Don Watkins — VOICES for REASON

In our latest Forbes.com column, Yaron Brook and I urge America’s most productive citizens not to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge. From the column:

[Y]our wealth was not an undeserved gift. Every dollar in your bank account came from some individual who voluntarily gave it to you—who gave it to you in exchange for a product he judged to be more valuable than his dollar. You have no moral obligation to “give back,” because you didn’t take anything in the first place.

Whole thing here.

Image: flickr

In our latest Forbes.com column, Yaron Brook and I explode the myth that cutting corners and exploiting people is the path to business success:

In a truly free market, the fly-by-night shysters who try to make a killing get killed–by the government, which outlaws force and fraud, and by the market, which shuns any company that fails to create genuine value.

Whole thing here.

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In posts criticizing my recent Forbes.com column (written with Yaron Brook), Ezra Klein and Will Wilkinson challenge my claim that government housing policy is un-American. As Wilkinson puts it in the comments section of his post:

The argument [that government housing policy is un-American] as stated is obviously (1) untrue: subsidizing specific patterns of settlement, land, houses, etc. is a longstanding American tradition; and (2) fallacious: implying that an idea has merit because it is distinctive of one’s own tradition is a subtle form of appeal to authority.

I can sympathize with people who bristle at claims that this or the other thing is “un-American.” Usually that tactic is used as an undefined smear or an appeal to the authority of tradition. But that’s not what Yaron and I were doing.

Yaron and I have a certain view of what the essence of America is. Our view is that certain basic ideas shaped the founding of this country: namely, the sovereignty of the individual, and government as the protector of the individual’s rights.

Whether or not government housing policy is un-American, therefore, has nothing to do with whether most Americans (now or in 1776) think the government should promote housing. It has nothing to do with what housing policies the Founders themselves might have advocated. The Founders were great men but they were not infallible oracles–they made mistakes and were not always fully consistent. The issue is: something is un-American if it is inconsistent with the principle of individual rights. That’s not a matter of tradition, but of logic.

Klein and Wilkinson suggest that all of this is irrelevant. It shouldn’t matter if a given policy is consistent with America’s founding principles–what matters is the policy’s merits. In Klein’s words, “we should stick to policy argument rather than philosophical projection.”

But Yaron and I share a radically different view of what constitutes the merits or demerits of a policy. We reject the widespread idea that to debate a policy on its merits means to engage in some sort of utilitarian calculus. Our view is that the standard for whether a policy is desirable is precisely its relationship to America’s founding principles–not out of blind obedience to tradition, but because those principles are true. To examine a policy on its merits is to ask: is it consistent with individual rights or not?

Our Forbes.com piece was not an appeal to authority or tradition. In fact, we went out of our way to declare our opposition to government’s traditional promotion of homeownership. Our point was that if you agree with us and the Founding Fathers, that government should protect your right to pursue happiness, then you have to reject the idea that the government should have a position on the wisdom of homeownership.

I am thrilled to announce that ARC’s Yaron Brook and I will now be regular columnists at Forbes.com. The co-authored column will appear twice a month and will focus mainly on issues related to business and economic freedom. The first installment addresses a debate that’s been raging over whether President Obama is anti-business. Our answer: Of course he is–but so is the rest of today’s political establishment.

Quick excerpt:

While Republicans often express admiration for Ayn Rand, the one thing they refuse to rein in is today’s massive regulatory-welfare state. To the extent they oppose Obama, it’s not on the grounds that businessmen have a right to function free from government coercion, but on the grounds that the amount of coercion Obama advocates goes a little too far.

The article’s title: “The U.S. Anti-Business Epidemic”

Finally, Yaron and I would like to thank the fine people at Forbes.com for this opportunity. We’re both excited to be writing for the Forbes audience.

image: Wikimedia Commons

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. In a just-published op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, my colleague Tom Bowden argues that Kagan does not understand the Constitution–the document which, if she confirmed by the Senate, Kagan will have to swear to uphold.

Alarmingly, Kagan’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that she rejects the Founders’ view of the Constitution as a charter of liberty whose purpose is to protect individual rights. Instead, she adheres to the modern view that it’s a mechanism for establishing unlimited majority rule over the individual.

As a matter of historical fact, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution for a certain purpose. They wanted a government that would respect and protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Aside from certain contradictions (the worst of which, toleration of slavery, required a bloody civil war to expunge), the Constitution is dedicated to protecting the individual from society by means of a limited government. The Supreme Court cannot objectively interpret the document’s language apart from this essential purpose.

Regrettably, however, too many of today’s judges reject this approach to constitutional interpretation.

Read the whole thing.

In honor of the news that Eliot Spitzer–the disgraced, power-lusting former governor of New York–will be coming to prime time TV, I thought I’d make note of a column he penned earlier this month. Invoking Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Spitzer writes:

The question confronting the United States today is whether the notion of sacrifice–personal and collective–still has enough traction in our society to enable us to overcome the range of problems we face.

He goes on to name some of the sacrifices he thinks will solve these problems:

• “[S]lightly higher marginal tax rates for the top 5 percent…in order to fund the necessary investment in social infrastructure”
• “[A] carbon tax”
• “[A] somewhat more rigorous regulatory structure”

There’s a reason that Spitzer couches his program in the terminology of “sacrifice.” If he simply said the government should solve our problems by taking more of our wealth and our freedom, he wouldn’t win many converts. “Sacrifice” adds a moral dimension to Spitzer’s call for government intervention. The purpose is to morally disarm anyone who wants to safeguard his wealth or his freedom by saying, “You, you’re just being selfish.”

It’s no accident that dictators throughout history have justified their demands for power by appealing to the duty to sacrifice: freedom is selfish. It is the freedom to do what you want with your wealth and your life, rather than what society, Eliot Spitzer, or Barack Obama wants you to do. As Ayn Rand noted nearly 70 years ago in her novel The Fountainhead:

[J]ust listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice–run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that’s it’s your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself–that will be the man who’s not after your soul.

Spitzer speaks of sacrifices. The Founding Fathers spoke of the individual’s right to pursue his own happiness. The Founders sought to create a free society. What, then, is Spitzer after?

Image: flickr

When the Supreme Court ruled that the government has to respect the right of corporations to engage in political speech, opponents of corporate speech (Obama included) put their weight behind the DISCLOSE Act. The Act reads like a grab-bag of policies united only by their intention: to place as many burdens as possible on groups that want to exercise their First Amendment rights.

DISCLOSE has been winding its way through Congress, but it faced strong opposition by the National Rifle Association (one of the groups subject to the proposed law). That is, until the House Democrats agreed to carve out an exception to the bill which–wouldn’t you know it–exempts the NRA from the Act’s speech-squelching measures. The exception was narrowly tailored so that only the NRA and a handful of other organizations (such as AARP) qualify. In return for this special favor, the NRA has agreed not to actively oppose the bill.

The lesson from Washington: free speech is no longer something you preserve by asserting your inalienable Constitutional rights–it’s something you preserve by throwing around your political clout.

New York magazine’s Steve Fishman just penned a fascinating account of Bernie Madoff’s life behind bars. What I find most fascinating, however, is the reaction from a number of quarters to the effect that Madoff is “thriving behind bars” and living like a “rock star.”

What actually emerges from the article is the exact opposite conclusion: that Madoff was frightened and unhappy before he was caught, and that his life in prison is empty and pathetic.

Take Madoff’s life before he was arrested. According to Fishman:

For Bernie Madoff, living a lie had once been a full-time job, which carried with it a constant, nagging anxiety. “It was a nightmare for me,” he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago,” he said in a little-noticed interview with them.

And what does life look like for Madoff, now that he’s been caught? As Fishman shows, Madoff lives separated from his family, surrounded by murderers and sex offenders, sweeping floors for fourteen cents and hour, and doing what he can not to fall victim to prison violence. Some rock star.

What comes across from Fishman’s article is that Madoff’s existential life now matches his inner life. A man whose inner life had been a nightmare is now trapped in a literal nightmare.

Madoff is often taken as the preeminent example of selfishness. But what the facts show is not a man who was concerned with his own interests, but rather someone totally uninterested in thinking about what kind of choices would genuinely promote his life. By trying to live like a criminal, rather than as a productive individual, Madoff guaranteed himself a meaningless, joyless, self-destructive  existence. There’s nothing selfish about that.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

ObamaCare included a little-noticed provision that will force restaurant chains with twenty or more stores to list how many calories are in each menu item. My view: The government has no business getting involved here. If we want to know how many calories are in our lunch, we can patronize only restaurants that tell us.

But you might wonder: Who could possibly object to giving people more information?

Well, here’s one man who does. Ken Schelper is a Vice President of Davanni’s, a small chain of pizzerias. He notes that under ObamaCare’s caloric mandate, his company will have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to replace all of its store menus, brochures, and drive through signs–every time it changes a single ingredient.

Information isn’t costless. Whether it involves scientific experiments to discover how many calories are in a slice of cheese or printing new menus, providing customers with information imposes genuine costs on businesses–costs that ultimately get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and fewer options.

Supporters of the menu requirement would have us believe that the only reason a company would choose not to provide certain kinds of information is because it’s trying to put something over on us. That’s simply not true. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that before ObamaCare passed, customers of Davanni’s were able to find out the caloric content of their food. It was on the restaurant’s website.

Image: flickr

Obama recently gave a speech pushing for increased regulation of the financial industry in which he said, “Now, what we’re doing, I want to be clear, we’re not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned.” He then went on to begrudge it: “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

Coming from one who is on record advocating “spreading the wealth around,” this paean to egalitarianism is not particularly surprising. But unfortunately that sentiment is common even among alleged defenders of the free market. They’re uncomfortable with the idea that some people are earning tens of millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars a year. Even if they can point out the economic reasons why great producers earn so much, they can think of no admirable motivation that would lead someone who made twenty-million last year to want to earn thirty-million next year. (You can see this in the ongoing debate over CEO pay.)

In the book Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of her Q&A, Ayn Rand addresses a similar issue. Asked why it is to a successful businessman’s interest to continue producing she responds in part: Read the rest of this entry »