foundation.  “In support of children’s savings accounts,” states the Globe article, “Boshara compares them to other great American policies such as the 1862 Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres to anyone willing to live on the land and work it for five years.”  This is outrageously disingenuous.  The principles involved in the Homestead Act are diametrically opposed to those of children’s trust funds.  The sentence from the article itself contains the key word that renders it false: work.  The Homestead Act did not grant land to every citizen; it issued deeds only to those that earned it.  The children’s savings program conspicuously eschews the notion of earning by unconditionally granting funds to everyone.  Furthermore, as the agent of the Homestead Act, the government did not first seize land that belonged to others, then redistribute it.  The land was unused and unowned.  In contrast, the children’s savings accounts would be funded by money taken from taxpayers.  In short, the Homestead Act is a model of good government, while the children’s trust fund is a model of nudging tyranny.  To compare the two is shameful.

NOTES

1.  Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Cash on Delivery,” http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/02/01/cash_on_delivery/.