Culture — VOICES for REASON

In a delightfully written column for the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins observes that baseball great Derek Jeter’s salary showdown has provoked none of the public outcry we inevitably hear when a CEO makes a lot of money. My favorite part:

Absent from the Jeter controversy has been envy or raillery about the horrors of income inequality. Absent has been the lethargic assumption that national income is a fixed sum, so more for Mr. Jeter means less for schoolteachers. Absent has been the psychological malady that, in a world not short of injustices, causes sociology professors to lie awake obsessing over the difference between their incomes and those of other people.

Said one fan on a New York paper’s website: “As far as the money is concerned, I really don’t care what they pay him. It’s not my money.” If it were catching, this healthy-minded attitude toward the paychecks of our fellow man would make the world a better, happier place.

There’s a lot to say about why the relatively high pay of superstar CEOs is reviled while the relatively high pay of superstar sports figures and celebrities is tolerated and even cheered.

One reason for this double standard is simply that few people have a clear idea of what it is a CEO does. We all can see what makes Jeter great (well, those of us who aren’t Red Sox fans), but just what does Larry Ellison do–and why can’t Oracle’s stockholders find someone to do it more cheaply?

I’ve often thought that a reality TV show based around a successful CEO who is not Donald Trump would go a long way toward remedying this problem. But, alas, it would not go all the way, for reasons I explain in my article (co-authored by Yaron Brook) “The Corrupt Critics of CEO Pay.”

image: flickr/keithallison

In honor of Veterans Day, we encourage you to read ARC’s Alex Epstein’s op-ed, “What We Owe Our Soldiers.”

Every Veterans Day we pay tribute to our fellow Americans who have served in the military. With speeches and ceremonies, we recognize their courage and valor. But justice demands that we also recognize that we should have far more living veterans than we do. All too many of our soldiers have died unnecessarily–because they were sent to fight for a purpose other than America’s freedom.

You can read the entire piece here.

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

There’s so much wrong with this picture, it’s hard to know where to begin: Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinijad is in New York City to gloat and pontificate, and, incidentally, attend the U.N. assembly. Outraged yet?  Recall that this is the head of the regime that — by the acknowledgement of our own government — is responsible for at least one-quarter of the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq (and probably much more, as I explain in my book). The same regime that has been financing, encouraging, training, equipping Islamist fighters to carry out attacks against U.S. and Western targets across the world. The same regime that is responsible for the murder of Americans across three-plus decades. The same regime that gunned down in the streets peaceful protestors objecting to its theocratic rule. And (yet again) we play host to the leader of a corrupt and violently anti-American regime? Seriously — our leadership lacks the moral confidence to take a stand even against that?

No, I don’t buy the notion that because he’s attending the U.N. meeting, we must let him onto U.S. soil. More than anything, that’s a reason to question our involvement in (and enormous funding of) an organization that has Iran as a member and obliges us to unroll a red carpet for Ahmedinijad.

This week ARI’s Yaron Brook was one of the speakers at The Economist’s “Ideas Economy: Human Potential” conference in New York. Today on CNN.com, Dr. Onkar Ghate and Dr. Brook have an opinion piece related to the theme of that conference. Noting how far the West has advanced thanks to scientific progress and political freedom, they argue that

… human progress demands implementation of a third idea to complete the scientific and political revolutions. We’re still beholden to the past in ethics.

Although few of us would turn to the Old Testament or the Quran to determine the age of the Earth, too many of us still turn obediently to these books (or their secular copies) as authorities about morality. We learn therein the moral superiority of faith to reason and collective sacrifice to personal profit.

But the more seriously we take these old ethical ideas, the more suspect become the modern ideas responsible for human progress.

CNN.com’s editors titled the piece “Our moral code is out of date.” Read the whole thing.

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

Investor’s Business Daily has published an essay from ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook on  Atlas Shrugged. The piece begins:

In the years leading up to 2008—09′s financial meltdown, government control over mortgages, interest rates and America’s banking system was at an all-time high.

And yet when crisis struck, free enterprise took the blame.

The cure, therefore, was to give government even wider powers. Washington can now bail out any company, fire CEOs, override contracts and print billions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy — all in the name of the public interest. The result? Our deficits and debt continue to mount, and there’s a real possibility of a future like Greece’s.

This is the state of our world today. It’s remarkably similar to the state of the world in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a mystery story about a future America whose economy is disintegrating and whose government is accumulating power faster than anyone thought possible. This parallel is a big reason a record 500,000 people bought “Atlas Shrugged” last year.

So what can we learn from a book that foresaw in 1957 what few believed possible in 2007? We can learn a lesson the heroes of the novel learn: the cause of the government’s greater, destructive control of business. And we can learn how to oppose it.

Read the whole thing.

My colleague Alex Epstein has published a new commentary at Forbes.com, “Three Myths About Oil.” Noting that the average American consumes three gallons of oil a day, Alex observes that nevertheless,

… oil’s detractors call it an addiction, downplaying its enormous benefits as fleeting pleasures that will necessarily bring long-term pain and destruction. An oil-based economy will inevitably collapse, they say, because oil is finite and will run out, because foreign oil causes terrorism, because oil, as a fossil fuel, will bring about climate catastrophe. Let’s examine these myths about oil.

Read the whole thing.

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

In his New York Times column, Ross Douthat recounts the backstory behind the death threat—posted on a Muslim website—against the producers of “South Park” and discerns a broader issue. He argues plausibly that Comedy Central’s decision to bleep out references to “Mohammad” and remove the supposedly offending episode is part of a larger pattern of self-censorship in our culture.

What concerns him is the apparent lopsidedness of the self-censorship: practically every value and idea today is subject to criticism in popular culture, whereas the “South Park” incident is “a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.” There’s something to that observation (though I don’t subscribe to Douthat’s explanation of it); but I want to put that aside for the moment to isolate a widely ignored, and broader, point. What he and others who echo this line overlook (or evade?) is that self-censorship in North America and (to a far greater degree in) Europe is in significant part a function of governments’ failure to uphold the freedom of speech.

The guardian of that right is the government — and it’s AWOL. To put it mildly.

The pattern we’ve witnessed in previous crises—from the death decree against author Salman Rushdie in 1989 to the Danish cartoons crisis, and similar cases—is the refusal of our political leaders to defend us against threats to our freedom of speech. Worse: we’ve seen them genuflecting before and seeking to appease aggressive Muslim activists and their backers. (I touch on this in Winning the Unwinnable War.) Yes, there have been publishers and TV networks and bookstores that exhibited fear, and perhaps cowardice, in the face of such threats. But when our government issues limp, apologetic statements mollifying the aggressors—and effectively leaves writers, publishers, filmmakers and everyone else unprotected from the threat of reprisals by would-be Islamist enforcers—is it surprising that self-censorship grows?