Founding Fathers

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FoxNews.com: Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus?

Wednesday, June 29, 2011 by

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has an editorial on FoxNews.com today. “Ayn Rand is everywhere,” he writes, and “her political opponents are growing nervous.” With some Tea Partiers and politicians praising Ayn Rand’s views, what “worries advocates of the welfare state is that they have never before faced any moral opposition.”

Whatever the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats in the past, they agreed on the basic goal: more and more government controls are necessary to rein in businessmen, “manage” the economy, and minister to those in need.

No matter which party was in power, therefore, we got things like Sarbanes-Oxley, bailouts of GM and Citibank, a huge prescription drug “benefit” and ObamaCare. Politics was a squabble about the efficacy of any proposed controls, not a dispute about the morality or immorality of imposing controls in the first place. As Krugman observes, in years past everyone “accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state.”

But now its advocates sense that this is no longer true, that some Americans are beginning to question the moral legitimacy of the welfare state. To strangle this questioning in the crib, supporters of government controls are trying to persuade their opponents to abandon Rand.

The current tactic is to tell Tea Partiers and “conservatives” that if you take religion seriously, you can’t be a fan of the atheist Ayn Rand. . . .

Dr. Ghate notes that “this much is true. Rand’s moral teachings are fundamentally different from Jesus’ teachings.”  But he goes on to ask the question, “Did Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers not reject the Sermon’s advice in creating America?”

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

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What’s America’s moral ideal?

Thursday, December 23, 2010 by

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” That was Karl Marx’s summary of communism, written back in the nineteenth century. Now, according to a recent Harris poll, it turns out that 42 percent of Americans mistakenly believe those words are contained somewhere in America’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

That seems strange on its face. After all, Marxism’s ideas of class warfare, dictatorship of the proletariat, and communism have failed to attract a following in the United States (leaving aside the many university professors who still cling to Marx’s vision). I’m quite sure that very few, if any, of the 42 percent who were polled would identify themselves as Marxists or communists.

But the widespread error about the founding documents becomes understandable when we shift our focus from politics to morality. I think what explains this poll is the fact that most Americans accept the moral premise underlying communism. They believe, on some level, that moral virtue consists of sacrificing one’s ability and wealth in the service of others. And they have gotten used to acting on that belief, as shown by the creation of a welfare state in America during the twentieth century.

Here’s how philosopher Leonard Peikoff explained this phenomenon in his book The Ominous Parallels:

The Americans were political revolutionaries but not ethical revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism, they remained explicitly within the standard European tradition, avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty. Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.

If nothing else, the Harris poll makes clear that our educational institutions need to do a better job teaching people what the Founding Fathers really accomplished in the founding documents. What they did was found a new nation on an ethical principle that was the opposite of that reflected in Marx’s slogan. Ayn Rand summarized the Founders’ achievement this way:

The basic premise of the Founding Fathers was man’s right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness—which means: man’s right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; and that the political implementation of this right is a society where men deal with one another as traders, by voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.

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Jefferson’s immortal deletion

Thursday, September 30, 2010 by

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!]

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Nancy Pelosi vs. the Founding Fathers

Wednesday, March 24, 2010 by

According to Nancy Pelosi, the House’s passage of the new health care bill is utterly in keeping with the founding principles of this country. In passing ObamaCare, she said,

we will honor the vows of our founders, who in the Declaration of Independence said that we are ‘endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This legislation will lead to healthier lives, more liberty to pursue hopes and dreams and happiness for the American people. This is an American proposal that honors the traditions of our country.

I have a question. Speaker Pelosi, if government-provided health care is essential to “the vows of our founders,” then why didn’t they put it in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution–or even discuss putting it there? Did they simply fail to draw out this subtle implication of their theory?

Hardly. The ideal of government-provided health care, aka a “right” to health care, is in complete contradiction to the proper understanding of rights put forward by the Founding Fathers. This is why the acknowledged “father of the Constitution” James Madison said “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government” and “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

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Freedom is not slavery

Friday, September 18, 2009 by

Jefferson_MemorialOne of the great dangers today is that political concepts such as “freedom” and “liberty” have been virtually emptied of meaning, save for some positive emotional residue left over from this country’s founding. This allows them to be co-opted by those seeking to use their positive connotations to push an anti-freedom agenda.

Exhibit A: Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal opinion section’s token liberal, penned a column this week urging the left to reclaim the word “freedom” from the opponents of government intervention. This is no mere academic issue, Frank assures us: the unpopularity of Obama’s health care plan, he suggests, is at least partially the result of allowing critics to portray ObamaCare as an attack on freedom (which it is).

Curiously, in a column about the proper meaning of the word “freedom,” Frank never deigns to define it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Why we have free speech in America – Part II

Thursday, June 18, 2009 by

In my last post, I pointed out how today’s opponents of free speech would do well to consider the arguments made by the greatest champions of that freedom: America’s Founding Fathers. There I discussed their arguments against restricting “blatantly false” ideas. Today I want to look at how the Founders addressed the second restriction on free speech advocated by citisven at the Daily Kos: the suppression of ideas that supposedly “incite violence.”

The Founders argued that although it’s true the government can stop people from “inciting violence,” ideas per se cannot incite violence. To be charged with inciting violence, one had to commit what they called an overt act.

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Why we have free speech in America – Part I

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of visiting Montpelier, the former home of James Madison. There were conspicuously few visitors–and none of the others appeared to be under 70 years of age. It was emblematic, I think, of how little awareness there is of the Founding Fathers today. Sure, we still invoke them regularly, but how many Americans actually study their writings?

Contrary to conservatives, the primary value of studying the Founders is not to learn about our “great traditions.” It’s to discover great minds wrestling with important ideas. And if you think their arguments aren’t relevant to today, think again.

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“Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence”

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 by

Frustrated Americans around the country are gearing up for another round of grassroots “tea parties” on Tax Day, April 15. Up to this point, it is unclear whether the loosely-connected protests will amount to anything other than a fleeting backlash against an onslaught of government intervention. What unites the protesters is not a consistent intellectual outlook–they appear to hold a hodgepodge of viewpoints–but rather their anger at the alarming expansion of our government. To have real impact, they’ll need a consistent intellectual framework.

Although the Tea Party name adopted by the protesters evokes images of the American Revolution, there is, at present, no basis for comparison. The American Revolution was fundamentally an intellectual movement–a revolt against the anti-freedom ideas motivating Britain’s treatment of the colonists, and, most importantly, a revolt for the idea of individual rights. These radical new ideas about what government should and should not consist of were enshrined by America’s Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence, and were the motivating force behind the revolt.

If today’s tea party protesters intend to spark any significant change, they need to understand that ideas drive change, and they need to advocate the right ideas. Both of these points are addressed in Onkar Ghate’s video presentation, “Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence.”

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