The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
If, back in 1998, I had told you, “A time will come in America, in 25 years or so, when these two seem like harmless pranksters compared to the volume and magnitude of totalitarian psychopathy sweeping the Western world,” you would have shuddered in horror.
Yet here we are!
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Congress: DEFUND the FBI. Arrest and prosecute those who violated the Constitution. NOW.
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Economist Larry Kudlow says Republicans must start “sticking to their guns.”
Guns? What guns? Republicans, leaving aside a couple of admirable exceptions, have no guns. You want guns? I’ll show you guns. How about a real revolution?
*************
“If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent, simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have cross a line to stand alongside tyrants.”
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement.
Finally, it is necessary to turn to the subject of separation of state from education, science, and religion.
Abolition of Public Education
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement. The method would be the enactment of state laws declaring that as of the end of the seventh school year following the enactment of the law, that state and its localities will no longer be responsible for the financing of the first-grade education of any student; that a year after that, they will no longer be responsible for the financing of the second-grade education of any student; and so on, through all the elementary, secondary, and college grades. This procedure would enable the parents of children alive at the time of the enactment of the phase-out legislation to go on using the public education system if they wished; it would give prospective new parents a year’s notice that they would be responsible for the cost of their children’s education.
The abolition of public education should be preceded by the recognition of the right of parents to educate their own children and by the abolition of educational licensing requirements. It would also be proper if the public schools were to be made to begin charging tuition fees to those who could afford them, which would be progressively increased, until they reflected the public school system’s costs. The fee system would permit steadily increasing competition and growth on the part of private schools, which would then be in a position easily and totally to displace the public schools.
One of the most immediate points to fight for in connection with the abolition of public education is the abolition of the federal Department of Education and all federal aid to education. These measures would create an immediate improvement in education by eliminating a major layer of bureaucracy and by forcing the elimination of unnecessary courses and unsound educational methods that are fostered, if not mandated, by the availability of federal funds. They would thus bring about a renewed concentration on the three R’s and other serious subjects.
In the struggle against public education, an important principle to stress is that the public education system is inherently unsuited to teach any subject about which there is controversy. This is because teaching such a subject necessarily entails forcing at least some taxpayers to violate their convictions, by providing funds for the dissemination of ideas which they consider to be false and possibly vicious. On the basis of this principle, the public schools should be barred from teaching not only religion, but also history, economics, civics, and biology. In the nature of things, only private schools, for whose services people have the choice of paying or not paying, can teach these subjects without violating the freedom of conscience. The fact that barring the public schools from teaching these subjects would leave them with very little to teach, and place them in a position in which they may as well not exist, simply confirms the fact that public education should be abolished.
Separation of Government and Science
The above principle concerning the government’s violation of the freedom of conscience in supporting the promulgation of controversial ideas also constitutes an argument for the abolition of practically all government support of the arts and sciences. There is great controversy concerning the artistic merit of various schools of literature, painting, and sculpture. There is significant and growing controversy even over the various theories of natural science, such as the controversy between the supporters of the “Big-Bang” theory of the origin of the universe and the supporters of the steady-state theory of the universe, which holds that the universe did not have an origin. For the government to finance any artistic or scientific activity means to compel taxpayers who hold the activity to be artistically or scientifically worthless, and perhaps immoral as well, to finance it nonetheless.
More fundamentally, our opposition to government involvement in art and science–and in education–is based on Ayn Rand’s principle that force and mind are opposites. Matters of truth and value can be determined only by the voluntary assent of the human mind. Yet government is essentially a policeman with a gun and club. It settles matters by means of force. This is directly contrary to the nature of knowledge. It has no place in the laboratory, the lecture hall, or the art gallery. The determination of what is true or false, or possessing or lacking in value, simply cannot properly be decided by government officials. Nor can it properly be decided by majorities in voting booths. Such a thing is further contrary to the nature of knowledge, which always begins as the discovery of just one mind, and which is as yet totally unknown to the entire rest of the human race. Governments and majorities must not be allowed to crush the isolated individual, who is the source of all new knowledge and improvement. Yet precisely this is the outcome of government support of science and art, which scoops up the limited funds available for the support of such activities and arbitrarily dictates how they are to be spent.
As to the tactics to be used to remove the government from these areas, the most important is the continuous demonstration of the contrary nature of government force, on the one side, and knowledge and value freely assented to, on the other.
* * *
An important step in reducing and ultimately eliminating government interference in science would be to require that all alleged scientific studies financed in any way by any government agency or department prominently state that fact. This might be required in the form of an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act. The requirement should extend to all press releases and public announcements made by the government or any of its employees concerning the study. In this way, the study could be easily identified as coming from the government or associated with the government. The requirement would serve, in effect, as a warning label. In addition, all information relevant to the study’s being undertaken, including the initial application for a government grant, and all correspondence and internal government documents pertaining to the study, should be identified in an appendix to the study, and copies made readily available to any member of the public wishing to see them. The study should also be required to include an appendix providing an intelligible explanation of the methodology on which it was based. These requirements would make it possible to scrutinize and judge the scientific seriousness of such studies far more easily than is possible today, and thus to enable people much more readily to distinguish government propaganda from science.
An important first step in the eventual abolition of such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be a law severely limiting their powers to ban drugs and chemical substances. The law would nullify the power of the agency’s adverse ruling in any case in which similar agencies in, say, two or more modern foreign countries, such as Canada, Switzerland, and Great Britain, have found no reason to ban a substance. In other words, it would subject these agencies to a form of liberalizing “peer review.” In such cases, in order to ban a substance, the FDA and EPA would have to prove their case before a court of law. The principle that the FDA and EPA and their staffs are not endowed with any form of divine guidance could be progressively extended–to the point where any one private individual was free to act on his contrary opinion. (After all, why should the opinions of American citizens be viewed as inferior to those of foreign bureaucrats?)
Perhaps the best way ultimately to abolish the FDA and the EPA would be to demand their conversion to private agencies, having no powers of compulsion and supported exclusively by private funds. They would then operate as advisory agencies, in competition with other such private advisory agencies, free to pronounce whatever opinions they wished about any subject, but not free to have force used to back their opinions–except when they could go before a court of law, as any other private citizen, and prove the existence of a danger to the lives or property of parties not willing to take the risk of such danger.
Separation of State and Church
Our opposition to government involvement in religion is based on the same foundation as our opposition to government involvement in education and science. Indeed, government-sponsored religion represents the most naked kind of use of force against the mind. Religion is based on faith. The use of force to impose it or its values is always the use of force in order to compel acceptance of what cannot be proved or denial of what can be proved.
The supporters of capitalism must take the lead in the battle against the current incursions of religion into politics and government. Nothing could be more vital to progress toward the establishment of a capitalist society. The old stereotypes of the advocates of socialism as enlightened liberals and the advocates of capitalism as religious conservatives need to be decisively broken. From now on, in accordance with the actual facts, the advocates of capitalism must be viewed as the representatives of enlightenment, and the socialists as the representatives of irrationalism and the Dark Ages.
In the 1930s and 1940s, to be sure, the seemingly enlightened Left was able to depict its opponents as virtual Ma and Pa Kettles, living on a farm somewhere, totally cut off from modern civilization, and projecting utter ignorance and contempt for science and technology. Exactly that image is what the New Left has chosen to wrap itself in, ever since it joined the ecology movement. We should be sure that the public eventually understands this fact and that it is with the New Left that those who place faith above reason belong.
Previous discussion in this book and in Ayn Rand’s The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution provide the essential basis for the transformation of the view of which side wears the mantle of Reason. They clearly show how the ecology movement, which is the last gasp of the Left, is thoroughly riddled with irrationalism and hostility to science and technology. Furthermore, the whole of this book and all of the writings of von Mises, of the other Austrian and classical economists, and of Ayn Rand, show beyond a shadow of a doubt that capitalism in no sense whatever depends on the acceptance of any form of faith or denial of reason. The case for capitalism is thoroughly rational.
In view of the fact that socialism has demonstrated its failure and that as a result its advocates have largely given up the banner of reason, means that the success of a rational, capitalist political program should be all the more rapid. By the admission of both sides, capitalism is the only system to which advocates of reason can turn.
Furthermore, the projection of a rational, capitalist political program, actually capable of solving major national and world problems, will stand as a major philosophic affirmation of the power of the human mind. Thus, it can be an important source of gaining recruits for all aspects of a rational philosophy. As previously shown in connection with the ecology movement, the cultural surge in blatant irrationality that has taken place in recent decades is due in no small measure to the demonstrated failure of socialism as a politico-economic system. Socialism is what most intellectuals have regarded as the system called for by logic and reason. As a result, its failure has served to shake their confidence in reason, and thus to open the floodgates to irrationalism. By the same token, a resurrection of respect for the potential of reason in the politico-economic realm will promote the case for reason everywhere.
* * *
The advocates of capitalism should take the lead in the defense of the freedoms of press and speech. At the same time that we seek to protect it for purveyors of “prurient” literature, we should seek to protect it for the writers of financial newsletters, whom the SEC wants to censor; for corporations, whom the Congress and the Federal Elections Commission want to censor by denying them the right to support political candidates of their choice; for unpopular speakers whom student thugs want to censor by denying them the ability to be heard by their audience; for ordinary citizens whom the Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to censor for speaking out against government-sponsored projects in their neighborhoods. We should demand the freedoms of speech and press for all advertisers, including cigarette advertisers.
We should place the establishment of full freedom of the press and of the more recent forms of communication, such as movies, radio, and television, in the forefront of our fight for a capitalist society. Long before the establishment of a fully capitalist society, we should seek the establishment of a fully free press and media as the pattern for all other industries later to follow. We should demand their exemption from all government regulation immediately–that is, we should demand that these industries, because of the intellectual nature of their products and services, be freed at once from the income tax, the antitrust laws, the labor laws, and every other form of government regulation and interference, so that they may advance their ideas totally without fear of punitive action of any kind being taken against them.
Copyright 1996 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
In Fossil Future, Alex Epstein refutes literally hundreds of myths about fossil fuels. Here are 20 myths that 11,000,000 people heard on Joe Rogan’s podcast this year, refuted.
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement.
Finally, it is necessary to turn to the subject of separation of state from education, science, and religion.
Abolition of Public Education
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement. The method would be the enactment of state laws declaring that as of the end of the seventh school year following the enactment of the law, that state and its localities will no longer be responsible for the financing of the first-grade education of any student; that a year after that, they will no longer be responsible for the financing of the second-grade education of any student; and so on, through all the elementary, secondary, and college grades. This procedure would enable the parents of children alive at the time of the enactment of the phase-out legislation to go on using the public education system if they wished; it would give prospective new parents a year’s notice that they would be responsible for the cost of their children’s education.
The abolition of public education should be preceded by the recognition of the right of parents to educate their own children and by the abolition of educational licensing requirements. It would also be proper if the public schools were to be made to begin charging tuition fees to those who could afford them, which would be progressively increased, until they reflected the public school system’s costs. The fee system would permit steadily increasing competition and growth on the part of private schools, which would then be in a position easily and totally to displace the public schools.
One of the most immediate points to fight for in connection with the abolition of public education is the abolition of the federal Department of Education and all federal aid to education. These measures would create an immediate improvement in education by eliminating a major layer of bureaucracy and by forcing the elimination of unnecessary courses and unsound educational methods that are fostered, if not mandated, by the availability of federal funds. They would thus bring about a renewed concentration on the three R’s and other serious subjects.
In the struggle against public education, an important principle to stress is that the public education system is inherently unsuited to teach any subject about which there is controversy. This is because teaching such a subject necessarily entails forcing at least some taxpayers to violate their convictions, by providing funds for the dissemination of ideas which they consider to be false and possibly vicious. On the basis of this principle, the public schools should be barred from teaching not only religion, but also history, economics, civics, and biology. In the nature of things, only private schools, for whose services people have the choice of paying or not paying, can teach these subjects without violating the freedom of conscience. The fact that barring the public schools from teaching these subjects would leave them with very little to teach, and place them in a position in which they may as well not exist, simply confirms the fact that public education should be abolished.
Separation of Government and Science
The above principle concerning the government’s violation of the freedom of conscience in supporting the promulgation of controversial ideas also constitutes an argument for the abolition of practically all government support of the arts and sciences. There is great controversy concerning the artistic merit of various schools of literature, painting, and sculpture. There is significant and growing controversy even over the various theories of natural science, such as the controversy between the supporters of the “Big-Bang” theory of the origin of the universe and the supporters of the steady-state theory of the universe, which holds that the universe did not have an origin. For the government to finance any artistic or scientific activity means to compel taxpayers who hold the activity to be artistically or scientifically worthless, and perhaps immoral as well, to finance it nonetheless.
More fundamentally, our opposition to government involvement in art and science–and in education–is based on Ayn Rand’s principle that force and mind are opposites. Matters of truth and value can be determined only by the voluntary assent of the human mind. Yet government is essentially a policeman with a gun and club. It settles matters by means of force. This is directly contrary to the nature of knowledge. It has no place in the laboratory, the lecture hall, or the art gallery. The determination of what is true or false, or possessing or lacking in value, simply cannot properly be decided by government officials. Nor can it properly be decided by majorities in voting booths. Such a thing is further contrary to the nature of knowledge, which always begins as the discovery of just one mind, and which is as yet totally unknown to the entire rest of the human race. Governments and majorities must not be allowed to crush the isolated individual, who is the source of all new knowledge and improvement. Yet precisely this is the outcome of government support of science and art, which scoops up the limited funds available for the support of such activities and arbitrarily dictates how they are to be spent.
As to the tactics to be used to remove the government from these areas, the most important is the continuous demonstration of the contrary nature of government force, on the one side, and knowledge and value freely assented to, on the other.
* * *
An important step in reducing and ultimately eliminating government interference in science would be to require that all alleged scientific studies financed in any way by any government agency or department prominently state that fact. This might be required in the form of an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act. The requirement should extend to all press releases and public announcements made by the government or any of its employees concerning the study. In this way, the study could be easily identified as coming from the government or associated with the government. The requirement would serve, in effect, as a warning label. In addition, all information relevant to the study’s being undertaken, including the initial application for a government grant, and all correspondence and internal government documents pertaining to the study, should be identified in an appendix to the study, and copies made readily available to any member of the public wishing to see them. The study should also be required to include an appendix providing an intelligible explanation of the methodology on which it was based. These requirements would make it possible to scrutinize and judge the scientific seriousness of such studies far more easily than is possible today, and thus to enable people much more readily to distinguish government propaganda from science.
An important first step in the eventual abolition of such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be a law severely limiting their powers to ban drugs and chemical substances. The law would nullify the power of the agency’s adverse ruling in any case in which similar agencies in, say, two or more modern foreign countries, such as Canada, Switzerland, and Great Britain, have found no reason to ban a substance. In other words, it would subject these agencies to a form of liberalizing “peer review.” In such cases, in order to ban a substance, the FDA and EPA would have to prove their case before a court of law. The principle that the FDA and EPA and their staffs are not endowed with any form of divine guidance could be progressively extended–to the point where any one private individual was free to act on his contrary opinion. (After all, why should the opinions of American citizens be viewed as inferior to those of foreign bureaucrats?)
Perhaps the best way ultimately to abolish the FDA and the EPA would be to demand their conversion to private agencies, having no powers of compulsion and supported exclusively by private funds. They would then operate as advisory agencies, in competition with other such private advisory agencies, free to pronounce whatever opinions they wished about any subject, but not free to have force used to back their opinions–except when they could go before a court of law, as any other private citizen, and prove the existence of a danger to the lives or property of parties not willing to take the risk of such danger.
Separation of State and Church
Our opposition to government involvement in religion is based on the same foundation as our opposition to government involvement in education and science. Indeed, government-sponsored religion represents the most naked kind of use of force against the mind. Religion is based on faith. The use of force to impose it or its values is always the use of force in order to compel acceptance of what cannot be proved or denial of what can be proved.
The supporters of capitalism must take the lead in the battle against the current incursions of religion into politics and government. Nothing could be more vital to progress toward the establishment of a capitalist society. The old stereotypes of the advocates of socialism as enlightened liberals and the advocates of capitalism as religious conservatives need to be decisively broken. From now on, in accordance with the actual facts, the advocates of capitalism must be viewed as the representatives of enlightenment, and the socialists as the representatives of irrationalism and the Dark Ages.
In the 1930s and 1940s, to be sure, the seemingly enlightened Left was able to depict its opponents as virtual Ma and Pa Kettles, living on a farm somewhere, totally cut off from modern civilization, and projecting utter ignorance and contempt for science and technology. Exactly that image is what the New Left has chosen to wrap itself in, ever since it joined the ecology movement. We should be sure that the public eventually understands this fact and that it is with the New Left that those who place faith above reason belong.
Previous discussion in this book and in Ayn Rand’s The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution provide the essential basis for the transformation of the view of which side wears the mantle of Reason. They clearly show how the ecology movement, which is the last gasp of the Left, is thoroughly riddled with irrationalism and hostility to science and technology. Furthermore, the whole of this book and all of the writings of von Mises, of the other Austrian and classical economists, and of Ayn Rand, show beyond a shadow of a doubt that capitalism in no sense whatever depends on the acceptance of any form of faith or denial of reason. The case for capitalism is thoroughly rational.
In view of the fact that socialism has demonstrated its failure and that as a result its advocates have largely given up the banner of reason, means that the success of a rational, capitalist political program should be all the more rapid. By the admission of both sides, capitalism is the only system to which advocates of reason can turn.
Furthermore, the projection of a rational, capitalist political program, actually capable of solving major national and world problems, will stand as a major philosophic affirmation of the power of the human mind. Thus, it can be an important source of gaining recruits for all aspects of a rational philosophy. As previously shown in connection with the ecology movement, the cultural surge in blatant irrationality that has taken place in recent decades is due in no small measure to the demonstrated failure of socialism as a politico-economic system. Socialism is what most intellectuals have regarded as the system called for by logic and reason. As a result, its failure has served to shake their confidence in reason, and thus to open the floodgates to irrationalism. By the same token, a resurrection of respect for the potential of reason in the politico-economic realm will promote the case for reason everywhere.
* * *
The advocates of capitalism should take the lead in the defense of the freedoms of press and speech. At the same time that we seek to protect it for purveyors of “prurient” literature, we should seek to protect it for the writers of financial newsletters, whom the SEC wants to censor; for corporations, whom the Congress and the Federal Elections Commission want to censor by denying them the right to support political candidates of their choice; for unpopular speakers whom student thugs want to censor by denying them the ability to be heard by their audience; for ordinary citizens whom the Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to censor for speaking out against government-sponsored projects in their neighborhoods. We should demand the freedoms of speech and press for all advertisers, including cigarette advertisers.
We should place the establishment of full freedom of the press and of the more recent forms of communication, such as movies, radio, and television, in the forefront of our fight for a capitalist society. Long before the establishment of a fully capitalist society, we should seek the establishment of a fully free press and media as the pattern for all other industries later to follow. We should demand their exemption from all government regulation immediately–that is, we should demand that these industries, because of the intellectual nature of their products and services, be freed at once from the income tax, the antitrust laws, the labor laws, and every other form of government regulation and interference, so that they may advance their ideas totally without fear of punitive action of any kind being taken against them.
Copyright 1996 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
In Fossil Future, Alex Epstein refutes literally hundreds of myths about fossil fuels. Here are 20 myths that 11,000,000 people heard on Joe Rogan’s podcast this year, refuted.
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush calls for $14 trillion to redistribute to people based on race, euphemistically calling it “reparations.” Please don’t say she’s not serious. Biden would sign it and the Senate would possibly pass it. The House would certainly pass it once back in DemCom hands, a real possibility by 2025 given continuing ballot fraud.
If this isn’t the basis for conventionofstates.com and/or secession, I don’t know what is.
***************
“This is a battle between human nature versus progressive politics. The survival urge is genetically driven, and progressives like Alvin Bragg prefer a docile, vulnerable, and easy-to-manage population. It’s no different from forcing you to mask up and take the vaccine. The Daniel Penny episode is a public training exercise in domestication and judging by the outpouring of support for the former Marine, lots of people are tired of being forced to submit when cornered.
Recall when Rosa Parks decided that she was sick and tired of being legally required to sit at the back of the bus. Many are now fed up with having to suffer abuse from the crazies and risk being arrested if they fight back. If governments refuse to protect us, we may have no choice but to send in the Marines. “
— from The American Thinker
****************
Censorship is always an implicit compliment. You don’t need to silence someone when you know they’re wrong.
****************
“NJ Gov. Murphy: We’ll Defy SCOTUS ‘to Save Lives’ if They Rule Against Abortion Pill,” says a headline.
So leftists are LAWLESS when it suits them. And as authoritarian as the Gestapo when they like the law or a particular decision.
I think millions of us should STOP OBEYING the Biden regime and any law we dislike. And any woke court decision we dislike. If these leftists want war, they will have it.
Imagine the impact if millions of us grew a spine and simply resisted these totalitarian freaks.
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement. The method would be the enactment of state laws declaring that as of the end of the seventh school year following the enactment of the law, that state and its localities will no longer be responsible for the financing of the first-grade education of any student; that a year after that, they will no longer be responsible for the financing of the second-grade education of any student; and so on, through all the elementary, secondary, and college grades. This procedure would enable the parents of children alive at the time of the enactment of the phase-out legislation to go on using the public education system if they wished; it would give prospective new parents a year’s notice that they would be responsible for the cost of their children’s education.
The abolition of public education should be preceded by the recognition of the right of parents to educate their own children and by the abolition of educational licensing requirements. It would also be proper if the public schools were to be made to begin charging tuition fees to those who could afford them, which would be progressively increased, until they reflected the public school system’s costs. The fee system would permit steadily increasing competition and growth on the part of private schools, which would then be in a position easily and totally to displace the public schools.
One of the most immediate points to fight for in connection with the abolition of public education is the abolition of the federal Department of Education and all federal aid to education. These measures would create an immediate improvement in education by eliminating a major layer of bureaucracy and by forcing the elimination of unnecessary courses and unsound educational methods that are fostered, if not mandated, by the availability of federal funds. They would thus bring about a renewed concentration on the three R’s and other serious subjects.
In the struggle against public education, an important principle to stress is that the public education system is inherently unsuited to teach any subject about which there is controversy. This is because teaching such a subject necessarily entails forcing at least some taxpayers to violate their convictions, by providing funds for the dissemination of ideas which they consider to be false and possibly vicious. On the basis of this principle, the public schools should be barred from teaching not only religion, but also history, economics, civics, and biology. In the nature of things, only private schools, for whose services people have the choice of paying or not paying, can teach these subjects without violating the freedom of conscience. The fact that barring the public schools from teaching these subjects would leave them with very little to teach, and place them in a position in which they may as well not exist, simply confirms the fact that public education should be abolished.
Separation of Government and Science
The above principle concerning the government’s violation of the freedom of conscience in supporting the promulgation of controversial ideas also constitutes an argument for the abolition of practically all government support of the arts and sciences. There is great controversy concerning the artistic merit of various schools of literature, painting, and sculpture. There is significant and growing controversy even over the various theories of natural science, such as the controversy between the supporters of the “Big-Bang” theory of the origin of the universe and the supporters of the steady-state theory of the universe, which holds that the universe did not have an origin. For the government to finance any artistic or scientific activity means to compel taxpayers who hold the activity to be artistically or scientifically worthless, and perhaps immoral as well, to finance it nonetheless.
More fundamentally, our opposition to government involvement in art and science–and in education–is based on Ayn Rand’s principle that force and mind are opposites. Matters of truth and value can be determined only by the voluntary assent of the human mind. Yet government is essentially a policeman with a gun and club. It settles matters by means of force. This is directly contrary to the nature of knowledge. It has no place in the laboratory, the lecture hall, or the art gallery. The determination of what is true or false, or possessing or lacking in value, simply cannot properly be decided by government officials. Nor can it properly be decided by majorities in voting booths. Such a thing is further contrary to the nature of knowledge, which always begins as the discovery of just one mind, and which is as yet totally unknown to the entire rest of the human race. Governments and majorities must not be allowed to crush the isolated individual, who is the source of all new knowledge and improvement. Yet precisely this is the outcome of government support of science and art, which scoops up the limited funds available for the support of such activities and arbitrarily dictates how they are to be spent.
As to the tactics to be used to remove the government from these areas, the most important is the continuous demonstration of the contrary nature of government force, on the one side, and knowledge and value freely assented to, on the other.
* * *
An important step in reducing and ultimately eliminating government interference in science would be to require that all alleged scientific studies financed in any way by any government agency or department prominently state that fact. This might be required in the form of an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act. The requirement should extend to all press releases and public announcements made by the government or any of its employees concerning the study. In this way, the study could be easily identified as coming from the government or associated with the government. The requirement would serve, in effect, as a warning label. In addition, all information relevant to the study’s being undertaken, including the initial application for a government grant, and all correspondence and internal government documents pertaining to the study, should be identified in an appendix to the study, and copies made readily available to any member of the public wishing to see them. The study should also be required to include an appendix providing an intelligible explanation of the methodology on which it was based. These requirements would make it possible to scrutinize and judge the scientific seriousness of such studies far more easily than is possible today, and thus to enable people much more readily to distinguish government propaganda from science.
An important first step in the eventual abolition of such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be a law severely limiting their powers to ban drugs and chemical substances. The law would nullify the power of the agency’s adverse ruling in any case in which similar agencies in, say, two or more modern foreign countries, such as Canada, Switzerland, and Great Britain, have found no reason to ban a substance. In other words, it would subject these agencies to a form of liberalizing “peer review.” In such cases, in order to ban a substance, the FDA and EPA would have to prove their case before a court of law. The principle that the FDA and EPA and their staffs are not endowed with any form of divine guidance could be progressively extended–to the point where any one private individual was free to act on his contrary opinion. (After all, why should the opinions of American citizens be viewed as inferior to those of foreign bureaucrats?)
Perhaps the best way ultimately to abolish the FDA and the EPA would be to demand their conversion to private agencies, having no powers of compulsion and supported exclusively by private funds. They would then operate as advisory agencies, in competition with other such private advisory agencies, free to pronounce whatever opinions they wished about any subject, but not free to have force used to back their opinions–except when they could go before a court of law, as any other private citizen, and prove the existence of a danger to the lives or property of parties not willing to take the risk of such danger.
Perhaps the best way ultimately to abolish the FDA and the EPA would be to demand their conversion to private agencies, having no powers of compulsion and supported exclusively by private funds. They would then operate as advisory agencies, in competition with other such private advisory agencies, free to pronounce whatever opinions they wished about any subject, but not free to have force used to back their opinions–except when they could go before a court of law, as any other private citizen, and prove the existence of a danger to the lives or property of parties not willing to take the risk of such danger.
Separation of State and Church
Our opposition to government involvement in religion is based on the same foundation as our opposition to government involvement in education and science. Indeed, government-sponsored religion represents the most naked kind of use of force against the mind. Religion is based on faith. The use of force to impose it or its values is always the use of force in order to compel acceptance of what cannot be proved or denial of what can be proved.
The supporters of capitalism must take the lead in the battle against the current incursions of religion into politics and government. Nothing could be more vital to progress toward the establishment of a capitalist society. The old stereotypes of the advocates of socialism as enlightened liberals and the advocates of capitalism as religious conservatives need to be decisively broken. From now on, in accordance with the actual facts, the advocates of capitalism must be viewed as the representatives of enlightenment, and the socialists as the representatives of irrationalism and the Dark Ages.
In the 1930s and 1940s, to be sure, the seemingly enlightened Left was able to depict its opponents as virtual Ma and Pa Kettles, living on a farm somewhere, totally cut off from modern civilization, and projecting utter ignorance and contempt for science and technology. Exactly that image is what the New Left has chosen to wrap itself in, ever since it joined the ecology movement. We should be sure that the public eventually understands this fact and that it is with the New Left that those who place faith above reason belong.
Previous discussion in this book and in Ayn Rand’s The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution provide the essential basis for the transformation of the view of which side wears the mantle of Reason. They clearly show how the ecology movement, which is the last gasp of the Left, is thoroughly riddled with irrationalism and hostility to science and technology. Furthermore, the whole of this book and all of the writings of von Mises, of the other Austrian and classical economists, and of Ayn Rand, show beyond a shadow of a doubt that capitalism in no sense whatever depends on the acceptance of any form of faith or denial of reason. The case for capitalism is thoroughly rational.
In view of the fact that socialism has demonstrated its failure and that as a result its advocates have largely given up the banner of reason, means that the success of a rational, capitalist political program should be all the more rapid. By the admission of both sides, capitalism is the only system to which advocates of reason can turn.
Furthermore, the projection of a rational, capitalist political program, actually capable of solving major national and world problems, will stand as a major philosophic affirmation of the power of the human mind. Thus, it can be an important source of gaining recruits for all aspects of a rational philosophy. As previously shown in connection with the ecology movement, the cultural surge in blatant irrationality that has taken place in recent decades is due in no small measure to the demonstrated failure of socialism as a politico-economic system. Socialism is what most intellectuals have regarded as the system called for by logic and reason. As a result, its failure has served to shake their confidence in reason, and thus to open the floodgates to irrationalism. By the same token, a resurrection of respect for the potential of reason in the politico-economic realm will promote the case for reason everywhere.
* * *
The advocates of capitalism should take the lead in the defense of the freedoms of press and speech. At the same time that we seek to protect it for purveyors of “prurient” literature, we should seek to protect it for the writers of financial newsletters, whom the SEC wants to censor; for corporations, whom the Congress and the Federal Elections Commission want to censor by denying them the right to support political candidates of their choice; for unpopular speakers whom student thugs want to censor by denying them the ability to be heard by their audience; for ordinary citizens whom the Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to censor for speaking out against government-sponsored projects in their neighborhoods. We should demand the freedoms of speech and press for all advertisers, including cigarette advertisers.
We should place the establishment of full freedom of the press and of the more recent forms of communication, such as movies, radio, and television, in the forefront of our fight for a capitalist society. Long before the establishment of a fully capitalist society, we should seek the establishment of a fully free press and media as the pattern for all other industries later to follow. We should demand their exemption from all government regulation immediately–that is, we should demand that these industries, because of the intellectual nature of their products and services, be freed at once from the income tax, the antitrust laws, the labor laws, and every other form of government regulation and interference, so that they may advance their ideas totally without fear of punitive action of any kind being taken against them.
Copyright 1996 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
I hear the argument — from people who don’t like Biden or leftists — that Republicans are getting “too extreme.” If only that were true!
But on the subject of “extreme”…how are we supposed to deal with the extreme views and actions of the people in charge of our culture, of private corporations and of the government? The view and actions of the “woke”?
We don’t label the woke “extreme” when they say that you must do as the government says, that you must shut up when the government tells you to shut up, that you’re stupid if you don’t want the face of a drag queen on your beer can, that you’re selfish and bad if you want to keep your gas car or stove, and that you’re evil and immoral if you want redistribution of wealth to stop. We don’t label them “extreme” when they say if you oppose government schools teaching racism and Communism with tax money to your children, that you’re a domestic terrorist. We don’t say it’s “extreme” when the FBI and the local police of major cities are weaponized and politicized in the service of minimizing or ignoring real crimes (theft, rape, murder) and replaced with political crimes (criticizing the government). We don’t call it “extreme” when Donald Trump faces charges for things he didn’t do in order to keep him from running for President again, and when ballots are manufactured to ensure no Republican ever wins again.
If it’s bad to be “extreme” by supporting the extreme opposite of all that is dishonest, disingenuous, irrational, psychotic, illegal, totally immoral and outright evil — then what exactly would be good? Keeping all the irrationality and evil going, and just toning it down a bit? Who will benefit from such a tepid approach? Who will be harmed the most?
My question is not for leftists. Leftists are beyond reason. They have made up their minds on entirely an emotional basis. My question is for the dissenters.
America is dying, not so much because of the irrational tyrants on the left. They’re just doing what tyrants do — being tyrants. It’s the people on the dissenting side who are too afraid or too apologetic to stand up to these tyrants and give them absolutely everything they deserve who will ensure our downfall.
It’s not left or right. It’s good or bad. ALL of the left is bad. MOST of the right is. Rationality & freedom are rare, and precious.
Leftists do not care about others. They care about being SEEN as caring about others.
Their fixation on putting “transgenders” on beer cans and swimsuit Sports Illustrated covers does not show they care for others. It simply shows that they wish to be SEEN as progressive and innovative. Obviously, they don’t know how to actually BE progressive and innovative. If they did know how, they would not choose such bizarre, self-refuting methods for attempting to show that they are.
When an individual fixates on trying to prove what he isn’t through distorted, self-congratulatory and reality-busting hallucinatory outbursts, running around and screaming about the alleged superiority of less than 1 percent of the population who consider themselves both male and female — and neither — at the same time, you would dismiss such a person as out of his mind. When the entire infrastructure of a culture goes down this road, you have no choice but to wonder if the fall of civilization as we know it is precariously close.
A former AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)) aide is a Communist. She doesn’t defensively admit she’s a Communist; she proudly brags about it.
AOC does not disassociate herself from her former aide. Why should she? AOC’s policies, like those of the entire Democratic Party, are now TOTALLY COMMUNIST.
Justine Medina, AOC’s pal and fellow Communist writes, “Communism is about equality, democracy, peace, the advancement of workers, the oppressed, and humanity in general. It is the true path; there will be unkind[ness] to those who block progress, but Communism is good and should not scare you.” She is now the senior official in the New York State Communist Party.
Wow. When a terrorizing, air-headed morally vacant thug tells you not to be scared, you should be scared. The only reason to be scared? Most are not paying attention and think it can’t happen here, and will never happen here. But it’s happening, and you don’t need AOC to ensure it. Joe Biden — the pitiful, half-dead puppet — will do just fine. With virtually no opposition worthy of the name, America is going down, and most people hope and pray that somehow a (rigged) election will fix everything.
Communism uses force and brutality to serve its ends. This has has been the case, whether in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Soviet Russia, Maoist China or anywhere else. Communism HAS to use force and brutality, by definition. Why? Because some people have to be sacrificed to others. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” That’s the Marxist credo of Communism. It’s an ideology of “share the wealth” — through brute force. Remember Stalin and Mao? They slaughtered millions to attain their ends. None of their ends were achieved, but the slaughters could not be reversed.
No worries, say Medina and — by extension — AOC and the modern Democratic Communist Party in America. Communism is nothing to fear — so long as you agree with it, and so long as you do what you’re told.
Joseph McCarthy was right. Communism did eventually take over America. But not by stealth. Out in the open, and with barely a whimper from what passes as opposition.
So in a way, McCarthy was wrong. He underestimated just how weak, ignorant, cowardly and stupid most Americans would become.
The proper evaluation of the United States in relation to slavery is this: ending slavery by fighting and winning the Civil War was a tremendous moral achievement and should be celebrated.
Slavery is an evil institution. It is a total violation of individual rights.
America did not create slavery
However, a routinely hidden secret in pubic discourse is the fact that America did not create slavery. Slavery has been part of world history for millennia. The first recorded report of slavery occurred about 9,000 years ago. Slavery existed in various forms in the Arab world, Africa, Assyria, Babylonia, China, Egypt, Greece, India, Italy, and Russia.
The prevailing explicit or implicit political view in the premodern world was that “might makes right.” It was considered only natural that the more militarily powerful tribes or cities had the right to enslave the less powerful. This was true even in ancient Greece; the city-states often fought each other.
If there were ever to be an alternative viewpoint, it had to be discovered as a product of philosophy. As noted earlier, a critical turning point in world political history was the 1690 publication of John Locke’s momentous Second Treatise on Civil Government. Locke argued that rather than citizens existing to serve the government, the government should exist to protect individual rights. Specifically, citizens should be protected from the initiation of force by the government (as well as by criminals). He argued that when the government usurped the rights of its citizens and could not be reformed, it was proper to overthrow it. Locke was the core philosopher of the American Revolution (Thompson, 2019).
Slavery before Locke was not based on the evasion of a valid, known moral principle but on moral ignorance. Even the Bible took slavery for granted. Locke’s theory made it clear that dictatorships, including those that espoused slavery, were immoral.
But there is more. Slavery was not brought to the U.S. by the vote of its own citizens. Until 1783, America was a British colony, and it was the British who brought slaves here for economic reasons: the British needed labor to grow sugar cane, tobacco, and cotton. To morally condemn the American colonies, which were under British rule, for a condition created by the colony’s rulers, is a gross injustice. The attacks on America put forth in The 1619 Project are a thinly veiled attempt to cause today’s Americans to feel unearned guilt for the unchosen actions of their colonial ancestors.
Slavery is based on statism, not capitalism
Another fallacy is that slavery was based on capitalism. This is a flagrantly dishonest claim, an obvious left-wing smear. Capitalism involves voluntary trade (see Assertion 21). Under capitalism the employer can offer a job and the job seeker has the right to accept or refuse it. Employees who dislike their job can quit anytime they want. Employees have to be paid; the employer does not have the right to make them work at gunpoint. The fact that slave owners bought and sold slaves does not make slave owners capitalists; they were flagrant criminals.
The first step needed in promoting a new theory of government based on Locke’s principle of individual rights was to free America from British rule. Battling slavery would have been pointless given that the White colonists were more numerous than their Black slaves (27 million White colonists v. 4.5 million Black slaves) and were not free themselves.
The two heroic American figures in freeing America were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Jefferson, with the help of others, wrote the Declaration of Independence (1776), which was based on Locke’s theory. The Declaration led to America becoming an independent nation, thanks to General Washington, without whom we would surely have lost the Revolutionary War. The regrettable fact that both men owned slaves, a leftover of British rule, does not undo their positive achievements. These achievements, in the end, doomed slavery.
It soon became obvious that the Declaration of Independence and slavery were incompatible. The Constitution, though correct in advocating rights, involved a temporary but tragic compromise with the South based on the probably justified fear that a divided nation would not survive. The British could have come back to protect their investments. There was a war in 1812. But it was inevitable that an abolitionist movement would arise.
Another great American hero was Frederick Douglas an escaped slave who spent decades talking and writing against slavery. It became more and more obvious that the Declaration of Independence and slavery could not long exist in the same country (or in the same mind) without evasion. The South saw the potential threat to its economy, which was based on slavery and the White Southerners’ feelings of racial superiority. As a result, the South resisted emancipation to the death. The inevitable result was the Civil War.
There were two more heroes here. The first was General Ulysses Grant,without whom the Union would certainly not have won the Civil War (the South was counting on a stalemate). The second was President Lincoln, who supported Grant and emancipated the slaves, and who would surely not have been re-elected without key Union victories.
The US ended slavery
The proper evaluation of the United States in relation to slavery is this: ending slavery by fighting and winning the Civil War was a tremendous moral achievement and should be celebrated.
Most revolutions in history have simply replaced one dictator or tribe with another. The American Revolution was based on a moral theory founded on reason and rights. Hundreds of thousands of men fought and died in the Civil War in the name of morality. The right side won. Shockingly, in today’s hostile, anti-intellectual climate, Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and Grant, all of whom deserve the utmost admiration, have been roundly condemned. In many cases, their statues have been torn down or threatened.
The Civil War, of course, was only the beginning. The next issue was how to put the Declaration and the Constitution into action because those immortal documents did not end prejudice or violence against Black Americans.
Frederick Douglas, the great abolitionist, was disappointed in the aftermath of the war. Backs still did not have equal rights. President Grant used Union troops for some time during reconstruction in order to protect Black Americans, but Grant lost his power, and the protection did not last. Racial violence thrived. One cause was that the White South never fully accepted defeat and greatly resented both the loss of slaves and the feeling of superiority that slavery gave them. State and local politics in the South backed forced segregation, vote prevention, corrupt courts, police brutality, murder, and more. A second cause of continued racial violence was that Southern politicians still had enormous power in Congress. Many bills could not be passed without their cooperation. Of course, racism also existed in the North but was less institutionalized.
And yet, the best people kept pushing back. Making Blacks equal before the law has been a critical ongoing project for over 150 years. We would all, of course, wish that progress had been made faster but changing 9000 years of history is not that easy. Many people stood in the way of progress. We can condemn those people who stood in the way while admiring those who moved us forward.
Most revolutions in history have simply replaced one dictator or tribe with another. The American Revolution was based on a moral theory founded on reason and rights. Hundreds of thousands of men fought and died in the Civil War in the name of morality. The right side won. Shockingly, in today’s hostile, anti-intellectual climate, Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and Grant, all of whom deserve the utmost admiration, have been roundly condemned. In many cases, their statues have been torn down or threatened.
The Civil War, of course, was only the beginning. The next issue was how to put the Declaration and the Constitution into action because those immortal documents did not end prejudice or violence against Black Americans.
Frederick Douglas, the great abolitionist, was disappointed in the aftermath of the war. Backs still did not have equal rights. President Grant used Union troops for some time during reconstruction in order to protect Black Americans, but Grant lost his power, and the protection did not last. Racial violence thrived. One cause was that the White South never fully accepted defeat and greatly resented both the loss of slaves and the feeling of superiority that slavery gave them. State and local politics in the South backed forced segregation, vote prevention, corrupt courts, police brutality, murder, and more. A second cause of continued racial violence was that Southern politicians still had enormous power in Congress. Many bills could not be passed without their cooperation. Of course, racism also existed in the North but was less institutionalized.
And yet, the best people kept pushing back. Making Blacks equal before the law has been a critical ongoing project for over 150 years. We would all, of course, wish that progress had been made faster but changing 9000 years of history is not that easy. Many people stood in the way of progress. We can condemn those people who stood in the way while admiring those who moved us forward.
Edwin A. Locke is Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Motivation Emeritus at the R.H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial & Organizational Behavior, and the Academy of Management. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (Society for I/O Psychology), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (OB Division), the J. M. Cattell Award (APS) and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Academy of Management. He, with Gary Latham, has spent over 50 years developing Goal Setting Theory, ranked No. 1 in importance among 73 management theories. He has published over 320 chapters, articles, reviews and notes, and has authored or edited 13 books including (w. Kenner) The Selfish Path to Romance, (w. Latham) New Directions in Goal Setting and Task Performance, and The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators. He is internationally known for his research on motivation, job satisfaction, leadership, and other topics. His website is: EdwinLocke.com
A man, an ex-Marine with no criminal history, restrains a known mentally insane, violent man on a New York City subway. In the process, he saves himself and others on the train from probable physical harm. At first, the idea of prosecuting him is too much even for New York DA Alvin Bragg, the Soros-appointed lawyer whose explicit intention is to destroy American cities and the American republic, starting with made-up charges against former President Donald Trump. However, after Black Lives Matter and other domestic terrorists weigh in, openly threatening to shoot up New York City if the ex-Marine, named Daniel Penny, is not immediately arrested and prosecuted for murder (or at least manslaughter), then Bragg gives in and proceeds to arrest Penny.
“[Daniel Penny] did the right thing,” Guardian Angel’s founder Curtis Sliwa said on Newsmax. “You give the Marine the benefit of the doubt who served America, not Neely, who already was listed as one of the 50 most dangerous people living in the subways.
“We spend millions to catalog who are the most dangerous and we don’t remove them and put them in shelters or psychiatric facilities.”
You do NOT want to live in or near New York City. The police are politicized, and they will protect citizens only according to political standards — not normal, reasonable police standards in a free society. And if you try to defend yourself in lieu of police, if you’re not in a politically protected class (or worse still, if you’re in a politically hated class, such as white, male and heterosexual) — well, you’ll be toast.
Stay the hell away from blue states and cities. Let these ignorant mounds of barbarism collapse of their own irrationality.
In the present-day world, a procapitalist foreign policy is indistinguishable from a pro-American foreign policy. The United States is the world’s leading capitalist country. It is so on the basis of its fundamental laws–its Constitution and Bill of Rights. And, not surprisingly, it is hated for it. It is regarded by much of the rest of the world in the same way that within the United States the minority constituted by businessmen and capitalists–the “rich”–are regarded by much of the rest of the American citizenry. If the United States is to stand up for itself, it must learn to stand up for capitalism.
The most essential point which needs to be recognized is that to the extent that the United States is a capitalist country, its government is morally legitimate, because to that extent its government acts to defend individual rights, and the powers it exercises consist of nothing more than those of the individual’s delegated right of self-defense. By the same token, governments which do not recognize the existence of individual rights, governments whose very existence is based on the premise of the forcible sacrifice of the individual to the collective, have no moral legitimacy. This means, above all, that the surviving Communist regimes, such as those of mainland China, North Korea, and Cuba, and many, if not most of the governments of the so-called third-world countries have no moral legitimacy.
The overthrow of these governments is earnestly to be desired on behalf not only of their own citizens, who are enslaved, but also on behalf of the people of the entire world, who are forcibly deprived of the benefits they could otherwise derive if these countries were free–benefits in the form of the free development of the talents of the citizens of those countries and the free development of their natural resources. A major principle here is that the violation of the rights of the individual anywhere is an attack on the well-being of people everywhere.
A foreign policy based on these principles would deal with such governments as bandits and outlaws, temporarily holding power by means of force and fear. This does not mean that it would be the obligation of the U.S. government to go to war with such countries if it were not itself attacked or directly threatened by them. But it certainly does mean, as a minimum, that the U.S. government should do nothing to promote the existence of such governments. It should certainly not aid them in any way, nor provide them with any kind of forum in which to defend their crimes, nor denounce those who prevent them from expanding their power or who prevent similar regimes from coming to power in the first place.
As examples from the recent past, the U.S. government should certainly not have provided Soviet Russia or Communist Poland with free food or loan guarantees. Instead, it should have allowed them to suffer the famines that socialism causes, while at the same time explaining to the world how socialism was the cause of the famines and thus how millions were forced into starvation because of the power-lust of the Communist rulers and their insistence on the preservation of the socialist system. It should have led world opinion in demanding that the Communist rulers step down and the socialist system they had imposed be abolished, so that the citizens of the Communist countries could become free to produce and live. Had the United States followed this policy, the collapse of communism would have occurred decades earlier.
Today, the United States should withdraw all official recognition from the remaining Communist-bloc countries and from totalitarian third-world countries, such as Iran, Iraq, and Libya, and expel their diplomats and alleged trade missions. It should end all so-called cultural exchanges with such regimes. If necessary, it should withdraw from the United Nations and expel that organization from U.S. territory. The only purpose served by the presence of these individuals and institutions is spying, terrorism, and subversion. If the governments of these countries wish to continue to be recognized, the prime condition must be their formal disavowal of socialism and the adoption of a genuine plan for the protection of individual rights and the establishment of capitalism in their countries.
It should be recalled that the very fact of the United States adopting a policy of laissez faire and respect for private property rights at home would itself go a long way toward undermining the power of today’s leading terrorist governments, namely, those of the Middle East. At the same time, it would cut the ground from under the resurgence of religious fanaticism in the region, which, like the arms build-up by governments in the region, is financed by money derived from an artificially high price of oil. These results would follow because a leading consequence of the adoption of a policy of laissez faire and respect for private property rights by the United States would be a great increase in the supply of domestically produced oil and other sources of energy, which latter, as substitutes for oil, would cause a reduction in the demand for oil. In the face both of a substantial increase in the supply and reduction in the demand for oil, there would be a sharp decline in its price. Thus, the revenues that finance the terrorists and fanatics would sharply decline.
* * *
A major obstacle to the pursuit of a proper foreign policy by the U.S. government is the incredible corruption of thought which exists not only within the United States but, to a much greater degree, in the rest of the world. This corruption was blatantly evident in the fact that throughout the so-called cold war, the state of world opinion was such that the expulsion of Communist diplomats from the United States would have been regarded as an act of aggression on our part. A call for the Communist leaders to step down and end the enslavement of their citizens would have been regarded as a transgression against their allegedly God-given right to enslave–or, as it is customarily put, “an interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations.”
The ability of the United States to pursue a proper foreign policy and the ability of foreign countries themselves to move toward the achievement of a capitalist society depends on the spread of procapitalist ideas abroad. To say the same thing in different words, both our immediate national security and our long-run goal of the establishment of a fully capitalist society throughout the world, with worldwide free trade, freedom of investment, and freedom of migration, require that we be interested in the spread of proreason philosophy and procapitalist economic theory in foreign countries as well as in the United States.
A major task in the years ahead must be to bring about the translation of all of our main books into all of the world’s major languages. Human Action,Socialism,Atlas Shrugged, and about fifty or more other titles, should be made available in Russian, Polish, and Chinese, as well as in Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and all the other leading languages. Efforts should be made to promote the circulation of these books everywhere. I do not agree for a moment with the notion that only people brought up in the United States or Canada can readily appreciate our literature. Our philosophy recognizes only one reality and one human nature. No matter what intellectual and psychological obstacles a particular culture may create in the thinking of people, there is always some significant number who are open to new ideas. Our commitment to our philosophy and our national and economic self-interest require that we try to reach these people. As an example of the importance of doing so, just imagine the effect on our national self-interest of a totalitarian regime’s someday having to deal with people who have come to realize that each individual possesses reason and has an inalienable right to life, and that their reason and their lives are being sacrificed because of nothing more than the rulers’ willful refusal to abandon an irrational dogma. Imagine the effect of the regime’s being infiltrated by such people.
It should go without saying that all such intellectual efforts must be undertaken privately, not as an activity of the U.S. government.
As a further point in connection with what we should be working toward in the area of foreign policy, I would like to make a suggestion for another special campaign. This would be a campaign urging newspapers, magazines, and television stations which choose to maintain officially accredited reporters in Communist or other totalitarian countries to provide a warning label on all their reports from those countries which are obtained with government sanction. The label would identify the totalitarian nature of the country and state that no reason exists for regarding the report as anything but propaganda serving the interests of the government that originated it or sanctioned it.
Freedom of Immigration
We need to make a beginning toward the establishment of freedom of immigration. A logical place to begin would be in calling for free immigration from our immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico. There is not the slightest reason for excluding Canadians. They are virtually indistinguishable from Americans, and had one or two battles gone the other way early in our history, would in fact be Americans. By the same token, had the Confederacy won the Civil War, then, with the prevalence of today’s ideas, present-day New Yorkers would probably not be able to migrate to Texas, nor Texans to California. Such restrictions, based on mere accidents of history, simply have no logical foundation.
It should not be necessary to add that the free immigration of Canadians, Mexicans, or any other nationality should not be at the expense of the immigration allowed under existing law to the members of any other nationality. As in the case of tax reduction, no one should be made any worse off than he now is, because of an attempt to improve conditions for anyone else.
The reason we must seek to abolish restrictions on Mexican immigration at the earliest possible moment is because the attempt to restrict it is in danger of making us adopt some of the most obnoxious features of the former South African regime–namely, a virtual pass law, in which people of Latin origin will have to carry identity papers to show on demand to immigration police, who, if they do not find the appropriate “papers,” will have the authority to destroy the lives of said individuals by uprooting them from their jobs and homes and deporting them. Already virtually Gestapo-like conditions exist in Southern California in connection with a notorious immigration checkpoint, where fleeing Mexicans of all ages and both sexes have often run into oncoming automobile traffic rather than be arrested by officers of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. This ignominy, I must note, has now been compounded by the recent passage of Proposition 187 in the state of California, which, if upheld in the courts, will actually impose the requirement of having an official identity card that must be shown on demand to the authorities.
Furthermore, the principle of private property rights implies that the Mexicans, and everyone else, have a perfect right to come here–to work for anyone who is willing to hire them and to live wherever anyone is willing to sell or rent to them. The violation of the rights the Mexicans or any other category of immigrant is a violation of the private property rights of employers and landlords–it is telling them that other people have the right to dictate whom they may or may not employ or to whom they may or may not sell or rent their property. It is a blatant manifestation of collectivism to believe that somehow the people of the United States as a whole have the right to tell the individual, private owners of property how they may use their property–that they must use it not as they, the private owners wish to use it, but as the nation collectively, or at least a majority of those voting, wish it to be used.
As I explained in Chapter 9, in a capitalist society free immigration does not deprive those already present of the opportunity of working and it does not reduce their standard of living. On the contrary, in the long run free immigration into a capitalist society from a semifeudal one, such as Mexico’s, must operate to raise the general standard of living in the capitalist society, because it means that more human beings will now live under freedom and have the opportunity to develop their talents. There are Mexicans and the children of Mexicans who have the potential for making the same kind of economic contribution to the general standard of living as have immigrants from other countries before them.
The only legitimate argument against unrestricted Mexican immigration (or unrestricted immigration of any other ethnic group) is based on the existence of our welfare state. To the extent that Mexicans come here and go on welfare and medicaid, or use public hospitals and public schools, and place an increased burden on government-subsidized public transportation facilities and so forth, then, it is true, there is a genuine loss imposed on the people already here. The solution, however, is not to violate the right of the Mexicans to immigrate, but to start dismantling our welfare state.
Without immediately abolishing the totality of the welfare state, which would be politically impossible, we could simply change its terms and make all noncitizens ineligible for its programs. This, of course, is essentially what a portion of California’s Proposition 187 seeks to do. However, that proposition also seeks to expel the immigrants and to deter further immigration through fear. Totally unlike Proposition 187, the mere exclusion of the immigrants from the welfare state would not impose any actual burden or disability on them. It would not be they who had to carry identity papers and prove why they should not be deported. There would be no question of that. On the contrary, it would only be the American citizens who sought the alleged benefits of the welfare state who would have to show papers and prove their citizenship.
While excluding the immigrants from the welfare state, we should simultaneously remove all government-imposed barriers to their being supplied privately with what they need. This would entail the removal of government licensing requirements in connection with meeting the medical, educational, transportation, and sanitation needs of the immigrants. As far as possible, this should be accompanied by privatization of such things as existing government-owned hospitals, schools, bus lines, and garbage-collection operations. An important result of privatization would be that the presence of the larger numbers of people resulting from immigration would be viewed as a source of more business, not more problems, as it is under the ineptitude of government ownership. In addition, in order to reduce the injustice that would exist in making immigrants pay taxes for the support of the welfare state for the native population, the immigrants should receive as nontaxable wages what would otherwise be their own and their employer’s social security and medicare contributions made in connection with their employment. The ironic effect of all these liberalizing measures would be to give the immigrants more freedom than today’s American citizens, and in that sense to make them truer Americans than today’s American citizens. If, at the same time, the immigrants could be reached with procapitalist ideas, this might well serve as the foundation for their being developed into a major group opposed to the welfare state for anyone.
In the present circumstances, it is especially important to make every effort to exclude immigrants from the public education system. At one time, it is true, public elementary education succeeded in educating pupils of all different nationalities in the three R’s. And even though its own existence represented a contradiction of the principle of individual rights, it instilled in pupils a basic respect and admiration for the United States. Today, public education teaches very little to anyone. It turns out masses of illiterates and students who have not the slightest idea of what the United States stands for. One of the last things we should want is today’s public education system teaching masses of immigrants in their own language. One of the major subjects that would be taught would undoubtedly be revolutionary Marxist nationalism. Under such conditions, as far fetched as it may sound, large-scale Mexican immigration into the Southwest could well result, one or two generations later, in a widespread demand for the return of the Southwest to Mexico. Thus, an important part of any campaign for free immigration for Mexicans should be an attack on public education and its Marxist domination. It is vital that the immigrants be assimilated as English speakers who support capitalism.
It would be enormously valuable if it could be explained to the immigrants that only the philosophy of individualism and respect for private property rights made possible their immigration. It would be legitimate to require of all immigrants an oath swearing to uphold the system of private property rights and to educate their children in the English language.
It would be a very short step from freedom of immigration for Mexicans to freedom of immigration for everyone.
Friendly Relations with Japan and Western Europe
Because of their exceptional economic strength and thus their potential someday to constitute a serious military threat to the United States, a cardinal principal of American foreign policy must be the maintenance of friendly relations with Japan and the countries of Western Europe. To assure this, what is necessary on our part is a policy of free trade, freedom of investment, and freedom of immigration–in short, a policy of full capitalism with respect to these countries. If we were to follow this policy, we would eliminate any possible economic basis of aggression against us on the part of these countries. And for all of the reasons shown in this book, from an economic point of view we could only gain from such a policy–probably very substantially. As I have shown, we would gain even if we alone were to follow a policy of free trade while the others clung to various protectionist measures. In that case our position would be analogous to the situation of a territory in which inbound transportation costs were lower than outbound transportation costs.
If we followed such a policy toward these countries, we could reasonably ask them to undertake a larger share of the defense of the free world, in accordance with the increase in wealth and income they have experienced. We would not have to worry that in doing so, we were encouraging potential enemies to arm, as we should presently be concerned.
Of course, the policy of full capitalism with respect to foreign relations should be applied to all countries. However, for the reasons stated, it is especially important in these two cases.
Copyright 1996 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
Dictatorships use their connections to the free world to get unearned respect, steal technology and money, and spread propaganda. The best solution would be to achieve the highest degree of separation possible between the free world and the unfree world.
We need to take seriously the lesson of the last 25 years. It is because the peace process negated the principle of moral judgment, that it enabled the Palestinian movement to subjugate, indoctrinate, and impoverish its people while continuing to attack Israel.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 