The Rule of Reason :: Weblog of the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

:: Monday, November 23, 2009 ::

Fork-Tongued in Washington

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 6:39 PM

This is in the way of a correction to my “Fork-Tongued in Shanghai” (November 21), and of a footnote about our fork-tongued Senators as they sanction the groundwork of totalitarianism in this country.

This statement is corrected:

What Obama said about Sino-American relations in Shanghai is irrelevant here. China is the largest creditor of the U.S., holding about $800 billion in U.S. government securities, perhaps only three times what a health-care bill is estimated to cost over a decade.

I subsequently added a comment to the Shanghai post:

Last night (November 21) the Washington Post headlined: "Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) this evening secured the 60 votes needed to move an $848 billion health-care reform bill to the Senate floor for debate, clearing the way for amendment deliberations to begin after the Thanksgiving recess."

So, this criminally irresponsible and morally evil legislation actually tops the $800 billion in U.S. government securities held by the Chinese government. Of course, there's no way the $800 billion debt can be paid. Now it's going to be $1.6 trillion -- and counting.

And counting, indeed. My projection of the debt doubling to $1.6 trillion was literal and quite innocent. Americans for Limited Government's Bill Wilson issued the following statement today:

"On Saturday, the Senate voted 60-39 to proceed to the so-called ’public option’ legislation that will cost more than $2 trillion over ten years when fully implemented, ration health care away from seniors, raise the cost of premiums, drive the American people off of private health options, and bankrupt the Treasury.”

And counting, again. But, accepting my modest projection of only $1.6 trillion -- and this is exclusive of the billions in expenditure and cost to the economy incurred by whatever other socialist/fascist legislation is incubating in Congress’s collective mind, such as cap-and-trade, and exclusive of the costs of the looting, redistributionist “climate change” treaty President Obama is expected to sign next month in Copenhagen -- the logical question to ask is: How can the U.S. honor its debt to China, and also pay for socialist health care? Where is all this money supposed to come from? Is it the diminishing private, productive sector of the U.S. economy, which would become a mere servant to government debt service? For how long?

Captive, command economies and a fettered citizenry produce according to the law of diminishing returns, unless it can siphon off wealth from another economy and benefit from the blood transfusions made possible by semi-free nations. Is this, or is it not, a formula for catastrophic economic collapse? Yes. Will it be an open invitation for dictatorship to “take charge” of a crisis of the government’s making? Yes.

The question assumes a frozen, static debt figure, astronomical as it may be. Total U.S. government debt to foreign holders is nearly $3.5 trillion, with China followed by Japan, the United Kingdom and OPEC, in that order.

As for the scale of federal indebtedness in all categories, that figure also boggles the imagination. See these Federal Reserve calculations for 2005. These are Alan Greenspan figures and legacy.

Economies and human actions are not static. Economies either atrophy or grow. Men flee from atrophying economies -- when they can, when they and their wealth can remove to friendlier economic climes without being arrested and shaken down -- or they create new wealth that allows economies to grow, provided they are not barred from action by fiat law. The Emerson Electric Co. of Chicago is a case in point, cited by The Wire: Washington Insider’s Report. The ALG title for the report is “Atlas Shrugs.”

Finally, here is a breakdown of the 60-39 Senate vote on whether or not to “debate” the Senate’s version of the health care bill, also now known as the ReidCare bill, which incorporates all the expropriatory and extortionate provisions and language as the House Pelosi/ObamaCare bill. And then some. The names of the guilty are there for all to see.

The “debate” will not proceed on anything as honest as a principle, not even a statist, collectivist one. As happened in the House, it will be in the nature of horse-trading, arm-twisting and sugar-coated corruption instigated by malice-driven humanitarians.

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:: Saturday, November 21, 2009 ::

Fork-Tongued in Shanghai

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 8:02 AM

One might be tempted to pen a dark comedy about it. Don’t bother. President Barack Obama has just added this latest act to his own peculiar satire, authored by his speechwriters and scripted by professional censors.

In Shanghai, China to bolster relations between China and the U.S., he appeared in a “town hall” that was as thoroughly rigged as his press conferences and other “town hall” meetings in the U.S. He addressed a group of Chinese government-vetted students and answered eight pre-selected questions from the audience and over the Internet.

“You see, freedom of speech in America is not given to the people by the president but is something that the people use to supervise their government and president, to protect themselves.”

No, don’t take heart. Obama did not say it. It was said by a Chinese blogger and novelist, Yang Hengjun (on Twitter via a proxy server, because Twitter is blocked in China) in admiration for and agreement with Obama‘s assertion that Americans can criticize their political leaders without fear of reprisal. Hengjun understands what neither Obama nor his White House minions and departmental appointees do not: that a free press and free speech can oppose, criticize, and even check the depredations of government.

Hengjun understood that freedom of speech is a right that originates in individuals, and is not a privilege or right bestowed by a government on a nation’s citizens.

What Obama said about Sino-American relations in Shanghai is irrelevant here. China is the largest creditor of the U.S., holding about $800 billion in U.S. government securities, perhaps only three times what a health-care bill is estimated to cost over a decade. China is not going to sign any climate change treaty next month in Oslo that would oblige it to cut back on CO2 emissions, and so agree to economic suicide, no matter how much Obama “prods“ the super creditor. Nor is it going to cease censoring its press or the Internet, it is never going to cease suppressing freedom of speech. China is a totalitarian country. It hosted the visit of a nascent totalitarian, President Obama. It allowed him to visit to amuse him, and to take his measure, just as Europe and the Mideast allowed him to visit, to make his speeches, and to take his measure.

While Obama and his team indulged in wishful thinking, the Chinese government called all the shots.

The particulars of the town hall, including whether it could even be called one, were the subject of delicate negotiations between the White House and the Chinese up to the last minute. It remained unclear, for instance, whether - and how broadly - it would be broadcast on television and how much of a hand the central government had in choosing those allowed to question the U.S. president.

Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama would call at random on several of those in the audience, to be made up of hundreds of students hand-picked by the department heads of Shanghai-area universities, and would also answer questions solicited in advance by the White House from "various sources on the Internet."

What Obama said in China about freedom and speech and censorship, however, is far more relevant here, because it bodes ill for the future of freedom of speech in America. In answer to a question about the “Great Firewall of China” -- the Chinese government’s absolute control over what is said and seen on the Internet -- a question asked, incidentally, not by a Chinese student, but by the U.S. ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, he replied:

"I'm a big supporter of non-censorship," Obama said. "I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet — or unrestricted Internet access — is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged."

Obama is a “big supporter of non-censorship”? What is “non-censorship”? Is it an awkward grasp of the concept of freedom of speech, or an inverted synonym? No. It cannot even have an antonym. If, to paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary definition of censor, censorship is the “inspection of all books, journals, dramatic pieces, etc., before publication, to secure that they shall contain nothing immoral, heretical, or offensive to the government,” then non-censorship is an anti-concept. It is the “not censoring” of speech in any venue or form. That is, it is the staying of the government’s hand to censor it. It is the implicit acknowledgement that a government has the power and the will to censor, but chooses not to, for the moment. It is an Orwellian anti-concept possible only to a power-seeker at home with censoring and non-censoring.

Obama did not say that he is a “big supporter of freedom of speech” for two reasons: It would have been offensive to the Chinese totalitarian government -- and because he does not believe in it.

Obama stated that he recognized that “different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet -- or unrestricted Internet access -- is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.

He avoided the term “freedom of speech” again, and likened it to “tradition,” or custom. Message to China’s communist/fascist rulers: You have a long tradition of censorship and suppression of speech. On the other hand, we in the United States have a long “tradition” of freedom of speech. So, it’s just a difference of tradition. I won’t make a distinction between our traditions and yours, nor judge your regime.

And for how long does Obama intend our free Internet to be a “source of strength”? Not for long.

Which brings us to his term “unrestricted Internet access,” a euphemism for one of Obama’s key goals, “net neutrality,” or, government control and censorship of the Internet. He promised to promote and enact such controls two years ago on MTV. Net neutrality, in a nutshell, is “the idea that broadband operators shouldn't be allowed to block or degrade Internet content and services--or charge content providers an extra fee for speedier delivery or more favorable placement.”

Suppose broadband operators want to block or degrade Internet content they do not wish to carry? Suppose customers do not mind paying extra for speedier delivery and more favorable placement? Well, that is beside the point, according to Obama. Like newspapers and other venues of speech and entertainment, broadband operators are regarded as “public servants” serving the public by providing it information and entertainment, and should not be permitted to discriminate against any comers. Moreover, no one should be permitted to discriminate in their favor, that is, exercise his freedom of choice. All must be “equal.”

To better concretize the issue: State-mandated smoking bans in restaurants, bars, businesses and other venues -- in some localities, even in one’s own residence or in a public park -- are enacted to favor an alleged majority of non-smokers for purported health reasons. This is the literal, partial seizure of private property for the benefit of one group. Call it the selective application of the power of eminent domain, in answer to the proclaimed “right” of non-smokers to drink or dine or work in a smoke-free, “un-degraded” environment, in defiance of the fact that they drink, dine or work in an environment that is someone else‘s property.

Business owners and proprietors nominally own their property or enterprises -- but only for as long as they submit to the ban. They are not allowed to discriminate between smokers and non-smokers -- call it “patron neutrality,” with a patron forbidden to light up lest he offend someone or “endanger” someone’s health -- and all customers must be reduced to the same state of being non-smokers.

Extrapolate that phenomenon to the Internet -- substitute bars, restaurants and businesses with broadband operators -- now call them providers, “neutral” bureaucratic jargon for anyone or any business that creates and offers a “service,” a term that has spread like a corrosive into virtually every realm of trade -- and it is easy to see what the consequences will be: a government policed Internet, just like the Chinese one. One will hear only what the government wishes one to hear, read, or watch.

Obama may have been hoping to set a personal example for China's leaders when he said he believes that free discussion, including criticism that may be annoying to him, [that] makes him "a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear."

Obama has made it eminently clear that he would rather not risk hearing opinions that conflict with his own. Recall his efforts to enlist Americans, at the height of the nationwide Tea Parties, to report “fishy” opinions about him and his administration directly to the White House. Remember that he wishes to compel radio and television stations to comply with a new “Fairness Doctrine” under the magic cloak of “diversity” and has chosen members of his Politburo to monitor and enforce that policy.

He appointed Mark Lloyd chief diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission, who wishes to make private broadcasting companies pay licensing fees equal to their total operating costs to allow public broadcasting outlets to spend the same on their operations as the private companies do.

Obama appointed Julius Genachowski, his former Harvard Law School classmate and a busybody social worker, as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Doubtless he will do Obama’s bidding, just for old times’ sake, and formulate a new speech policy that would regulate the Internet to ensure net neutrality.

Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed strengthening the agency’s current guidelines on net neutrality by formally adopting them as regulation. He also proposed two additional rules, including one aimed at preventing Internet companies from discriminating against any traffic to certain types of content or services. In other words, all traffic would have to be treated the same.

Net neutrality was a cornerstone of Obama’s technology priorities during his campaign. Genachowski, his top campaign tech adviser, was a key architect behind those plans.

Cass Sunstein, head of the White Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, can rule on virtually any brand of speech anywhere. Indeed, one blogger reported:

The recent Obama intended appointment of Cass Sunstein…is the next nail in the coffin of the First Amendment. In this position Sunstein will have powers that are unprecedented and very far reaching; not merely mind-boggling but with explicit ability to use the courts to stifle free speech if it opposes Obama policies. In particular, Sunstein thinks that the bloggers have been “rampaging out of control” and that “new laws need to be written” to contain them.

Doubtless this blogger, as well as countless others who disagree with Obama that the Constitution is “deeply flawed,” has been marked for gagging by administration snoops and FCC bloodhounds on the scent of “non-diversity.”

Of course, Mao admirer Anita Dunn, White House communications director and failed Fox-hunter who was a “victim” of opinions Obama would rather not hear, is gone, “but will remain as a consultant to the White House on the communications and strategic matters.” Her husband, attorney Robert Bauer and a long-time Obama devotee, has been appointed White House counsel to fend off more “frivolous” allegations and charges against Obama and members of his “team,” a political organization whose suffocating power is intended to extend from the White House rose garden to every nock and cranny of American life.

The satire is that in Shanghai, Obama was subjected to the same censorship that he wishes to impose on America. It was the professional totalitarians showing the ropes to an amateur.

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:: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 ::

Natural Allies Against Liberty

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 8:53 PM

Just as the Witch Doctor is impotent without Attila, so Attila is impotent without the Witch Doctor; neither can make his power last without the other.*

I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.**

In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.***

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lent its endorsement to the 2,000+ page health care bill passed by the House last week (H.R. 3962), when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her arm-twisting cohorts persuaded others to okay the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. The amendment would prohibit insurance companies from including coverage for federally-subsidized abortions in their health plans, or so restrict them that it would not encourage any insurance company to include an abortion as a covered medical procedure.

The amendment, which passed by a vote of 240 to 194, would be included in the so-called “public option” of the legislation. The term “public option,” however, is a deceptive misnomer. There is nothing “public” about it. It would place a government bureaucrat in between an insurer and the insured. It should be called the “bureaucratic option.”

What has not been paid much attention is the fact that an organization of Catholic clergy has prevailed upon a nominally secular government to impose its religious dogma -- that fetuses are persons from the moment of conception -- on the rest of the country, in the face of opposition by several other religious groups, including one called Catholics for Choice. Of course, few in Congress, least of all Pelosi and her mandating munchkins and trolls, care to think of the First Amendment of the Constitution or even to give it serious credence, or perhaps devote two seconds of consideration of it in their power-obsessed minds. The words in that amendment are simple, clear and brief. It states that:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

The establishment clause prohibits Congress from creating a state religion, while the free exercise clause bars Congress from granting “most-favored religion” status to any religion at the expense of or over another (that is, while not literally creating a state religion).

Balance that against the mammoth health care bill with its millions of words. The question, however, is: Can the endorsement of the anti-abortion provision by the bishops, together with the concession by Pelosi (also a Catholic) and her allies in response to the peevish machinations of Stupak and his allies, be construed as the establishment of a religion?

Actually, no. But it hovers close to it. In fact, the American Catholic Church is a major recipient of federal funds. Its collection basket overflows with taxpayer money. It should come as no surprise that the bishops could exert such extraordinary influence on a nominally secular Congress. Politico reports:

With well over half of their revenue coming from the government, it is safe to say that Catholic hospitals survive on government funding as well as contributions from private sources….Catholic Charities, the domestic direct service arm of the bishops, also depends on state and federal dollars. Sixty-seven percent of Catholic Charities’ income comes from government funding. That represents over $2.6 billion in 2008 — an amount that is more than three times as large as the next largest charitable recipient of federal funds, the YMCA. Just as Catholic hospitals do, Catholic Charities receives enormous quantities of government dollars while abiding by existing constitutional and statutory requirements that prevent government sponsorship of religion.

How the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the health care bill came to be an issue is completely consistent with the character of the bill itself. In a move that smacks of extortion of extortionists. Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat (and Catholic) who sponsored the amendment, together with Pennsylvania Republican representative Joseph Pitts (an evangelical Christian), promised that they and other Democrats and Republicans would block passage of the bill if it permitted the federal subsidy of abortions in conjunction with the bill’s insurance coverage. Joining them in that maneuver were Democratic Representatives Ike Skelton of Missouri, John Tanner and Lincoln Davis of Tennessee, and Dan Boren of Oklahoma.

They were apparently moved to initiate that maneuver by the first bishops’ letter, dated October 10, in which, among other things, the bishops demanded that the bill:

Exclude mandated coverage for abortion, and incorporate longstanding policies against abortion funding and in favor of conscience rights. No one should be required to pay for or participate in abortion. It is essential that the legislation clearly apply to this new program longstanding and widely supported federal restrictions on abortion funding and mandates, and protections for rights of conscience. No current bill meets this test.

Otherwise, the bishops warned:

If final legislation does not meet our principles, we will have no choice but to oppose the bill. We remain committed to working with the Administration, Congressional leadership, and our allies to produce final health reform legislation that will reflect our principles.

Once the amendment had passed, however, the bishops wrote the House:

We are very pleased that the House leadership has agreed to allow the essential Stupak-Pitts-Kaptur-Dahlkemper-Lipinski-Smith Amendment to be considered by the House. This amendment will add to the Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962) crucial provisions that maintain the current protections against abortion funding and mandates. Specifically, it will achieve our objective of applying the provisions of the Hyde amendment to the public health plan and on the affordability credits in the exchanges called for in the legislation.

Passing this amendment allows the House to meet our criteria of preserving the existing protections against abortion funding in the new legislation. It also would fulfill President Obama’s commitment in this area. Most importantly, it will ensure that no government funds will be used for abortion or health plans which include abortion. It is a major step forward.

In the bishops’ first letter there is no reference to or mention of the premise that abortion is immoral, or that fetuses are “persons” with “rights.” Those are merely covered by the disingenuous phrases, “rights of conscience” and “our principles.” What “rights” and what “principles”? As Ayn Rand would retort: Blank-out. In the second, congratulatory letter, the bishops felt they no longer needed to mention “rights” or “principles.” They were only too happy to pat the Stupak syndicate on the back.

Catholics and their clergy are not the only religious groups that oppose abortion on moral grounds. There are secular opponents, as well. The question, then, is not whether there are any provable grounds to such a position, but whether or not such an idea, grounded on mere emotionalist assertions, has any business influencing any legislation.

In both of the bishops’ letters, the premise is not spoken, revealed, or even implied. It has been merely incorporated into the arid language of the bill concerning federal funding of abortions and insurance coverage.

In an apparent digression here, it would be apropos to quote Ayn Rand from her 1964 Playboy interview. Asked about her alleged remark about the cross being a symbol of torture, she replied:

To begin with, I never said that. It's not my style….What is correct is that I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. Isn't that what it does mean? Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.

What is the bishops’ premise? What is their principle? Just as environmentalists expect man to sacrifice his well-being, standard of living, longevity, and happiness in the name of “preserving” the earth or the climate or polar bears or weeds, women are specifically expected to be virtuous by sacrificing their lives and happiness for the sake of a non-ideal, that is, for the sake of a fetus, or a non-person.

So it is logical that the bishops would endorse the entire, sacrifice-through-coercion health care legislation. It is doubtful that they actually believe in the nonsense that fetuses have “rights.” They know, in the dark, unexamined cores of their souls, that the bill is a prescription for slavery and sacrifice to all the “non-ideal” men and women in the country. They are the Witch Doctors working hand-in-hand with the Attilas. Virtue comes from the point of a gun. They pose as “pro-life,” when, in fact, they are anti-life.

Had the bishops not intervened and played politics with the House sponsors and advocates of the health care bill, the provisions that cover insurance-covered abortions would probably have remained untouched. This is aside from the issue that the whole bill virtually appropriates Americans’ bodies and wealth for the sake of the poor, the uninsured, illegal immigrants -- and fetuses. The bishops are indifferent to the fact that the bill lays the groundwork for totalitarianism in this country. They are oblivious to the virtual enslavement of the medical profession. Their “rights of conscience” and “principles” trump those of all other Americans.

The bishops are not only anti-choice in the matter of abortion, but anti-choice in the most fundamental sense of individual rights. The Bill of Rights means as little to them as it does to most members of Congress. They are the natural allies of the totalitarians in the House and Senate.

*”For the New Intellectual,” in For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Signet, 1961, p. 23.

**Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 499.

***Robert G. Ingersoll, 1833-1899, Prose Poems and Selections, 1884. From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p. 190.

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:: Thursday, November 12, 2009 ::

In Congress, Ignorance is Strength

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 7:27 PM

I open this commentary with the introduction to my previous commentary, “The Mainstream Smearing of Ayn Rand.” The disparity in subject is not so irrelevant as one might presume, but I won’t dwell on that matter.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi looked like a deer caught in the blinding headlight of an oncoming freight train, her expression frozen in either ignorance or fear. It has always been difficult to distinguish between the two in her. But the malice in her words was palpable.

CNSNews.com: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?”

Pelosi: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes, I am.”

Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandate that individual Americans buy health insurance was not a "serious question."

“You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”

If a government plan is part of the deal, “as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent whose vote Democrats need to overcome GOP filibusters.

It seems that some Senators understand the original purpose of the Senate, which is to act as a check on the populist, “democratic,” majority-rule grounded legislation concocted by the House, to better preserve and protect the life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness of Americans. Unfortunately, only Graham, Lieberman, and a handful of other Senators appreciate that intention. Others have publicly articulated it -- but with reservations.

Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) says he is “not aware” of the Constitution giving Congress the authority to make individuals purchase health insurance, as the health care bills in both the House and Senate require.

No, he isn’t aware of the Constitution mandating Congress the power to force Americans to buy health insurance. And that unawareness won’t stop him from advocating such compulsion.

When asked if there was a specific part of the Constitution that gives Congress the authority to make people buy health insurance, Akaka said: “Not in particular with health insurance. It’s not covered in that respect. But in ways to help citizens in our country to live a good life, let me say it that way, is what we’re trying to do, and in this case, we’re trying to help them with their health.”

Both House and Senate health care bills mandate that people buy health insurance, facing a financial penalty if they do not. Akaka said this mandate should not be looked upon as a penalty…“It’s an idea of making it possible for people and this is what it’s all about,” he said. “I don’t look upon that as a penalty but as a way of getting help with health insurance.”

If Akaka had been sharp enough, he might have echoed House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland and claimed that “helping people” at the point of a gun to buy health insurance came under the (misunderstood) general welfare clause. But, he was not sharp enough, and that neglect simply added to his ignorance quotient.

Other politicians have been more specific in their opposition to any health care legislation. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah remarked that if the government can force Americans to purchase health insurance, “then there is literally nothing the federal government can’t force us to do.”

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island is in a dead heat with Senator Akaka in being unaware of any Constitutional mandate to compel Americans to buy health insurance. When asked by a reporter to identify that mandate in the Constitution, Reed answered:

“Let me see,” said Reed. “I would have to check the specific sections, so I’ll have to get back to you on the specific section. But it is not unusual that the Congress has required individuals to do things, like sign up for the draft and do many other things too, which I don’t think are explicitly contained [in the Constitution]. It gives Congress a right to raise an army, but it doesn’t say you can take people and draft them. But since that was something necessary for the functioning of the government over the past several years, the practice on the books, it’s been recognized, the authority to do that.”

The gentleman did not “get back” to the reporter who buttonholed him with that question. He likened the element of compulsion to forcing Americans to register for the military draft. That is okay with him. It is all about duty, and sacrifice, and “giving back” to society. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska also displayed his ignorance as well as his manners:

“Specifically, where in the Constitution does Congress get its authority to mandate that individuals purchase health insurance?” CNSNews.com asked Nelson.

“Well, you know, I don’t know that I’m a constitutional scholar,” said Nelson. So, I, I’m not going to be able to answer that question.” The senator then turned away to answer another reporter’s question.

If he doesn’t know whether or not he’s a constitutional scholar, then he isn’t one. That answer invites the observation and question: One can expect members of the House of Representatives to be foggy on matters of constitutionality, although their two-year terms ought to allow them to become experts on the subject.

Should Senators come to their jobs as Solons prepared to repel any and all usurpations of the Constitution? Yes. Willing and able to uphold individual rights and the sanctity of private contract? Yes. It is in the nature of the title and the concomitant responsibility of the office. Most senators, however, do not come to the job with anything near a tenuous knowledge of their function. And many of them assume their seats in the Senate with a contempt for the Constitution that may as well be ignorance.

Most Senators complement their ignorance of the Constitution with an indifference to its clearly-worded stipulations, and in this state of mind emulate President Barack Obama, former pseudo-professor of Constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. Obama is not so much ignorant of that document as hostile to it. It is “deeply flawed,” and a “charter of negative liberties,” which should be amended or rewritten to include the “positive“ liberties of welfare state entitlements and provisions for fiat executive powers. His demonstrated hostility for individual rights and private property is arguably more deep-seated than was FDR’s, whose grasp of the Constitutional limits placed on the executive and legislative branches of government was as blithely disjointed as is Obama’s.

The key to understanding the machinations of Obama, Pelosi, Reid and their allies in Congress is to grasp this: No one can express, as they have, such vehement ignorance without knowing full well what it is they are ignorant of.

It is time Americans called their bluff, as they may well do in the 2010 mid-term elections, or in manners reminiscent of the Tea Parties of 2009, or of the Minute Men of 1775.

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:: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 ::

The Mainstream Smearing of Ayn Rand

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 7:48 AM

More famous words from one of our wannabe Platonic guardians:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi looked like a deer caught in the blinding headlight of an oncoming freight train, her expression frozen in either ignorance or fear. It has always been difficult to distinguish between the two in her. But the malice in her words was palpable.

CNSNews.com: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?”

Pelosi: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes, I am.”

Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandate that individual Americans buy health insurance was not a "serious question."

“You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”

His iterating mockery of the reporter is indeed on the record. Elshami, deputy communications director and senior adviser to Pelosi, later issued a press release stating that Congress was empowered by the commerce clause in the Constitution to mandate individual health insurance. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), however, differed from that dubious specificity, instead likening the power to compel all Americans to buy health insurance to federal authority to impose speed limits on interstate highways (???), adding that “nobody questions” Congress’s authority to impose controls of any kind. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) linked the power to the general welfare clause.

All in all, nobody in Congress, it seems, treats questioning Congressional powers as a serious matter. Pelosi, Leahy, Hoyer, not to mention President Barack Obama, dismissively deflect any suggestion that particular members of Congress are violating their oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution. A handful of words that meant something entirely different to the authors of the Constitution -- in fact, the exact opposite of Congressional renditions -- is their sole sanction for expanding government powers. (And where is the Supreme Court on this issue? Absent from the bench, of course.)

Recounting this episode in crass contempt and learned ignorance is an overture to the subject of the mainstream critical establishment’s reception of the two biographies of Ayn Rand, Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday), and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press). As most of our lawmakers consider raising the subject of the unlawfulness of their actions as beyond the bounds of polite or legitimate enquiry, the overwhelming consensus of contemporary critics is that Ayn Rand’s philosophy of reason and individual rights cannot -- should not -- be taken seriously and must be treated with similar contempt and ignorance. And, as with the libertarians (see my previous commentary), the mainstream press’s chief purpose in paying any attention to the Heller and Burns books is to attack Rand by cadging supporting statements from both biographies.

(I shall repeat here that I have not yet read the Heller and Burns biographies, but plan to. The subject here, again, is the reviewers, not the books or their authors.)

Late last year and early this year, when observers were reporting the uncanny similarities between current events and the events in Atlas Shrugged, there was nothing to do but report the phenomena. The parallels were undeniable and untouchable. But the appearance of these books now is propinquitous.

Her stalwart critics cannot refute her philosophy. The best of them, such as British philosopher Anthony Clifford Grayling (discussed below), can only dazzle the gullible with mental whirligigs. Some critics are so unread and illiterate that they can never grasp the philosophy, but only sense its danger to their intellectual and moral lethargy in an animalistic, feral manner. So they all adopt the policy of ad hominem, frequently interspersing their attacks on her person with generous ad captandum monologues. As I suggested in my previous commentary, imagine if it were reported that Aristotle beat his wife (as claimed, perhaps, by Roman biographer Suetonius in a newly discovered fragment), then that would constitute sufficient refutation of his work.

So it is with the mainstream media and literary treatment of Rand. In all instances, the fear, ignorance and malice in these reviews are palpable. For the present, their authors monopolize the podium of the culture.

TIME’s review of both biographies, “Ayn Rand: Extremist or Visionary?” (October 12) is perhaps the shortest. It does not so much review the books as borrow indiscriminately from them. After attempting to make Rand look comical in the first paragraph, the review goes on:

The bad economy has been good news for Rand's legacy. Her fierce denunciations of government regulation have sent sales of her two best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, soaring. Yet her me-first brand of capitalism has been excoriated for fomenting the recent financial crisis. And her most famous former acolyte--onetime Fed chairman Alan Greenspan--has been blamed for inflating the housing bubble by refusing to intervene in the market.

Does the author of the review attempt to rebut the charges that Rand’s philosophy of laissez-faire capitalism was responsible for the financial crisis, and suggest instead that government intervention was and remains the culprit? No. If she had, she would not have insinuated that Alan Greenspan still believed in free markets, and that blame for the crisis could be pinned on them. An ounce of acuity in the author about Greenspan’s position would have led her to suspect that the former Federal Reserve chairman had abandoned laissez-faire in favor of intervention.

The TIME review goes on:

In the midst of the newly rekindled debate, two excellent biographies have just been published: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller…is a comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rand's personal life, and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns…leans more heavily on Rand's theories and politics.

TIME’s reviewer, however, does not dwell on the theories and politics, but rather on Rand herself, quoting more often from Burns’ book than from Heller’s. Among other inaccuracies, it asserts that Rand’s horrible experience in Soviet Russia was the genesis of her “hatred of communism and any sort of collectivism,” which hatred “would guide her life” and somehow lead to the formulation of a philosophy. If the review’s author had bothered to investigate further (and perhaps read the biographies a little more closely), she would have seen that Rand abhorred collectivism before the Bolshevik coup and the imposition of communist rule in Russia. The reviewer does not attempt to answer whether Rand was an “extremist” or a “visionary.” She simply concludes that Rand’s emotions trumped reason and that, consequently, she was a pathetic person.

Janet Maslin in her New York Times review, “Twin Biographies of a Singular Woman, Ayn Rand” (October 22), emulating TIME’s review, opens with the same ridiculing reference to Rand’s appearance, stressing her gold dollar-sign pin, calling it a “Halloween-ready costume.” That more or less sets the tone of Maslin’s review.

Repeating the error that Rand’s antipathy for any kind of collectivism was the foundation of what would become her philosophy of Objectivism, Maslin writes:

Ms. Heller’s book is worth its $35 price, which is not the kind of detail that Rand herself would have been shy about trumpeting. When Russian Bolshevik soldiers commandeered and closed the St. Petersburg pharmacy run by Zinovy Rosenbaum [Rand‘s father], they made a lifelong capitalist of his 12-year-old daughter, Alissa [Rand], who would wind up fusing the subversive power of the Russian political novel with glittering Hollywood-fueled visions of the American dream.

Maslin, like Andrea Sachs of TIME and other reviewers, fairly gloats over Rand’s affair with Nathaniel Branden, her “foremost acolyte and officially anointed intellectual heir,” and predictably attaches more importance to it than to the body of Rand’s work.

Both books characterize Rand’s long relationship with Branden as the most important connection in her life. And both use it to illustrate how drastically Rand’s personal ties could rupture. The amphetamine-addicted, self-styled goddess in both books becomes so moody and volatile that her associates do not simply part ways with her. Some, like Branden and his wife, Barbara, wind up excommunicated.

Maslin concludes that Rand had “an hypnotic effect on those in her orbit,” implying that her ideas and logic were of less importance than her need to have “acolytes” and her “acolytes” needing her brand of religion. Referring to Rand’s first days in Hollywood -- a “fishy story” which Maslin writes was investigated by Heller -- Maslin concludes that Rand’s chief asset was her “charisma”:

Rand might have expressed disdain for that charisma, but it was enough to stop [Cecil B.] DeMille in his tracks. She would have been nowhere without it.

Sam Anderson’s New York Magazine review, “Mrs. Logic” (October 18), is arguably worse than either Maslin’s or Sachs’. Anderson, who confesses that he was once a student of Objectivism, reviews only Heller’s book, and mooches from it with scanty attribution and imposes his own evaluation on the information he gleans from it, so that rarely can one distinguish between his and Heller‘s evaluations. Beginning his review with a snide narration of what people could expect upon first meeting Rand, he writes:

….[S]he would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers: “Tell me your premises.” Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forth—the whole Objectivist catechism. And once you conceded any part of that basic platform, the game was pretty much over. She’d start piecing together her rationalist Tinkertoys until the mighty Randian edifice towered over you: a rigidly logical Art Deco skyscraper, 30 or 40 feet tall, with little plastic industrialists peeking out the windows—a shining monument to the glories of individualism, the virtues of selfishness, and the deep morality of laissez-faire capitalism. Grant Ayn Rand a premise and you’d leave with a lifestyle.

Among Anderson’s numerous egregious and vicious statements about Rand, two stand out:

It’s easy to chuckle at Rand, smugly, from the safe distance of intervening decades or an opposed ideology, but in person—her big black eyes flashing deep into the night, fueled by nicotine, caffeine, and amphetamines—she was apparently an irresistible force, a machine of pure reason, a free-market Spock who converted doubters left, right, and center. Eyewitnesses say that she never lost an argument.

Thus the subtitle of Anderson’s review: “Ayn Rand never got into an argument she couldn’t win. Except, perhaps, with herself.” Harping again on the allegedly subjective, virtually neurotic origins and nature of Objectivism, he notes:

Anne Heller’s new biography…allows us to poke our heads, for the first time, into the Russian-American’s overheated philosophical subbasement. After reading the details of Rand’s early life, I find it hard to think of Objectivism as very objective at all—it looks more like a rational program retrofitted to a lifelong temperament, a fantasy world created to cancel the nightmare of a terrifying childhood….No one, according to Heller’s portrait, struggled with the unreality of Objectivism more than Rand herself. She wept, throughout her life, at the world’s refusal to conform to her ideal vision of it. Although she claimed that “one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner,” she repeatedly withheld or distorted facts to feed her own mythology.

This is the theme of Anderson’s whole review: Ayn Rand created her own “mythology”; ergo, she was as phony as her philosophy. He can’t take her seriously, nor should anyone else.

An unsigned review of the Heller and Burns biographies in The Economist, "Capitalism's martyred hero" (October 22), repeats but does not dwell on the “mythology” theme:

But her most important attribute was her talent for myth-making. Rand perfected her literary art as a screenwriter in Hollywood. And she dealt in Hollywood-style dichotomies between good and evil, between white-hatted capitalists and black-hatted collectivists. Greys don’t interest me, she once said. “Atlas Shrugged” conjured up a world in which all creative businessmen had gone on strike, retreating to Galt’s Gulch in Colorado, and culminated in a dramatic court scene in which Galt detailed the evils of collectivism.

The reviewer obviously had not read Atlas Shrugged to the end; John Galt does not appear in any courtroom scene. (Perhaps the reviewer had read The Fountainhead, but Galt and Howard Roark are emphatically not the same.) The swipes taken against Rand in this review are less offensive than those in the Anderson and Maslin reviews. The Economist reviewer at least concedes that Atlas Shrugged especially has permanent relevance and that Rand was right.

Jennifer Burns is better versed in conservative thought. Both are well worth reading, partly because Rand’s life was so extraordinary and partly because the questions that she raised about the proper power of government are just as urgent now as they ever were….Rand was the single most uncompromising critic of the collectivist tide that swept across the capitalist world in the wake of the Depression. For her, government was nothing more than licensed robbery and altruism just an excuse for power-grabbing. Intellectuals and bureaucrats might pose as champions of the people against the powerful. But in reality they were empire builders who were motivated by a noxious mixture of envy and greed.

The review concludes:

Yet Rand’s appeal has been undimmed by either the vituperation of her critics or the peculiarity of her admirers. Her insight in “Atlas Shrugged”—that society cannot thrive unless it is willing to give freedom to its entrepreneurs and innovators—has proved to be prescient.

Nick Gillespie, former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine and now editor of Reason.com and Reason.tv, in his Fall Wilson Quarterly review, “Ready for Her Close-Up,” asks:

Has any major postwar American author taken as much critical abuse as Ayn Rand? Her best-known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, have sold more than 12 million copies in the United States alone and were ranked first and second in a 1998 Modern Library reader survey of the “greatest books” of the 20th century. Yet over the years, Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all.

Later on, Gillespie notes:

Despite—or perhaps because of—such persistent mass appeal, critics have never been kind to Rand.

And:

Contempt has long been the standard literati response to Rand. Like Jack Kerouac, Rand is typically written off as a writer whose basic appeal is to maladjusted adolescents, a sort of vaguely embarrassing starter author who is quickly outgrown by those of us who develop more sophisticated aesthetic and ideological tastes. There’s more than a small degree of truth to such a characterization, but the extreme prejudice with which Rand is dismissed belies a body of work that continues to reach new audiences.

Of all the reviews discussed here, Gillespie’s is the fairest, not only to Rand, but to the Burns and Heller biographies. But the writer still feels compelled to take swings at Rand’s persona; it is the fairest review in terms of there being in it the least number of sneers and snorts directed at Rand. It is almost as though Gillespie were under some editorial obligation to include them (otherwise the review might not have passed muster in the Quarterly). He quotes Burns early in the article:

That Rand’s life story is in many ways more melodramatic, unbelievable, and conflicted than one of her own plots certainly helps to keep the reader’s attention. As Burns puts it, “The clash between her romantic and rational sides makes [her life] not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy of sorts.”

And, remarking on both biographies, ends it with:

Together, they provide a rounded portrait of a woman who, as Burns writes, “tried to nurture herself exclusively on ideas.” As Rand’s biography underscores, she failed miserably in that, even as she helped create an ideological framework that continues to energize debate in contemporary America.

By far the longest and most irrelevant review of the Heller and Burns biographies appeared September 14 in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait’s “Wealthcare.” It is a lengthy, bilious protest against the recent revolt of the “right” against an economically and politically carnivorous White House and Congress, a revolt which Chait blames almost exclusively on Rand. At the same time, it is the most honest of all the reviews, for Chait doesn’t hide behind cowardly chortles and guffaws to argue his position. However, lumping her together with conservative politicians, betrayed Obama supporters, and Tea Partiers, Chait writes of the uprising:

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand. Some, though not all, of the conservatives protesting against redistribution and conferring the highest moral prestige upon material success explicitly identify themselves as acolytes of Rand.

A few more clicks to the left and The New Republic’s masthead could very well read The Daily Worker. Chait, a senior editor of the publication, has apparently read Rand’s novels -- perhaps even some of her non-fiction essays on politics -- for he contrasts free market economics with socialist economics, and almost gets John Galt’s speech right. He handily explicates Rand’s ethics of productive work. For example:

It was Atlas Shrugged that Rand deemed the apogee of her life’s work and the definitive statement of her philosophy. She believed that the principle of trade governed all human relationships--that in a free market one earned money only by creating value for others. Hence, one’s value to society could be measured by his income. History largely consisted of "looters and moochers" stealing from society’s productive elements.

Chait quotes from Galt’s speech about the pyramid of ability -- not a pyramid of intellect, as Chait implies, for ability presupposes a mind or an intellect, while ability or competence or productive work is the observable, measurable consequence of such a mind in action, and can be measured as a value -- and calls it an “inverted Marxism.” And even though Chait demonstrates a more than superficial understanding of Rand’s ethics -- certainly more than any of the other reviewers discussed in this commentary -- he still sides with collectivism. Earlier in his review he remarked about the revolt against Obama and his socialist agenda, before discussing Rand‘s role in it:

In these disparate comments we can see the outlines of a coherent view of society. It expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms--that taking from the rich harms the economy--but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

Chait’s epistemological errors include thinking that “society” is an actual, independent, volitional entity, and that the term “rich” does not include the middle class, that part of “society” which also performs productive work. This is to be expected of a committed collectivist such as Chait, and when he coheres to Marxist criticism, his arguments begin to disintegrate. To wit:

Rand’s political philosophy remained amorphous in her early years. Aside from a revulsion at communism [sic], her primary influence was Nietzsche, whose exaltation of the superior individual spoke to her personally….In essence, Rand advocated an inverted Marxism. In the Marxist analysis, workers produce all value, and capitalists merely leech off their labor. Rand posited the opposite….Rand’s hotly pro-capitalist novels oddly mirrored the Socialist Realist style, with two-dimensional characters serving as ideological props….Like her old idol Nietzsche, she denounced a transvaluation of values according to which the strong had been made weak and the weak were praised as the strong….Rand called her doctrine "Objectivism," and it eventually expanded well beyond politics and economics to psychology, culture, science (she considered the entire field of physics "corrupt"), and sundry other fields. Objectivism was premised on the absolute centrality of logic to all human endeavors. Emotion and taste had no place….Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence. Rand’s movement devolved into a corrupt and cruel parody of itself.

Ultimately, Chait, while he accuses Rand (perhaps influenced by the Heller and Burns biographies) of shutting out the world in order to sustain her “world view,” is himself ideologically insulated against the observable phenomenon that Objectivism is “on a roll,” that it has hardly failed. The balance of his review is largely a disjointed and distracting critique of conservative/Republican economic policies and an endorsement of Obama’s, only tenuously connected to the biographies.

Lastly, A.C. Grayling, a British professor of philosophy at Birbeck College, University of London, and a frequent book reviewer for, all of things, Barnes & Noble, of all the reviewers discussed her, fails the most miserably when confronted with the task of reviewing the Burns and Heller biographies of Ayn Rand, but chiefly in his misapprehension of Rand’s philosophy. That misapprehension is rooted in a natural hostility to objectivity and logic, and may be taken as evidence of the state of contemporary, “mainstream” philosophy.

It is noteworthy that Grayling tackles only Heller’s biography, not Jennifer Burns’, for the latter apparently delves in more detail into the development of Rand’s philosophy and thinking than does Heller‘s. Other than a pair of irrelevant remarks about Rand by the late leftist/neo-conservative philosopher Sidney Hook, Grayling shies away from any philosophical rebuttal. He lets Hook do his talking.

Grayling’ review is particularly insipid, for it falls back on pleas for altruism to combat the purported heartlessness of Rand and her philosophy.

As the Branden affair shows, Rand's life was indeed exemplary of her thought. It was, in line with her avowed principles, an entirely selfish life, to which she sacrificed her family, her good-natured husband Frank O'Connor, her friends, and all but the last of her devoted followers, Leonard Peikoff. Whoever was not wholly with her was against her.

Au contraire, Rand did value her family, still prisoners in Soviet Russia, and was faced with the conflict of maintaining contact with them at the risk of jeopardizing their lives. She loved her husband, and as Letters of Ayn Rand amply reveals, concerned herself with the well-being of friends and relatives (on her husband’s side, her own distant relatives in Russia being beyond help). She could be generous, but not to a fault.

As for her philosophy, all Grayling can ascribe to it is cruelty and brutality.

What is wrong with Rand's views is what is wrong with Gordon Gekko. The unregulated market coupled with unbridled individual self-interest adds up to something far from heroic in the would-be Roark/Galt mode; instead it adds up to the strong trampling the weak, to the callousness of the jungle -- and eventually to a mightily ironic paradox, which is that the weak have to rescue the strong because the latter's unrestricted rampaging has consumed their own hunting-grounds.

Whatever that might mean. Again, Grayling writes, willing to forgive Rand but for her philosophy of egoism (which he never names):

She had enormous talents, great charisma, courage and dedication -- all as apparent in her work as in her life, and all acknowledged by Heller -- and not all of her ideas were wrong: her secularism merits applause, as does her opposition to the use of force in world affairs, and as does her championing of liberty -- or rather, this latter might merit applause if it were not in fact a coarse and callous libertarianism merely, which means liberty only for the few strong enough to trample on the heads of the rest.

And that represents Grayling’s summary view of the philosophical significance of Rand’s thinking, the hoary old collectivist chestnut, preached for decades from pulpits and in grade school “social studies” and in university classrooms, that unregulated freedom can only mean the oppression of the poor and “disadvantaged” and the average. No one but the “rich” and the “strong” could possibly profit from freedom -- a rather stultified and not very original position for a prominent philosopher to take.

Critics serve the function of cultural scouts, pointing out to the public what is significant, what is worth one’s attention, and what may be of value -- and also what is significantly not a value. Ayn Rand and her oeuvre are major contributors to Western culture, certainly the most significant in the last two hundred years, yet our culture has descended to such a state that its scouts are desperately and maliciously trying to persuade people that neither she nor her work should be taken seriously, for if they did, it would mean the end of the critics’ own importance.

Fortunately, few are heeding the advice of the critics, and countless individuals are discovering that there is an oasis over the horizon, and there, in Rand and her works, can be found life as it was meant and ought to be.

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:: Saturday, October 24, 2009 ::

The Oblique Smearing of Ayn Rand

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 3:44 PM

Two biographies of Ayn Rand have burst upon the literary scene, both written by non-Objectivists, Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday), and Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press). I have not read either book, but will in time. I have read the first chapter of the Burns book on Amazon Books. It is a literate account of Rand’s early life in Russia, and contains details of her life heretofore unknown to me, but that appraisal in no way can be extended to the rest of her biography, not until I have read it. Of the two books, however, going by their reception in the press and the literary establishment, the Heller book is the least significant, because it is less intellectual and more biographical. Moreover, both books provide Rand’s detractors with a limitless salad bar of details of Rand’s life. This is not the fault of the authors, of course, regardless of the merits or demerits of their books.

Burns, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia, focuses on Rand’s intellectual development from her years in Russia up to her death in 1982. Heller, a magazine writer and editor for Esquire and Redbook, apparently dwells on the “story” of Rand in terms of her social and personal life and political positions. It is the latter book from which “libertarian” reviewers have filled their plates from the salad bar. They have all proclaimed their fealty to Rand’s ideas, but at the same time have tried to diminish those ideas by deeming them as strictly “libertarian” and merely part of an evolutionary process of the development of libertarianism.

The most offensive instance of this kind of treatment of Rand -- praise so qualified that it ceases to be praise at all -- using Heller’s biography as a vehicle to not-so-subtly slander Rand, is Stephen Cox’s review of the book in the October issue of Liberty magazine. His review, “Ayn’s World,” can be taken as the apotheosis of all libertarian reviews, because it is long, commits the same offenses, and is as thorough a job of “debunking“ Rand short of a Whittaker Chambers/William F. Buckley Jr. effort.

The first offense, and there are many offenses in his article, is that he continually refers to Rand as a “libertarian” or a “radical libertarian.” Well, she was not a libertarian. She stated this so many times it would be almost pointless to repeat them here. Nevertheless, here is what she wrote:

For the record, I shall repeat what I have said many times before: I do not join or endorse any political group or movement. More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with, and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs.

Moreover, she added,

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (e.g.,the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies.

Dr. Harry Binswanger seconds Rand’s position:

The “libertarians” . . . plagiarize Ayn Rand’s principle that no man may initiate the use of physical force, and treat it as a mystically revealed, out-of-context absolute . . . .

In the philosophical battle for a free society, the one crucial connection to be upheld is that between capitalism and reason. The religious conservatives are seeking to tie capitalism to mysticism; the “libertarians” are tying capitalism to the whim-worshipping subjectivism and chaos of anarchy. To cooperate with either group is to betray capitalism, reason, and one’s own future.

A “mystically revealed” absolute is a deserved opprobrium. To libertarians, that “absolute” is just floating out there in space, ready to be recognized and picked out of the air, and incorporated into an alleged political philosophy. How did it get there? Why is it there? What is its cause? No rational answers are forthcoming, or will be, for libertarians eschew a rational metaphysics. This is no better or defensible a means of validating the concept of political freedom than attributing freedom to God’s wishes or plan, as the religious conservatives do. From a political philosophy standpoint, it is equally appropriate that Rand links in substance libertarians with the religious conservatives. Libertarians -- “radical” or not -- do not subscribe to a philosophy of freedom, but instead to what one could call a cosmology absent an inexplicable “first cause.”

But Cox will have none of that. He states early on in the review, feigning a preemptive, parenthetical tiredness with the distinction Rand made between libertarians and herself (and, implicitly, between herself and himself):

(I know, she repudiated the name “libertarian,” but she did so for reasons that do her no credit for objective self-description. Instead of calling herself a libertarian, she said she was an individualist and a “radical for capitalism” — in short, a libertarian.)

Translation: Well, I don’t feel like making the distinction she made. She argued for freedom, ergo, she was a libertarian. That’s how I’m going to perceive her, mainly because it will allow me to take cheap shots at her and permit me to “humanize“ her. After all, she made a lot of mistakes, was not a nice person, and didn’t consistently live her philosophy. So, there.

It is difficult to decide which is the cheapest shot Cox takes against Rand. Bear in mind that while these shots are woven into his discussion of Heller’s biography, they are easy to detect. For example:

Rand often denied that she wrote propaganda, or even that she intended to teach her audience anything. (I believe the first claim was true; the second, transparently false.) She said that she wrote for her own pleasure, to create the kind of characters she would want to meet, in the kind of world that such characters would inhabit and deal with in their own way. Whatever her motivation, she did create a literary world in which radical libertarian ideas were embodied and found an interesting home — an intense and serious world, a world full of ideas and characters and exciting action, a world in which libertarians, self-proclaimed or only implicit, could feel that they too were at home.

It is an instance of gratuitous graciousness of Cox to concede that Rand did not write propaganda. But then he accuses her of lying, that she did indeed write to teach her audience. Again, Rand often stated that she did not write her novels to “teach” anyone anything, but for her own selfish pleasure of recreating a world in which she would want to live. (See her essay, “The Goal of My Writing” in The Romantic Manifesto.) If she had written from a motive of “service” -- to teach her audience -- her novels would have been markedly different and likely as bad as other novels written for a pedagogical purpose, such as two novels cited by Cox as literary precursors of Atlas Shrugged, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Henry Hazlitt’s Time Will Run Back. (Cox could have cited novels that are better literarily, such as H.G. Wells’s 1933 Things to Come, or Jack London’s 1908 The Iron Heel. As dystopian novels, these would have better served as comparisons to Atlas Shrugged -- if one regards Rand‘s novel as a purely political/economic tract, which would be the libertarian way, and wrong.)

I shall skip over other remarks Cox makes about Rand, as they are of the same insouciant tone. His praise alternates with his back-stabbing. He does get around to discussing Heller’s book, and repeats some of her own estimates of Rand, touching, for example, on how he wished she had taken Albert Jay Nock, that wistful, ineffectual individualist of the 1930’s, more seriously. In fact, Cox repeats the libertarian mantra that Rand was not a true original thinker, but that she inherited and profited from the intellectual labors of her pro-freedom predecessors and contemporaries, but refused, in some narcissistic hubris, to acknowledge it. Cox missed a chance to quote Nock, who ends his essay, “Isaiah’s Job,“ with:

If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewusstsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.

No, as is evident in Journals of Ayn Rand and Letters of Ayn Rand, and in her other writings, she never forgot how she came by any idea, nor why she agreed with or dismissed another’s idea. Cox asserts in his review that Rand acknowledged only Aristotle as the sole influence in her intellectual development. Wrong. She acknowledged John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, and other pro-reason thinkers from the past. She admired such contemporaries as H.L. Mencken. She was not interested, however, in addressing and consoling a “Remnant,” an idea she would have considered futile, self-defeating, and essentially malevolent because it surrendered one’s life and the world to the mindless.

After making some smarmy remarks on how long it took Rand to write and complete The Fountainhead, Cox makes this verbose crack about how and why she completed Atlas Shrugged:

After “The Fountainhead,” she started planning the novel that would be known as “Atlas Shrugged.” She supposed that she would finish it posthaste. It took her 14 years. For what reason? She put out the rumor that she spent the last few of those years getting the right tone for the endless speech about philosophy that she intrudes on the final movement of the book. The true reason, as it seems to me, is that she had come to regard “Atlas” as a philosophical Bible and was anxious to ensure that everything in the Speech would represent her ultimate, unassailable statement of reality. The result was a 60-page literary disaster — a ridiculously long prose essay, its tone arrogant, inappropriate, and repellent to the last degree, in which she repeated everything she had already made obvious in the rest of the novel. Years working on the “tone”? I don’t think so. Rand’s attitude toward this manifest literary failure is a mystery of the creative process. How could she have thought she was doing the right thing? (Italics mine)

So, not only does Cox imply again that Rand was a liar, but states that Galt’s speech in the novel was a “literary disaster.” That also was the consensus of most mainstream book reviewers of Atlas when it appeared. What Cox fails to appreciate is that Rand was a rule-breaker in literature, and that there was no rule anyway that governed the length of any speech, and that without that speech, there would have been no “libertarian” movement for him to abscond to after cherry-picking the philosophy explicated in that speech.

Cox continues later on in his review about Rand’s alleged intellectual ingratitude:

There have been important writers — Hemingway is a good example — who were not intellectuals, and who read fairly little. Rand is the only example I can identify of an important writer, and a brilliant intellectual to boot, who in her mature period retained practically no curiosity about current or classic works of literature, philosophy, or history. She had studied some kind of history at Leningrad University, but where are the accounts of her enjoying any work on the subject, outside of Paterson’s “The God of the Machine” (1943)? After that book, and some works by Ludwig von Mises, the great economic theorist, she appears to have ceased learning much from either theory or history. It was as if she were making good on her claim not to have been influenced by other people. It was as if individualism meant making everything up on one’s own.

Enough said. There is much, much more that is offensive in Cox’s review, which, as I wrote earlier, served as a vehicle through which to launch his not-so-subtly buried digs at Ayn Rand. One wonders what he would have written if, by some chance, a scholar had uncovered the complete life of Aristotle and published it as Heller has published it: when and where he was born, the professions of his parents, his foibles, loves, hates and hobbies, his relationships with Alexander the Great, his friends, students and enemies, and how he went off the deep end of rationality after publishing the Nichomachean Ethics and became a cave-dwelling recluse -- and devoting minimal attention to what Aristotle bequeathed to the world.

Someday, if Western civilization survives the double onslaught of statism and Islam, another book will appear with the same title, only it will describe the phoenix of reason and the world Ayn Rand helped to make possible. Libertarianism, as an ideology, will merit perhaps only a footnote.

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:: Thursday, October 22, 2009 ::

Objectivist Blog Round-Up #119

:: Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 12:00 AM

Welcome to the October 22nd, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up:

Benjamin Skipper presents The Power of Epistemology II: Institutionalized Education posted at Benpercent, saying, "It is superficial to say that lengthening school days will stress out kids. If Obama's goal comes to be, he will worsen the epistemological crisis we are seeing in our culture today."

Andy Clarkson presents The Epistemology of Richard Dawkins posted at The Charlotte Capitalist, saying, "On Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of seeing Richard Dawkins speak at Queens College in Charlotte. He presented to a “sold-out” (tickets were free) crowd of 2300. Dawkins read selections from his new book “The Greatest Show On Earth” and then took questions. The book is a defense of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was great to hear a prominent figure explicitly advocate “reason”, “rational analysis of evidence”, “science”, and so on."

Jared Rhoads presents Health Reform Tea Party posted at The Lucidicus Project, saying, "The Lucidicus Project attended the health reform Tea Party rally in Boston on October 17th. I spoke at the event and gave several interviews. Here is a report, including photos and a news clip."

Jeff Montgomery presents Review - Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns posted at Fun With Gravity, saying, "In this post I review Jennifer Burns' clear-headed and respectful intellectual biography of Ayn Rand. I found it to be an interesting and enjoyable read."

Diana Hsieh presents LTE on Free Speech posted at NoodleFood, saying, "My letter to the editor on the FTC's new speech regulations for bloggers was published in the Denver Post."

Paul Hsieh presents Hong Kong Vs. Typhoon posted at NoodleFood, saying, "This time lapse video of "Typhoon 'Nangka' over Hong Kong" made me appreciate the power of storms -- and the power of men's ability to build cities capable of withstanding them."

John Drake presents Your feelings are illegal posted at Try Reason!, saying, "I was saddened recently watching the movie Equilibrium when I realized that it is a manifestation of Kant's ideal society, and that we are not all that far from it."

Kirk presents The Reality of Medical Care posted at A is A, saying, "At a time when comprehensive medical care is being pushed on us all, it is important to look at reality rather than what we wish reality to be when making our decision."

Ari Armstrong presents Activism and Writing Letters to the Editor posted at FreeColorado.com, saying, "Some basics to writing an effective letter to the editor."

Kelly Valenzuela presents The Berlin Wall posted at Rant from the Rock.
Stella presents Once you pop, you can't stop posted at ReasonPharm, saying, "The status quo is a sticky thing -- which is why we need to avoid creating yet another government entitlement through healthcare "reform.""

Rational Jenn presents In Which I'm An Activist posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "You never know when an opportunity for activism will present itself. In this case, I was able to make a point about the "right" to healthcare in a concrete way, and help others do so, too."

Doug Reich presents Tales from the History of Money and Banking, Part II posted at The Rational Capitalist, saying, "What does the hyperinflation of the French Revolution have to do with our current economy? Andrew Dickson White told us - in 1912."

* * *

That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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:: Saturday, October 10, 2009 ::

The Ignoble Nobel Peace Prize

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 6:27 PM

One searches in vain through the whole list of Nobel Peace Prize winners from 1901 to the present for a single laureate whose work measurably advanced the cause of peace. The term peace itself, as it is employed by the Nobel Committee, on the surface is wishful and ethereal. The Peace Prize has, as a rule, recognized peace efforts which have unfailingly come to naught. Why? The “peace” pined for is essentially a Kantian concept. It is disconnected from reality. Work for peace, urges the Committee, even if your efforts are spoiled by war and conflict. Peace is good for its own sake. Work for peace as though you wished it to become a maxim, a moral rule.

The “peace” sought after and rewarded by the Nobel Committee is an unconditional peace that admits no legitimate grounds for war or conflict -- nor any rational grounds for peace or war. Alfred Nobel set the original terms for the Peace Prize in 1895 when he said that it should be given to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” In 1895, Nobel might have had a different idea of a “fraternity between nations,” which certainly could not have included the conquest or subjugation of one nation by another. Still, it is an altruistic statement of pacifism.

The Nobel Peace Prize discards the concept of the initiation of force by one country against another -- or by one individual against another -- as a criterion for evaluation, and substitutes an inverted moral judgment. The wishes of the initiator of force should be treated just as legitimate as the wishes of his victim. If the victim resists, war or conflict result. That is bad. Violence ensues. Ergo, the victim must compromise and cede some or all of the initiator’s wishes, if there is to be any “peace.”

Thus, for example, the continuing pressure on Israel to sacrifice its existence to the likes of Yassir Arafat, Hamas and other killers and predators. Or the pressure on the U.S. to not defend itself against its attackers, or to sign the Kyoto Treaty that would destroy what is left of its industrial base.

It is a premise shared by the Nobel Committee, and by most of the laureates, benign, disreputable, and indifferent alike. Thus the Prize’s futility. It is, appropriately, a Kantian trophy of no consequence, a blue ribbon for good intentions. Thorbjoern Jagland, former Norwegian prime minister who chaired the five-member selection committee (elected to the committee by the Norwegian parliament), defended the committee’s choice against charges that Obama had accomplished nothing to deserve the award.

“We are not awarding the prize for what may happen in the future but for what [Obama] has done in the previous year…We would hope this will enhance what he is trying to do.”

Jagland also explained away the fact that Obama was nominated for the prize about two weeks into his presidency, before he had a chance to move on any item on his agenda.

"Some people say — and I understand it — 'Isn't it premature? Too early?' Well, I'd say then that it could be too late to respond three years from now," Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told the AP. "It is now that we have the opportunity to respond — all of us."

Jagland said the committee whittled down a record pool of 205 nominations and had "several candidates until the last minute," but it became more obvious that "we couldn't get around these deep changes that are taking place" under Obama.

Those promised “deep changes” -- meaning, among other things, the virtual regimentation of the American economy -- are what moved Jagland and his colleagues to nominate Obama based solely on his campaign rhetoric, before Obama had a chance to routinely retreat to the Rose Garden to enjoy a Marlboro. In short, they awarded him the Peace Prize before he had won the election. That’s the Chicago way: pretend for legal reasons to solicit open bids for a government contract, while having already chosen who’s going to get it.

A gold medallion and a sack of cash will recognize the unrealized "efforts" of an American president, Barack Obama, who, to date, has failed to keep any of his socialist promises to transform America into a European collectivist knock-off -- though he has helped to lay the foundation of totalitarianism here. In tune with Obama’s continuing campaign slogan, the Nobel committee awarded Obama the prize in the “hope” that he will indeed "change" the U.S. into something with which it and its fellow anti-American European manqués would be more comfortable: a whipped giant, chained to servitude and sacrifice for the sake of the global poor, the environment, “social justice,” and other “global challenges.”

The reaction to the announcement of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win has been, to say the least, “polarized.” Daniel Pipes notes that “the absurdity of the prize decision will hurt Obama politically in the United States, contrasting his role as international celebrity with his record devoid of accomplishments.” The Taliban and other Islamic gangs and spokesmen also made the same observation, demanding, “Show us the money!” Media Matters, the left-wing mouthpiece of liberals and Democrats, responded immediately to any and all criticism of Obama’s win in a posting, “Still rooting against America: Right-wing media use Nobel Prize announcement as excuse to attack Obama,” and included links to several “right-wingers’” statements about the Nobel decision. That no one should need an “excuse” to attack Obama is beyond the grasp of these collectivists. He has provided Americans with numerous reasons, not including his three dozen or so “czars.”

Bloomberg News also provided links to reactions to the announcement, some of the statements indiscriminately witless with delight, others dour and disappointed. “It sets the seal on America’s return to the heart of all the world’s peoples,” French President Nicholas Sarkozy wrote to Obama. Those questioning whether he deserved the prize included Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip. “There’s a lot more that Obama needs to achieve for peace and for the Palestinian people in order to receive this award,” Barhoum said in a telephone interview.

Iran also sputtered raspberries.

Ali Akbar Javanfekr, media aide to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told AFP: "We hope that this gives (Obama) the incentive to walk in the path of bringing justice to the world order…We are not upset and we hope that by receiving this prize he will start taking practical steps to remove injustice in the world."

Raising his voice to be heard over this noisy tug-of-war between Pecksniffian mental astaticism and Islamic nose-wrinkling Obama, ever ready to comment on anything, expressed surprise at winning the Peace Prize. However,

To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

Translation: Why didn’t Saul Alinsky win the Peace Prize? He transformed me! Besides, I really don’t know who else has won it, except maybe Al Gore, and that Southern cracker, Jimmy Carter. I looked up the list of past winners, and can’t even pronounce half their names.

True to the Nobel Committee’s “party line” and explanations of why it awarded the Prize to a non-achiever, Obama noted:

That is why I've said that I will accept this award as a call to action, a call for all nations and all peoples to confront the common challenges of the 21st century. These challenges won't all be met during my presidency, or even my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met so long as it's recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone.

This is true. All those “challenges” require the employment of force to effect the changes to bring the U.S. more into line with a collectivized and increasingly barbaric world.

This award -- and the call to action that comes with it -- does not belong simply to me or my administration; it belongs to all people around the world who have fought for justice and for peace. And most of all, it belongs to you, the men and women of America, who have dared to hope and have worked so hard to make our world a little better.

Such faux humility sounds more like an Oscar speech than an acknowledgement; one keeps imagining him clutching a statuette, with his eyes glazing over to keep back the tears.

But, no, thank you, Mr. President. You keep it. By the terms of the Nobel Committee, you earned it. To your everlasting ignominy.

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:: Friday, October 02, 2009 ::

Philosophical Continental Drift

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 7:22 PM

Two Wall Street Journal book reviews, both called “Continental Drift” but spaced over two years apart, echo the pessimism about the future of Europe in the books they discuss: one with absolute pessimism, the other with qualified pessimism. The problem the books discuss is the looming conquest by immigration and non-assimilation by Muslims.

A Daily Telegraph (London) article of August 8th, “Muslim Europe: the demographic time bomb transforming our continent,” substantiates the trends and the perils facing Europe.

Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, and almost no policy-makers are talking about it.

The numbers are startling. Only 3.2 per cent of Spain's population was foreign-born in 1998. In 2007 it was 13.4 per cent. Europe's Muslim population has more than doubled in the past 30 years and will have doubled again by 2015. In Brussels, the top seven baby boys' names recently were Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza.

Yet European leaders and the European Union are ignoring or evading the demographics, writes Adrian Michaels, usually for fear of being accused of racism or religious intolerance.

In another article in the Telegraph, “A fifth of European Union will be Muslim by 2050,” Michaels reports:

Last year, five per cent of the total population of the 27 EU countries was Muslim. But rising levels of immigration from Muslim countries and low birth rates among Europe's indigenous population mean that, by 2050, the figure will be 20 per cent, according to forecasts….Data gathered from various sources indicate that Britain, Spain and Holland will have an even higher proportion of Muslims in a shorter amount of time….The UK, which currently has 20 million fewer people than Germany, is also projected to be the EU's most populous country by 2060, with 77 million people.

Gerald Baker’s May 2007 review of Walter Laqueur’s The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent, makes many of the same points as Paul Marshall’s September 2009 review of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.

The authors and reviewers concur that Europe is stymied by two disabling phenomena: the deluge of Muslims whose creed forbids all but token assimilation and whose growing numbers will ultimately present non-Muslim Europeans with the paradox of having to choose to assimilate into Islamic society, or else; and the inability or unwillingness of Europe’s policymakers to deal with a problem of their own and their predecessors’ making.

Walter Laqueur, for his part, reviewed Bruce Bawer’s 2006 book on the same subject, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Laqueur, a noted critic of Europe’s timidity and evasion when faced with the consequences of its immigration and multicultural policies, noted in his remarks about Scandinavia:

In Denmark, Muslims make up 5% of the population but receive 40% of social-welfare outlays. Their preachers have told them, Mr. Bawer reports, that only a fool would not take maximum advantage of the bounty that Western Europe offers and that it is perfectly legitimate to cheat and lie. The benefits they receive are a kind of jizya, the tribute that infidels in Muslim-occupied countries have to pay to preserve their lives. (The subsidized-radical situation in Britain and Germany is not much different: The four suicide bombers in London last year had raked in close to a million dollars in social benefits before going on their murderous mission.)

With even radical Muslims entrenched in the Scandinavian countries, it's no wonder that their fellow immigrants are feeling rather confident about the future: In Stockholm, Islamic residents have been known to wear T-shirts that say simply: "2030 -- then we take over." These expectations might be a little overstated, but Muslims in Sweden have indeed already taken over much of the city of Malmo and parts of Stockholm, which are becoming no-go zones for everyone else….The Scandinavian countries are bringing disaster upon themselves.

But what have these books and their reviewers to say about why Europe, heir of the Enlightenment, is becoming an Islamized Europe, whose political and cultural character could only be generously called morbid and medieval? What is missing from the dire predictions and the angst?

It is a recognition that the values born in and nurtured by the Enlightenment -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, best developed, adopted and applied in the United States -- had never become as deeply rooted in the European character as they had in the American character. Those values were a consequence of a philosophical revolution in Europe, but Europe never completely shed its dependence on and deference to the state and authority. The monarchs and their bureaucrats of one century were replaced with prime ministers and their bureaucrats of another. With very few exceptions, and in spite of the growing prosperity of Europe made possible by capitalism, Europeans retained class and guild mentalities, a desire to be shielded from the risks and vicissitudes of life, and a natural hostility for the kind of individualism and freedom enjoyed by Americans.

They looked to the state to patronize, promote and sanction their class and guild mentalities, and to complement through legislation and controls their hostility for the individualism that would disturb those mentalities. Piled on top of the Muslim conundrum is the accommodating behemoth of the European Union, a kind of Orwellian prototype Eurasian regime with a pretty blue flag and a smiley face, a supra-organization that seeks to dissolve national sovereignties and rule unconditionally over all its byzantine bureaucracy surveys.

The reviewers Baker, Marshall, and Laqueur, and the authors Laqueur, Caldwell, and Bawer, do not delve into the philosophical bankruptcy that could explain why Europeans cannot defend themselves from being overrun by an inimical population of dedicated Muslims, nor be able to assert why their culture and civilization are superior to Islam‘s. The writers dwell on subsidiary issues, and chronicle futile efforts to combat the phenomenon, such as banning headscarves in French schools and tightening immigration rules, which they concede are too little, too late. Indeed, the authors and the reviewers do not seem to be aware of the philosophical bankruptcy that is the root of the problem.

The books’ authors and the reviewers cite multiculturalism as one cause of Europe’s impotency in the face of conquest by Islam. They do not investigate, except in a cursory way, its philosophically nihilistic nature, a nihilism which can only permit the triumph of a barbarism committed to imposing its suffocating, stultifying, and anti-life values by force or fraud. Values apologized for, denied, or destroyed cannot be defended. Multiculturalism is an egalitarian leveler; its function is to render the highest equal to the lowest common denominator. (To paraphrase Ellsworth Toohey: Enshrine the irrational, and the rational is razed.) The barbarism can take many forms: in art, a Jackson Pollack canvas of drips and scratches equal to a canvas by Jean-Léon Gérôme; in science, invalidated global-warming models equal to observable scientific fact; in politics, church-state separation equal to the mosque-state union of Islam.

Marshall, in his review of Calder’s book, goes right to the point in his introductory remarks about the influx of Muslim immigrants:

“Today’s immigrants might be considered hostile to European values, except that Europe itself increasingly has only a foggy idea of what those values might be.”

Marshall notes, quoting author Caldwell:

Many Europeans are determined to defend their values…but it is hard to defend what you cannot define. “There is no consensus, not even the beginning of a consensus about what European values are.”

Marshall cites German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, an atheist, who acknowledged:

“Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”

Or post-reason chatter, which is the same thing. Christianity might have once been the “ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy.”

But, no longer. As David Greenfield notes in his August 2009 article, “What will a Muslim Europe Look Like?”:

“The old [native] European is likely to have a limited interest in church or synagogue. His children may even hold an open hostility toward organized religion. The churches and synagogues will pursue his grandchildren with all sorts of gimmicks in the hopes of getting them to show up, but even if they do, there will be very little to hold them.”

By the old Europeans, Greenfield means those who are beneficiaries of the welfare state, more concerned with taking advantage of their state-mandated employment perks and pensions, medical care, extra-long paid holidays, and other collectivist entitlements, all of it the result of burdensome tax rates, than worrying about the future of their countries. Let our children take the hindmost, is their attitude, but let us have fun now. As far as Europe is concerned, it is a question of whether or not religion ever was the underlying moral code that permitted the continent to enjoy the fruits of freedom and capitalism, limited as those fruits might have been by government intervention. The Enlightenment, after all, was in large part a revolt against especially Catholic Church authority.

The vaunted “invincible faith of the Christian” has grown flabby and insouciant, and is no match for the invincible faith of the Muslim. Without a philosophy of reason, Europe is left stammering and stuttering in the face of such certitude.

The authors of the reviewed books and the reviewers also point out that European policy of opening the gates to unlimited immigration was an act of expediency by its leaders, with no thought to the future consequences. Their immediate, electorate-focused concern was to bolster their workforces to take the unskilled jobs Europeans no longer wished to take. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants turned out to be Muslims from parts of the globe that were chronically “undeveloped.” The nature of Islamic belief rejects concessions to non-believers’ political and moral norms. Europeans remain despised infidels. Unless they convert to Islam, they are doomed to dhimmitude, or to second-class subservience.

As many “radical” Islamic spokesmen have smugly observed, if Europe cannot be “reconquered” with military jihad, it can be conquered with population jihad. Which is exactly what is happening. These spokesmen see the day when they can boast: Our brothers disposed of your garbage and swept your streets; now we are going to dispose of you and sweep your culture away. You tolerated us, without grasping that we are not tolerant. Notre Dame de Paris will be turned into a mosque, as well as your opera houses, your topless beaches will be abolished, your books will be censored, and the crescent shall adorn the top of the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of our Ummah.

From a journalistic standpoint, it may be profitable to note the disturbing demographics of Muslim population growth in Europe, together with European accommodation of Muslim sensitivities, the latter in itself a mark of uncertainty whose root is nihilistic relativism. But no prominent author has undertaken, to my knowledge, the task of addressing the fundamental problem, which is philosophic in nature: What can account for and permit the decline of a civilization in the face of conquest by barbarism?

What is happening in Europe -- a self-induced philosophic drift, a drift encouraged and sanctioned by universities, schools and official, politically correct policies -- can also happen in America as its politics teeters between a defaulting commitment to statism and the command economy of a compulsory welfare state, and a renewed commitment to freedom, the beginnings of which have been manifested in the Tea Parties and the hesitant behavior of Congress to legislate socialism.

However, Muslim organizations such as CAIR, the American Muslim Council, and other non-profit Muslim councils and advocacy organizations, even though many of their principals have links to Islamic terrorist organizations, are making virtually unobstructed headway in having their customs and barbaric ethics accepted under the ruse of “civil rights.” Death threats against apostates, “honor killings” of teenage girls, and even beheadings go largely unreported in the American media.

The self-censorship practiced by Europeans only encourages Islamic hubris. The same self-censorship, especially by the mainstream media, can only result in the United States contracting the European disease. The Tea Parties of 2009 especially cause some hope that America’s own drift towards statism -- never mind an Islamic demographic jihad in this country -- can be arrested, and the course reset to rediscover its glorious philosophic origins, origins which promoted reason and individual rights.

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:: Thursday, September 24, 2009 ::

“High Noon” for the First Amendment

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 7:24 AM

Most of President Barack Obama’s administration cohorts have a distinctly and undeniable leftist hue, ranging from Marxist, to socialist, to ”pink.” Obama himself speaks in glasnostian euphemisms that stand in for socialist rhetoric. It is a form of political “cross-dressing.“ Most of his cabinet, staff and “czarist” appointees speak the same “language.” The press, especially if it endorses Obama‘s agenda, while it deals in words, either cannot fathom the double-speak, or chooses not to. Clueless or not, the mainstream news media is complicit in the success of Obama’s expansion of executive and legislative powers.

Obama’s academic appointees, such as Cass Sunstein, now head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, are hard to pin a label to unless one reads their books, speeches, and public statements, and then identifies and collates their key premises into a coherent political philosophy. That political philosophy invariably translates into socialism, or, as they prefer to call it, “progressivism,” which is the saccharine, less frightening term for the same thing. They know what they are saying, and hope that most Americans do not.

Communists have a record of violently seizing power during a civil war or internal political strife. Fascists, or “national socialists,” however, have a record of reaching power by stealth, exploiting a semi-free country’s parliamentary structure. Hitler and his national socialists tried direct seizure of the German government in the Beer Hall Putsch, literally at the point of a gun, but failed. Hitler spent time in prison. He learned his lesson from that attempted coup and entered the “democratic” hustings. He and his party banked and built on over ten years his rhetorical skills and alleged “magnetism,” both of which exploited a sheer emotionalism that smothered the irrationalism of their agenda and to which the German electorate was responsive. By 1933, Hitler and his Nazis were in power.

Were they socialists, or fascists? Communists have a habit of simply seizing private property outright. Socialists prefer to “ease” into seizure over a period of time. Fascists allow nominal private ownership of property, so long as the owners take orders from the government and cohere to its collectivist agenda. If things go wrong, the government can blame the management of a “private“ company, not the policies it requires management to submit to. Both practices are usually in the name of some nationalist sentiment. Obama has capitalized on past regulatory legislation and “eased” into the banking and car manufacturing industries, and hopes to do the same with health care and insurance. Now his sights are set on the press. All this makes him a national socialist.

One of the first things the Nazis took over was the press, aided by a suspension of the Weimar Constitution. Time Magazine reported the sequence of events with an honesty foreign to most journalists today: “With the Reichstag fire as his excuse, weary old President Paul von Hindenburg signed a decree giving Chancellor Hitler & Cabinet a tyrant's powers.” Of relevant interest here, given ominous actions taken by the Obama administration, and to judge by the simpatico political character of his appointees and staff, are particular stipulations in the German Constitution nullified by Hindenburg’s decree:

Article 118: "Every German has the right within the limits of the general laws to express his opinion by word, in writing, printing, by picture, or in any other way. . . ."
Article 123: "All Germans have the right to gather in meetings peaceably and unarmed without announcement or particular permission. . . ."
Article 124: "All Germans have the right to form societies or associations for purposes not contrary to the penal law.
Article 153: "Property is safeguarded by the Constitution. . . ."

As disconnected as those “rights” were, absent an integrated philosophy of reason and individual rights, they still offered some protection. Hitler swept them from the political life of Germany like so many crumbs. That was his intention in 1923. While he was in prison dictating Mein Kampf, he had a very good press. But the German press barons should have taken heed of what he had to say about newspapers:

“Freedom of the press is a nuisance that allows unpunishable lies to poison the people.” (Mein Kampf, p. 335)

The Toledo Blade reported on September 20th that Obama met with editors from that paper and its sister paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

In an Oval Office interview with editors from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade, the President talked about the vital role journalism and newspapers play in American society. "Journalistic integrity, you know, fact-based reporting, serious investigative reporting, how to retain those ethics in all these different new media and how to make sure that it's paid for, is really a challenge," Mr. Obama said. "But it's something that I think is absolutely critical to the health of our democracy."

Journalistic integrity? Fact-based reporting? Serious investigative reporting? Again, Obama speaks of things about which he either knows nothing, or cares not a fig, just as he knows nothing about the Constitution he purportedly taught at the University of Chicago Law School, or cares a fig, either. But, here is his real worry:

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,"

Just as Representative Joe Wilson shouted across a void, “You lie!”? Just as the blogosphere is compensating for the slanted, biased, non-objective reporting in the print and broadcast media, and over which the government has little or no control?

The Toledo Blade does not mention who called the meeting in the Oval Office between Obama and the editors. Did Obama summon the editors, or did the editors beg for an audience with him? The omission of this important information is a salutary instance of the shoddy state of modern journalism.

Several bills have been introduced in Congress to aid the newspaper industry, including a Senate measure that would allow newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks. The President was noncommittal about the legislation but said: "I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them."

No, he hasn’t seen the detailed proposals yet, but he will be happy to look at them to see if they fit into his agenda -- just as he hasn’t mastered the details of the health-care bills or the cap-and-trade bills and the details of any other regulatory and confiscatory legislation he would sign. The details are irrelevant to Obama. As long as the legislation regulates and confiscates, that is fine with him.

American editors and newspaper barons should also heed Hitler’s annoyance with the press as they contemplate rescue by the government from their financial straits. How often has Obama inveighed against the “lies,” “distortions,” and “fishy” information that have appeared in newspapers over the last year? How often has he criticized the right of assembly exercised by Americans to protest his health-care and other coercive legislation, and called such Americans dupes of those lies and distortions? How often has he expressed anger over any degree of opposition to his agenda, an opposition which, whether frank and open or watered down and euphemized in the press, is based on statements and allegations appearing in the press?

Obama cannot but believe that freedom of the press is also a nuisance, that the people have been “poisoned” by it to oppose his agenda, and that the “lies” on which that opposition is founded ought to be punished. (He has hired Cass Sunstein to devise punishment.) How else to explain the opposition, he must ask himself. How could there be any ideology other than his own? Leftist ideology is not so much embedded in him, as he is embedded in it. He sees this country and the world through the prisms of Marx and Alinsky. As his ideology has been propagated and promoted by the Democratic National Committee, with millions of dollars in assistance from organizations such as MoveOn, he cannot imagine that resistance to his agenda could be anything but organized by a coalition of Republicans, “racists,“ and other conspiratorial ogres; that is, he cannot imagine that a large segment of the American population could object to his agenda and ideology and establish their own “correspondence committees” to express their opposition, without any political or moral guidance from the Republicans.

Obama’s idea of a “free press” is to appear on popular talk shows and news analysis programs whose hosts he can count on not to pose questions of any substance. In those public venues, on the White House lawn, in staged press conferences, on the Internet, he is free to spout his agenda and assurances. But he and his handlers (principally Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff) will not brook any back-talk or probing queries. Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” must have shaken him more than either he or his staff of ventriloquists, marionettes and dissemblers will admit. Wilson’s statement was, after all, a truth spoken before a national audience; it exposed a core tactic permissible in practical leftist politics -- that lies are a weapon as a means to the acquisition of power, just as taqiya is a form of Islamic religious dissimulation, by which falsehoods and concealment aimed against non-Muslims are approved by the Koran as a legitimate form of jihad.

The mainstream news media, which includes such periodicals as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and also the three major television networks, would not mind a co-opting by the federal government, as long as the expropriation (and the surrender) was promoted as an “efficiency“ or “consolidation“ move, a la Goebbels, and as long as the various entities retained some nominal independence, but reorganized, according to the proposed agenda, as non-profit organizations. What they choose to advocate, endorse and support now -- which is Obama’s agenda -- would become an obligation.

This leaves Fox News, for the moment, as the Will Kane of the news media, virtually alone in the media in taking on the vengeance-on-America Frank Miller gang of the White House and Congress. Never mind the irony that both conservatives and leftists once claimed High Noon as an allegory (or “metaphor’) for their specific politics. The difference now is that the townsmen are also rallying to protect themselves and their freedom from the Obama gang -- and that gang is socialist in purpose, fascist in practice.

The townsmen are receiving no help from the mainstream news media. The Obama gang they rightly fear and will fight. The MSM they despise.

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:: Saturday, September 19, 2009 ::

Cass Sunstein: "Czar" in Wolf's Clothing

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 10:10 AM

In “Reason is Forever” I commented on the phenomenon of liberals, collectivists, and fascist/socialist fellow travelers in the Obama administration endorsing the gagging of anyone who criticizes the administration and its agenda, and wishing to bestow a taxpayer-bought bullhorn on Obama’s propagandists. I also discuss the incremental move to censorship in America in “Censorship by Nickels and Dimes,” “Thought Crime: The Logical End of Politically Correct Speech,” and “The Move Towards Freedomless Speech.”

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was recently caught with its curtain drawn open for its role in that effort. Its director of communications, Yosi Sergant, was the facilitator of a teleconference of artists and other “cool people” who had not only benefited from NEA grants, but worked directly or indirectly to elect Obama. The ostensive purpose of the call was to enlist the active support of the invited participants to “sell” the Obama agenda, including the health-care bill, to the public. It took a while for the implications of that “call to arms” to sink into the consciousness of Patrick C. Courrielche, columnist for Big Hollywood, who subsequently, and with some apparent regret, reported the call in detail on the Big Hollywood blog site.

For having violated its nominally apolitical mandate (if it is a creature of politics, how could it be “apolitical”?), the NEA went mum after the whistle-blowing, and the director of communications has been either fired or “reassigned.” His whereabouts are otherwise unknown. Ben Smith, writing for Politico, notes that Sergant was an “outsider from Washington’s careful culture” -- that is, he was a novice in Washington’s culture of stealth and subterfuge and did not absorb the culture quickly enough.

One cannot blame him for the gaucherie. Observe the hubris of Obama and the Democrats in how they propose their blatantly socialist legislation, thinly disguised in populist euphemisms. Why shouldn't Sergant have just emulated the tactics of the White House? But, he obviously had the cooperation or sanction of the White House to conduct the enlistment drive, perhaps with the sage guidance of White House staffer Marion Phillips, who, in an official blog post called “Facts are Stubborn Things” requested that "fishy" criticisms of the administration's plans for health care reform be reported to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Well, Courrielche had the decency to flag the White House and the NEA, instead. Nationally syndicated conservative columnist George Will also reported on the Big Hollywood exposé in “Artists in Harness” and in addition offers a brief critique of the NEA’s anti-esthetic standards (without offering any standards of his own). These NEA beneficiaries, Will notes,

“…are just another servile interest group seeking morsels from the federal banquet. Are they real artists? Sure, because in this egalitarian era, government reasons circularly: Art is whatever an artist says it is, and an artist is whoever produces art….For government today, ‘art’ is a classification so capacious it does not classify.”

Bigger game to bring down than Yosi Sergant is Cass Sunstein, Obama’s most recently appointed “czar,” formally the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is under the Office of Management and Budget, one of the few “czars” to be confirmed by the Senate. Sunstein, a tenured professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and who is married to Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, began teaching at Harvard Law School in the fall of 2008. That didn’t last long, because he is now on leave from Harvard to pursue the application of his collectivist theories and hypotheses.

Former dean of Harvard Law School and now U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan said of Sunstein on the announcement of his going to Harvard:

"Cass Sunstein is the preeminent legal scholar of our time -- the most wide-ranging, the most prolific, the most cited, and the most influential. His work in any one of the fields he pursues -- administrative law and policy, constitutional law and theory, behavioral economics and law, environmental law, to name a non-exhaustive few -- would put him in the very front ranks of legal scholars; the combination is singular and breathtaking."

But, hoist Sunstein out of the swirling maelstrom of his interests, and you find a totalitarian, a "czar" in wolf's clothing. It is no coincidence that Obama, who was a mere “senior lecturer” at the University of Chicago Law School, would find him an appropriate choice to become a regulatory czar, one who can “regulate” just about everything he puts his mind to.

On environmentalism, he is open to persuasion. He argued against the so-called Precautionary Principle about the cost vs. benefit equation in enforcing environmental law, a position that raised the hackles of advocates of environmental crime and which he would be willing to reverse. He argues that animals should be represented in court. Apparently, he hasn’t made up his mind about whether animals should be conveyed the attribute of “personhood” that would allow them to file lawsuits for abuse and cruelty.

Substitute the planet, the environment, and glaciers for animals, and Sunstein‘s reservations would fall like the Maginot Line. One can wonder why such a subject would fascinate Sunstein, but not for long. Individuals fare no better in his legalistic universe, in which ideas just hover in space and orbit no central philosophy.

On the First Amendment and freedom of speech, Sunstein has definite ideas. One of his “New Deals” would be a rewrite of the Constitution to allow for mandatory or compulsory “diversity” of views in virtually every medium of “public” communication, but most especially in television and on radio. In his book, Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech (1995), he argues that that such a rewrite would “reinvigorate the processes of democratic deliberation, by ensuring greater attention to public issues and greater diversity of views.”

In order to attain that goal, which would be the resurrection of the Fairness Doctrine in all but name, he would support the creation of a federal panel of “nonpartisan experts” who would judge whether or not a television or radio station met their diversity criteria. If they did not, one imagines that they would refer the case and the offense to the Federal Communications Commission, which has the power to grant, deny or withdraw licenses to broadcast.

Sunstein proposes also that commercial broadcasters be required to subsidize “public” television or other commercial stations to ensure “less profitable but high-quality programming.” All this regulating and requiring, he asserts, would not violate the “spirit” of the Constitution. One can presume that he doesn’t regard the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Amendments as being in violation of that “spirit.”

Again, one may wonder why he believes “diversity” is necessary. Clearly, the mainstream media are on the side of Obama and his plans to fit the nation for the yoke of servitude. Not even the anchors and shills of ABC, CBS and NBC could boast that ‘diversity” thrives in the MSM. It is only on “renegade” broadcasters such as Fox, and in conservative radio talk shows that “diversity“ is not present, especially when they oppose the Obama and other collectivist agendas. One of Sunstein’s interests, as noted above, is behavioral economics and law, which treats individuals as non-sentient atoms that coagulate into insulated groups, and, as atoms, autonomously make “decisions” that affect the marketplace and politics, and so, society.

This position meshes perfectly with his argument in his 2001 book, Republic.com, that the Internet is dangerous to “democracy” because on the Internet individuals may further choose to ally themselves with groups that reflect their values, and so repel the leveling influence of “diversity.“ This, argues Sunstein, permits individuals to reject information or positions that might challenge their beliefs. Ironclad convictions cannot be allowed. “Rational actors” should be gagged or banished to the fringe of “democracy.” Open-mindedness should be made mandatory, even if it means regulating -- or censoring -- the Internet.

The object of that argument, of course, is not hard-core Democrats or wish-driven liberals, who, when faced with a rational argument against government-run health care, or smoking bans, or government-mandated nutrition guides, or public education, typically shut out reason in what Ayn Rand deemed “blanking out” the truth. In short, it is Sunstein’s political friends and allies who insulate themselves from reason and rationality. If they choose not to think about individual rights, then they cannot exist.

In his 2004 book, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, Sunstein advocates a “Second Bill of Rights,” something proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his State of the Union address in January, 1944. Like FDR’s “four freedoms” (introduced in his address to Congress in 1941), these rights include rights to an education, to a home, to health care, and to protection against monopolies, all picked out of the space of floating abstractions.

How to pay for these rights? Taxation. Sunstein is tax happy. In an April 1999 Chicago Tribune Op-Ed he castigated tax “grumblers” on the advantages and virtues of taxation.

“Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending….It may be reasonable, in some cases, to cut tax rates. What is unreasonable and, in fact, preposterous is the all-too-familiar conservative rhetoric that flatly opposes individual liberty to the government power to tax and spend. You cannot be for rights and against government because rights are meaningless unless enforced by government…Rights to private property, freedom of speech, immunity from police abuse, contractual liberty, free exercise of religion--just as much as rights to Social Security, Medicare and food stamps--are taxpayer-funded and government-managed social services designed to improve collective and individual well-being…There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great Supreme Court justice, liked to say, taxes are ‘the price we pay for civilization.’"

Without taxes there would be no property? Which came first? The chicken or the egg? Has Sunstein ever imagined that the purpose of government is to protect rights -- individual rights, not community- or society- or government-bequeathed rights -- not to “enforce” them? Perhaps. If he had, he rejected the idea. Note that his idea of rights includes what could only be called government-created entitlements, such as Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps. If it can be argued that rights originate anywhere but in the nature of man as a being of volitional consciousness responsible for his own life and happiness, then, of course, these “rights” can be “enforced” by government. Therefore, the government owns the chicken and the egg, and the individual is merely a “steward” of property that somehow originates in government coercion acting for “society.” Sunstein makes no distinction between them.

Sunstein’s position was better articulated in an April 2005 blog entry in connection with a Yale University conference, “The Constitution in 2020,” whose subject was the United States in the 21st century and how it should define itself. What should not be conceded at the conference, he suggested, was any notion that the Constitution should be regarded as an absolute defender of individual rights and liberty. An “absolutist” position on them is a natural enemy of “democratic deliberation.” He warned that in debate:

I will be urging that it is important to resist, on democratic grounds, the idea that the document should be interpreted to reflect the view of the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party. This idea, sometimes masquerading under the name of originalism or strict construction, represents a form of judicial hubris; it is bad history and bad law. It should be exposed and rejected as such.

Sunstein’s chief danger is his confessed ambition to be a de facto censor, or, as Ayn Rand characterized such a person in Atlas Shrugged, an intellectual cop. He would be perfect for the role. It is little wonder that Obama nominated him for the office, given the president’s own attempts to stifle freedom of speech and his wish for critics to not “do a lot of talking.”

Cass Sunstein, for all his academic credentials and books, is just another member of the Chicago-Beltway wolf pack. Hear them yelp and howl for "democracy."

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:: Wednesday, September 16, 2009 ::

The Perilous Ambiguities in the Constitution

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 12:49 PM

The rectangle of light in the acres of a farm was the window of the library of Judge Narragansett. He sat at a table, and the light of his lamp fell on the copy of an ancient document. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade….”*

Writing about the presumption and power of Congress to enact health-care legislation, Andrew P. Napolitano in his Wall Street Journal article “Health-Care Reform and the Constitution” (Sept. 15) states unambiguously that the power is non-existent -- that is, that the power is not one of the enumerated powers granted to Congress. It is irrelevant, he states, that politicians, and even the Supreme Court, believe that the term regulate means control of the movement or existence of commodities and services via taxation, quotas, or any other species of interventionism across state lines or within them.

Napolitano limits his article to the subject of health insurance and why it is not “regulated” by Congress. He notes that all fifty states prohibit the sale of such insurance across state lines, e.g., a company or broker domiciled and licensed in Virginia being prohibited from selling policies in Maryland, unless the company is also domiciled and licensed in Maryland to sell much the same product. He then holds forth the specter of Congress simply nationalizing or socializing the whole business and “regulating” it on federal terms by making health insurance compulsory, with the ultimate “single payer” bureaucracy domiciled in Washington.

He opens his article with an interesting and revealing exchange he had with a South Carolina representative, whom he challenged to show him where in the Constitution the power was granted to the government to regulate the delivery of health care.

He replied: "There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do." Then he shot back: "How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?"

Well, that would be an easy task, notes Napolitano, referring to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and to the enumerated powers granted to Congress. Napolitano, however, was dealing with a thuggish mentality that will not be stopped by words that restrict his power to legislate any kind of “stuff” that comes to his mind. The former Superior Court judge argues for Congress to “regulate” the sale of health care insurance by prohibiting the states from controlling its sale across state lines (in the interests of free trade), perhaps on the premise that such an action would give Congress less of an excuse to nationalize health care. While this is a laudable aim, and certainly consistent with the intent -- or, rather, a rational understanding -- of the commerce clause, it overlooks the broader issue, which is the language itself.

The two most destructive phrases in the Constitution are destructive, not because they explicitly or intentionally contradict the principles underlying the document’s wording and otherwise explicit language, but because they are arguably ill- or undefined, and, to later generations of scholars and jurists, ambiguous and open to “interpretation.” Their ambiguity later permitted contradictory amendments to the Constitution together with legislation that all but rendered the Constitution a dead document, giving leave to presidents and Congress over the decades to advocate and enact a mammoth, costly, and liberty-destroying mountain of “stuff.”

These phrases are general welfare and regulate commerce.

Britannica cites “commerce clause” in the Constitution and the presumption and power in Article I, section 8:

“To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian Tribes.”

And then makes this bald but true statement: “It is the legal foundation of much of the U.S. government’s regulatory authority.” Legal? Yes. Moral? No.

Concerning the “general welfare” clause, the Preamble of the Constitution reads:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Cato Journal notes:

Article I, section 8 of the Constitution confers upon Congress certain enumerated powers and a potentially more sweeping authority to provide for the general welfare, a goal also set forth in the Preamble. For proponents of a limited central government, the General Welfare Clause has been a source of great mischief. Interpreted elastically by constitutionalists of the "living document" persuasion, the Clause has helped serve up a gourmand’s feast of government programs, regulations, and intrusions that would have been unimaginable to the Framers. [Italics mine.)

I stressed elastically because better minds were not so elastic in their positions on the clause. Thomas Jefferson, for example, expressed his doubts about the meaning of “general welfare”:

“[T]he laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They [Congress] are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose.“ [Writings of Thomas Jefferson ,Library Edition, 1904, 147–149.]

The clause, in short, notes the Cornell Law site, “is not an independent grant of power, but a qualification of the taxing power.” But, is it a “qualification of the taxing power” of Congress? Neither Jefferson nor any of his contemporaries go on to discuss the precise meaning of the phrase “general welfare.” That meaning has been a point of contention for over two hundred years, but a succession of statists in Congress has taken advantage of its ambiguity to lay taxes and enact regulations ad libitum for any purpose the South Carolina representative and his political ancestors and contemporaries have pleased.

James Madison, writing about the objects embraced by the power, noted that:

“no state be at liberty to impose duties on any goods, wares, or merchandise, imported by land or by water, from any other state, but may altogether prohibit the importation from any state of any particular species or description of goods, wares, or merchandise, of which the importation is at the same time prohibited from all other places whatsoever.” [Madison’s resolution for empowering Congress to regulate trade, November 30, 1785]

Jefferson weighed in with:

“To make a thing which may be bought and sold is not to prescribe regulations for buying and selling. Besides, if this were an exercise of the power of regulating commerce, it would be void, as extending as much to the internal commerce of every state, as to its external.”

The Constitution site remarks, referring the best dictionary available to the Founders:

Samuel Johnson's dictionary defined "to regulate" as "1. To adjust by rule or method ... 2. To direct." This definition is supported by Chief Justice Marshall's noted description of the power to regulate as the power "to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed." Chief Justice Melville Fuller later reiterated a similar formulation: "The power to regulate commerce is the power to prescribe the rule by which commerce shall be governed." This formulation suggests that the aim of "regulation" must be limited to the governance of commerce, although Supreme Court jurisprudence is not uniform on this topic.

Edward Banfield (1916 – 1999), a political scientist, argued that the attempt to define the outer limits of national power, as Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution does, was likely a flawed enterprise, doomed to failure from the very beginning:

Nothing of importance can be done to stop the spread of federal power, let alone to restore something like the division of powers agreed upon by the framers of the Constitution. The reason lies in human nature: men cannot be relied upon voluntarily to abide by their agreements, including those upon which their political order depends. There is an antagonism, amounting to an incompatibility, between popular government — meaning government in accordance with the will of the people — and the maintenance of limits on the sphere of government.

Banfield blamed human nature, surely what the drafters of the Constitution had in mind, for eventual federal encroachments on individual freedom. But, half the blame can be laid to the ambiguity of the term regulate, and also to the clause general welfare.

Again, the term regulate is employed ambiguously. Did Marshall, Madison, Jefferson, and others mean that it empowered the government to regulate commerce through taxation or by quotas or by some other mode of intervention? Or did they imply the establishment of objective law, by which free trade among individuals and corporations would be protected from intervention? This ambiguity has never been resolved.

What was the purpose of the commerce clause? The Father of the Constitution, Madison, wrote the following:

"Yet it is very certain that it grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the non-importing, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged." - Letter to Cabell, February 13, 1829.

But Congress has arbitrarily assumed the “remedial power” not only to “reform” health care but to “regulate” virtually every other realm of human activity in the United States. The solution to that “remedial power” is to dislodge it from Congress.

Joseph Story (1779-1845), Supreme Court justice and protégé of John Marshall, expressed the conflict succinctly in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833):

Agriculture, colonies, capital, machinery, the wages of labour, the profits of stock, the rents of land, the punctual performance of contracts, and the diffusion of knowledge would all be within the scope of the power; for all of them bear an intimate relation to commerce. The result would be, that the powers of congress would embrace the widest extent of legislative functions, to the utter demolition of all constitutional boundaries between the state and national governments. [Book 3, Chapter 15, § 1075.]

Story might have added, but unfortunately did not include in his warning, the demolition of all constitutional boundaries between government and the individual. This is an instance of how an ambiguity in crucial language can become perilous and destructive, even in the most well-intentioned and cogent statements. This is also why I have trouble granting credibility to statements such as that found on the Campaign for Liberty site, which is written from a sense of certitude, but not from a certainty that could be validated by subjecting it to rational scrutiny and explication:

Far from granting Congress the power to create the massive regulatory, central economic planning, nearly limitless government in which we live today... the Commerce Clause was intended to be a restriction on States, not a positive grant of power to Congress at all! Why then is it under "Powers of Congress"? Simple, the federal government has the power to resolve trade disputes among the states and essentially provide for free trade among the states. Perhaps no clause in the Constitution has been so perverted as the Interstate Commerce Clause.

Even though I would like to agree with that statement, I could not say with any conviction that this is what the commerce clause, or even the general welfare clause, means or that this is what the Founders meant and intended -- not without precise definitions of general welfare and regulate. Those two terms have been bonded together by statists into a poisonous, amphioxus sanction by collectivists and other enemies of freedom to the detriment of freedom.

What is needed is a Judge Narragansett to scour the Constitution and correct its debilitating and destructive amendments and to define its language with exactitude, so that a government instituted among men may better and absolutely “secure these rights” to the freedom of production and trade -- including the trade in health care, health care insurance, and every other voluntary transaction among individuals. Then, perhaps, predatory creatures like Napolitano’s South Carolina congressman would not dare contemplate -- indeed, he would be prohibited from -- abridging our rights and reducing our liberties with “stuff.”

*From Atlas Shrugged, p. 1168. New York: Dutton 35th Anniversary Edition.

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:: Saturday, September 12, 2009 ::

Republicans: Ready to Embrace Freedom?

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 8:05 AM

Or to help Obama and the Democrats shoplift it?

Writing about the Republican Party's ambivalent attraction to the Tea Party movement, Dan Eggen and Perry Bacon Jr.‘s September 12th column in The Washington Post, “GOP Sees Protest As an Opportunity,” attaches more importance to today's march and protest than liberals would like to concede. What follows here is an expansion of my comments left on the Post comment page.

With tens of thousands of conservative protesters expected to gather in Washington on Saturday for a "Taxpayer March on D.C.," Republican officials are attempting to capitalize on a movement that lately has galvanized anti-Obama activists more effectively than the party's elected leaders in Washington.

Taking into account the usual vitriolic, name-calling, emotionalist comments posted here by welfare state advocates, I have this to say about Eggen and Bacon Jr.'s article: While it is the least biased piece I've seen in the Post concerning the Tea Partiers in a long while, it is still a tad slanted and inaccurate in its content.

First, the authors confess that, low and behold, the Tea Partiers are not a conspiracy cooked up by the Republican Party and insurance companies, as many Democrats have charged. They are "a loose-knit coalition of groups that helped to organize health-care protests...and anti-tax rallies in the spring." The authors might have also mentioned that tens of thousands of these "mobsters" were Americans who carried signs and asked inconvenient questions of their representatives at town hall meetings of their own volition, without being asked or prompted by anyone else, moved by their own anger and concerns.

If the Republicans were truly the culprits behind these "rowdy hooligans," why are they, on the one hand, eager to "embrace" them, and, on the other, afraid to? Eggen and Bacon Jr. attempt to answer that question, but fail to shed any light on that anxiety.

Eggen and Bacon Jr. write:

Searching for ways to compete with Democrats after two consecutive electoral drubbings, Republicans have moved past earlier uncertainty about the protesters, who organized nationwide rallies this summer that have threatened Democratic health-care plans and eroded President Obama's standing with the public.

Yes, those rallies have contributed to the threat against Democratic health-care plans, and moved many Republicans to dig in their heels over the bill’s costs and intrusive nature. That tactic, however, is but disputing the details of slavery, but not the slavery itself. And, as three articles have pointed out, the protesters did not “erode” President Obama’s standing with the public. He accomplished that himself. John Lewis of Duke University in The Objective Standard, Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal, and Geoffrey P. Hunt in an article in American Thinker, address the phenomena of Obama’s plummeting fortunes in all matters from three unique perspectives. Lewis, however, makes the most salient observation. Noting the Republicans’ failure to oppose the Democratic agenda over the decades, he writes:

Republicans should have brought forward a positive, principled alternative to the statist trend years ago. They failed. Obama has now done the job for them. He has presented the stark alternative from the other side, by specifying and demanding a comprehensive agenda that carries no pretense of individual liberty. He has created an alarming sense of urgency by demanding that this agenda be made into law now. [Italics mine.]

There may be "tens of thousands of conservative protesters" in the DC march, but also tens of thousands of independents and former Obama supporters who are, at the very least, literally disenchanted with their former idol.

Eggen and Bacon Jr. write:

Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and other Republicans, said there is an "opportunity for Republicans" to tap into legitimate fears about an overreaching federal government. But he said that "right-wing nutballs are aligning themselves with these movements" and are dominating media coverage. "It's bad for Republicans because in the absence of any real leadership, the freaks fill the void and define the party," McKinnon said.

Freaks? Right-wing nutballs? Eggen and Bacon Jr. could have mentioned that Sam Adams was considered "rowdy" and a "troublemaker," while Patrick Henry's Stamp Act Resolves of 1765 contained, according to the conservatives of his day, language too "violent" and "disrespectful." Revolutions are not made by meek, humble milquetoasts afraid to take a stand on crucial issues and who settled for a tsk-tsk against Joe Wilson for stating a truth. To paraphrase Henry: If I am a freakish nutball, then I shall make the most of it, because you, Mr. McKinnon, stand for nothing but compromise and cowardice.

The authors report that "Some protesters this year have loudly disrupted community meetings, brought guns to Obama events and likened the president to Adolf Hitler,” and that

…top Republican strategists and many party observers also worry about the impact that the most extreme protesters might have on the party's image, including those who carry swastika signs or obsess over the veracity of Obama's Hawaiian birth.

And? Never mind that the authors neglect to mention that in 2004, George W. Bush was vilified by Democratic protesters sporting offensive signs that likened him to Hitler and worse, and who also disrupted political rallies and community meetings. Unlike the “loose coalition of groups,” those disruptions were organized by Democratic Party proxies.

Guns? The only reported instance of someone bringing a gun to a rally was deliberately misreported by MSNBC. The person who appeared at the rally, at which Obama was scheduled to speak, was characterized by the network as a crazy, gun-toting racist, when it was a black man who opposes Obama’s and Congress’s health care legislation. Obama’s Hawaiian birth? If this is so bogus and desperate a charge, why has not Obama addressed the issue and laid it to rest?

Eggen and Bacon Jr. must agree, however, that try as he might, Bush could never have aspired to be like Hitler even if he tried. He had neither the “charisma” nor the rhetorical skills. And, are the authors so clueless that they could not see that Obama's tactics and rhetoric these last six months -- never mind during the 2008 campaign -- are too "Hitlerian" for words? His charisma and rhetoric still seduce the devoted and those who judge issues by their emotions, while they repel anyone with a definable sense of self and self-worth.

In an attempt to portray the typical Tea Partier as mentally unbalanced, Eggen and Bacon Jr. report:

One blogger who writes regularly for Freedomworks, Ross Kaminsky of Boulder, Colo., compared Obama's Tuesday address to U.S. schoolchildren to the tactics of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and other murderous dictators. "Totalitarians of all stripes put great emphasis on brainwashing the young, and Obama is no exception," he wrote on the group's Web site under the name "rossputin."

Ross Kaminsky is right: although the authors try to paint him and his words in a bad light, Obama's address to school children was the ruse of a nascent totalitarian to capture the minds and loyalty of those children. See my article, “Obama: Seducer of the Young.”

Eggen and Bacon Jr. write:

At the event on Thursday, activists shouted "Liar!" at the mention of Obama's name, just hours after GOP leaders had condemned Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) for a similar outburst during Obama's speech to Congress the evening before. Protesters also shouted "No more czars!" -- a reference to a line of conservative attack on administration appointments that has emerged from Beck's show.

So, the authors are conceding that the protesters are no longer “mobsters” or “hooligans,” but activists? What a change of tune! The authors could have dwelt on the “No more czars” outburst, asking the question of why Obama has circumvented Senate confirmation proceedings for these unelected and wholly unconstitutional satraps, and why the protesters oppose them so much. But, they did not ask that question.

There is much more that can be said about Eggen and Bacon Jr.'s article. But they miss the point as much as do the anxious Republicans. The Republicans have got to shape up -- that is, think -- and stand for what their party name connotes: Champions of individual rights, the separation of not only church and state, but of the economy and state, of freedom of speech, and the right of individuals to live their own lives free of government interference and guidance.

Focusing on Republican hand-wringing over the protests, Eggen and Bacon Jr. report:

"It is good to see that there are some Republican elected officials, especially people from Congress right now, who are paying attention to us and interested in what we're doing," said Jenny Beth Martin of Atlanta, a national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots who was previously active in GOP politics in Georgia. "But there's a sense of distrust among many people who have considered themselves Republicans in the past. When they were in the majority and were in the White House, they squandered that opportunity."

Given Republican behavior in the past, especially in Republican endorsement of policies that differ little from Obama’s except in their scope, that distrust is legitimate. American eyes are opening to the fraud and deceit practiced by both parties, and today’s protest is a rejection in toto of those shared policies, fraud and deceit. Will the Republicans grasp that fact? Or will they evade their collective guilt and squander an opportunity to redeem themselves by siding in toto with the 9/12 Tea Party?

Anything less than an across-the-board commitment to freedom would be a cruel fraud, just as Bush and the Republicans posing (and accused by Democrats) as advocates of free enterprise was a fraud and a hoax. Without committing themselves to the fundamental principles adhered to and implemented by the Founders, the Republicans may as well not bother trying to "embrace" today's protests.

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:: Thursday, September 10, 2009 ::

Reason is Forever

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 6:14 PM

Liberals are now awakening to the evidence that President Barack Obama and his web of cronies, pull-peddlers, appointees and assorted parasites -- that alliance of the Chicago and Beltway Gangs -- are planning to move in on freedom of speech with every intention of “modifying” it so that it means only what the government wants it to mean. And some are worried that current restrictions on the First Amendment might be “modified” or even reversed and declared unconstitutional, specifically McCain-Feingold, which governs corporate spending on election campaign ads, and other anti-freedom of speech rulings such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which a movie, “Hillary: The Movie,” made by an anti-Clinton group, fell under the strictures of McCain-Feingold. A three-judge FEC “court” ruled against an appeal by the group to challenge the Court’s decision.

McCain-Feingold is “a federal enactment designed to prevent ‘big money’ from unfairly influencing federal elections-which, among other things, prohibits corporate financing of ‘electioneering communications’ and imposes mandatory disclosure and disclaimer requirements on such communications.”

Robert Barnes, in a Washington Post article of September 8, “Reversal of Precedents at Issue,” complains that the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John G. Roberts, may well “defy the decisions of Congress and to set aside its own precedents.”

This raises ageless questions about the role of stare decisis -- the court’s custom of standing by its previous decisions. But it also raises new ones about the boldness of a court that has moved to the right with the addition of Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

It seems that while liberals are all for trashing customs and traditions in the march to an egalitarian, collectivist society -- not to mention reason and justice -- some traditions become sacred to them if the trashing or violation jeopardizes the advances of the collectivists. Thus, Barnes’s worry that the precedent of the Supreme Court upholding McCain-Feingold in December 2003 may in turn be subjected to an unprecedented volte-face. Justices Roberts, Alito, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas could well be the majority that reverses the Citizens United v. FEC and McConnell v. FEC rulings.

[For details concerning these and other McCain-Feingold and FEC-related cases, see The Campaign Finance Institute here.]

“Overruling Austin or McConnell in this case would be unwarranted and unseemly,” former solicitor general Seth P. Waxman told the court on behalf of McCain and other congressional sponsors. “Stare decisis requires respect for precedents absent a special justification for overruling tem. No such justification exists.”

Unwarranted? Unseemly? What old-fashioned terms! They sound almost “Republican.“

Yes, such a justification exists -- the First Amendment -- but no Supreme Court justice will cite it without paragraphs of rationalistic legal babble, or at least understand, adhere to, and expound its absoluteness: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The language is clear; that is justification enough.

The Court was wrong to uphold McCain-Feingold. It ought to have declared it unconstitutional at the first opportunity and in the strongest terms in December 2003. That was a precedent that should never have been made, and which should be corrected now-- in the strongest terms. But, we should not count on Chief Justice Roberts et al. to rule absolutely in upholding the First Amendment. Rationalizations and procedural niceties, going by their past decisions, will likely befog or obstruct their thinking.

On the other side of the freedom of speech coin is the issue of an attempt by the administration to co-opt the National Endowment for the Arts as a branch of the White House and convert it into a Joseph Goebbels-style Ministry of Propaganda (or as an American style, Orwellian Ministry of Truth). This development has given liberals painful stomach flutters, especially in those who campaigned for Obama.

It is a little too late for them to worry about the encroachment now. If they believed in and endorsed Obama’s campaign promises to undertake a radical “change” of the country to unadulterated socialism, they should have realized that it meant the “socialization” of everything, including art, which is protected by the First Amendment. One wonders why artists and writers believe themselves exempt from the slavery and servitude they advocate should be imposed on everyone else.

On August 25, Patrick C. Courrielche, columnist for Big Hollywood, reported on an unusual but unreported teleconference that occurred on August 5.

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

Courrielche goes on to reveal:

The people running the conference call and rallying the group to get active on these issues were Yosi Sergant, the Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons.

We were encouraged to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these “focus areas” as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign, and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues. Throughout the conversation, we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to “shape the lives” of those around us. The now famous Obama “Hope” poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election.

Courrielche expresses his qualms and reservations about this event, which went mostly unreported by the MSM. In a follow-up to his column, he writes that it is doubtful that the NEA’s action has any legal basis for such recruitment, and reports further that when its role in the White House teleconference was revealed, the NEA denied any responsibility, and fobbed off that responsibility on a “third party.”

Courrielche believes in the existence of the NEA. He will not question the rightness of its existence. Government, he believes, has a responsibility to support and encourage the arts. So, he wonders:

The NEA is the nation’s largest annual funder of the arts. That is right, the largest funder of the arts in the nation – a fact that I’m sure was not lost on those that were on the call, including myself. One of the NEA’s major functions is providing grants to artists and arts organizations. The NEA has also historically shown the ability to attract “matching funds” for the art projects and foundations that they select. So we have the nation’s largest arts funder, which is a federal agency staffed by the administration, with those that they potentially fund together on a conference call discussing taking action on issues under vigorous national debate. Does there appear to be any potential for conflict here?

Yes, there is a major conflict of interest here: taxpayers coerced into paying for the “free expression” of dependent writers and artists. They must be satisfied with being involuntary donors to sustain the country’s “culture.“ But, this is the government calling in its loans and markers. He and his subsidized colleagues in the arts benefited from the looting of other taxpayers. He protests too much:

I’m not a “right-wing nut job.” It just goes against my core beliefs to sit quietly while the art community is used by the NEA and the administration to push an agenda other than the one for which it was created. It is not within the National Endowment for the Arts’ original charter to initiate, organize, and tap into the art community to help bring awareness to health care, or energy & environmental issues for that matter; and especially not at a time when it is being vehemently debated. Artists shouldn’t be used as tools of the state to help create a climate amenable to their positions, which is what appears to be happening in this instance. If the art community wants to tackle those issues on its own then fine. But tackling them shouldn’t come as an encouragement from the NEA to those they potentially fund at this coincidental time.

It is hardly “coincidental” that the NEA would become a party to the current White House plan to bombard Americans with leftist propaganda. It was in the cards. It does not occur to Courrielche that taxpayers should not be used as tools of the state to promote the careers of writers and artists, whatever the degree of their competence or lack of it.

And if you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. “This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare [sic] with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely… “

Safely? Isn’t that the first concern of a thief contemplating a crime? Of a bureaucrat “overreaching” his mandate, as Courrielche puts it? Isn’t usage of that term indicative of a mind habituated to felony? He ought to have known better. He was a former employee of the NEA and learned first-hand that since political pull governs who gets how much in taxpayer money to “support the arts,” it cannot be limited to that species of theft. When all the stops have been removed, as they have been throughout Obama’s administration, the practice will necessarily expand into other realms of political action.

Including drafting writers and artists into a White House-directed propaganda blitz to persuade Americans that the administration means no harm and that its goals are benign and glorious. The White House and the NEA do not give a fig about Courrielche’s “core beliefs.” They are irrelevant to power-lusters. You ate my bread. Now, sing my song. Or you get no more donuts. That is the message of the benefactors to the beneficiaries.

The Supreme Court should never have upheld McCain-Feingold. And Patrick Courrielche and his colleagues should never have taken government money to subsidize their careers, nor endorsed any government program that did. Robert Barnes is fearful that a modicum of reason might move the Court to reverse its stand on the selective censorship of McCain-Feingold. Courrielche, also allowing a quantum of reason to stir his own fears, is concerned that Obama, together with the NEA, is out to corrupt the integrity of tax-supported artists in whom integrity never existed.

Neither Barnes, nor the Supreme Court, nor Courrielche has ever grasped that reason is forever -- it is the indispensable means of man for his survival and happiness -- and that it cannot be discarded or evaded, in the short term or the long term. It will ultimately overtake and dispel the illusion that it can be dispensed with.

Speaking of freedom of speech, something moved Joe Wilson, Republican representative from South Carolina who has opposed the health care bill, to shout “You lie!” to Obama on September 9th as he addressed a joint session of Congress to plead for passage of the health care bill. Obama had just claimed that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for government-run health care insurance. He replied, “That’s not true.“ Well, why should anyone believe what Obama says is true or untrue? Wilson was immediately condemned by Democrats and Republicans for the “outburst.” Wilson should not be condemned, nor should he have apologized.

One newspaper reported that “Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi directed a fierce frown at him…Vice President Joe Biden looked down and shook his head….” But, in the CNN video, which can be seen here, Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi glance sharply in the direction of Wilson -- like a pair of liars surprised in the act and their expressions full of malice for the person who surprised them.

One may ask: Wasn’t Wilson’s outburst disrespectful, unwarranted and unseemly? Hardly. How else was he to call to the country’s attention with any drama that the whole health care bill is a lie, and that Obama and Congressional supporters of it have lied about it from the very beginning? Wilson chose to not sit quietly while the President of the United States lied, and while his fellow Congressmen sanctioned what they knew was a lie with their silence.

In the face of falsehood, and in the presence of a falsifier, decorum and respect should be one's last concern.

Perhaps Wilson, too, grasped for a moment that reason is forever.

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:: Tuesday, September 08, 2009 ::

Objectivist charged with corrupting the youth

:: Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 9:09 AM

Dan Edge, an Objectivist activist living in Greenville, South Carolina was arrested over the weekend by the Greenville police. Mr. Edge's crime, you ask? Nothing less than contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Edge was protesting the Greenville City Council's recent enactment of an "emergency" 10PM curfew for minors, a law that Edge says curtails the freedom of the peaceable in supposed answer to the crimes committed by the un-peaceable.

According to Edge, such freedom was an important part of his development:

Along with many other Greenville natives, I was greatly enriched by experiences, conversations, and new friends discovered in downtown Greenville – some even after (gasp!) 10pm on a weekend night – and I never committed a crime or created a nuisance there. These experiences enriched my life and contributed to making me into the cultured, responsible adult I am today. It would be a great shame to take that same opportunity away from responsible young men and women, especially in a time when Greenville is becoming more and more a rich source of southern culture.

And thus Edge's Saturday evening protest against the curfew, which went fine until a departing minor had the audacity to say "Thank You" to Edge after the 10PM hour, a crime that led to Edge's arrest (Edge provides a detailed narrative of his arrest here.)

What does Greenville have next in store for Mr. Edge? Hemlock perhaps? Socrates would be proud, but we should be appalled.

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Barack Obama: Seducer of the Young

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 5:05 AM

A very brief but important article on the fundamental purpose of the health care bill is circulating and with which President Barack Obama and his cadre of communist and pinkish radicals, czars and advisors would agree with nods of approval, and which most Democrats would endorse, had they but the nerve. President Barack Obama will soon plead with Congress to stop dragging its collective feet over “non-essential“ and “distracting” aspects of the “reform” bill, such as its astronomical cost and its usurpation of the right of Americans to reject it, and just pass the damned thing. “The Real Meaning of Health Care Reform” makes this crucial but neglected point:

The primary goal of health care "reform" is the enactment of the legal basis for totalitarianism. So many of the provisions of the health care bill, to a close reading, set a precedent for government control of every single basis of our lives -- health care or not.

That’s it. If the government expropriates the health care realm in any style, shape or form-- no matter how watered down the bill is, if it is reduced from 1,600 pages to merely 400, if it focuses on controlling expenditures and not on choice, if it gives one a temporary but penalized option other than the “public option,” the fancy trimmings are all irrelevant -- it will automatically grant the government the legal power over one’s body and it will govern all actions one might take to sustain it. It needn’t be named after Senator Ted Kennedy to be a nullification of one’s right to live for one’s own sake.

The Crown’s Stamp Act of 1765 had an unchallenged legal basis, dating back to 1650: the will and power of Parliament to legislate for the British colonies. This Act was repealed exactly a year after its passage, as a consequence of violent opposition to it in the colonies, but the repeal was accompanied by the Declaratory Act, which asserted that Parliament retained “the full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.”

Few colonists paid the attention to the Declaratory Act it deserved. Most were celebrating their victory over Parliament. A few regarded it as Parliament’s peevish, ill-mannered means of saving face after a humiliating defeat. But it was a loaded gun. Parliament passed it, ergo it had a legal basis.

In short, the Crown said: You may have won this round, but, nevertheless, we own you, “in all cases whatsoever.”

Obama’s broadcast speech to the nation’s schools complements that totalitarian purpose. The text of it, if Obama sticks to the script, is, on the surface, a yawner. Many a student will feel a desire to nod off. The speech can be faulted only for its patronizing banality. But, as one blogger noted: “It’s not the speech, it’s the subtext.” And subtext there is, very subtly woven throughout Obama’s innocuous blandishments to study hard and to mind what adults say. The subtext declares: I own you. Or, rather, we, the state, own you. This point was made last week in the “I Pledge” video as a prefatory note to America’s school children.

Of course, many newspaper columnists are wondering why the speech is being attacked and called propagandistic. They don’t understand what the hue and cry are about. After all, didn’t Ronald Reagan and George Bush address school children? But, the subtext is invisible to them, or they see nothing wrong with it.

Here are instances of the subtext, and one major gaffe.

Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team. (Paragraph 13.)

I can think of numerous mayors, Senators and Supreme Court Justices -- including a few Presidents -- who didn’t know about the Constitution, or who dismissed it as being as antiquated as a Babylonian law tablet, but that never stopped them from becoming what they are. That’s the gaffe. But, on to the subtext.

What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future. (Paragraph 15.)

Which challenges? Fill in the blanks, children. It’s a multiple choice question. But stick to the choices we give you. My friend Professor Bill Ayers has drawn up a list, in consultation with my many czars and advisors. But never forget that we are a nation, and we must all pull together to meet those challenges.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that -- if you quit on school -- you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country. (Paragraph 17.)

Which difficult problems? Again, fill in the blanks, and choose from Professor Ayers’ list. If you quit on us, it means that you see a conflict between our goals and yours. That would be a selfish thing to do. Fulfillment can be found in selfless service to your country.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you - don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country. (Paragraph 38.)

If you give up on yourself, you become useless to your country and a needless charge to society. Then we must and will determine your future as a servant of the state. If you don’t want us to tell you what to do and when and why, then do as we say.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country? (Paragraph 41.)

We expect you to make selfless contributions to the country, regardless of what careers you choose to follow. How would you be able to live with yourself, knowing that you did everything for yourself, and not for your country? You are but a cell of society, and society expects your best, and for you to give back to it. Remember what a great president once said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That is all I am asking of you, too.

Contradicting the subtext is this statement:

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll wind up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. (Paragraph 24.)

Come again? Or must the future I make for myself first be vetted by the state? That’s what brighter students might ask of the President. He would have no answer for them, and might ask whoever on his staff wrote that statement what the hell he meant by it.

If the adults won’t listen, go after the kids. Can you think of a better way to inculcate the character of totalitarian servitude and obeisance in children than this speech? Of making seductive enlistment in the Obama Youth or Ayers’ New Pioneers? Of having children believe from the start of their lives that the government has a right to control ever single basis of their lives, and that this is a moral norm?

If you wanted better proof of how Obama, his cadre in the White House, his appointees, and the Democrats in Congress want to own Americans “in all cases whatsoever,” read a transcript of Obama’s speech, and watch the video. Judge for yourself. His speech is an invitation to children to become moral monsters.

For years I have kept a page from The New York Times. It features a teen-aged Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK. It is a symbol, not so much of a generational link, but of a philosophical link, of the passing on of the political torch of statism and collectivism. Now we have Barack Obama reaching out to shake hands with another generation.

This has got to stop. And if Americans have any kind of duty to their country, that is what they must stop. For their own sakes, and for the sake of their children.

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:: Saturday, September 05, 2009 ::

Barack Obama: Heil Headmaster!

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 7:11 PM

Someone else may have said it first: When the adults won’t listen, go after the kids.

The sick irony is that the federal government has been “going after the kids” ever since it was first allowed to put its nose in the tent of education. This has been going on for decades. Now the smelly, drooling beast occupies virtually the whole tent, in the form of Ayn Rand’s Comprachicos, the lobotomizing, teacher-college trained “conditioners” who take orders from the feds and politicized school boards on what constitutes “teaching.” “Teaching,” to them, is basically the skilled inculcation of passivity in students of all ages as a precondition to following orders without question and voluntary servitude without expectation of reward or recognition -- to serve the state, the collective, the environment, whatever the local party chief, ward-heeler, or galeiter says is the “good.”

Rand wrote:

“The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life -- by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, I.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past -- and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.”*

On modern education, she noted:

“The academia-jet set coalition is attempting to tame the American character by the deliberate breeding of helplessness and resignation -- in those incubators of lethargy known as ‘Progressive’ schools, which are dedicated to the task of crippling a child’s mind by arresting his cognitive development.”**

Last week, President Barack Obama went after the kids with his “I Pledge” video, which featured a number of Hollywood and other familiar faces “pledging” to adhere to a number of collectivist causes, including not using plastic water bottles, plastic bags, getting rid of fuel-inefficient cars in favor of hybrids, of offering one’s smiles and service to complete strangers, etc. and ad nauseam, ending with Demi Moore and her partner saying, “I pledge to be a servant of our President and all mankind.”

The video then becomes an expanding mosaic or montage of all the stars speaking at once (“because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we seek” -- which could have been the oath of allegiance to the collective “We” in Rand’s novel, Anthem), and then the montage fades into the off-color poster of Obama, flanked by the Capitol and the White House, looking like a lonely leader. Like a Big Brother, who just wants your understanding and cooperation. And service. No questions asked. Or tolerated.

Obama says you don’t have time to think. Just to act. Just as he has.

A very slick piece of propaganda. Hitler would have envied it. There were no Nazi Party chiefs telling the populace or the children what they should think or do. No Heinrich Himmler or Joseph Goebbels lecturing them from on high on their duty to the state, to the Party, to the nation. Just a parade of popular Hollywood and music video faces speaking very sincerely about their willingness to “serve our President.”

No, too many American adults will not listen to Obama and his pick of the Communist Party about what is best for them. So, they go after the helpless victims of government-mandated indoctrination. Employ famous pop culture faces to deliver the message. Then require every public school in the country to broadcast it, as an overture to Obama’s address to school children on September 8th.

But, they have not counted on volition. They have underestimated the American character. They did not count on parents “opting out” of allowing their children to be subjected to the video and the speech. On school boards and principals warily offering parents and students the chance to say “No, thanks, we‘re thinking beings, and this is an insult to our intelligence.”

Obama’s attempt to ram socialism down the throats of Americans through his and Congress’s health care bill has faltered because there are enough thinking individuals left in this country who are speaking out against him and his entire agenda. Those Americans are a reality they thought they could bypass. But that detour has almost led them to race right off the end of an unfinished bridge.

Desperation drives despots to win over children. To seduce them with pop culture eye-candy or appeals to emotion. Or to enslave them. More on this contemptible appeal to American school children after September 8th.

*”The Comprachicos,” in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, p. 231.
**”Don’t Let It Go,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 261.

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:: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 ::

Senator Ted Kennedy: Rest in Perdition

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 5:24 PM

On the occasion of Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy’s death last week, ABC News posted on its website the question: "What do the Kennedys mean to you?” and invited readers to comment. Most of the comments were severely critical of especially Ted Kennedy: a sodden, corrupt, hypocritical, power-lusting ogre, an appropriate climax of an elitist, disreputable succession of Kennedys. I had nothing positive to say about him, either, nor about any of the Kennedys. They were major movers of the nation in the direction of fascism. What they meant to me was the incremental destruction of this country.

The mainstream media currently is besotted with admiration for Kennedy and wailing over his passing. You would think that this was Argentina, when that country grieved over the deaths of Juan and Evita Peron -- a grief orchestrated and mandated by the government and its controlled news media and press. For example, Eugene Robinson, a columnist for The Washington Post, waxes nearly poetic in his tribute to Kennedy, “A Prince‘s Fate“:

“Princes often have lives that are difficult, even within the context of wealth and privilege. They have to find ways to keep from being eaten alive by ambition that can never be requited….The hardest task for an eternal prince is to construct an original identity of which he can be proud -- an identity that allows him to live a life of purpose, meaning and impact. Ted Kennedy accomplished this feat by becoming the greatest senator of our age and serving as the liberal conscience of the nation.”

Robinson’s thesis is that Ted Kennedy’s ambition to become president was foiled by many things, and so he remained a “prince.” Robinson is wrong: Kennedy’s ambition was requited. He was responsible for much of the post-Rooseveltian welfare state and regulatory legislation that currently burdens the country. And it was not so much ambition that motivated Kennedy, as vengeance on a country that would not grant him the status of “savior” or “king.”

Robinson, like many other columnists and news media pundits, glossed over Kennedy’s essentially malign character to portray him as a perfect model of a self-sacrificing humanitarian. But his blinders-defined tribute to Kennedy is almost tolerable compared to most politicians’ expressions of admiration. Consider New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s puerile, glassy-eyed hosanna:

"In the Senate, Ted Kennedy was our sun--the center of our universe. To be pulled by his strong gravitational field, to bask in his warmth was a privilege, an honor, and, for many of us, even a life-changing experience.”

What follows are my expanded comments on the ABC site on the Kennedys.

Ted Kennedy stunned the nation in 2008 when he endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. And while it was coincidence that Obama, as President, was vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard when Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer, it seemed to be a politically appropriate place for him to be, for that millionaire’s retreat was where Kennedy got away with what could only be generously called “manslaughter.” That is where, thanks to Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechine met her death at the negligent hands of Ted Kennedy. For some details on how he lied about the incident and was released from criminal responsibility by the political influence of his father, see David A. Patten’s account here. Patten, however honest an account he delivers about Kennedy’s character flaws (including his incomprehensible answer to the question of why he wanted to be president), still extols his political career, crediting him approvingly with “perhaps the most impressive legislative record of the past half century.”

It would be appropriate to go back a few years and begin with Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Sr., the “Godfather” of a political dynasty. It is a fair analogy to say that he was the Boston-Irish family patriarch to Vito Corleone’s New York-Italian patriarch, rising to power and influence through a combination of “business” and politics in roughly the same period, driven by power-lust and envy of the “smart set” and social establishment and determined to become part of that glittering parade of fashion and wealth. He established the leitmotif for his sons’ characters and careers. Most biographies of Kennedy Senior are carefully crafted narratives that skip over the unsavory aspects of his career, such as his alleged bootlegging empire during Prohibition (by importing liquor from Canada and Cuba). Near the end of Prohibition, he procured the exclusive rights to import Scotch whiskey from the U.K. and Canada into the U.S.

In all his business dealings, Kennedy Senior was not so much a productive businessman as a manipulator of already produced wealth and an exploiter of regulatory controls. His first job after graduating from Harvard in 1912 was as assistant state bank examiner. He helped run the Bethlehem Steel shipyards in Massachusetts during WWI, when he met and became close to Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy. He was the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was a lifelong Democrat and significant ally of Roosevelt, and staunch advocate of Roosevelt‘s domestic policies. FDR appointed Kennedy, an Anglophobe, ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1938.

Kennedy Senior’s prime ambition was to become president of the United States. One gaffe, however, doomed that prospect. As ambassador to the U.K., in November 1940, during the Battle of Britain, he asserted that Britain’s fight against the Nazis was not to save “democracy,” but merely to survive. Now, this is a curious dichotomy. If “democracy” is meant to imply a state of semi-freedom and semi-representative government (and not pure mob rule, which is what it actually means), of course its survival may be seen as a paramount value. The U.S., he implied, should view Britain’s opposition to Hitler as just a means to buy America time to prepare to fight the Nazis, insinuating that he did not otherwise care what happened to Britain. “Democracy” in Britain, he stated, was “finished” and “it may be here” (in the United States). He was perfectly willing to avoid a fight with Germany by concluding a peace treaty with Hitler. His remarks were not well received by either Roosevelt or the American public.

That being said, Kennedy Senior’s sons benefited from his ill-gotten largess. Like father, like son. Not one of them ever held a productive, wealth producing job in his life. Only two of them ever ventured into the real world: Joe Junior, the eldest, whose experimental bomber blew up in England during WWII, and John F. Kennedy, who at least saw some action in the Pacific, although the full story of PT109 may or not ever be known. Because of the draft, Teddy Kennedy enlisted in the Army (signing up for four years, instead of the intended two, but his father got him out of that, as well), and landed a plumb assignment in Paris, France.

All four Kennedy sons, “Joe Junior,“ JFK, Robert and "Ted," grew up as spoiled aristocrats, completely insulated from the productive world and responsibility for their own lives and actions. The real world, the world that produced all their clothes, cars, and pricy baubles, was their oyster. They only knew how to milk it and corrupt themselves in the process. Things could be had, never made. They were sent to the "best" schools where they were taught that the productive, wealth-producing world was their private realm -- that it wasn't "fair" and ready to be redistributed to their dependents -- if they went into politics. And, that's where they went.

When they could take time from their drinking and hedonism.

But, one doesn’t go into politics without a political philosophy, however crude, populist, or sophisticated it may be. The sons adopted the statist, collectivist, and socialist philosophies of their teachers -- and the cynical pragmatism of their father. That was fine with Joseph Kennedy. He knew nothing about living a productive life, either. He never had to earn a living, never had to sustain his own life -- in terms of trading values. It is interesting to note that Kennedy Senior was impressed by Harold Laski, the premier British socialist of the time, and wished his sons to study under him at the London School of Economics. “Joe Junior,” being groomed for a political career which his father hoped would lead to the White House, spent a year with Laski before enrolling in Harvard Law School. In 1935 JFK enrolled at the LSE with the intention of studying political economy for a year under Laski’s tutelage, but an illness hospitalized him shortly after his enrollment. During the autumn of the same year, he enrolled in Princeton University, but was forced to leave after contracting jaundice. The next autumn, he began attending Harvard College.

Much of what burdens this country today, including a welfare state for the poor and for pull-peddling businesses, and especially the fascist/socialist agenda that is inculcated in virtually every level of education today, we owe to the Kennedys.

In that respect, Barack Obama is just a Johnnie-Come-Lately. Ted Kennedy's endorsement of his bid for the White House was an act of hate for America. He knew what Obama's credentials were -- a community-organizing socialist who has appointed to power and is advised by a company of communists and socialists.

Some of Kennedy’s “accomplishments” include: strengthening OSHA‘s powers; a quadrupling of spending for cancer funding and research (but, should government be involved in medical research? No); WIC program (Women, Infants and Children, administered by the Federal Food and Nutrition Service ); Meals On Wheels; Title IX; Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; Americans With Disabilities Act; Medical Relief Act; No Child Left Behind Act; Anti-Apartheid Act; National Military Child Care Act; Direct Lending Program; Family and Medical Leave Act; Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; Children's Health Insurance Program; Funding for the AMBER Alert system; Family Opportunity Act. And much, much more. Not one of them a legitimate, Constitutionally-mandated government action.

The Kennedys should be damned, not revered or mourned. The whole corrupt, smarmy, elitist lot of them.

When a true, objective history is written about the second half of the 20th century, about how the freest country in history slid into statism and political and economic collapse, the Kennedys will be dealt the justice and judgment they have dodged and been denied for so long -- by historians, by students, by the press.

Ted Kennedy died of a malignant soul cancer long ago -- of corruption, of hating America as a free country of free individuals. One could say that the tumor that infected his character finally spread to his brain. In all justice, no true American -- no American who valued his own freedom, his own liberty, his own life -- should mourn Kennedy's passing. No flags should be ordered to half-mast for this traitor. Americans should say: Good riddance! And we hope Mary Jo Kopechine waited for him at the gates of hell with her own pitchfork, for if there is a hell, that is where Ted Kennedy has gone.

May he rest in perdition.

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:: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 ::

Justifying Ted Kennedy's negligent homicide

:: Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 9:39 AM

Speaking about the political career of Senator Edward Kennedy and Kennedy's role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, Hufffington Post columnist Melissa Lafsky offered the following:

We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she'd have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don't know, as always, could fill a Metrodome.

Still, ignorance doesn't preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn't automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.

What we are being asked to swallow is that the victim of negligent homicide would somehow consider their homicide "worth it" because their killer had a prolific political career--a career defined primarily by their support for the forced transfer of wealth from those who earn it to those who do not.

It was a horrific injustice that Kennedy never received more than a slap on the hand for his role in Kopechne's needless and preventable death. It is all the more horrific that Kennedy would now be celebrated for it. But notice Lafsky's claim here: even the most cowardly and despicable acts can be forgiven if altruism is one's aim.

If you ever doubt the wickedness--the outright willingness to justify anything in the name of the self-abnegation that is altruism--remember the life of Ted Kennedy and the moral claims of those who would attempt to lionise him.

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:: Thursday, August 20, 2009 ::

Objectivist Blog Round-Up # 113

:: Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 8:15 AM

Welcome to the July 30th, 2009 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up:

A. Chambers presents The Caretaker State? posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "For decades, politicians have spoken about their visions to “take care” of American citizens, the world population, and the Earth itself. But long before Presidents Obama and Bush, presidents who held a very different vision of the role of government led America."

Burgess Laughlin presents Weaving the Fabric of History posted at Making Progress, saying, "Ideas cause actions. History is the sum of human actions through time. This hopeful post illustrates one tiny thread of change flowing through the fabric of US culture, from 1957 to 2009."

Alex Moya presents The (False) Logic of Sacrifice posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "In his latest book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, the philosopher Peter Singer claims that you are morally obligated to relieve poverty. Singer offers his readers the following “proof” demonstrating why everyone is immoral if they don’t sacrifice for others. But where does one draw the line?"

Brian Phillips presents The "Public Option" and Education posted at Houston Property Rights, saying, "The "public option" in education offers some valuable lessons regarding health care. But only if we think in principles."

Kevin W. presents We Need a “Martian” Option for Health Care Reform! posted at Wisecracks and Wisdom, saying, "Giving what-for to a webcomic posted this week about Obamacare."

Ryan Krause presents The West Bank Has A Stock Exchange? posted at The Money Speech, saying, "West Bank residents choose luxury foreign cars over car bombs."

Diana Hsieh presents Homeowners Associations posted at NoodleFood, saying, "These neighborhood groups often impose irrational rules -- and serve as breeding grounds for petty power-lusters without a shred of respect for property or contract law."

Michael Labeit presents On the Epistemological Problem of Anarchy posted at Coroner's Bureau, saying, "A libertarian anarchist responds to my critique of libertarian anarchism and advocacy of limited government."

Kelly Elmore presents Post-Partum Depression posted at Reepicheep's Coracle, saying, "One of the less talked about (especially among Objectivists) possibilities of parenthood."

Ari Armstrong presents Rationing inherent in Obamacare: Sources for Gazette Article posted at FreeColorado.com, saying, "Read my Gazette article on rationing, then read my follow-up notes."

Stella presents What's missing from One Lesson posted at ReasonPharm, saying, "Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" is still a classic -- but Hazlitt's arguments need a moral component in order to combat healthcare "reform.""

Paul Hsieh presents The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "Whole Foods CEO John Mackey demonstrates courage and integrity in speaking out in favor of free market health care reform."

Michael Labeit presents On Private Factor Ownership and Effective Government posted at Bathtub Gin Brigade, saying, "Why private ownership of the means of production is essential for military effectiveness."

Doug Reich presents Why Liberals Don't Read Their Bills, Evade Their Constituents, but "Penetrate the Message Wars" posted at The Rational Capitalist, saying, "Analysis of how a non-conceptual approach to knowledge leads liberals to vote for any policy seeming to involve sacrifice and state control, regardless of the consequences."

Doug Reich presents Health Insurance Negation Plan posted at The Rational Capitalist, saying, "Obama's proposal to stop insurers from considering pre-existing conditions does not represent a "reform" of insurance, it represents an obliteration of the concept of insurance"

Stephen Bourque presents One Reality: Death Panels posted at One Reality, saying, "What better than “death panel” could capture the meaning of a council of wise government officials who sit around a table deciding who gets what health care, like the Three Fates, spinning, weaving, and - yes - cutting?"

C. August presents Tax Withholding is the Threat Here? posted at Titanic Deck Chairs.

* * *

That concludes this edition of the round-up. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round-up using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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:: Monday, August 10, 2009 ::

Obama’s DNC Mouthpiece

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 5:50 PM

On August 8, I sent this letter to the Democratic National Committee. The letter from Jen O’Malley Dillon -- obviously a form letter prepared for emailing to countless Citizens X for or against ObamaCare -- is reprinted in italics in its entirety following my response to it. Dillon’s letter is as impersonally comforting and assuring as a spam notice that you have a fantastic amount of money sitting in an account with the Bank of Lagos, ready to be wire-transferred to your stateside checking account, if only you would send the undersigned your private banking details. My response does not attempt to counter or refute every assertion, charge, and lie in Dillon’s letter, just the more egregiously offensive statements.

Jen O'Malley Dillon
Executive Director
Democratic National Committee
democraticparty@democrats.org

Dear Jen:

A friend shared with me your letter to him about how evil and anti-democratic Americans are for exercising their First Amendment right to protest the lies and deceptions of the President and the Democratic Party about the health care legislation.

The truth is that the protesters are truly "grassroots," not being guided, advised, or manipulated by nefarious powers behind the scenes. I took part in several Tea Parties over the last few months. No one asked me to. No one paid me to. I'm not being "funded" by anyone or by any organization. I took part because I do not want socialized medicine to destroy my liberty. I know of no one who has taken part in these protests who was acting as a tool of the Republican Party or an insurance company or some other Darth Vaderish entity, as Democratic propaganda asserts.

The truth is that the protesters are not "organized mobs, disrupting town halls, and silencing real discussion." They have every right to shout down any politician who believes he can feed his constituents the same old pap of assurances, promises, and lies about the health care legislation and get away with it. That is what Americans have been told for decades, and they are tired of it. They are smart enough to see a snake in the grass -- dozens of snakes in the tall grass of political obfuscation and in the self-serving rhetoric of venal politicians.

The truth is that there is a need for real health insurance reform -- to get the government out of the realms of medical, health care, and insurance. In fact, out of the economy entirely. Nothing in the Constitution permits the federal government to take care of anyone. The Constitution exists to protect individual rights, the lives of individuals, their happiness and their property. But several Democratic and Republican administrations have usurped those restrictions and limitations. Americans are beginning to connect those dots. Just as Americans connected the dots in 1773 when they "disrupted" the cargoes of tea and tossed them into Boston Harbor. Just as they connected the dots in 1765 against the Stamp Act, and "disrupted" collection of that tax.

Frankly, I wish the Republican Party would take its name seriously enough to be more forthright in its applause of the "disruptions." This is, after all, supposed to be a republic of free individuals, not a democracy of mob rule orchestrated by petit tyrants and professional looters.

More power to Americans if they can intimidate presumptuous, power-seeking, sanctimonious lawmakers.

You stated in your letter that "as the President has repeatedly said, health insurance reform will create more health care choices for the American people, not reduce them. If you like your insurance or your doctor, you can keep them, and there is no 'government takeover' in any part of any plan supported by the President or Congress." Who asked you to intrude on people's choices in the first place? Why intrude, if you do not intend to take over the whole realm of health care? Who are you to care whether or not I like my insurance or my doctor? The only job of an elected representative or senator is to uphold the Constitution and individual rights. Period.

You state in your letter: "Health insurance reform is about our lives, our jobs, and our families -- we can't let distortions and intimidation get in the way." What is this our business? I don't own you, and you don't own me. There is no such thing as a collective that can legitimately employ that adjective. There is just a collection of individuals, free to associate with each other or not. My business is not your business, or anyone else's, except in voluntary association or trade. But that's something the health care legislation would end -- by chaining all Americans together in a work gang.

Speaking of distortions, how many millions of dollars has the DNC committed to defeating American opposition to slavery or servitude with smears, lies and glitzy TV ads? And speaking of intimidation, just who unleashed the troglodytes of ACORN, the AFL-CIO, and SEIU (a notoriously communist organization, with international links, of course) on Tea Partiers and others who protest the health care bill? You should warn those thugs: If attacked, we will fight back. Just as we did at Lexington and Concord, and at Bunker Hill.

Your party stooped to a new low when the President authorized an invitation to Americans to inform on each other if they overheard or read a breath of criticism of the health care bill. Well, that tactic certainly backfired, did it not?

Yes, it's going to be a long, hot August. We, the new Sons of Liberty, will also stand strong together to expose the truth about the indentured servitude you are proposing.

Sincerely, and yours in liberty,

Edward Cline

Dear Citizen:

There's been a lot of media coverage about organized mobs intimidating lawmakers, disrupting town halls, and silencing real discussion about the need for real health insurance reform.

The truth is, it's a sham. These "grassroots protests" are being organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies who are desperate to block reform. They're trying to use lies and fear to break the President and his agenda for change.

Health insurance reform is about our lives, our jobs, and our families -- we can't let distortions and intimidation get in the way. We need to expose these outrageous tactics, and we're counting on you to help. Can you read these "5 facts about the anti-reform mobs," then pass them along to your friends and family?

Five facts about the anti-reform mobs

1. These disruptions are being funded and organized by out-of-district special-interest groups and insurance companies who fear that health insurance reform could help Americans, but hurt their bottom line. A group run by the same folks who made the "Swiftboat" ads against John Kerry is compiling a list of congressional events in August to disrupt. An insurance company coalition has stationed employees in 30 states to track where local lawmakers hold town-hall meetings.

2. People are scared because they are being fed frightening lies. These crowds are being riled up by anti-reform lies being spread by industry front groups that invent smears to tarnish the President's plan and scare voters. But as the President has repeatedly said, health insurance reform will create more health care choices for the American people, not reduce them. If you like your insurance or your doctor, you can keep them, and there is no "government takeover" in any part of any plan supported by the President or Congress.

3. Their actions are getting more extreme. Texas protesters brought signs displaying a tombstone for Rep. Lloyd Doggett and using the "SS" symbol to compare President Obama's policies to Nazism. Maryland Rep. Frank Kratovil was hanged in effigy outside his district office. Rep. Tim Bishop of New York had to be escorted to his car by police after an angry few disrupted his town hall meeting -- and more examples like this come in every day. And they have gone beyond just trying to derail the President's health insurance reform plans, they are trying to "break" the President himself and ruin his Presidency.

4. Their goal is to disrupt and shut down legitimate conversation. Protesters have routinely shouted down representatives trying to engage in constructive dialogue with voters, and done everything they can to intimidate and silence regular people who just want more information. One attack group has even published a manual instructing protesters to "stand up and shout" and try to "rattle" lawmakers to prevent them from talking peacefully with their constituents.

5. Republican leadership is irresponsibly cheering on the thuggish crowds. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner issued a statement applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

It's time to expose this charade, before it gets more dangerous. Please send these facts to everyone you know. You can also post them on your website, blog, or Facebook page.

Now, more than ever, we need to stand strong together and defend the truth.

Thanks,

Jen

I have a suggestion in reference to the poor Congressmen who fled their town halls under police escort, or who were hanged in effigy, or who find Americans who “disrupt” their peaceful convocations of the clueless wholly “un-democratic” and “thuggish.“ It should be an emphatic point of discussion that any politician who does not open his town hall meeting or forum with a clear statement that he is pledged to defend individual rights and private property -- including the bodies of individuals -- and will fight tooth and nail against passage of the health care/health insurance legislation -- that unless he is willing to make such a statement with unquestionable sincerity and certitude -- he will overstep or suborn his mandate to uphold the Constitution and represent his constituents, and will earn the disruption and untoward questions put to him, regardless of the rules of order.

He may advocate socialism and all the scams and schemes he wishes, as a private citizen -- but not as an elected official. This is what Americans should demand. They must grasp that it is not reason or civil discourse that the statists and collectivists want in these encounters. They want bovine agreement and unthinking obedience.

If a Congressman or Senator is unwilling to make such a pledge, then he should not hold the charade of a town hall meeting or forum. He should ignore his constituents and vote according to his feelings.

It is now a matter of either/or, not only for Democratic and Republican politicians, but for any American with courage and integrity enough to understand what is at stake and to question any politician’s right to plunder the lives and fortunes of those who sent him to office.

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:: Thursday, August 06, 2009 ::

Obama’s Email Arrogance

:: Posted by Edward Cline at 11:23 AM

Obama’s Email Arrogance

Yesterday I sent this impertinent message to President Barack Obama when his staff sent me the invitation to inform on other Americans who criticize his and Congress’s plans to impose socialized health care on the country.

The White House
flag@whitehouse.gov

5 August 2009

Dear Mr. President:

What is your definition of "fishy"? That it is odiferous? Bad-smelling? Unwelcome? Stinky? Ready to bury?

How dare you refer to Americans criticizing your socialist health and economic plans, and the facts they are bringing to light about your whole power-lusting, corrupt regime as fishy? How dare you threaten to abrogate their First Amendment rights?

Oh, that's right. I forgot. You don't want to be president of a nation of free men. You want to lord it over a nation of dependent troglodytes, ever grateful for the crumbs you throw them after you've eaten the cakes they created through productive work.

If anything can be described as fishy in this country now, it is your administration, and Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, and Barney Frank, and the whole crew of your looting parasites.

So, flag this!!

Regards,

A real American and a genuine patriot.

The key paragraph in the White House’s invitation is this:

“There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors travel just beneath the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

This was preceded by two other interesting paragraphs:

“Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, ‘facts are stubborn things.’

Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to ‘uncover’ the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.”

This announcement was posted by Macon Phillips (White House Director of News Media, go here for the career of this non-entity), but bets can be taken that the idea of inviting Americans to inform on each other is not flying too well at the moment, for undoubtedly the “in box” of flag@whitehouse.gov was almost immediately filled to overflowing with emails from outraged Americans, organized or not. This was not a good idea. Phillips and his handlers in the White House should have realized, given the genuine opposition across the country to Obama’s and Congress’s health care bill, that the reaction to it would have been overwhelmingly instant and “negative.”

What were they thinking? Perhaps, given that opposition, which has chiefly taken the form of what White House denizens have characterized as “disrupters” not tolerating the bromides and platitudes of elected representatives’ raucous town hall meetings about the proposed legislation, they are feeling desperate enough to try anything.

In addition to having the gall to quote John Adams, Phillips (or whoever wrote the invitation, it was probably a committee effort) also paraphrased Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” as though that reference to Gore’s discredited “scary movie” on global warming still had some currency among Americans. He also refers to First Amendment communications between bloggers and individuals as “scary chain emails” and videos as “percolating” on the Internet, chock full of “disinformation.” Facts, however, are not what the White House and its allies in Congress are conveying to the American public about the contents of the health care bill. They have launched, for the length of August up until Congress reconvenes in September, a campaign of disinformation not only about the contents of the bill, but against anyone opposed to the legislation, whether he is a Republican, a voter, or a blogger.

One might wonder where Obama and Company get their arrogance. They get it from the fact that the have gotten away with lies and disinformation for so long.

What is worrisome -- and that is the kindest term I can think of at the moment -- is that all the emails, friendly or not to the idea of informing on fellow Americans, can be collected and used somehow to punish or reward, whether or not the health bill legislation passes. Remember the outrage of the news media over President George W. Bush’s “lost” emails? Even the ever-loyal news media is stammering its reservations about the informant program.

Senator John Cornyn raises this issue in his letter to Obama about the impropriety of asking Americans to inform on others.

“Furthermore, Cornyn wrote, the collection of e-mails could amount to the White House amassing various forms of personally identifiable information.”

Among other things, Cornyn posed this important question to Obama:

“At the very least, I request that you detail to Congress and the public the protocols that your White House is following to purge the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and identities of citizens who are reported to have engaged in “fishy” speech.”

It will be interesting if Cornyn gets an answer to any of his questions. Read the whole text of his letter here. There is some comfort in seeing that not all politicians are clueless or indifferent.

But, make no mistake about it: If Obama and Company are willing to stoop to so low a tactic as inviting Americans to inform on each other, even in “casual conversation,” what else would they be willing to do? Aside from all the lies and disinformation conveyed to the public over the last six months about not only the health care bill, but about TARP, the cash for clunkers program, and even Harry Reid’s pet project, a magnet-train link between California and Las Vegas (!!!), this tactic reveals the core, evil soul of Obama and his supporters in and out of government in their quest for total power. Germans were asked by Hitler to inform on their fellow Germans, and tens of thousands of Germans wound up in work camps or concentration camps.

Will Americans follow suit, or are there still enough of us alive to put a brake on our march to fascism?

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