Trouncing CREDO With Capitalism

CREDO is the name of a political activist organization that has replaced ACORN.

It has an nice web site---http://www.workingforchange.com/ Using only black and a soft blue-green pastel, it looks fresh and clean and invites easy reading without many distracting colors, boxes and bars. The layout is simple and easily navigated, the content is provided in a good size font easy to read.

On the left side of the site is a list of current events with brief paragraphs stating what CREDO is against or for, and includes admonitions to take various actions. On the right side of the site is a feature entitled "Mobile CREDO."

Here's an overview of some of the "issues" on the site. The lead paragraph links to a blog entitled "Praying for Palin." The blog post is a sanctimoniously cowardly attack blaming Mrs. Palin for the Tucson shooting. The site writer then hops to filibuster reform, then abortion, then declares that "We must put a stop to the escalating hate rhetoric of the right and its very specific calls to armed violent act." Then back to filibuster reform, to the riots in Egypt, to bashing John Boehner and the Tea parties. Next it's the Koch brothers "and their Tea Party funding cabal," then over to "U.S. evangelicals spreading hate in Uganda," and on to the Chamber of Commerce. And so forth and so on.

The funniest statement on this site is the charge that Ayn Rand "secretly applied for Medicare and Social Security." The statement is, of course, merely the writer's public announcement of the absence of gray matter between his own ears.

The Left's "argument" boils down to the claim that those who were forced to pay into a system over which they had no say and no control may not request return of their money in the form of Social Security payments, nor seek redress of funds through Medicare. In other words, the robbed has no right to request a return of his money from the robber.

To the Leftists, to want your money back "contradicts" your view that Social Security and government health care is wrong. That point of view certainly squares with Leftist's philosophy, which is that only those who did not pay into the system should be given government money.

As in almost everything else, Leftists do not have a grasp of principles. Their frantic demand to be taken care of has caused in them a serious break with reality. The extent of that break is evident in CREDO's harangues to run from "crisis" to "crisis." Let them.

Meanwhile, those of us who advocate individual rights, limited government and free-markets will make significant strides. How? By showing people how capitalism works, and that it is for them as individuals---not as a nest of ants.

I started doing that on Twitter some months ago. I was surprised that the number of followers jumped from zero per day to 2 a day. A lot of people are interested in learning how capitalism works and why it's the only moral system devised by man.

Here are some Tweets I posted in the past and will be posting in the future:

Capitalism allows men to rise by choice---not by force--to whatever level they can. The ambitious create large markets.

The welfare state hampers the ambitious through regulation.

In capitalism, small businesses proliferate, supported by large businesses. Support industries surrounding large companies are an example.

The welfare state hinders small business employment by taking money from the able to give to the less able, thus encouraging stagnation.

Capitalism frees men to function to the best of their ability.

The welfare state penalizes the able through regulation and progressive taxes and forces the less able into dependency.

To phase out gov't interference in the economy and to phase in capitalism, the first step is to de-regulate.

---End Tweets-------

FYI: An acquaintance of mine reminded me of the following quote, which identifies a principle that is applicable to many contexts. Because I have touched on differences between capitalism and the welfare state, it is highly appropriate here.

“The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.” --- St. Thomas Aquinas 1225-1274, Italian Scholastic Philosopher and Theologian

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Tweets Posted Last Week

Nov 8, 2010:
Understanding what capitalism is: “Capitalism is a social system in which all property is privately owned.”

At present we have a “mixed-economy,” meaning some freedoms and many regulations.

Capitalism is founded upon the moral principle of individual rights. Regulations violate rights by imposing limitations upon freedoms.

Nov 9, 2010:
Capitalism is a process of voluntary trade. It requires men be free to choose, set goals and decide how they want to achieve those goals.

Capitalism means those with capital are free to voluntarily take risks and make a profit or not.

Capitalism means that investors & businesses are not to be bailed out if they fail. Capitalism requires individual responsibility

Capitalism means those who seek loans take responsibility for re-paying them & that lenders are not forced to make loans they deem risky.

Nov 10, 2010:
Capitalism means that men have the right to save their money & will not be forced to support those they do not choose to support.

Capitalism means that those who choose to help the indigent will not be stopped.

Capitalism means that those who offer a product consumers want won't be penalized as some companies presently are---e.g., Microsoft.

Capitalism means that Americans will not be forced to subsidize a product consumers don't---for example, modern art.

Nov 11, 2010:
Capitalism means that those who want to farm their land are free to do so but may not force others to support them---i.e. gov't subsidies.

Capitalism means those who want a good education are free to seek one but may not force others to pay for it.

Capitalism means that those who want a house are free to build or buy one but may not force others to pay for it.

Capitalism means individualism. Individualism means a military dedicated to freedom---in intellect & physical courage. Thank you, American military.

Nov 12, 2010:
Capitalism means that those who want a job are free to create or apply for one but may not force others to provide one.

Capitalism means that one requests a raise in salary but mat not force an employer to give it, or vote themselves one, e.g. gov't officials.

Capitalism means that those who want to form a union may do so but may not force a company to accept it or an employee to join it.

Nov 13, 2010:
Capitalism means that those who want to build a library for a community are free to do so but may not force others to support it.

Capitalism means that disputes be settled in courts of objective law and that lawmen & judges be held accountable for their actions.

Capitalism means that the initiation of force is prohibited and those who initiate it are punished---including gov't officials.

Prohibition Revisited

Survivalists, or "Preppers" as they sometimes call themselves, see a bleak future. They could be right…or not. It depends on which road we take: acquiescence or resistance.

Prohibition made it illegal for Americans to buy alcohol. It did not stop them from drinking. It increased it. Going to a speakeasy was groovy, as collegians -- even high school students -- sought new adventures. Others started to drink in sheer defiance of the heavy handedness of the federal enforcement of the 18th Amendment.

Prohibition interfered with individuals' choices. So does the healthcare law. ObamaCare interferes with the relationship between doctor and patient. The new law will not stop suffering. It will increase it. The Affordable Health Care Act (Public Law No. 111-148) forces doctors to give free examinations and preventive treatment. In some cities, doctors are currently paid as little as $8.00 a visit. That fee can be expected to decline further under the new law. The number of doctors taking Medicare/Medicaid patients has dropped from over 70% to approximately 50% in 2009.

This percentage is expected to continue to sink farther, as doctors withdraw or refuse to take part. One hopes so. They have formed a Tea Party and are advocating the repeal of the healthcare law. Most doctors know that capitalism would fairly reward the highly skilled. Welfare states on the premise that the able are obligated to care for the malingerer, do not.

Prohibition increased criminal activity. So will the healthcare law. As the number of doctors decline and the safety of medical practices is sabotaged by corruption and fraud, criminal activity in black markets will erupt. The unscrupulous will offer shoddy, possibly even deadly medications, preying upon those tired of waiting in long lines.

Those denied access to medical care will surely face extortionists. Donald Berwick, arch-socialist, has been nominated to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He admires Great Britain's health care system. He supports massive government rationing. Those who accede to politician/bureaucrats' demands will get treatment. Those who don't, won't.

Mr. Berwick also supports a massive health care bureaucracy to redistribute the wealth. The wealth he will loot will pass into non-productive hands and unprofitable schemes, disappearing down black holes of spending instead of investment. Mr. Berwick's nullification of individuals' choices guarantees that the productive will vanish.

The healthcare law also usurps State sovereignty. It has been widely reported that 21 states have filed lawsuits on the grounds of the unconstitutionality of the healthcare law, that 10 more are planning to, and that 41 states are banning key aspects of it. The infringement on state sovereignty as much as the unaffordable cost prompted Florida, for instance, to act. The Complaint, filed in the US District Court Northern District of Florida, shows that the law will add another 1 million enrollees to Florida's already bloated 2.7 million Medicare/Medicaid recipients. The healthcare cost for Florida will be around $6,700 per person. New Mexico will have to shoulder an estimated 91,000 new enrollees at $7,074 per person.

Nationally, the new health care law will add $562 billion to the deficit over the next ten years. Since the costs of implementing and creating state bureaucracies to run the healthcare program are not included in healthcare estimates, the actual deficit is expected to be close to $1 trillion. Former New Mexico Congresswoman Heather Wilson rhetorically asked in an e-mail to several acquaintances, including this author, "Where is that money coming from?"

Productive citizens in the private sector are the government's only source of real revenue. To illustrate one way of squeezing that source, a business associate related the following: "A friend was medi-vac'd from St. Vincent's to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Her bill there was $106,000. The hospital accepted the Medicare reimbursement as payment in full. That reimbursement was $5,000. The $101,000 then [went] to G & A as overhead to be passed on to other patients with health insurance, [who] will pay higher rates for service."

The new healthcare law mandates even lower hospital reimbursements.

Prohibition sought to force individuals not to buy a product an individual wanted. The healthcare law seeks to force individuals to buy a product an individual may not want. Both laws violate the individual rights to life and property. Advertisers entreat you to buy a product, or shun a competitor's, but they cannot force you to do so. A government can. It points a gun---i.e. prison and/or a fine if you do not obey---at your head to force you to take actions you do not choose. Since life is a process of making choices and taking actions to sustain your life, such laws violate your right to life by placing politicians' values between your choices and your actions. In the same way, they violate your right to property by forcing you to spend your money (your property) as they dictate.

The violation of individual rights is not only a violation of one's political freedom. It is more fundamentally a violation of one's moral values. The violation of one's right to life, for instance, is the attempt to cancel one's reason. Since every man must think in order to live, thinking is a matter of sustaining one's life, and thus it is right to use one's own mind to do one's job and earn one's way. Hence, reason is a moral value. When, however, the government violates your right to life, it violates the function of that moral value. It says, in effect, the government will tell you what to do, you must forgo following your own thinking and choice.

The violation of individual rights also violates one's moral virtues. It is no secret that after more than a generation of the welfare state, those bought up in it have a moocher mentality and a malingerer's approach to self-supporting work. Such attitudes show that the virtue of productivity has been destroyed and that the virtue of pride and the virtue of independence
---the choice to think for oneself---have been obliterated. The individual who held a sign in Arizona protesting that state's immigration law is an example of what violating moral virtues lead to. Her sign read: "We want free food; free housing. You owe us, America."

"They can put me in jail and fine me. I will not comply with that law," Dr. Andrew Bernstein, author of Capitalism Unbound, stated on his Facebook wall. Others have come to the same conclusion. What will happen when a large number of otherwise law-abiding, hard working, tax-paying Americans elect to go to jail rather than comply? Who---or what---is the government going to loot next? Bank and retirement accounts. It has already begun. A proposal is being readied to take over retirement accounts. The productive are the competent. Without the competent to maintain them, electrical grids will break down. Illumination, cooking, heating, cooling, security systems, stock trading, banking, computers controlling myriad operations of all forms of communications, transportation, water supply and fuel pumps, will not function. Food supplies will also be affected.

Harvested food will rot in trucks stopped on the roadside for lack of fuel, and in stores for lack of refrigeration. People desperate for food will tear through crops. Whatever foodstuffs remain in the fields will spoil without a means to harvest and transport it.

As the supply of goods dwindles, the number of sick will balloon. Different forms of medical help will be offered. The government's extortion racket will surely invite "underground" practices. Like the speakeasies of the Prohibition era, you will have to know someone to gain admission into a trustworthy underground medical facility. Thugs will run another type of facility, offering bogus remedies and butcher-knife "operations." Many people will die unnecessarily. And not on clean sheets.

We should be prepared, but our goal should be to retrieve our country. Preppers seek to move to self-sufficient rural areas, isolating themselves as much as possible from what they believe is to come. Let us stay and fight. Let us dedicate ourselves to Patrick Henry's view.

We need not accept so dark a future. We need not acquiesce to the meaning and intent of this law---which comes close to near-total control of individual lives. Consider who fashioned this law: Corrupt, grasping, dishonest politicians who have caused crises after crises---such as Barney Frank's "Affordable Housing" which is acknowledged to have been the underlying cause of the economic meltdown. Such men and women have presumed to write a law violating our rights and telling us we must obey it. Are you willing to be ruled by such creatures?

Let us repeal the healthcare law. Let us vote out those corrupt politicians. Let us recognize the importance of free-market medicine and individual rights, and that we cannot have one without the other and be healthy and safe.

Ideas and Politics

It is not unusual to hear politicians express contempt for philosophical ideas while simultaneously claiming they are Progressives and Pragmatist---as if those words did not give title to volumes of philosophical ideas---each resting upon the most lethal premise in man’s history.

While many Republicans---conservative and liberal alike---steep themselves in social issues of highly charged emotionality, such as abortion, they evade or ignore fundamental ideas. Some fail to distinguish between concretes and fundamentals completely, thus disarming themselves for a battle that requires intellectual clarity and moral certitude.

Fundamental ideas give rise to, make possible and color every concrete with which an individual deals. To evade or ignore them is to invite disaster. That’s what has happened to the Republican Party. They have for too long mouthed the same Democrat pap that we’ve heard scores of times. If the Democrats, for instance, say they want to provide universal health care, the Republicans do not denounce such a flagrant attack on individual rights. Instead they say, “Yes, we do too, but not your way.” On this issue as on every other, the Republicans are on the same page with the Democrats, singing the same tune, using the same chords, merely in a different key.

Some politicians claim that voters are not interested in ideas. This is patently false. The grassroots assuredly are interested in ideas, as witness the avalanche of interest in Ayn Rand’s books---which deal exclusively with the dramatization of ideas. American voters are not indifferent to ideas as the lines at libraries, the sales in bookstores and the explosion of blogs attests. At present they are looking for ideas more eagerly than ever before.

The Republican Party has said that it wants to figure out how to re-invigorate the GOP. They can do it if they throw out collectivist ideas. This will disassociate the party from past mistakes. In lieu of discarded collectivism, the GOP should rally Americans to the restoration of individual rights, the only effective way to counteract the Obama government's collectivist assault on the American people. The restoration of our individual rights protects our freedoms, makes possible limited government, and leads to capitalism.

The grassroots recognizes the validity and importance of the right to life, property, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They understand the connection between their individual rights and their choice of work, keeping what they earn, disposing of their income as they see fit, choosing their own doctor and paying their own way. They are fully aware that when one takes from the producer/earner to give to the non-earner, one is depleting savings. They know that reducing savings reduces investment in productive enterprises, which chokes growth, which reduces the standard of living.

Collectivism holds that the individual exists for the state. For decades Democrats have advocated taking from the earner and giving to the non-earner. They have advocated enforced unionization, enforced medical care, enforced social security, enforced public education, enforced business regulation. Obama’s Administration has crystallized this practice.

The grassroots has been clearly shown the irresponsible spending that blasts through the stratosphere, the disastrous regulations and take-overs of companies, the harassment and intimidation of businessmen, the support of corrupt union leaders against the membership, the appeasement of our enemies and the snubbing of our allies, the attempts at “fishy” censorship, and now, recently, the attempt to shut down free expression on the net. They have been told the topsy-turvy collectivist line that a rich nation is a bad nation, that producers/earners are demonical threats to society, that those who create jobs are exploitative, that dissent is unpatriotic (now, but wasn't during the 1960s), that supporting countries that deserve it is intolerant but kissing thugs and bowing to savage rulers is sensitive diplomacy.

The preceding are all concrete expressions of a fundamental idea: statism. Statism is the culmination of collectivism, the rule of brute force, in which the state is supreme, the individual subservient to the ruler in all respects and instances. Statism is the complete destruction of the individual and his rights.

To stop the Obama Administration’s giddy plunge toward statism, the Republican Party would be foolish---and self-destructive---not to join the grassroots and commit itself to the restoration of individual rights. The GOP could seek no greater re-generation than to re-establish the abstract ideas this country was founded on: individual rights, limited government and capitalism, and their concrete social expression, our constitutional freedoms: freedom of speech, of press, of assembly, of worship, and to keep and bear arms.

Collectivists say might makes right. But it does not. Rights make right. If the Republican Party wants to be a viable political party, they must self-righteously proclaim the practical virtue of individual rights, a moral principle that assures peace and prosperity. Nothing more than this is needed. Nothing short of this will win.

Report on the Albuquerque, NM Tea Party

Last night the Albuquerque Tea Party Organization met in preparation for the July 4th rally. About 60 New Mexican volunteers were present.

The Albuquerque Tea Party leadership is impressive. The men and women are personable and easy to work with. They are affable, dedicated and hard working individuals, objective thinkers who understand the importance of principles and of working toward fundamentals without being way-laid by narrower concerns that often bog down start-up organizations.

The evidence of the ABQ Tea Party leadership's objective thinking is shown by their position paper. For instance,

Mission Statement:
"To preserve the Constitutional Rights of the citizens of the U.S.A., by limiting government; constraining government spending and taxation; and advancing a free market economy."

Core Issues: "
Excessive government spending, taxation, intervention;
Individual's Constitutional Rights;
Free market Economy (Capitalism).

Those interested in the development of tea parties may already know that a vast network of organizations has been and is presently escalating across the nation. The Tea Party Patriots at present seem to dominate most of these and are coordinating a national effort. To this end, most of the Tea Party organizations in cities throughout the nation are now affiliated with the TPP. Some of these affiliates have undertaken various and different kinds of goals. For instance, some of them advocate anti-abortion positions and religious concerns.

The ABQ Tea Party is affiliated with TPP but is more philosophically oriented. This is certainly the better route to take. The way to overturn government excesses is to pound home on the fundamentals of limited government, capitalism and individual rights. Get these; the rest takes care of itself.

The Albuquerque group has a clearly thought out foundation. They are in it for the long haul with their focus presently out to 2012. Primaries are being looked at during "lulls" between Tea Parties to consider candidates best to support and "throw out the bums" as one man said.

A town hall meeting is planned for June 25 to argue against universal health care.

Way to go New Mexico!

America At A Crossroads

Today's political mix includes liberal and conservative Republicans, and liberal and conservative Democrats. The Republican and Democrat tags no longer accurately identify political doctrine. The designations liberal and conservative have also changed from their original meaning.

Today's liberalism is a perversion of Classical Liberalism, which stressed the essential goodness and rationality of man and his ability to recognize and solve problems, all of which led to systematic improvement in man's life, exemplified by the Enlightenment.

The corruption began in 1848. Karl Marx and Friedich Engels, ignoring the vast improvements the Enlightenment made possible, argued that the state should advance the welfare of individuals. Since the state has no income except by taxing those who produce, those who produce were sentenced to provide for those who did not, violating the rights of producers.

The corruption spread in the 1930s when Roosevelt signed into law the minimum wage, progressive taxation, Social Security and established Fannie Mae to provide low-interest mortgages. Classical Liberalism was dead. Liberalism and the welfare state became one: socialism.

Conservatism originally supported limited government and free enterprise. But it also held that political, social and religious institutions represented ageless wisdom and that the source of individual rights were "gifts from God," not man's nature. Rights, therefore, were considered privileges meted out in obedience to God.

The communist victory in Russia disarmed conservatives. They recognized that their own views did not contradict communism. Politically "You are your brother's keeper" was collectivism. Seeking to disassociate themselves from communism, conservative patriotism devolved into "my country right or wrong." By 2008, John McCain solidified this view explicitly with the campaign slogan "Country First," stressing duty and placing the group above the individual: nationalism.

In the decades following World War II, liberal and conservative doctrine continued to draw closer. Both attempted to defend the nation against communism using questionable methods. During the 1950s, conservatives used abrasive, sometimes intrusive investigative methods. In the 1960s liberals attempted to assassinate a communist head of state.

During his inauguration speech John F. Kennedy, sounded the conservatives nationalist theme scolding Americans to "Ask what you can do for your country," then in his liberal role doubled the number of government regulatory agencies. Two decades later, conservative Ronald Reagan continued Kennedy's big government policies and signed Affirmative Action into law, violating the rights of businessmen by telling them whom to hire.

In 1965, liberal Lyndon Johnson established Medicare and Medicaid, violating the rights of doctors, the medical profession and those requiring its services. In 2003 conservative George W. Bush violated another large segment of the medical profession with the Prescription Drug Act.

By such actions as these and many, many more, conservatism and liberalism merged to become nationalist-socialism, hardly distinguishable from each other in their violations of individual rights.

Nationalist-socialism is fascism, a form of collectivism that shuns individual rights and the division of political power, leading to dictatorship. Fascism is government ownership of the means of production, with private enterprise ordered to do the work and take responsibility for it.

In 1970, Lyndon Johnson re-structured Fannie Mae, then added Freddie Mac, exempting both from taxation and oversight. Currently, Freddie and Fannie Mae---i.e. the government---control 90 percent of the nation's secondary mortgage market. Today, a government-created financial crisis is blamed on "greedy" businessmen and "capitalism," while the government orders CEOs to resign and to conceal vital information from shareholders.

Liberals claim they are not socialist. They merely want to force rich people to feed poor people. But individual rights determined by other people's wishes are not rights.

Conservatives claim they are not theocratic nationalists. They merely want to force people to do their duty to church and state. But rights dictated according to a group's desires are not rights.

Liberals claim they do not seek to violate individual rights---except when the violation is for a cause they deem "good," such as forcing men to practice socialized medicine. But rights restricted by some people's needs are not rights.

Conservatives claim they do not seek to violate individual rights---except when the violation is for a cause they consider morally sound, such as forcing women to have children they do not want. But rights predicated on the assumption of women's inferior status to force them into unchosen actions are not rights.

"A right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." [Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights"] To claim that a moral principle is at the mercy of another's wish is blasphemous. Rights do not include the "right" to violate another's rights---no matter what the need, wish, demand, or assumption.

America has been pushed toward a cross roads where she must choose between force and freedom, between government edict and individual rights. If we choose freedom and rights then we must dismantle the welfare state and abjure fascism. In place of the welfare state we must establish genuine free enterprise for once---Laissez-faire capitalism---which means protection of individual rights and limited government. Nothing short of this will free us. Nothing more than this is worth fighting for.
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Suggested Reading:
Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal
Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Tea Parties - America's New Direction?

On April 15, 2009 Tea Parties protesting the government's fiscal irresponsibility took place throughout the nation. A second Tea Party is being planned for July 4.

Rejecting socialism, Tea Party participants are acting fundamentally on the principle of individual rights. It is right to earn a living. It is wrong to give our earnings to those who don’t. It is right to benefit from one’s own efforts and actions. It is wrong to "bail out" companies which the government caused to fail in the first place, then make us pay for the government's mistakes.

Government-created Fannie and Freddie Mae unleashed Barney Frank's "Affordable Housing" program and pressured banks and insurance companies to give loans and coverage to those who could not afford it. Yet the government claims that capitalism has failed and more government intervention is required. But the present economic system is not capitalism and it is not free.

We live in a "mixed economy"---one with some freedom and many controls. We are still free to start a business, but not free to run it the way we see fit. Government regulations presently control every size business on every level---federal, state and city. We are still free to own some property and visit stores of our choice, but the government controls and regulates virtually every product and service we buy, including entertainment, energy, land, fuel and the air waves.

We have been misinformed about the nature of an economic system that is founded on the individual's right to his own life, to benefit from his own effort, to dispose of what he earns as he chooses. We have been misled about an economic system that despite continuous government interference has resulted in the creation of the richest nation on earth, filled with the most generous individuals on earth. It is an economic system that has been vilified, maligned, distorted and made the scapegoat of every government failure and disaster caused by government regulation since the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913. That system is capitalism.

"Capitalism," novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, "is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned."

In a completely free society, the government's role is solely to protect individual rights. It leaves men free to produce or not as they choose, to work to the best of their ability or not as they choose, to trade with others, to benefit from their own effort, to save and invest and support charities as they choose.

But over many decades government has increasingly violated our rights and eroded our freedom. Today we are seeing the culmination of that erosion in an open assault on individual freedom. Kennedy's bill, for instance, to make "volunteerism" mandatory for all Americans, from children to seniors, is as flagrant a contradiction in terms as it is a blatant attack on individual rights of life, property, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To safeguard the individual and thereby the nation, men must be left free to think and act and work without government controls and regulations. Tea Parties may be the catalyst that will help to shift our country toward a genuinely free and morally sound direction. They may be the beginning of a grass roots movement to tell government to leave us alone. Get out of our lives. Limit government. Protect individual rights. Let us implement a truly free enterprise system of economics. Let us for once practice genuine laissez-faire capitalism.

Suggested Reading:
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal
Ayn Rand, Philosophy Who Needs It

Ayn Rand and the Financial Crisis

In this time of financial crisis and the Democrats' irrational response to it, Americans are showing a growing interest in Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Increasing sales of her masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, have been reported around the United States. Reports in The Economist indicate the same is happening in Great Britain.

People are looking for better answers than the Democrats' frenzied bacchanal of print and spend. Surely appointing tax evaders to cabinet posts have raised many a temper. Even Democrats at the important grass roots level are disenchanted by the proposal to raise taxes on those making $250,000 or more per annum. Such a proposal affects every small businessperson in the country, and many of the self-employed. In protest, one such small businessperson coined the phrase "Going Galt," which has gained considerable publicity.

Raising dividend and capital gains taxes will increase the penalty on those who've worked and struggled a lifetime to save for their retirement. The shamefully dictatorial mindlessness of universal health care will break the back of doctors, the medical profession as a whole, their patients and every hard-working American and their children who will be forced to pay for it. The unbridled insolence of the current administration proposal to "cut back" on doctor's "pay" reminds one of Caligula's mental state.

The only people who will benefit from this orgy of print, spend and dictate will be the corrupt.

This is not what most Americans want. And so we are looking for answers. Answers are available. They lay in our moral base.

The morality, or ethics, one accepts gives rise to the politics one accepts. This is true of every individual whether he is aware of it or not. Since a nation is composed of many individuals, their combined choices will sum to a majority accepting a given ethical system. In this way, the predominating choices shape the nations' politics---its practices if not its principles.

One of the leading questions of ethics is: who should be the beneficiary of a man's actions? Should a man live for himself, or should he live for others?

If he lives for himself he keeps the result of his efforts and uses his property for his own purposes. Our own past history shows that the greater the freedom to live for one's own benefit, the more will men prosper, and so will the nation. Objectivism holds that this is moral. It is called rational selfishness. Individualism, free-enterprise and limited government are its political expressions.

If a man lives for others, then whatever he earns must be given to someone else---inevitably to those who earn less than he does. In this way, as the Soviet Union demonstrated, the standard of living declines radically and the nation as a whole spirals down into poverty and destruction. Objectivism holds that this is immoral. It is called altruism. Collectivism is its political expression. Socialism is an instance of collectivism.

We presently have a "mixed economy," with some freedom and many controls, regulations, restrictions and intrusions into our economic activity and private lives. This has led to many socialistic practices, and if Obama and Pelosi have their way, socialism will surely engulf this nation ever more extensively.

The first step out of this government-created financial mess is to CUT taxes. We are taxed at every level of government. Taxes should be CUT across the board---federal, state and city---and of every kind including property and sales taxes. Leave more money in the hands of those who've earned it. Whatever one may think about the current government's policies, most Americans agree that taxes are too high and too many and they are becoming increasingly onerous.

The first step toward recapturing the original meaning of our nation---a nation of free men---is to recognize the inviolate right of the individual to his life and property, which is based on the ethical system of a man's right to live for himself---i.e., rational selfishness. Once this point of view is adopted, we shall begin to experience a far better future.

Ayn Rand's ethical system rests upon reason and individual rights. To discover the true meaning of capitalism, to establish genuine free-enterprise and authentic limited government, it is her ethical system the United States should adopt.

To learn more, you might care to visit The Ayn Rand Institute web site: http://www.aynrand.org/

At web site of The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights are some interesting articles on the financial crisis: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=arc_financial_crisis

Suggested Reading:
Atlas Shrugged
The Virtue of Selfishness
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Philosophy Who Needs It

Letter to Editor, Boston Globe: Published

Re a writer's query to Ayn Rand fans: There's no need to apologize for free-markets. But because of considerable mis-education, there is a need to explain them. The use of the terms "execrable" and "distribution of wealth" indicates the mistaken Marxist-Keynesian views of the questioner. Properly, wealth is not be "distributed." It is earned. CEOs do that. They earn a lot of money because they have a great deal more responsibility than other employees do. Most importantly, they create jobs, expand production and thereby raise the standing of living. Politicians' promises "to create jobs" is self-aggrandizement. Politicians don't create jobs. CEOs do. That's why they're highly paid.

©2008. Sylvia Bokor. All Rights Reserved.
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Suggested Reading:
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal