November — 2009 — VOICES for REASON

In the 1972 case, U.S. v. 12 200-Ft. Reels of Super 8mm Film, then Chief Justice Warren Burger noted:

The seductive plausibility of single steps in a chain of evolutionary development of a legal rule is often not perceived until a third, fourth, or fifth ‘logical’ extension occurs. Each step, when taken, appeared a reasonable step in relation to that which preceded it, although the aggregate or end result is one that would never have been seriously considered in the first instance.

The phenomenon Chief Justice Burger was observing is wider than the development of legal rules. If people were confronted with a stark choice between freedom and dictatorship, few would choose dictatorship. But that is not what they are confronted with. While it’s true that to compromise the principle of freedom puts one on a path that ultimately leads to total enslavement, it is a long path, and each step of increasing government control can seem necessary in relation to the step that preceded it.

A few recent examples: Read the rest of this entry »

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s an unforgettable Thanksgiving scene at the mansion of Hank Rearden, a self-made millionaire industrialist whose achievements include the invention—after ten years of toil—of a revolutionary new metal, stronger, cheaper and more durable than steel. In addition to Rearden, seated at the table for Thanksgiving dinner are his mother, his wife Lillian, and his brother Philip, all of whom are wholly dependent on Rearden and his wealth.

Here’s is Rand’s description of the setting:

The roast turkey had cost $30. The champagne had cost $25. The lace tablecloth, a cobweb of grapes and vine leaves iridescent in the candlelight, had cost $2,000. The dinner service, with an artist’s design burned in blue and gold into a translucent white china, had cost $2,500. The silverware, which bore the initials LR in Empire wreaths of laurels, had cost $3,000. But it was held to be unspiritual to think of money and of what that money represented.

A peasant’s wooden shoe, gilded, stood in the center of the table, filled with marigolds, grapes and carrots. The candles were stuck into pumpkins that were cut as open-mouthed faces drooling raisins, nuts and candy upon the tablecloth.

In keeping with Thanksgiving tradition, Rearden’s family gives thanks for the bounty before them.

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d heard every last pseudo-explanation for why the militant regime in Iran really is seeking nuclear technology as a means, not to threaten others, but for some kind of peaceful purpose. Until recently.

The other week I attended a panel discussion on Iran featuring Hans Blix. Dr. Blix is a Swedish diplomat and the head of an outfit called The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (notably, he was involved in the UN inspections of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). The venue for the panel, moreover, was the annual conference of the Middle East Institute. All of which is to say that he is sufficiently respected a figure to be invited to address this informed, specialist audience. At the opening of his remarks, he seriously suggested that Iran could well be seeking nuclear technology, not for weapons, but for energy, because . . . nuclear power has the “ecological” benefit of avoiding pollution.

Yet: Iran has not sought to hook up its existing nuclear facilities to the electrical grid. More than that, who could seriously believe Iran cares one iota about the fate of its citizens, let alone the air they breathe (as Blix implies in re avoiding pollution)? Who could seriously believe that a regime that crushes its own people when they challenge its legitimacy; that tortures and murders political opponents; that funds vicious groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and the PLO; that has waged devastating attacks on American targets for years; who could seriously believe that a regime with such contempt for the lives of individuals within and without its borders could really have benign motives for its nuclear program? There’s no empirical basis for that belief.

Blix, like so many others, seems willing to dream up all manner of rationalizations for continued (so-called) diplomacy with Iran, rather than face the true nature of that regime and the need to stop its malignant ambitions.

image:wikiCommons

Darwin’s masterpiece The Origin of Species was published 150 years ago today, and the truths Darwin discovered are now the cornerstones of modern biology.

Nevertheless, creationists are still trying to dodge the facts and distort Darwin’s science and legacy. The latest scheme is a creationist edition of Origin with an introduction that attacks Darwin personally and rehashes scientifically illiterate claims against evolution. The edition has been published by creationist Ray Comfort, a colleague of child-TV-star-cum-evangelical-fanatic Kirk Cameron, in order to hand out free copies to students on college campuses.

Check out this four-part exchange between Comfort and scientist Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.) It is revealing, I think, of the hostility and utter ignorance of Darwin’s enemies, as well as the futility—Scott’s valiant efforts notwithstanding—of trying to engage in reasoned debate with people who are essentially anti-reason.

In his autobiography, Darwin said: “I have almost always been treated honestly by my reviewers, passing over those without scientific knowledge as not worthy of notice.” While this is too broad a dismissal of all nonscientist commentators, it certainly applies to those who willingly and militantly embrace scientific ignorance in the name of faith.

It’s vital to see how the “bundle of rights” approach obliterates property rights as a moral principle. In truth, property rights are inviolable moral principles, protecting each individual’s sovereign right to keep the material values he earns and use them to support his life. This principle is violated when the very first “stick” is removed—that is, when property rights are infringed for the very first time. The crucial benefit of principles is that they serve as early warning systems, like the nerve endings in your skin, alerting you to any damage, no matter how slight, so that you can quickly identify the source of the pain and fight it. The “bundle of rights” approach is specifically designed to anesthetize you against awareness that your rights are being violated. That way, a thousand cuts can be inflicted—a thousand regulations can be imposed—and you won’t know what’s happening to you. Here’s how the authors sum it up: “[F]raming property as bundles of rights and forewarning of limitations weakens perceptions of ownership and decreases resistance to subsequent restrictions.” (Italics added). Here’s my translation: If legal professionals systematically avoid telling people they have a moral right to their property, there will be less messy resistance when those rights are taken away by government fiat. Under this concept, property rights can be selectively violated (or eradicated) by majority vote—rendering them in fact (but not in name) “bundles of permissions.” Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember the moment when you turned the key in the lock of your first automobile, or your first house? Can you recall the sense of exhilaration you felt? “This is mine, all mine, and nobody can tell me what to do with it,” you may have thought. Part of what you were experiencing was the pleasure of ownership—exclusive personal dominion over an important material value.

If you’ve ever felt such owner’s pride, then you should be aware that according to theories long dominant in law schools, you don’t really own a car or a house—you only have a “bundle of rights” pertaining to its use. For example, if you have land, your “bundle” might allow building on it, walking on it, cutting down trees on it, digging in it, growing plants on it, fencing it off, and so forth.

This way of looking at property might strike you as idle academic chat. But it has serious real-world implications for anyone who values their property rights. Consider a recent scholarly article called “Property Frames” by two law professors (Jonathan Remy Nash, of Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, and Stephanie Stern, of Chicago-Kent College of Law) who use the bundle theory to answer the startling question with which they begin their paper: “How can we most effectively weaken property rights?”

Read the rest of this entry »

One argument sometimes heard in favor of green energy is that sources such as wind and solar are “free, forever.”  Al Gore, in particular, has said repeatedly that to end our “overdependence on outdated, heavily polluting carbon-based technologies . . . we need sources that are free forever, like the sun, wind and earth.” (See also here, here and here.)

On a superficial glance, this might seem to have a certain ring of plausibility. To use the energy in oil, coal and natural gas takes a lot of work and resources: the fuels have to be discovered, extracted, transported, processed, refined, and distributed—all at great effort and expense.

By contrast, sunlight and wind are flows of energy that already occur all by themselves in nature. Sunshine is, literally, a stream of electromagnetic energy flowing onto the earth. Similarly with wind, which consists of air particles that carry kinetic energy by the very fact of their being in motion. We can feel the effects of such energy without effort, just by sitting in the sun and enjoying the breeze.

But if you give this even a tiny amount of additional thought, you should quickly realize that the “free forever” argument is just plain silly.

Read the rest of this entry »

For months, Republicans’ singular strategy in the health-care debate has been to attack Democrat plans as “a government takeover of health care.” There are at least three major problems with this strategy. 1) It fails to acknowledge that we already have a government takeover of health care, thanks to government policies dating back to the 1940s. 2) It fails to acknowledge the major, systemic problems caused by our current, government-controlled system, such as skyrocketing prices across the board. (For more on this, see Jeff Scialabba’s posts here, here, and here.) 3) It fails to offer a positive, truly free-market alternative.

In recent weeks, finally, the Republicans offered a positive health care proposal of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous post I described how controls breed controls: when politicians intervene in the economy, they create distortions and problems which, unless corrected by rescinding the controls, necessitate further controls–a process ultimately resulting in total control by the government over the economy. We can see this process at work in the two domestic issues that have dominated headlines over the last year: the debate over health care and the financial crisis.

In both cases, the conventional wisdom has been that the free market created problems only government intervention can solve. In both cases, the conventional wisdom is wrong: it was government controls that created the problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Ayn Rand was an uncompromising defender of laissez-faire capitalism, which, she held, means “the abolition of any and all forms of government intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.” In her essay “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?”, she noted:

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.

This view would shock most people today. They take it as self-evident that we must have some combination of freedom and government control of the economy. The idea that “just a few controls” would lead to “gradual enslavement” strikes them as dubious, to say the least. But the evidence for this proposition is all around us. A free country doesn’t dissolve into authoritarian rule over night, but by steps–some small and innocuous, others vast and brazen. Today, we’re seeing examples of both.

Here’s a recent example of the former: Read the rest of this entry »