December — 2009 — VOICES for REASON

We at Voices for Reason would like to wish all you a very happy New Year. And what better way to start the New Year than by reading Alex Epstein’s op-ed, “The Meaning of New Year’s Resolutions”?

This New Year’s, resolve to think about how to make your life better, not just once a year, but every day. Resolve to set goals, not just in one or two aspects of life, but in every important aspect and in your life as a whole. Resolve to pursue the goals that will make you successful and happy, not as the exception in a life of passivity, but as the rule that becomes second-nature.

Whole thing here.

Image: Flickr

Commentators on both the right and the left have griped about the many conditions in the Senate and House health-care bills that were added to win the support of special interest groups or specific congressmen. The right, for example, has decried the dealing as “cash for cloture,” while the left has assailed the individual mandate as an insurance industry coup.

And indeed, the bills are ripe with provisions that benefit some at the expense of others. Among those in the Senate bill alone (see this article for a more complete list):

• $300 million to Louisiana for the vote of Mary Landrieu
• $100 million to a Connecticut hospital to help the sinking poll numbers of Christopher Dodd
• A permanent expansion of federal Medicare payments to Nebraska (estimated value, $100 million) for the vote of Ben Nelson
• An excise tax exemption for longshoremen in exchange for the support of their union
• A 10 percent tax on tanning salons—added at the behest of the American Medical Association in place of a proposed a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery
• The exemption of Florida senior citizens from Medicare cuts for the vote of Bill Nelson
• $600 million in Medicaid benefits to Vermont for the vote of Patrick Leahy

Where does the money for these favors come from? From the only place it can—the pockets of U.S. citizens who have created that wealth in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Conservatives—and, more broadly, many on the right—are horrified that ObamaCare is getting close to becoming a reality, and rightly so. Indeed, many have been horrified for months, as ominous proposal after ominous proposal has been put forward. Take the recent flirtation with a “Medicare buy-in.” Medicare has, by some estimates, $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities—and over half the Senate was willing to extend this fiscal train-wreck to cover everyone from 55 to 65. Or take the House and Senate requirement forcing insurers to sell policies to individuals with preexisting conditions for the same price as everyone else. This is like forcing a company to sell fire insurance to someone whose house has just burned down. Why would a young, healthy person buy health insurance and pay premiums for years when he can just buy it the first time he gets sick—with a $750 slap on the wrist (the penalty for not buying “mandatory” insurance)?

Such proposals make it easy to demonize liberals as the health-care villains. But conservatives must share in the blame for the likely passage of ObamaCare.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a post of mine called “Eminent domain ‘abuse?,’” I wrote that eminent domain “has no place in a free society” and that it would be practical to build roads, bridges, and power lines without calling on government to seize land by force of law.

A reader challenged my position, noting that a private contractor who tried to build a road without eminent domain could not obtain the land at a price that would allow a profit. The closer he got to completion, the commenter worried, the higher the price each landowner would charge for the last pieces of the puzzle.

Here’s the kind of scenario this comment suggests. Suppose the New Road Company wants to build a highway from Point A to Point B. It starts quietly buying up plots of land along the planned route. After a year or so, however, word leaks out that millions of dollars have been invested in this route. The planned route is apparent from the locations of the properties being bought. And it’s obvious that the entire investment will become worthless unless the company can acquire a one-acre parcel owned by Joe Lucky, whose land offers the only practical entryway to Point B. “Kind of in a bind, aren’t you?” Joe says when the company’s representative comes calling. “Sure, I’ll sell my land–for $100 million.” The project collapses in debt, and the road never gets built. The implication is that modern transportation would grind to a halt without government’s power of eminent domain to seize property at lower-than-market prices.

Okay, let’s come back to reality. Consider the fact that successful developers are not idiots. No businessman with this little planning ability would ever be trusted with the millions necessary for such a project. On a free market, a typical developer would ensure (before spending millions on purchases) his ability to acquire the entire right-of-way for a reasonable price. How? One approach would make use of option contracts. In an option contract, a landowner agrees to sell his parcel of property for $X, but only if the developer can reach agreements with other owners permitting acquisition of the entire right-of-way for a reasonable price (that is, a price that will allow a profit). What’s more, a smart developer would be working on one or more alternative routes, to encourage price competition among landowners. No single landowner would be able to jack up his asking price arbitrarily, because the developer would never put himself in a position where he had to pay a price so high that profit became impossible.

The idea that public roads, built by eminent domain, are the only practical option for modern transportation is a myth that should long ago have been shattered. But we are too complacent. We sit idly in stopped traffic on inadequate highways and curse the rush hour, never imagining there could be a better option than a government monopoly built on coercion. Of course, a free market does not guarantee that every developer will invest his money wisely. Nor does it preclude the existence of landowners who refuse to sell at any price. The point is that on a free market, such people could do nothing to prevent others from making the necessary transactions to get roads built.

Just imagine, in this age of email, Internet, and FedEx, if someone argued that the only practical means of communicating across the American continent is through the federal government’s postal monopoly. That person would be laughed out of town. It’s high time people understood that not only communication but transportation can flourish under a regime of property rights and freedom of contract.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Amid the economic collapse and backlash against the growth of government, interest in Ayn Rand exploded in 2009. Within six months of 2009, bookstore sales of Atlas Shrugged had doubled the record of 200,000 set in 2008, and they are expected to exceed 400,000. Discussion of Rand and her views was a regular occurrence in the media, with some even dubbing 2009 “the year of Ayn Rand.”

Undoubtedly Ayn Rand’s popularity 27 years after her death was remarkable, and I view it as a positive sign that so many Americans saw on some level the connection between Atlas Shrugged and current events. I’d like to think, however, that the year of Ayn Rand would not be characterized by billion dollar government bailouts, the inauguration of a statist president elected on a platform as vacuous as “hope and change,” and government takeovers of automakers, financial institutions and the health care system.

On the contrary, a truly “Ayn Rand year” would witness the casting off of these and all other government chains. But this would require a much deeper process of intellectual and cultural change than we have yet seen. Read the rest of this entry »

As 2009 draws to a close, all of us at Voices for Reason wish you a festive and happy holiday season! Thank you for reading our commentary, and for sharing it with your friends, colleagues, or other contacts. We’ve appreciated all of your feedback and comments, and look forward to hearing more from you in 2010.

Our goal continues to be to bring you commentary informed by Ayn Rand’s distinctive philosophical system, Objectivism—and to analyze and explore the solutions these ideas offer to today’s political, economic and cultural debates. We strive to offer a unique perspective on what’s happening in the world, and why.

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Thankfully, no binding agreement was reached on the global economic suicide pact that delegates were trying to craft at the climate conference in Copenhagen. Despite President Obama’s personal intervention—which apparently does not have magical agreement-forging powers (who knew?)—all that emerged from the meeting was a toothless “accord” and an agreement to keep talking.

But even though the provisions of the accord are legally non-binding, they do represent small steps toward actual commitments. The accord includes pledges to “enhance our long-term cooperative action to combat climate change,” to “hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius,” to “cooperate to achieve the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible,” and to provide undeveloped countries with “adequate funding” to adapt to climate change.

This last item was a major theme of the conference. The fact that poor countries are much more vulnerable to severe climate events than industrialized nations is widely recognized, and it is used to argue that developed nations have a duty to dole out massive amounts of foreign aid to help undeveloped countries adapt.

What’s not widely acknowledged is the fact that preindustrial countries have always been vulnerable to drought and hurricanes and heat waves and so on—and they always will be so long as they remain preindustrial. What keeps them at risk is not the possibility of large-scale changes to the climate, but their poverty and lack of technology. Their climate vulnerability is primarily a result of their lack of industrialization and political freedom.  Read the rest of this entry »

That’s the intriguing start to an essay by Onkar Ghate, senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (and Voices for Reason blogger), in the latest issue of U.S. News & World Report. The magazine invited him to address the “con” side of this debate: “Have the Holidays Become Too Secular?”

His answer, in essence, is that the true meaning of Christmas is secular, not religious. “Christmas in America is not a Christian holiday,” Dr. Ghate writes, explaining the paradox this way:

Christmas’s relation to goodwill leads many to believe the holiday inseparable from Christianity, allegedly the religion of goodwill. But the connection is tenuous. A doctrine that tells you that you’re a sinner—that you must seek redemption but cannot earn it yourself—and that Jesus, sinless, has endured an excruciating death to redeem you, who doesn’t deserve his sacrifice but who should accept it anyway—can hardly be characterized as expressing a benevolent view of man.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the worst foreign policy developments of 2009 was also one of the most underreported—the Obama administration’s decision to do away with the official use of the term “global war on terror” in favor of “Overseas Contingency Operation.” The term “global war on terror” was awful, to be sure—it named our enemy vaguely and evasively. But instead of correcting that mistake by a clear identification of the enemy that threatens us with terrorism and nuclear attacks, President Obama’s new designation denies the existence of any enemy. We went from worse to worser.

Correctly defining the enemy is indispensable in any war. In Chapter 4 of Winning the Unwinnable War, Alex Epstein and Yaron Brook write:

To fulfill the promise to defeat the terrorist enemy that struck on 9/11, our leaders would first have to identify who exactly that enemy is and then be willing to do whatever is necessary to defeat him.

Who is the enemy that attacked on 9/11? It is not “terrorism”—just as our enemy in World War II was not kamikaze strikes or U-boat attacks. Terrorism is a tactic employed by a certain group for a certain cause. That group and, above all, the cause they fight for are our enemy.

Read the rest of this entry »

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