Tom Bowden — VOICES for REASON

In a generally excellent article, Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger felt obliged to apologize for what he was about to say. He noted that it’s “churlish” to remind the world that the rescue of the trapped Chilean miners was “a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.”

“Churlish” means rude, boorish. Why is it rude to give businessmen high moral credit for the life-giving products they create? Henninger saw no need to explain. It’s simply taken for granted—by a columnist at a pro-business newspaper, no less—that an apology is necessary in order to speak approvingly, in polite company, about the profit motive.

But notice: It isn’t deemed rude or boorish to call the rescue mission a religious miracle and say, with Chile’s president, Sebastian Pinera: “Faith has moved mountains”—despite the fact that an army of praying monks could not have lifted a single trapped miner to safety.

Henninger’s article assembles fascinating facts to show that profit-making businesses made the rescue possible. But those businessmen and engineers deserve more than a neutral accounting. They deserve moral praise—which, according to conventional morality, they haven’t any right to expect because their motives are self-interested. It’s not supposed to bother them that people ignore the moral virtue required for businessmen and engineers to develop, for example, an impact drill capable of conquering the hard Chilean lava rock.

One of Ayn Rand’s great achievements in Atlas Shrugged was to offer industrialists and engineers the gratitude they deserve but have never received. This is a good time to follow her lead and say “thank you” to all the profit-seeking capitalists whose productive virtues led to the rescue of those miners.

I don’t necessarily expect ordinary folks like those rescued miners to become the pioneers who clarify the crucial moral issue here. But I do look forward to the day when defenders of capitalism will feel free to speak out in praise of heroic industrialists without pausing to include the slightest hint of an apology.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In recognition of Columbus Day, Fox News Opinion is carrying my essay on the achievements of Western civilization. As I explain there (and at length in my book, The Enemies of Christopher Columbus), the spread of that civilization across a savage wilderness deserves to be celebrated, and Columbus Day is that celebration. The 1492 voyage  was epochal not only because Columbus revealed to Europe the existence of vast lands in this hemisphere, he also showed others how to get here and return safely. The rest is history.

Here are two paragraphs from my article:

Western civilization’s stress on the value of reason led inexorably to its distinctive individualism. Western thinkers were first to declare that every individual, no matter what his skin color or ancestry, is fully human, possessed of reason and free will—a being of self-made character who deserves to be judged accordingly, not as a member of a racial or tribal collective. And thanks to John Locke and the Founding Fathers, individuals were recognized as possessing individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—rights that made slavery indefensible and led to its eradication, at the cost of a civil war.

These are the facts we are no longer taught—and the measure of that educational failure is the disdain with which Columbus’s holiday is regarded in the country that owes its existence to his courage. It is time to take back Columbus Day, as an occasion to publicly rejoice, not in the bloodshed that occurred before Columbus’s arrival and after, but in our commitment to the life-serving values of Western civilization: reason and individualism. We do so by honoring the great explorer who opened the way for that civilization to flourish in the New World.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

One of the commenters on my recent Investor’s Business Daily op-ed argued that if antitrust law were abolished,

we’d ultimately regress to the big monopolies we had a century or so ago. Those big monopolies were a problem, to say the least. Monopolies are good only for the monopolizing entity and they are bad news for everybody else . . . .

I’m here to say that the widespread fear of monopolies is based largely on historical myths. My colleague Alex Epstein has written extensively on what is generally regarded as the biggest, baddest granddaddy of all monopolies: Standard Oil. If you’re troubled by scary notions of what might befall the consumer on a free market without antitrust laws, you should read his article, “Vindicating Capitalism: The Real History of the Standard Oil Company.”

I can’t repeat all the factual documentation Alex assembles, but here’s a passage that summarizes an important point:

The fact that Standard Oil faced such stiff competition and was driven to expand output and lower prices even further demonstrates the myth of Rockefeller’s “control” of the market. Markets are not possessions that one can acquire or control. They are dynamic, evolving systems of voluntary association, in which competing producers have no ability to force customers to buy their product, nor any ability to prevent others from offering their customers superior substitutes. The expression “control a market share,” translated into reality, means simply that at a given time one has persuaded a given group of individuals to buy one’s product—a state of affairs that can quickly change if someone offers a superior substitute. Read the rest of this entry »

As we approach the November elections, a lot of people (especially those in the tea party movement) are concerned that government is acting like our master, not our servant. Politicians expect us to take whatever new controls, taxes, bailouts, or welfare schemes issue from Washington as if we were the subjects of a monarch, duty-bound to take orders and obey.

Now there’s a new flash of inspiration for those who are resisting the trend toward statism. It comes from one of the greatest of the Founding Fathers by way of an unlikely source: the document preservation department at the Library of Congress.

As is well known, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Using ink on parchment, it was his custom to cross out his mistakes and write a new word nearby in a separate space. But scholars have long been puzzled by the one exception to that rule, found on an early draft of the Declaration. Instead of crossing out his mistake, Jefferson obliterated a word and over it wrote the word “citizens.”

Thanks to spectral imaging technology, research scientists have recently found a way to read the word that Jefferson wanted no one else to see: it’s the word “subjects.” That’s right, “subjects”–as in subjects of the King, subjects of His Majesty.

American colonists, like their countrymen back in England, had referred to themselves as subjects for more than a century. But on the brink of revolution, here was Jefferson, eradicating an important vestige of the idea that government is the master and individuals are the loyal servants. From an article in The Washington Post:

“Seldom can we re-create a moment in history in such a dramatic and living way,” Library of Congress preservation director Dianne van der Reyden said . . . .

“It’s almost like we can see him write ‘subjects’ and then quickly decide that’s not what he wanted to say at all, that he didn’t even want a record of it,” she said. “Really, it sends chills down the spine.”

Living as we are in a time when government’s power over private companies, private pocketbooks, and private lives is expanding at an unprecedented rate, I take sustenance from Thomas Jefferson’s ardent determination to make it crystal clear that government is the individual’s servant, established to protect individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Everyone who takes pride in his status as a citizen of the United States of America should take a moment to salute Thomas Jefferson, and then dedicate himself to understanding and upholding the Founders’ political ideals.

[Update: Thanks to Steve Simpson for linking here. Congress Shall Make No Law readers, welcome!]

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The zoning law for the City of Hermosa Beach, California, starts by stating that “no building shall be erected, reconstructed or structurally altered, nor shall any building or land be used for any purpose . . . .” Let’s pause and allow that to soak in. The logical starting point for this zoning code—which is typical of zoning laws nationwide—is that landowners have no right to use their land for any purpose at all.

Of course, that’s just the beginning. The ordinance then goes on, in excruciating detail, to list exceptions to the general ban on property use. But these uses are “permitted uses,” not rightful uses. And without political clout, owners wanting to put their property to an unpopular use—say, opening a tattoo parlor—will fail to garner enough votes. Result? The use will remain illegal under the initial, total ban.

Johnny Anderson, a successful tattoo artist in Los Angeles, wanted to open a parlor in Hermosa Beach, but the zoning code didn’t permit it, and so he sued. Four years (and many lawyers’ billable hours) later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has now ruled in Anderson’s favor, ordering the city to include tattoo parlors on its list of permitted uses.

This case is interesting for what it says about property rights in this country. The court did not rule that Anderson’s right to property includes the right to rent or buy a store and offer tattooing services on the premises. Far from it. The court ruled that tattoos are “purely expressive activity” and therefore protected by the First Amendment, just as a speaker on a soapbox is protected from a government ban.

Tattooing as speech? What’s going on here? If property rights were respected in this country, a tattoo parlor would not have to shoehorn itself into the First Amendment “speech” category in order to get the government off its back. It would have an absolute right to offer its services in any building it might own or rent (subject only to objective laws against nuisance, trespass, and the like). It would certainly not need permission from a zoning board.

I am neither criticizing nor endorsing the Ninth Circuit’s decision in Anderson v. City of Hermosa Beach, which may well have applied the Supreme Court’s First Amendment precedents as required. My point is that the First Amendment cannot, and was never meant to, compensate for the collapse of property rights. Something is very wrong with a legal system that requires landowners to beg society’s permission to earn a living on their own property.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” a powerful tornado sends Dorothy’s house—with her in it—spinning high in the air only to deposit it safely in the land of Oz. In real life, of course, the story is different: tornadoes and hurricanes often destroy houses and sometimes kill their occupants. A below-ground shelter is good protection (remember the root cellar where Dorothy’s family huddled to ride out the storm?), but mobile homes and houses without basements often lack good protection.

Now a new manufacturing industry has emerged, offering ready-made storm shelters (also called safe rooms) to the general public, at a cost of $4,000 to $15,000. Usually made of concrete or steel, these rigid structures can be trucked to a home and bolted to a concrete slab, whether inside the house, outside, or in the garage. Increasingly, too, they are being built into newly constructed homes. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, safe rooms are replacing danger with security:

When a powerful tornado roared through Murfreesboro, Tenn., last year, David Glass ducked into his newly installed “TornadoSafeRoom,” a $4,300 galvanized steel shelter bolted to the concrete floor of his garage. Mr. Glass waited out the storm in the shelter with his brother-in-law who was visiting and Mr. Glass’s two cats, Buggs and Lady Buggs. (His wife was at work.) They emerged to find the home battered but still standing. Five doors down, though, a neighbor’s house was flattened.

I just want to make two points about this:

1. The emergence of this market illustrates an important truth: increased safety is a product of increased wealth. It’s long been noted that natural disasters in wealthy countries like the United States are far less dangerous than similar events in underdeveloped countries overseas, where hundreds or thousands of people might die in an event that would injure far fewer people here. But the direct connection between wealth and safety is even more obvious when you think about how an intelligent investment in a safe room can provide personal safety against violent storms for many years in the future. Even owners of mobile homes, notoriously vulnerable to tornadic winds, can obtain security that would have been impossible before.

2. The rise of the safe room industry also illustrates how individualized risk assessment works on a free market. Each resident of a disaster-prone area must make his own risk/benefit calculations, involving such factors as: How likely is it that a storm will hit? How solidly built is my house? Do I have a basement or other suitable protected area? What else could I do with the funds necessary to buy and install a safe room—and would that other choice provide me a greater value than increased physical security? The individual is in charge of his own life and his own safety.

For contrast, think what a collectivist approach would look like: a multibillion-dollar program to install safe rooms in every home, funded by taxpayers who aren’t even exposed to the risks. In a world where government frequently makes disasters more disastrous, it is worthwhile to contemplate the alternative: a free market in disaster insurance, prevention, protection, and recovery.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

It has been many years since I’ve visited the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey—but I recall it as a fascinating place to learn about, and pay homage to, an inventive genius. If you haven’t had the pleasure, you might want to take advantage of a fee-free “Edison Day” on Sept. 25 or Nov. 11. This informative article from The Wall Street Journal gives some of the reasons why:

In this era of cyberspace and fiber-optics, our image of an inventor tends to revolve around intangible diagrams manipulated on a computer screen by technogeeks working behind sliding glass doors. But back when Thomas Edison (1847-1931) was opening up the new age of electricity, the act of inventing usually involved prototypes made of very tangible materials—spring steel, cast iron, polished brass, beveled glass and varnished oak. Edison’s world ran on tooled gears, tanned leather, rubber, tar-paper and shelves of chemicals in hand-labeled bottles with ground glass stoppers. Machinery in motion really moved—flywheels spinning, pistons snorting, belts running from driveshafts—while smoke, tallow and machine oil lent their pungent smells to the air. . . .

In the West Orange lab, Edison and his staff invented, among other things, a successful alkaline storage battery, a fluoroscope for viewing X-ray images, and a method of erecting poured-concrete buildings. Here they also developed motion pictures and conducted experiments toward adding sound to the silent movies. In the surrounding factory buildings, with their own large work forces, Edison ran the various businesses born of his inventions, including the manufacture of movie cameras, film and projectors, and his favorite enterprise, the Edison Phonograph Co., with its vast catalog of phonographs and recordings released under the Edison label. Indeed, Edison effectively invented the modern entertainment industry.

Edison’s career stands as an eloquent symbol of the productive human mind. As we close the door on another Labor Day holiday, it’s worth thinking about how much we owe to those men and women whose mental labor makes the creation of industrial wealth possible. Here’s a short passage from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on that theme:

When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

Are you curious about that last comment, concerning the “work of the philosopher”? You really have to read the book!

Image: WikiMedia Commons

In the five years since Katrina devastated New Orleans, $15 billion has been spent on rebuilding infrastructure (enough to protect against a Category 3 hurricane). But, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “many engineers and local politicians argue it may not be good enough.”

What would be good enough? “They say the city should be steeled for a 500-year or 1,000-year storm—roughly equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane.” Estimated cost: “at least $70 billion.”

New Orleans, most of which lies below sea level, gives new meaning to the term “money pit.” Yet the tax dollars keep flowing, partly because it’s taken for granted that no matter how risky it is to live next door to a wall of water, government must ensure everyone’s safety at public expense. “We should be looking at a much higher level of protection in New Orleans,” said one college professor. “If that thing breaks, you’ve got people who are trapped in there.”

The second sentence is true, but the first doesn’t follow logically from it. There are lots of places in America where the forces of nature threaten human safety. But it’s not government’s function to protect us from natural forces, only from human force—such as that wielded by foreign enemies or criminals. By spending billions on such measures as flood protection, government lures people into building (or rebuilding) in places where they wouldn’t otherwise dare to live.

In this way, as I’ve written elsewhere, government has a way of making natural disasters more disastrous. What is to be done?

[T]he solution is not more of the market distortions and perverse incentives that have lured so many people into harm’s way. The solution is to replace the prevailing entitlement mentality with a free market in disaster prevention, insurance, and recovery.

In a free market—without tax-paid levees, government disaster relief, or subsidized insurance—anyone who contemplates building or buying property in a high-hazard area will need to face hard facts about the local history of natural disasters, the efficacy and cost of preventive measures, and the availability of insurance.

For example, the high price—or total unavailability—of private insurance will resound like a clanging alarm bell, signaling the market’s objective view that a particular building plan is abnormally risky compared to less dangerous locales.

With their own lives and wealth at stake, people will have every incentive to evaluate risks objectively. And if hardy souls still choose to occupy and fortify New Orleans, or build on an earthquake fault, or live in a tornado alley, the risk and reward will be theirs alone. No longer will government make disasters more disastrous by pretending that citizens have a right to defy the forces of nature at others’ expense.

It’s time to start planning for the day when the money spigot that keeps New Orleans awash in federal dollars can be twisted shut.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Citizens United case is a landmark. The Supreme Court struck down parts of America’s campaign finance laws—the parts that forbade corporations from speaking out during election season. I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel discussion on the case, called “Citizens United and the Future of Campaign Finance Law.” (Details on the panel members are here.)

The entire 72-minute discussion is worth listening to—all four panelists were excellent in presenting their diverging viewpoints—but if you’re pressed for time, I urge you to start with Prof. Eric Daniels’ 8-minute discussion of essential issues raised in the case. In this segment, Dr. Daniels makes it clear why he agrees with the result reached by the Supreme Court, but not with the Court’s reasoning. Along the way, he addresses some important questions:

• Is the First Amendment an instrument for achieving so-called social interests, or is it a safeguard of individual rights?
• Why do corporations spend as much money as they do on elections, and is that spending a symptom of a deeper problem?
• Are corporations exercising special privileges when they speak, or are the rights of individuals being exercised?

To locate the Daniels segment, let the video download (click here—may take a few minutes to finish) and then move the slider to the 36:25 mark.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

There are 391 national parks in America. You might think you could visit any such park to relax on a vacation, without being confronted by spokesmen for religious, political, or social movements. But you would be wrong.

Because national parks are “public property,” not private property, any restrictions on expressive activities such as leafleting, oratory, and picketing must pass First Amendment scrutiny, since such restrictions are government actions. (The First Amendment doesn’t apply to private decisions on private property.) To the extent any national park is a “public forum” for debate (this varies from park to park), the government’s attitude must be “hands off.”

Until recently, to maintain a recreational atmosphere, the national parks required anyone engaging in First Amendment activity to obtain a permit in advance. But now a federal appellate court, in a case called Boardley v. U.S. Dep’t of the Interior, has declared the permit system unconstitutional, at least as it applies to individuals and small groups.

My point is not to criticize or praise the D.C. Circuit’s decision, because there is no way to decide such a case correctly. That’s because the institution of “public property” creates insoluble conflicts among individuals. Citizens who just want to relax in a park have no use for speakers peddling controversy—but speakers peddling controversy want nothing more than to shake vacationers out of their complacency. Because both groups are composed of taxpayers who “own” the park, both have a plausible claim to use it for their own purposes. As a result, their disputes end up in court, where judges are supposed to “balance” the two sides where no scales of justice exist. Read the rest of this entry »