sacrifice — VOICES for REASON

In my latest Forbes.com column (co-authored by Yaron Brook), “What’s Missing from the Budget Debate,” I argue that to cut the entitlement state, you have to reject the morality of need and defend the individual’s right to live and work solely for his own sake. Ira Stoll at Future of Capitalism raises an interesting objection:

I don’t think it’s necessary to reject responsibility for your brother or your neighbor in order to support some entitlement reform or reductions. It’s possible to accept responsibility (or choose to accept responsibility) for your brother or neighbor, without accepting it for all Americans, or for the whole world. One can have different levels of obligation to people in different circles. At issue in the entitlement debate Messrs. Brook and Watkins are writing about is what obligation, if any, Americans have to each other as Americans, since not even the far left, so far as I can tell, is talking about including the entire world’s population into Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Here’s my response, posted in his comments:

Thanks for taking note of our column, Ira, and for your thoughtful comments. I think, however, that framing the issue in terms of “circles of obligation” clouds the issue because it blurs a crucial distinction: obligations an individual voluntarily accepts in pursuit of his own interests, and unchosen obligations an individual supposedly has that demand him to sacrifice his interests.

I would argue that a person pursuing his self-interest has all sorts of voluntarily-accepted obligations. For instance, I have obligations to treat my wife a certain way, not as some painful duty, but in order to foster a relationship that means a tremendous amount to me. Similarly, I’m contractually obligated to write the best columns I can for my employer.

That is radically different from the idea that there are people I have a self-sacrificial duty to help regardless of their value to me. Once you accept that idea, it doesn’t matter whether you happen to think it applies only to certain others. You’ve conceded the essential issue: the individual is not sovereign, and the needs of his neighbor trump his pursuit of happiness. It’s hard to see how you can then defend against the person who says that your “neighbor” ought to include your entire town, or city, or county, or planet. Indeed, isn’t that what moralists like Peter Singer (to say nothing of Christian theorists) have argued?

In my view, you can’t fight the welfare state by defending the welfare town. You have to fight for the individual’s moral and political right to pursue his own self-interest.

Ayn Rand addresses some of these issues at aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/charity.html and aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sacrifice.html. I encourage anyone interested to take a look.

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