The murders of American diplomatic and military personnel in Libya underscore the consequences of America’s longstanding failure to uphold the rights of Americans to live and speak their minds in the face of the Islamist threat.

For decades, U.S. policymakers have refused to recognize the religious character and goals of the Islamist movement. That movement — which encompasses Tehran’s mullahs, al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and many others — is a political ideology that seeks to subjugate all the world’s peoples, by physical force, under the supreme governing authority of Islamic religious law, in every area of life and thought.

America has for decades failed to see how that audacious long-term plan of conquest — however grandiose and fanciful it might seem — in fact actuates the Islamist cause. Whether the Libyan murderers and the mobs in Cairo and in Sanaa were truly incensed by a YouTube film or merely using that as a pretext, the Islamist goal remains to enforce submission in body and mind — on pain of death. The West’s long history of religious wars attests to the fact that until religion has been defanged and marginalized by reason, it is deadly.Our failure to understand this has crippled our policymaking.

The pattern is stark.

Rewind three decades to a watershed crisis. The 1979 raid on the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and ensuing captivity of American diplomats were acts of war blessed by Iran’s jihadist regime. Did Washington assert itself, declare that American lives are untouchable, and vow to retaliate with all necessary force unless the hostages were freed?

If only.

The Carter administration disavowed serious military action, eventually imposed some limp sanctions, and agonized over how best to accommodate Tehran’s demands (for money, legal immunity, a face-saving resolution). We caved. The ayatollahs correctly drew an ominous lesson that when attacked, America will not do a damn thing.

What followed was a spate of attacks that Tehran and its jihadist allies spearheaded. Perhaps the most audacious were the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon and the barracks of U.S. Marines, killing 241 Americans. Reagan’s response? Loud but empty rhetoric about retaliation, followed by meek capitulation.

Raid an embassy, take Americans hostage, murder Americans — and get away with it. That was a bright green light inviting more aggression, from an America apparently willing to surrender its self-respect.

It was against this backdrop that Ayatollah Khomeini decided he could now tell Americans what we can think and say, issuing a death-sentence fatwa on Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” and his American publisher, for having offended Mohammad and Islam. In the face of this religious endorsement of totalitarian thought control, did the George H. W. Bush administration declare that an American’s freedom of speech is inviolable? Did it vow to end the regime in Iran if anyone, anywhere dared to act on Khomeini’s death decree?

No. On the contrary, even as U.S. booksellers were flooded with death threats, even as two bookstores were firebombed, even as employees of American publishers trembled in fear of an assassin’s bullet — the administration was passive. Effectively, that non-response sold out the principle of freedom of speech, in deference to a blood-lusting Islamist cleric.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were the climax, up until then, of a mounting series of jihadist attacks. Bush quickly assured us that the attacks had nothing to do with religion. The subsequent U.S. military response in Iraq and Afghanistan, far from seeking to defeat Islamists, in fact brought many to power through Bush’s crusade for elections. Despite the large-scale military deployment, our policy remained one of conciliation (let the Afghans and Iraqis define their own constitutions) and active appeasement (trying to bribe Tehran to stop its aggression).

This policy failed to dissuade jihadists from viewing America as (in bin Laden’s favored phrase) a paper tiger. A case in point was the 2006 Muslim riots over Danish cartoons lampooning Mohammad. The raging of mobs, the burning of flags, the firebombing of embassies — all this was meant to coerce the nations of Europe and North America to bow down before Islamic religious law. Practically all of them did. In unison. With a perfunctory nod to the right of free speech, George W. Bush’s administration betrayed that principle by indicating that perhaps the cartoons were better left unpublished, while the State Department criticized their publication as “offensive to the beliefs of Muslims.”

The cycle is clear. Islamists attack, expecting a non-response. We, unable or unwilling to tackle the issue of religion, submit, conciliate, appease — inviting them to ramp up their aggression.

Is it any wonder that our embassies in the Middle East are besieged, breached, bombed?

The cycle persists, because without connecting the dots to see the big picture,without grasping the uniting religious goal of the Islamist movement, we cannot take the steps necessary to stop it. Until we end America’s policy of passivity, inaction and appeasement, we can only expect more Islamist aggression.

About The Author

Elan Journo

Senior Fellow and Vice President of Content Products, Ayn Rand Institute

A CEO stands in front of his crumbling, century-old factory and speaks to his employees. “I promise that no matter what, I will never renovate this place. No matter how many worn-out items break, no matter how much our out-of-date machinery slows us down, no matter how many people tease us for clinging to fax machines over email, I will keep this factory going as-is. It’s time to embrace the inefficient.”

How long do you think a company operated in such a fashion would last? How long do you think its employees would have jobs? 

Everyone understands that in a competitive economy, businesses face an ultimatum: maximize efficiency or die. But although few today would demand that a CEO tolerate an unproductive factory, the notion that a CEO has a duty to maintain unproductive jobs is sacrosanct.

“You’re fired.” Two words that were unpleasant even before they were associated with Donald Trump. Losing your job can be incredibly painful, particularly in today’s economy, where Washington’s Byzantine regulatory regime has kept unemployment near double digits. 

But keeping employees who are hurting a company’s bottom line isn’t good for anyone — not even the employee whose unproductive job is (temporarily) allowed to weigh down the enterprise.

It’s a lesson that is clearly needed in the wake of recent attacks on private equity firms, which profit by making other companies profitable. Mitt Romney has been excoriated because his firm, Bain Capital, sometimes acquired companies that could only be made attractive to lenders and buyers by laying off significant numbers of employees.

Why is this even controversial? Because we have a weird double standard. When an employee leaves a company for greener pastures — maybe higher pay, maybe more satisfying work, maybe a more pleasant commute — nobody complains. Of course he should do what’s best for him. 

But when a business does the same thing? When it judges that some jobs are draining profits and need to be cut? Then it’s as if some nefarious sin has been committed.

Well, if Bain thought shedding those jobs would foster its bottom line, then why shouldn’t it have done so? A business exists to make a profit for its owners. That’s why owners and lenders risk their wealth investing in companies to begin with. No profit motive, no businesses — and no jobs.

A productive employee adds value to the company over and above what it costs to retain him. A good salesman may get paid a hundred grand a year. But if he brings in two million dollars in business? Small price to pay.

When it comes to the employee who costs more than he brings in, though, laying him off is as necessary as replacing out-of-date machinery. It doesn’t necessarily mean the employee is incompetent — often it’s the job itself that is not productive. Perhaps you’re the greatest C++ programmer around, but if your company’s customers start demanding programs written in Java, then from an economic standpoint, your role at the organization is no longer productive. You’re hurting your company’s profitability, not helping it.

Small comfort to the guy who finds himself out of work, though, right? Actually, it should be something of a comfort. Think about it. You work for an employer because you think it’s a good deal for you: would you really want to stay if you thought it was a bad deal for him? If you thought all your hard work contributed nothing to the bottom line? A business relationship should be win-win — profit-profit — for both parties. Anything else is charity.

Losing your job is never fun, but it’s worth keeping in mind the big picture. We all benefit from living in an economy where there is a relentless push for efficiency — even more so if you happen to be out of work. Think of how much worse it would be to lose your job in a world where you couldn’t take advantage of Walmart’s low prices. 

And in a dynamic economy the more ability, skills, and work virtues you develop, the more companies can’t afford not to hire you. Besides, if no one appreciates your talents, you are always free to start your own business. 

The problem today is not that companies are laying off employees in pursuit of profits. It’s that the government has hamstrung everybody’s ability to pursue profits, leading to the sort of widespread, prolonged unemployment that wouldn’t exist in a genuinely free market. In an economy where the government gets out of the way and unleashes the profit motive, layoffs can be, dare we say, a good thing for everyone involved.

About The Authors

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has credited
philosopher Ayn Rand with inspiring him to enter politics — and made her
1,000-plus-page opus, Atlas Shrugged,
required reading for his staff. “The reason I got
involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one
person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said in 2005 at a gathering of Rand fans. “The fight we are in
here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus
collectivism.” It is a theme that pervades Rand’s corpus.

Given the Wisconsin congressman’s interest in Rand’s
writings, Ryan’s addition to the GOP ticket has naturally unleashed a flash-mob
of analysts parsing his speeches, articles, and signature proposals for evidence
of her influence. On domestic policy, the impact of Rand’s
ideas
on Ryan’s outlook
is marked, though uneven and sometimes overstated. Religion, in particular, has
driven a wedge between Ryan, who would enact Catholic dogma into law,
and Rand, an atheist, who championed the separation of church and state. But
what has received far less attention is Ryan’s outlook on foreign policy — and
whether it bears the mark of Rand’s thought.

Ayn Rand’s foreign policy, if we can construct one from her
writings, would be grounded in her view of man’s
rights and the nature
of government. In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Rand argues that the ideal
government is the servant, not the master, of the individual. In her view, it
is a vital institution strictly limited to one function: to safeguard
individual rights. By “rights,” Rand means
freedom to take “all the actions required by the nature of a rational
being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of
his own life.” Critically, the protection of an individual’s rights “does
not mean that others must provide him
with the necessities of life.”

Domestically, this outlook entails a truly free market with
absolute legal protection of private property, and without regulations,
bailouts, corporate handouts, or entitlement programs like Social Security,
Medicaid, and Medicare. (Ryan breaks with Rand by attempting to save, rather
than end these programs.) In Rand’s political philosophy, however, there is no
gulf between economic rights and personal and intellectual ones: for instance,
she wrote passionately of the crucial importance (contra Ryan) of the right to abortion, and
regarded freedom
of speech as sacrosanct.

Like her views on domestic policy, a Randian foreign policy
would be guided exclusively by the goal of protecting the individual rights of
Americans, and only Americans. Accordingly, the U.S. government shouldn’t issue
handouts to other countries (through foreign aid or international welfare
schemes), nor treat its citizens as cannon fodder (through a military draft). Indeed,
Rand was scathing in her analyses of the Vietnam War, arguing that it did not
serve America’s national interest. “[I]t is a pure instance of blind, senseless
altruistic self-sacrificial slaughter,” she wrote in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Of course, there are times when government is obligated to
go to war, according to Rand. The crucial standard here is whether the lives
and property of Americans are imperiled. The only morally justifiable purpose
for war, she wrote, is self-defense. This rules out so-called humanitarian missions,
like the tragic Clinton-era mission in Somalia, and the notion that the United
States is somehow obliged to serve as the world’s policeman. The primary
function of the military, in Rand’s eyes, should be to deter, and when necessary,
defeat foreign aggressors.

Although some of Rand’s political ideas have informed the
libertarian movement, she regarded any form of pacifism (including
Ron Paul-esque passivity) as destructive to national defense. And undoubtedly
she would have supported a strong military response to the 9/11 attacks
(though, as I have argued in my book,
she would have rejected George W. Bush’s conception of the enemy and his entire
prosecution of the war).

Rand viewed deterrence as an especially important — and
effective — method of defending American freedom. In her view, the power of a
morally confident, assertive United States was considerable, though largely
unappreciated. For instance, she believed that if the West had truly stood up
to the Soviet bloc by withdrawing its moral sanction, ending the flow of aid,
and imposing an airtight boycott, the Soviet threat would have imploded many
years before it actually did, without the need for war.

Perhaps most importantly, Rand argued in favor of genuine
free trade — without trade barriers, protective tariffs, or special
privileges. In her words:
“the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international trade and
competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with
one another.” In the 19th century, she argued, free trade liberated the world
by “undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny
of absolute monarchies.” Not coincidentally, she observed, this era
enjoyed the longest period of general peace in human history (roughly from 1815
to 1914).

Taken together, Rand’s approach implies a re-thinking of the
moral values that should inform foreign policy. The result is a
foreign policy based on pure, “rational
self-interest” — defined as the aggregated ability of individual Americans
to enjoy life, liberty, and property unmolested by foreign aggressors.
Crucially, it rejects the duty selflessly to serve others, whether they
are next door or overseas. So how, then, does Paul Ryan’s foreign policy
measure up?

Reading Ryan’s most substantive speech
on foreign policy, delivered at the Hamilton Society in 2011, you can certainly
hear the reverberation of Rand’s ideas. “[I]f you believe these rights are
universal human rights, then that clearly forms the basis of your views on
foreign policy,” he said, partially echoing the Randian conviction that
regimes are moral to the degree that they respect individual rights. For Ryan, as
for Rand, championing rights
leads “you to reject moral relativism. It causes you to recoil at the idea
of persistent moral indifference toward any nation that stifles and denies
liberty.” Moreover, Ryan falls in line with Rand in his thoughtful
promotion of free
trade. In his Hamilton Society speech, for instance, he argued in favor of
an “expanding community of nations that shares our economic values as well as
our political values” in order to “ensure a more prosperous world.”

But if these similarities are meaningful, Ryan nevertheless seems
to fundamentally part ways with Rand. In particular, he speaks of the need to
“renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for
human freedom the world has ever seen,” and sees in the Arab Spring the
“long-repressed populations give voice to the fundamental desire for
liberty.” Further, Ryan claims that it is “always in the interest of
the United States to promote these principles in other nations.” Like
President George W. Bush, whose wars he supported, Ryan appears to subscribe to
the quasi-religious view that freedom
is written into the soul of mankind, and that it is somehow the moral duty of
America, the freest and wealthiest of nations, to go forth and wage wars to
unchain the world’s oppressed. In all this, he could not be less Randian.

Rand certainly believed that the United States benefits from
a freer world. Thus, she held, America should speak up for dissidents
everywhere who seek greater freedom. But Rand would only ever consider deploying
the military where the rights of Americans hang in the balance — when, in
other words, it becomes an issue of self-defense. This critical distinction may
well be lost on Ryan, if the media’s parsing of his neoconservative leanings
has been fair.

Perhaps as he gears up for the October vice-presidential
debate, Ryan will consider re-reading Rand’s work. Anyone seeking to inject
more rational and more distinctively American ideas into our nation’s chaotic
foreign policy ought to seriously consider Ayn Rand’s refreshingly clear-eyed
perspective.

About The Author

Elan Journo

Senior Fellow and Vice President of Content Products, Ayn Rand Institute

Paul Ryan is Romney’s pick for Vice President and now Ayn Rand’s name is on everyone’s lips.

Many on the left are pillorying Ryan as an unrealistic “ideologue” because of his Rand connection. Many on the right accede, quickly trying to set aside Ryan’s admiration for Atlas Shrugged as youthful indiscretion. “Every young conservative has a fascination with Ayn Rand at some point,” Romney’s strategist Eric Fehrnstrom says dismissively.

But hold on. If we actually consider the essence of what Rand advocates, the idea that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her position but of the many adults from whom this accusation stems.

The key to Rand’s enduring popularity is that she appeals not to the immaturity but to the idealism of youth. This is why more than 29,000 students submitted entries this year to essay contests on her novels and, in the past five years alone, high school teachers have requested over 1.5 million copies of The Fountainhead, We the Living, Anthem and Atlas Shrugged to use in their classrooms. They know that students respond to her stories and heroes as to few other books.

“There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire,” Rand wrote in 1969, “some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days — the conviction that ideas matter.” The nature of this conviction? “That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.”

If Ryan is a man who takes ideas seriously, as numerous supporters and detractors claim, this is an attitude he would have encountered on every page of Rand’s writings.

But how as an adult do you sustain the conviction that the truth matters, in the face of constant calls to compromise your views and give in?

You need to achieve, Rand argues, a radical independence of mind. Independence does not mean doing whatever you feel like doing but rather forging principles and using them to choose your actions rationally, carefully, scientifically. Independence means refusal to subordinate your ideas or values to the “public interest,” as too many secularists demand, or to the “glory of God,” as too many religionists demand. It means refusal to grant obedience to any authority.

The independent mind instead embraces reason as an absolute. “The noblest act you have ever performed,” declares the hero of Atlas Shrugged, “is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.” Rand meant it.

On Rand’s view, to take the truth of your own ideas seriously is a remarkable achievement: it represents a profound dedication to self. Crucially, this dedication requires that you not passively absorb your society’s moral views, however well-entrenched, but instead question and study the entire field of good and evil. This is precisely what Atlas Shrugged — with its critique of the regulatory-welfare state and the moral ideas that spawned it, alongside its presentation of a new moral code of rational self-interest — challenges us to do.

Most of us are passionate about morality only when young. As we grow older and discover the impractical, even self-destructive nature of the moral slogans we were taught to bandy about, we abandon the field. After all, we tell ourselves, “we’ve got to live.”

But this split between the moral and the practical poisons the soul. “To take ideas seriously,” Rand writes, “means that you intend to live by, to practice, any idea you accept as true,” that you recognize “that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life.”

Her approach here is the opposite of the view that ideals transcend this world, one’s interests and human comprehension — that idealism is, according to a former president whose words are echoed by virtually every leader today, “to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself.”

In a world that equates idealism with otherworldliness and denial of self, while simultaneously reminding us that, as one conservative commentator puts it, “perfection in the life of man on earth” is impossible — Rand stands alone. She argues that perfection on earth is possible, if only we’re ready to work for it.

Hold your own life as your highest value, follow reason, bow to no authority, pursue unwaveringly the true and the good, create a life of productive achievement and personal joy — enact these demanding values and virtues, Rand argues in Atlas Shrugged, preserve “the hero in your soul,” and an ideal world, here on earth, is “real, it’s possible — it’s yours.”

Does an adult world that decries this philosophy as “simplistic” not convict itself?

Instead of criticizing Ryan’s Rand connection, perhaps the question we should be asking is why her ideas have not had a much greater impact on his worldview.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

It’s not often that an American election sparks debate about a philosopher. But ever since Mitt Romney announced his selection of Paul Ryan as his vice presidential candidate, talk has turned to the ideas of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand.

Ryan is on record as being a fan of Rand’s, and although he has taken pains to distance himself from her entire philosophy, he continues to stress that her novel Atlas Shrugged “is a great novel.” Ryan is far from the only one who thinks so. Since the financial meltdown of 2008, Rand’s 1957 novel has sold more than 1.5 million copies.

But here’s something interesting: virtually all of those sales took place in the US. Why are so many Americans, from students to politicians, talking about Rand’s novel — and why are her books comparatively unknown in Europe?

The answer to both questions is the same: Atlas Shrugged is a hymn to the American spirit.

The American spirit is characterized by independence, individualism, political and economic freedom, and productive ambition. It’s the sense of life best summed up in the American Revolutionary motto “Don’t tread on Me.” It was this spirit that led so many Americans to rebel against the post 2008 expansion of state power. They didn’t just see big government as a threat to the economy: it was an affront to their whole conception of what America is about. After eight years of Bush and eight minutes of Obama, they were fed up with being tread upon.

Atlas speaks to this spirit. Set in a world eerily similar to ours — a world where the economy is crumbling, where government intervention is growing, and where productive individuals are denounced and drained for the sake of the unproductive — it tells the story of men and women who decide to stop being tread upon.

But the dramatic story contains a powerful intellectual punch: Atlas gives the American spirit a philosophic defense it has never had. The American spirit often has been attacked as atomistic, cruel, and materialistic. Atlas blasts any such notion. It shows that capitalism is a win-win system where all individuals are free to pursue their happiness. It shows that it is right for individuals to be concerned with their own happiness. And it shows that those who seek to “tread on you” — to control your life, redistribute your wealth, and mortgage your future — are morally wrong. 

It’s no accident, then, that Ayn Rand’s immense popularity in America has not crossed over to Europe. It’s for the same reason that Europeans largely embraced the government’s post-financial crisis interventionist policies — from bailouts to stimulus spending sprees to vast new regulatory powers — while Americans rebelled. Whatever motto best captures the European attitude toward life, “Don’t tread on me” is not it.

Ayn Rand wrote Atlas, in part, as a warning to Americans. She believed that, as early as 1890, America had veered from its free-market roots and was descending into statism. (She would have regarded as absurd the widely-held notion that America in the years before the financial crisis had anything resembling a free market.) To reverse that trend, Americans would have to translate their individualistic spirit into an explicit ideological program: one that upheld individualism and laissez-faire capitalism as moral and political ideals.

To succeed in this task, Rand argued, Americans would need to question and reject the alien idea of altruism. Altruism is the Old World doctrine that it’s your duty to live for others and renounce your own self-interest. In one form or another, this moral doctrine has been the justification for every welfare program. Other people need money for their retirement or healthcare, it’s claimed, and therefore they’re entitled to that money from you. The individual’s pursuit of his own happiness versus altruism — this is the choice facing America.

Although Rand was primarily speaking to Americans, she was not only speaking to Americans. The spirit of America, she held, is open to any individual willing to think. Today, as Europe is doubling down on the welfare state, that spirit, and the ideas of Atlas Shrugged, are needed more than ever.

About The Author

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Whether he likes it or not, Paul Ryan’s worldview is going to be defined in large part by its distance from philosopher Ayn Rand’s. Ryan is on record as praising Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” and her moral defense of capitalism. He’s also on record as rejecting Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism.

So, where does Ryan sit in relation to Rand?

There are signs that Rand influenced Ryan’s views on individual rights. “If one wishes to advocate a free society — that is, capitalism,” Rand wrote half a century ago, “one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so-called ‘conservatives.’”

Paul Ryan is one of the few conservatives who does speak regularly — and meaningfully — about individual rights. In a speech delivered in June, Ryan said that this election would come down to a choice between two views of rights, and their differing implications for the welfare state: the view that rights “come to us naturally before government, they are ours automatically — or this new idea, the progressive theory of government-granted rights. … It’s an opportunity society versus welfare state.”

But don’t be too quick to leap from these broad proclamations to the conclusion that Ryan is an avowed Randian on rights. Even if we leave aside Ryan’s Catholic dogma about souls and embryos, which Rand completely rejected, and focus only on the economic issues for which Ryan is most known, the differences remain stark.

According to Rand, rights are moral principles that are designed to restrain society from interfering with an individual’s moral action. Morality helps an individual decide what he ought to do — rights tell society not to stop him from doing what he ought to do. Since morality, in Rand’s egoistic conception, tells an individual he should support his own life, act on his own independent judgment, produce the wealth he needs to survive, and seek out his own happiness, then a political system should enshrine the individual’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

These rights, Rand stressed, are rights to action — not to a physical object. Individuals have a right to earn property and use it as they see fit. If a thief (or an IRS agent) takes their money, their right to property has been violated. But no one can have a right to be provided with property at someone else’s expense. “If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.”
Think of what this implies for the entitlement state, a subject near to Ryan’s heart.

Rand saw entitlements as a violation of individual rights on a massive scale. This is why she opposed Social Security when FDR enacted it in the 1930s, why she rejected Medicare when Johnson proposed it in the 1960s and why she held that the whole entitlement state should be phased out and ultimately abolished.

For Rand, the great achievement of America’s founding was to create a society based on rights, in which peaceful, voluntary coexistence among men was possible. People were free to deal with one another on mutually agreeable terms, or else go their own way. The entitlement state blasted that peaceful coexistence, turning politics into a mad scramble by warring pressure groups for other people’s money.

Ryan’s goal, by contrast, is not to end the entitlement state but to save it. His budget reflects that view: it preserves Medicare, albeit in a less costly form, and it actually increases Social Security spending, from 4.75 percent of GDP to 6 percent, according to the CBO. Although Ryan regularly invokes individual rights, he does not stand by them consistently. Not even on economic issues, where he is best.

For anyone who believes in limited government, it is a positive sign that a leading politician talks seriously about individual rights, and this clearly is due in part to Rand’s influence. But to take rights seriously, as Rand advised? That will require a much more principled agenda.

About The Author

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Are you free to use your own body’s cells to treat your medical condition? Under the rule of the FDA, apparently not. A U.S. District Court has sided with the FDA in its lawsuit against Regenerative Sciences, stopping the company from treating orthopedic injuries by culturing and re-injecting a patient’s own stem cells.

Adult stem cell therapies are relatively new; their promise is only starting to be realized, as in a recent study, which saw the safe regrowth of damaged heart tissue in 17 heart attack patients. Yet just as these first successful treatments are emerging, the FDA is flexing its regulatory muscle.

The lawsuit against Regenerative is precedent-setting, because the FDA is, in effect, applying drug manufacturing standards to the use of your own bodily cells. As one researcher put it, “The FDA does not come into a cardiology practice and tell doctors how to do their surgeries or how to do heart replacements. And yet they feel they can come into a stem cell clinic.”

The problem with the FDA “coming into a stem cell clinic” is that it could have a chilling effect on this whole field of medical research. What, for instance, might happen to the costs of developing adult stem cell treatments under the burden of the FDA’s regulatory intervention? The history of drug development over the past few decades offers a hint.

According to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, the cost of getting a new drug developed and approved 30 years ago was around $138 million (adjusted for inflation). Today, it’s around $1 billion. Another study finds that only 2 out of 10 drugs ever earn enough to cover the R&D costs for the manufacturer — and that’s after they make it to market. How many potentially lifesaving drugs never even make it out of the lab, being too expensive to pursue under FDA control?

How many promising avenues of adult stem cell research will be cut off by the same regulatory oversight? And how many of us who could benefit from new treatments will instead be forced to endure pain and debilitating disease?

Christopher Centeno, the director of Regenerative Sciences, sees his company’s lawsuit as “a 21st-century civil rights issue that will define what control you have about the use of your own cells and tissue. If a loved one is dying in intensive care and a well-done study shows that the patient’s own cells can be used to help, does the patient get to decide to use those cells, or is that a decision for the FDA? Will the patient still be alive while we wait on Washington to issue this decision?”

Unfortunately, the prospect of patients dying waiting for the FDA to act is all too real — as suggested, again, by its regulation of drugs and medical devices.

Because the agency has the power to keep drugs and devices off the market while its regulators plod through their labyrinthine review process, we and our doctors are forbidden by law from using treatments that lack the FDA’s stamp of approval, even with informed consent. In cases where the patient has little time left and no other options, this leads to tragic outcomes.

Consider a recently approved device designed to replace a brittle aortic valve. During a four-year period of FDA review, the device was used safely in Europe while being forbidden in America. According to one commentator, “More than 15,000 patients worldwide will receive the device by the time it’s slated for approval in the U.S. Some Americans healthy enough to fly have sought the procedure in Europe. Tens of thousands of Americans unable to travel, and too sick to undergo open-heart surgery, have died during the intervening four years.”

The tragedy of dying patients denied the right to use drugs under FDA review is one that has occurred again and again — as in the case of the cancer drug interleukin-2, or beta blockers, which reduce the risk of secondary heart attacks. Estimates put the death toll from the FDA’s withholding of these drugs in the tens of thousands. Do we really want to see the same tragic toll occur in the context of stem cell therapies?

There is no question that the government must spare no effort in defining and prosecuting real cases of medical fraud, malpractice and criminal negligence — and there is no question that such cases exist in the stem cell market. But instead of serving as our protector against charlatans who prey on the sick and desperate, the FDA has itself become an agent of coercion, forcibly denying us the freedom to use treatments that could save our lives.

Regenerative Sciences plans to appeal the decision. It would be a tragedy if we allow the FDA’s regulatory tentacles to extend into adult stem cell research and choke off this promising area of medicine in its infancy.

About The Author

Keith Lockitch

Vice President of Education and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

My grandfather, a gruff and uneducated but whip-smart guy, started out poor. Following a stint in the Army, he spent a few years working and scrimped together enough money to start his own restaurant in a small town near Philadelphia.

He — and the rest of his family — worked incredibly long hours, first to keep the restaurant in business and then to turn it into a success: cooking the food, managing the employees, sweeping the floors, keeping the books, pleasing the customers, and a great deal else. It was a struggle, but he ended his life as a modestly wealthy man.

But according to President Obama, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

No, Mr. President, “somebody else” didn’t. My grandfather did.

To be fair, the president’s defenders claim Obama is being taken out of context, that by “that” he was referring to infrastructure such as roads and schools. But even granting that, the entire thrust of the president’s comments was to minimize the importance of individual initiative.

[I]f you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . . I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

So it’s not your mind that explains your success. And it’s not your hard work. What is it?

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. . . . Somebody invested in roads and bridges.

You get the idea. According to Obama, anyone proud of his own achievements and opposed to having the government tax and regulate them more must be so deluded as to think he never received any benefit from others. Since anyone living in society obviously has benefited from others, individual achievement is, well, not quite a myth, but a bit of a delusion.

Individual businessmen? Sure they contribute something, but it’s small change compared to the contribution of others — especially the state.

Obama wants to wipe out the enormous difference between people like my grandfather, who succeed because they choose to think, create, work, and build — and those who don’t. In the president’s account, what makes us successful isn’t our intelligence, it isn’t our ambition, it isn’t in the end even the infrastructure: We all drive on the roads and go to school; we don’t all create a successful restaurant let alone a Fortune 500 company.

No, the real root of success is dumb luck. Some happen to get a lot from society, others happen to get a little. To borrow my colleague Harry Binswanger’s apt summary of Obama’s argument, “The only reason Joe Sixpack didn’t find the Higgs boson is that he didn’t happen to be provided with a large hadron collider.”

Well, Mr. President, my grandfather was not given a lot. (And how many people have been handed a Fortune 500 company and destroyed it because they didn’t exercise the intelligence and productive effort necessary to make it successful?) He was primarily responsible for his own success.

Did he benefit from others? Of course. We all do. One of the greatest things about freedom is the extent to which we can profit from collaborating with other people. As Ayn Rand points out, “Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. . . . The two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade.”
But knowledge and trade are not gifts from the collective — let alone gifts that come with undefined strings attached. They come from the past and present achievements of other individuals.

Individuals — Aristotle, Galileo, Newton — made possible modern science. Individuals — Franklin, Edison, Tesla — created revolutionary inventions. Individuals — Rockefeller, Ford, Jobs — catapulted our standard of living forward. On a smaller level, my grandfather didn’t build the streets or invent the stove. But his restaurant? It was his blood, sweat, and ambition that made it a success.

Every creator makes use of the achievements of those who go before him. But what he creates by building on his predecessors is his achievement.

In America, it has always been hard to demonize, tax, and control someone who has clearly earned his success. Obama’s recent comments, like Elizabeth Warren’s earlier rant, are aimed at destroying the very concept of individual achievement in order to pave the way for an anti-capitalist agenda.

My grandfather is no longer alive, but I’d like to think he would have responded to Obama’s comments with an unapologetic: “I earned my success.” In truth, I suspect his message would have been somewhat more brief and a great deal more obscene.

About The Author

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are currently fighting over who is the more patriotic. Obama slams Romney for having outsourced jobs to China during his Bain Capital days. Romney punches back by labeling Obama “Outsourcer in Chief.” The latest is that both John Boehner and Harry Reid are voicing outrage over America’s made-in-China Olympic uniforms. “Burn them!” thunders Reid.

Republicans and Democrats strangely agree that outsourcing is unpatriotic, and that the moral and patriotic thing to do is to “Hire American” and “Buy American.”

Well, no. Not in a thousand years. The fear of outsourcing and international trade is economic nonsense and moral blindness. More than that: this anti-profit attitude is un-American.

Despite the ongoing Europeanization of America, America still symbolizes the land of freedom, entrepreneurship, profit-making, and, above all, individualism.

But collectivism is the premise of “Hire/Buy American”: we are to view ourselves and others not as individuals, but as units of a nation. Businesses are urged to pay more in labor costs, simply to hire workers who are American; consumers are urged to forgo Walmart’s low prices and pay more, simply because the pricier goods were made by “our guys.” This is not rational patriotism, it is not Americanism, it is primitive tribalism.

American individualism means making buying decisions on the basis of economic merit, giving no regard to the nationality or race of the seller. Let’s not hide behind patriotic-sounding slogans. Let’s name things straight for a change: giving preference to American sellers over foreign sellers is the same mindless injustice as giving preference to sellers who are white over those who are black.

Economic nationalism is as morally outrageous as racism. Buying on the basis of nationality or race is the same collectivist evil: judging men and their products by the group from which they come, not by merit.

The anti-outsourcers view trade as if it were a form of war. “It’s them or us!” seems to be their motto. But, in fact and in the American outlook, international competition is not combat but cooperation. Trade is the exchange of values not the exchange of gunfire; it is productive not destructive.

The benefits of international trade flow to both trading partners. It’s win-win. This applies even when one of the countries is more efficient across the board: the wealth of the world grows when each country specializes in its area of comparative advantage. It’s even called the “Law of Comparative Advantage” in economics textbooks.

The bigger picture is this: the beneficial nature of trade does not depend upon lines drawn on a map. Trade between people in different nations is mutually beneficial for the same reason that trade between people in different states is. And trade between people in different cities. And crosstown trade. There is no difference in economic effect between outsourcing a job to Poland and outsourcing it to a firm across the street. If outsourcing the job saves money, it saves resources and is to be applauded. The name of the region or country the new hire lives in is economically irrelevant.

What is supremely relevant is how the new hire affects production — does it make production easier or more difficult?

This emphasis on production is not popular today.  Most people, including many economists, are blind to the whole issue of production and its needs. They view wealth as a static quantity, a fixed pie to be divided among claimants.

But wealth has to be produced before it can be traded or stolen. Without production, there is nothing to steal. Production not theft is the motor of human history. Man did not rise from the cave to the skyscraper by stealing his neighbor’s roots and berries. The buildings, cars, and computers were not there to be stolen — they had to be thought of, invented, produced.

In the process of creating wealth, whatever saves costs is to everyone’s interest. It is irrelevant whether your saving is maximized by hiring your cousin or a stranger in Bangladesh.

The “Hire American” premise is the opposite: everyone must cling to his own tribe and fight all the other tribes for a share of a static supply of goods. If China is getting richer, then we must be getting poorer. And this tribalist, xenophobic attitude is supposed to reflect Americanism? America — born in a rebellion *against* English interference with our international trade?

American individualism looks at men as individuals. It holds that a man’s personal identity, moral worth, and inalienable rights belong to him as an individual, not as a member of a particular race, class, nation, or other collective.  In the truly American view, men are not natural enemies but allies. The interests of men do not conflict — not men who are self-supporting and earn what they get.

The interests of free nations do not conflict either. One nation’s gain is all other nations’ gain. As India gets richer, our standard of living goes up. Evidence? Just ask yourself: which nation adds more to your standard of living: a richer nation or an impoverished one — Germany or Uganda? And do the economic tribalists dare suggest that  Americans would be better off if Germany were suddenly reduced to the economic level of Uganda? Yet that is what is implied in their paranoid, beggar-thy-neighbor outlook: we should, on their premises, want to live in a world where everyone but Americans is starving. Strangely, they don’t want to live in a city or neighborhood where everyone else is starving.

It’s time to drop the xenophobia and paranoia. No one benefits from the poverty or incompetence of others. It’s just the opposite: it is in your interest that other men — in every country — be smart, ambitious, and productive — not stupid, lazy, or incompetent. Would you be better off if Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs had been dim-witted? Nothing is changed if we change the example to an inventor in India or an entrepreneur in China.

Loss of jobs? Quite the contrary. Outsourcing means better or better-paying jobs for Americans. When individuals are fired from one line of work, it’s to release capital to do other work — the law of comparative advantage again. Outsourcing changes the composition of the labor force — fewer Americans are employed to make computer chips, say — but it does not decrease the demand for labor as such, and displaced workers find more productive employment — and thus higher wages — in other lines of work.

Contrary to the tribalist assumption, cost-savings are good for all men, everywhere. He who cut costs saves money, expands production, and raises the standard of living of everyone participating in the global economy. And we’re not not just talking more shirts for Walmart: the money saved goes into the global capital market — to fund also the next generation of CPUs, research into anti-aging drugs, the private exploration of space, and any other potentially profitable endeavor.

Any outsourcing that saves costs and increases profits is to be celebrated. A Congressional Medal of Honor should go to the CEO who cuts his costs the most, whether he does it by outsourcing or any other means. He is the true friend of humanity.

About The Author

Harry Binswanger

Member, Board of Directors, Ayn Rand Institute

John Maynard Keynes — not exactly history’s greatest opponent of government spending — is reported to have said he would be worried if government outlays ever surpassed 25 percent of GDP. Well, in recent years both American and British government expenditures have hovered around 40 percent of GDP. The bulk of that spending, perhaps as much as 70 percent in Britain, goes to feed the ravenous welfare state.

Clearly it’s time to question the welfare state. But such questions are too often viewed as taboo. Anyone who challenges it is viewed as seeking a return to the “dog-eat-dog” world of unfettered capitalism — a world where sellers supposedly exploited buyers, employers exploited workers, the rich exploited the poor.

But capitalism, to say nothing of poor old Fido, has gotten a bad rap.

Capitalism — real capitalism, not the mixed economies that have existed for the past century — is the system based on private property, free production, and voluntary trade. It’s not a zero-sum game where people battle over a fixed pie. Each person is free to create wealth and to trade it with others, such that they all benefit.

That’s the beauty of capitalism. Because all economic relationships are voluntary, people only enter into them when each party thinks it’s to his advantage. When you accept a job, for instance, it’s not because the employer forced you to work at the point of a gun. It’s because you valued the paycheck more than other possible uses of your time. It’s a gain for you and a gain for your employer. In some cases you may not be thrilled with the work or the pay, but the fact that a win may be smaller than you would have preferred doesn’t change the fact that it’s a win. And if what first seemed like a win turns out badly, you’re free to make a new bargain.

Capitalism isn’t dog-eat-dog: It’s win-win.

We don’t have capitalism anymore — not in Britain, not in the rest of Europe, not in the United States. What we have instead are massive welfare states. And if the false charge against capitalism is that it allows “the strong” to exploit “the weak,” then the true nature of the welfare state is that it allows “the weak” — i.e., the unproductive — to exploit “the strong” — i.e., the productive.

And exploiting they are. The Davey family, for instance, made headlines in 2010 for receiving £42,000 in state-provided benefits while driving a Mercedes, enjoying cutting-edge electronics, and continuing to have children (at the time of the story they had seven with another on the way). Mrs. Davey had never worked, and Mr. Davey had quit his job after he figured out he could do better by living on the dole. “I don’t feel bad about being subsidized by people who are working,” Mrs. Davey told The Daily Mail.

This sort of story does not represent some bizarre failure of the system — it captures the system’s spirit.

The truth is that the goal of the welfare state is to make the productive sacrifice for the unproductive. It establishes the principle that a person is entitled to state support simply by virtue of his need. But the state doesn’t have any money. In order to provide support, it has to take money from the people who earned it. Translation? A person’s need entitles him to your money. The less value he creates, the more rewards you owe him — and the more value you create, the greater your duty to serve him, and all the Daveys of the world. As Ayn Rand put it in her novel Atlas Shrugged, “If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf.”

How is that fair?

In place of capitalism’s philosophy of win-win, the welfare state puts everyone’s wealth up for grabs, ensuring that one person’s gain comes at his neighbor’s expense. Talk about dog-eat-dog.

About The Authors

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute