December — 2009 — VOICES for REASON

A thoughtful reader sent in a comment I’d like to discuss, in response to my post, “What are the property rights of mall owners?” In that post, I argued that a private shopping mall’s owners have the right to decide what conduct is permissible on their property. In the particular case at issue, a mall was being sued because it had called the police to remove protestors who were urging shoppers to boycott the mall.

My commenter wrote this:

Mall owners hold their property out as a public space for people to gather, shop, get entertained. Seems unfair to allow them to hold themselves out as a public asset, get public financing in many cases, provide space for public events (which many malls do), and make serious dough doing so, without expecting that they would be treated as a semi-public place when it comes to Constitutional protections for free speech at the core of our democracy.

I don’t see why property owners need special protections from democratic principles.

This comment certainly reflects widespread views, but it contains a number of confusions (for instance, confusions over the meaning of “democracy” and over the meaning of the Constitution’s protection of free speech). For now, though, I want to focus on just one confusion. It’s this idea of a “public space” as any area where members of the public who are strangers to each other might congregate for a common purpose.

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President Obama has sought to buy off Iran with concessions and talks, so that Tehran will agree to end its nuclear program. This policy of so-called engagement (in reality, appeasement) has quite predictably shipwrecked (the administration is admitting as much). I have been arguing that Obama’s policy of appeasement works to galvanize Tehran in its belligerence, including notably its nuclear program. That appears to be an intensifying trend.

Secretary of State Clinton starts making noises that the time has come to “pressure” Iran with the additional sanctions. Iran scoffs at a bill in Congress that would sanction its fuel supply. And it successfully test fires an enhanced long-range Sejil 2 missile.

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Here’s an unpublished letter ARC’s Yaron Brook sent to the Wall Street Journal in response to an op-ed by Heather Wilhelm:

Dear Editor,

After indulging in a truly dazzling series of ad hominem attacks on philosopher Ayn Rand, Heather Wilhelm does manage to raise one important issue: she asserts that Rand, whose books continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands a year, is not an effective salesman for capitalism. Whereas Rand is allegedly “elitist, cold and laser-focused on the supermen and superwomen of the world,” Wilhelm claims that what capitalism truly needs is an explanation of “how everyone, especially society’s neediest” benefit from economic liberty. That claim betrays an appalling ignorance of history.

Capitalism’s defenders have appealed to its beneficent effects since its inception. Accepting the conventional view that service to the needy is the essence of morality, they have downplayed and denied the essence of capitalism: the profit motive and the unrestricted pursuit of rational self-interest. This approach hasn’t worked. So long as even the free market’s defenders feel guilty and embarrassed by capitalism’s selfish nature, any attempt to reverse the anticapitalist trend is hopeless. Who is going to believe that vice is the path to the good?

What Rand offers is a radical alternative—a proper, moral defense of capitalism’s essence.

Rand argued that the proper standard of morality is the objective requirements of human life. She argued that human life requires productive achievement, and that the noblest act of moral virtue is using one’s mind to create life-sustaining values. She argued that profit is moral because it enriches the individual who achieves it—that someone like Bill Gates deserves the highest moral praise, not for giving away his wealth, but for creating it. Thus Rand advocated capitalism precisely because it is the only system that rewards the profit motive and respects the individual’s right to act on his own judgment in the pursuit of his own life and happiness. And yes, that includes not only the most intelligent and successful, but every individual committed to making his life the best life it can be. Capitalism is good, Rand argued, because selfishness, correctly understood, is a virtue.

Wilhelm’s views aside, Rand continues to be the greatest salesman capitalism has ever had. It’s not hard to discern why: whereas the rest of the world looked at capitalism and saw the hollow pursuit of material gain, Rand saw man the hero free to seek his highest values.

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The scene: an ostensibly civilized White House gathering between President Barack Obama and executives from the nation’s largest financial institutions. The subject? According to President Obama:

My main message in today’s meeting was very simple: that America’s banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry, and now that they’re back on their feet we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy . . .[this] starts with finding ways to help creditworthy small and medium-sized businesses get the loans that they need to open their doors, grow their operations and create new jobs . . . we expect them to explore every responsible way to help get our economy moving again.

A hallmark of dictatorship is the view that individuals, including market institutions, are incapable of making rational decisions for themselves, and thus must be compelled to act rationally by some higher authority. Obama’s latest meeting illustrates that he holds this view of banks, and that he is more than happy to be the higher authority that tells them when to lend and whom to lend to.

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The Climategate documents—the hundreds of emails and other data hacked from the Climatic Research Unit of England’s East Anglia University—have exposed serious breaches of scientific integrity. They contain evidence of collusion among a small but highly influential group of climate researchers to suppress and even delete key data, to manipulate the scientific peer-review process, to exclude the work of dissenting scientists, and allegedly to evade Freedom of Information requests by destroying requested materials.

Climate alarmists have responded by trying desperately to make the issue go away. They argue that the bad behavior of a few individuals doesn’t invalidate the entire edifice of global warming science. Surely, they ask, you’re not suggesting that the whole theory is just one big massive fraud, are you?

Some are even trying to ridicule the legitimate concerns the documents raise by invoking the specter of some sort of nefarious global conspiracy. At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) sarcastically put the question to a number of testifying scientists:

“I just wanted to ask you if you’re part of that massive international conspiracy,” he said to the witnesses, adding with a note of sarcasm, “Are either one of you members of the Trilateral Commission, SPECTRE or KAOS? I just need an answer.”

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A follow up to my post on Obama’s policy and “just war” doctrine: NPR ran a story Friday that eloquently illustrates how this approach undermines our military, how it (understandably) frustrates our troops, and how it needlessly exposes them to greater risks. The story describes a clear-cut incident where U.S. forces observed insurgents planting a road-side bomb, but under newly tightened, even more restrictive rules of engagement, the soldiers had to let them get away with it.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the report are the comments from Gen. Stanley McChryrstal who champions this approach and believes it will bring us success.

Listen to the audio (4m55s).

image: Flickr/dvids//CC BY 2.0

When accepting his Nobel Peace Prize — a ludicrous, debased award also bestowed on murderers like Yasser Arafat — President Obama spoke about his foreign policy. Pervading his Nobel speech there was a peculiar undertone of contrition. If translated into words, it would go something like this: “Ideally, we would behave like Gandhi, never resorting to the use of force in asserting our rights . . . but alas, as commander-in-chief of the United States, I’m duty-bound to protect the lives of Americans, and that now means having to fight. Sorry about that.”

This apologetic drift flows naturally from the substance of Obama’s foreign policy.

A key point in the speech is that America must uphold — but has lately fallen short of — the standards set by “just war” doctrine. Summarizing this widely held view of morality in war, he explains that a war is justified only “when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.”

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Suppose you heard of someone who, in spite of its bloody and impoverished history, advocated socialism. Suppose that person thought the key to moving America toward socialism was using government power to ensure the media pushed an anti-capitalist message. Suppose that, in order to achieve this goal, he wrote a book arguing that the Federal Communications Commission should curtail the private media with a crippling array of restrictions and taxes, and then pour tens of billions of dollars into the creation of a government-funded “public” media. Suppose he also advocated subjecting Americans to mandatory “media training” so they would know how to “properly” interpret the media.

What would you say of such a person? Well, if you were the Obama Administration, you would say, “This person deserves a job at the FCC.”

I’ve written before about Mark Lloyd, chosen by the Obama Administration to be the FCC’s Chief Diversity Officer. But I was shocked to find that in Lloyd’s 2006 book Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America, he lays out the very proposals I noted above. I will have more to say about the book in the future. If we want to understand the anti-freedom path the FCC is heading down, we need to start by paying attention to the openly declared goals of its officers. As an agency which exists precisely in order to control the media, it should be especially alarming when one of its representatives is committed to radically expanding that control.

Image: flickr

In a recent series of posts I discussed how increased government control over health care in America would devastate the medical technology industry and stifle innovation. But the negative effect that government interference has on innovation is true for any industry. From cookware to computers, men will only invest time, money and thought on developing new products if they project the payoff to be worth it. The more the success of a potential product is subject to the dictates of Washington bureaucrats, the less likely that potentiality will be made real. The more regulatory hurdles one has to overcome to achieve a dream, the less likely one will make the effort to overcome them.

This past Monday bore witness to the achievements possible to man when he is left free. In a hangar in the Mojave desert, Sir Richard Branson and his team at Virgin Galactic lifted the veil off Space Ship Two, the world’s first commercial spacecraft. Space Ship Two will take passengers to a height of 68 miles above Earth, well beyond the recognized border of space. It is one of a number of private spacecraft being developed in the nascent space tourism industry, which will make it possible for private citizens to experience wonders previously reserved for government astronauts.

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Now that a federal court has found the U.S. liable for post-Katrina flooding in New Orleans, the federal government will be pouring tax money down yet another drain hole in the name of disaster relief. The court found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was grossly negligent in maintaining a vast network of levees and flood control structures that were supposed to protect New Orleans. The court-ordered damages must be paid from tax funds along with the costs of rebuilding. Said a Los Angeles Times article: “The federal government has promised tens of billions of dollars in post-storm rebuilding aid to Louisiana. The Justice Department has estimated that the total outstanding civil claims could amount to billions more.”

This is not a shocking development. Once Uncle Sam took on the job of flood protection for a city situated in a below-sea-level bowl, it was readily foreseeable that any negligence would increase the population’s exposure to the kind of disaster that Katrina brought. Yet despite the obvious hazards, government policy continues to be formulated as if New Orleans has an unquestionable right to continue defying nature at taxpayer expense.

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