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

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

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

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

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

Many of the heroes in Atlas Shrugged are the kind of men and women who built, and continue to build, America into the economic power that it is — inventors such as Edison, industrialists in the mold of Rockefeller and Carnegie, business visionaries reminiscent of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

In logic and justice, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged should be admired and appreciated for their efforts; instead, they’re demonized and shackled.

Man of Steel

Take the case of Hank Rearden, the leading industrialist in Atlas Shrugged and inventor of Rearden Metal, an alloy superior to steel. Rearden is denounced and forced to surrender his iron and coal businesses because the Equalization of Opportunity Bill demands he create business “opportunities” for struggling competitors.

His production of Rearden Metal is capped by the Preservation of Livelihood Law designed to keep other steel makers afloat. Key businesses can’t buy enough Rearden Metal because Rearden’s forced to give every customer an equal portion under the Fair Share Law.

Each new government scheme to control Rearden’s industry brings a new crisis, and each new crisis brings a new scheme.

The result is the accelerating collapse of Rearden’s business empire — and of all the other productive enterprises that depend on Rearden’s enormous productivity. The only beneficiaries of this orgy of government authority are power-lusting politicians and the pseudo-businessmen who lobby for and profiteer from these laws.

This scenario from Atlas Shrugged is an incredibly destructive one — and yet it is all too reminiscent of recent bailouts and power grabs in Washington.

Why? Why does government control over the economy only grow? Part of the answer in Atlas Shrugged is that those seeking power over business triumph because they claim, unchallenged, the moral upper hand.

Bankers and hedge funds today, like Rearden and the other industrialists in Atlas Shrugged, are denounced as selfish, greedy profit seekers.

And everyone knows that selfishness and profit seeking are evil, right?

Further, the justification of every new government scheme in our world, as in the world of Atlas Shrugged, is that it places “the public interest” above private profit.

When the government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, authorizing them to guarantee trillions of dollars in mortgages, what was the justification? It’s in “the public interest” to promote homeownership for countless Americans.

When the housing bubble collapsed, what was the justification for bailing out failing institutions? “The public interest” demands the preservation of illiquid and insolvent banks. The justification for bailing out GM? It’s in “the public interest” to keep GM workers employed.

And who, after all, dares question the morality of pursuing the public interest?

So when government controls inevitably create an economic crisis, there exists a ready-made explanation and scapegoat: The evil profit seekers must be responsible and so must be further reined in, and the good, public-spirited officials charged with reining them in must have had too little power, which must therefore be increased. Which means: more shackles for productive American businessmen and more power for government.

And so America moves, step by step, in the direction of the economic shambles of a banana republic or a Soviet Russia.

How to reverse course? Challenge these moral ideas.

“The public interest” is an immoral idea.

As Rand puts it elsewhere: “Since there is no such entity as ‘the public,’ since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that ‘the public interest’ supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.”

This is precisely what we witness in Atlas Shrugged as Rearden’s business is torn apart in the name of the public interest: His money, property and life are sacrificed to anyone and everyone who can gain the title of “the public.” Rearden has no right to his money and metal, because he’s selfishly produced them; sundry other people have a right to both, because in their selflessness they have produced neither, which entitles them to be regarded as “the public.”

This is precisely what we see all around us today, as failing banks are bailed out by healthy banks and taxpayers (are they any less the public?), unprofitable GM is saved at the expense of profitable businesses and their employees (are they any less the public?), and homeowners who cannot pay their mortgages are bailed out by prudent people who didn’t even buy a house (are they any less the public?).

The lesson? Anytime anyone calls for economic policies to promote “the public interest,” he’s calling for evil — the sacrifice of individuals who’ve earned something to those who haven’t.

What’s the alternative to the tyranny of “the public interest”? Each individual’s pursuit of his private interests — in Jefferson’s words, the pursuit of happiness.

The result is a nonsacrificial society, in which government is stripped of the power to concoct schemes to promote “the public interest” and is solely focused on protecting each individual’s rights, including his property rights.

Doing What’s Right

But such a society, Atlas Shrugged shows us, can exist only if we regard making (and enjoying) a profit as an unmitigated, life-sustaining virtue. Rearden comes to realize this — and the importance of speaking up morally. He declares publicly what no Rockefeller, Carnegie or Gates would ever dare declare:

I work for nothing but my own profit — which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. . . . I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage — and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. . . . I refuse to apologize for my ability — I refuse to apologize for my success — I refuse to apologize for my money.

Rearden takes this moral stand because he’s realized, in the words of a friend, that:

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose — because it contains all the others — the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money.” . . . Men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words “to make money” hold the essence of human morality.

Unless we recapture this quintessentially American spirit, this independent, individualistic ethic — and discover the words fully to name it, to understand it, to defend it and to implement it — we’ve no right to expect the freedom and progress that earlier Americans achieved.

This is one of timeless themes of Atlas Shrugged.

About The Author

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

After clearing the Senate Judiciary Committee today, Elena Kagan must now win the support of the full Senate.

Assuming that the Senate confirms Ms. Kagan to be the next justice for the Supreme Court, she must swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” But does she understand the document she’s supposed to uphold?

Alarmingly, Kagan’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that she rejects the Founders’ view of the Constitution as a charter of liberty whose purpose is to protect individual rights. Instead, she adheres to the modern view that it’s a mechanism for establishing unlimited majority rule over the individual.

As a matter of historical fact, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution for a certain purpose. They wanted a government that would respect and protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Aside from certain contradictions (the worst of which, toleration of slavery, required a bloody civil war to expunge), the Constitution is dedicated to protecting the individual from society by means of a limited government. The Supreme Court cannot objectively interpret the document’s language apart from this essential purpose.

Regrettably, however, too many of today’s judges reject this approach to constitutional interpretation.

The Holmes model: sneering at natural rights

Instead, they follow the path marked out by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who sat on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. “All my life I have sneered at the natural rights of man,” Holmes wrote, reflecting his view that the individual rights venerated by the Founders have no objective validity and therefore no role in discerning the Constitution’s meaning.

Judges may harbor personal opinions on man’s rights, Holmes conceded, but such notions have “nothing to do with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law.” Holmes’s view directly contradicts that of James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, who reviled unlimited democracy as “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.”

Kagan, during her recent hearings, declared her allegiance to the Holmesian orthodoxy. Under questioning from Sen. Tom Coburn (R) of Oklahoma, Kagan said a judge’s understanding of inalienable rights is “outside the Constitution and the laws,” and therefore “you should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief.”

In a written follow-up, Kagan named Holmes as the last century’s most influential Supreme Court justice, stating: “His opinions . . . set forth the basic rationale for judicial deference to legislative policy decisions.” Having discarded the Constitution’s actual purpose as irrelevant to judging, Kagan is left with Holmes’s concept of the Constitution as a mechanism for implementing unlimited majority rule.

How might a different judge proceed — one who regards it as her duty to interpret each clause in relation to the individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness?

Different ideas about the Commerce Clause

Suppose she were asked to interpret the oft-disputed provision that grants Congress authority to “regulate Commerce . . . among the several States.” Such a judge would recognize that the Commerce Clause empowered Congress to protect the rights of traders, by preventing states from imposing tariffs and other restrictions on the free movement of goods across state lines.

Such a judge, applying the Commerce Clause to current cases, would ask whether any proposed government action itself violates an individual’s rights. And such a judge would stand ready to strike down laws that exceed the government’s granted authority.

Kagan, by contrast, would see the Commerce Clause as authorizing nearly total control by the majority over the way every individual earns a living, spends money, and trades with others — his rights be damned. She would have no trouble finding, for example, that the majority, through its elected representatives in Congress, is authorized to mandate the individual purchase of health insurance, as Obamacare attempts to do. After all, insurance is part of commerce, isn’t it?

Nor would she fail to find authority for the government to bully banks into joining bailout schemes, launch massive “stimulus” spending of taxpayer money, and cap carbon emissions. If it’s commerce, the majority can control it. During her testimony, Kagan even lectured Sen. Coburn on the majority’s constitutional right to (hypothetically) require that each individual eat three vegetables a day — allowing herself only an inconsequential personal opinion that such a dictatorial law would be “dumb.”

This is the judicial philosophy that has enabled government to expand at an accelerating pace for more than a century — without judicial impediment, and without any end in sight.

If the Senate confirms her nomination, Elena Kagan will surely recite the words of her oath accurately, but her testimony shows she has no intention of supporting and defending the true Constitution.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

Just when swine flu was expected to peak, it has mysteriously faded from view. Now that Americans are no longer queuing up for vaccine, some 71 million doses (part of a $1.6 billion tax-funded program) are likely to be trashed upon expiration. While baffled health experts investigate causes, it’s worth looking back at some important but little-known decisions that the Food and Drug Administration took amidst last fall’s crisis atmosphere.

Afraid of being held accountable for widespread sickness and death due to swine flu or H1N1 virus, the FDA elected to bypass its labyrinthine, virtually interminable approval process so that doctors could immediately employ promising remedies (other than vaccines) to combat the disease. In sweeping aside regulatory obstacles, the FDA was using authority granted by Congress back in 2004 — to be used only in the event of a “public health emergency.”

Of course, Congress was implicitly conceding what the FDA’s critics have known for decades — that people die unnecessarily (millions, by some reckonings) when denied access to drugs the agency has not yet condescended to approve. Once H1N1 was deemed a “public health emergency,” the FDA issued a series of so-called Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) providing exemptions for three antiviral drugs (Peramivir, Tamiflu, and Relenza), two “flu panels” (diagnostic tests), and a respirator.

Congress’s rationale for permitting such EUAs was to remove the FDA roadblock when unapproved drugs (or approved drugs used in unapproved ways) might enhance national security in the face of a chemical or biological threat to “public health.” But wait a minute: Why does preserving “public health” justify bypassing the FDA approval process, while private health doesn’t? Why should drug companies be able to offer life-saving drugs to large numbers of sick people — but not to small numbers, or even to single individuals?

There is no rational answer to such questions, because there is no rational distinction between public and private health in this context. Every life-threatening disease presents a health emergency to the individual patient. Morally, you have the right to seek the best treatment you can find. Yet our legal system denies you that right when it comes to private health emergencies.

In 2008 the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal in Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. von Eschenbach, leaving in place a lower court decision that a lone individual has no constitutional right to escape the government approval process, even if his life is at stake. The plaintiff in that case was a nonprofit named for Abigail Burroughs, a 21-year-old woman who died of cancer in 2001 after a desperate, but futile, quest for federal permission to take an experimental cancer-fighting drug her doctor recommended.

The answer to such injustices is not for Congress to tinker with the standards by which EUAs can be issued. Instead, we need to challenge the idea that private parties striving to preserve human life against dread diseases should ever have to ask government permission before acting.

Pharmaceutical products such as antivirals are the private property of their manufacturers. Drug companies should be free to offer those products for sale on an open market, on terms they deem proper. If a doctor views a particular drug as his patient’s best option, then he should be free to prescribe it. And if a patient decides it’s his best chance for health, he has a right to authorize the treatment — indeed, his unalienable right to life is meaningless in that situation without such freedom.

Of course, government must always stand at the ready, with power to redress such objective legal wrongs as fraud, negligence, and breach of contract. But otherwise the government should remain entirely out of the loop when drug companies, doctors, and patients are making the all-important decision to treat a life-threatening disease with a promising drug.

Whether the recent EUAs freed up remedies that actually saved people from succumbing to swine flu is an open question. But there is no doubt that individuals afflicted by other diseases continue to die because their rights are trampled by FDA control over pharmaceuticals.

Drug companies should never have to look toward Washington, D.C., bowing and begging for bureaucratic permission to save lives — a million lives, or just one.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

How many Congressmen does it take to identify the cause of a runaway Toyota Prius? No, it’s not a trick question. Yesterday a Congressional panel issued a draft report on a case of supposed runaway acceleration reported last week in San Diego.

Why wasn’t that left to the objective assessment of the police and courts? The answer to that question was made clear during last month’s Congressional hearings on the Toyota recalls.

In February Toyota execs were hauled in front of Congress, purportedly so that renowned auto experts like Henry Waxman could determine the cause of reported cases of unintended acceleration and evaluate Toyota’s alleged failure to respond.

The hearings had the fingerprints of politics all over them. Indeed, it was uncanny how easily a careful observer could predict whether a given Congressman would defend or deride Toyota. Just take stock of which pressure groups dominate his district.

Would you believe that Rep. John Dingell of Detroit was highly critical of Toyota? Or that Henry Cuellar, whose district is home to thousands of Toyota employees, came to the car company’s defense?

The whole spectacle is a rogues’ gallery of pressure groups descending upon Washington.

The United Auto Workers union showed up hoping to use Toyota’s problems as leverage to force the company to keep open its sole UAW factory. Rumor has it that some in the UAW camp even hope to unionize all of Toyota’s U.S. factories.

The trial lawyers are drooling at the prospect of parlaying Toyoda’s apology into hundred-million-dollar awards. No need to wait for the evidence to come in, either — they have their own “experts” who already “know” Toyota is covering up pedals of doom.

And then there’s the Detroit lobby, which is hard to distinguish from the government itself now that the government holds a 60 percent stake in General Motors. Even if concerns about an electronic problem in Toyota’s pedals turn out to be baseless, domestic manufacturers stand to benefit by prolonging the parade of bad publicity.

Anyone who thinks Toyota’s executives were summoned to Congress to discuss the evidence concerning Toyota’s pedals has missed the point. Regardless of what we ultimately discover about Toyota, this was about a horde of pressure groups seeking to impose their economic agendas via political power. But pressure groups are only a symptom. The cause is the government’s power to intervene in the market to pick winners and losers.

In the auto industry alone, the government controls everything from whom car companies can hire (unionized employees) to what kind of vehicles they must build (hybrids). And elsewhere it decides which businesses are “too big to fail,” which industries “deserve” massive subsidies, and which unproven technologies warrant billions of taxpayer “investment.” That’s a recipe for pressure group warfare.

This is not what Madison and Jefferson had in mind. Their vision was of a strictly limited government, which would perform one basic function — guard individual rights. Its role was to protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property from infringement by thugs and frauds, while otherwise leaving people free to produce and trade in a free market. In the original American system, it’s the job of the market to pick winners and losers, and the job of the courts — not Congress — to arbitrate disputes, such as that between Toyota and drivers harmed in accidents.

The truth is Toyota’s troubles should not be a political issue. On a free market, Toyota would have to address the real or alleged problems with its cars and work to restore its reputation with consumers, or suffer the consequences. And if the company were proved in a court of law to be guilty of negligence, it would be held accountable. In any case, there would be no need for the circus now taking place, with all its sordid political posturing and favor-trading.

So here’s a proposal. Make Washington come up with a plan to disentangle government from the economy. It might even start with a Congressional investigation.

About The Authors

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Newport Beach is considering banning smoking in a variety of new places, potentially including parks and outdoor dining areas. This is just the latest step in a widespread war on smoking by federal, state, and local governments — a campaign that includes massive taxes on cigarettes, advertising bans, and endless lawsuits against tobacco companies. This war is infecting America with a political disease far worse than any health risk caused by smoking; it is destroying our freedom to make our own judgments and choices.

According to the anti-smoking movement, restricting people’s freedom to smoke is justified by the necessity of combating the “epidemic” of smoking-related disease and death. Cigarettes, we are told, kill hundreds of thousands each year, and expose countless millions to secondhand smoke. Smoking, the anti-smoking movement says, in effect, is a plague, whose ravages can only be combated through drastic government action.

But smoking is not some infectious disease that must be quarantined and destroyed by the government. It’s a voluntary activity that every individual is free to abstain from (including by avoiding restaurants and other private establishments that permit smoking). And, contrary to those who regard any smoking as irrational on its face, cigarettes are a potential value that each individual must assess for himself. Of course, smoking can be harmful — in certain quantities, over a certain period of time, it can be habit forming and lead to disease or death. But many understandably regard the risks as minimal if one smokes relatively infrequently, and they see smoking as offering definite value, such as physical pleasure.

Are they right? Can it be a value to smoke cigarettes — and if so, in what quantity? This is the sort of judgment that properly belongs to every individual, based on his assessment of the evidence concerning smoking’s benefits and risks, and taking into account his particular circumstances (age, family history, etc.). If others believe the smoker is making a mistake, they are free to try to persuade him of their viewpoint. But they should not be free to dictate his decision, any more than they should be able to dictate his decision on whether and to what extent to drink alcohol or play poker. The fact that some individuals will smoke themselves into an early grave is no more justification for banning smoking than that the existence of alcoholics is grounds for prohibiting you from enjoying a drink at dinner.

Implicit in the war on smoking, however, is the view that the government must dictate the individual’s decisions with regard to smoking, because he is incapable of making them rationally. To the extent the anti-smoking movement succeeds in wielding the power of government coercion to impose on Americans its blanket opposition to smoking, it is entrenching paternalism: the view that individuals are incompetent to run their own lives, and thus require a nanny-state to control every aspect of those lives.

This state is well on its way: from trans-fat bans to bicycle helmet laws to prohibitions on gambling, the government is increasingly abridging our freedom on the grounds that we are not competent to make rational decisions in these areas — just as it has long done by paternalistically dictating how we plan for retirement (Social Security) or what medicines we may take (the FDA).

Indeed, one of the main arguments used to bolster the anti-smoking agenda is the claim that smokers impose “social costs” on non-smokers, such as smoking-related medical expenses — an argument that perversely uses an injustice created by paternalism to support its expansion. The only reason non-smokers today are forced to foot the medical bills of smokers is that our government has virtually taken over the field of medicine, in order to relieve us inept Americans of the freedom to manage our own health care, and bear the costs of our own choices.

But contrary to paternalism, we are not congenitally irrational misfits. We are thinking beings for whom it is both possible and necessary to rationally judge which courses of action will serve our interests. The consequences of ignoring this fact range from denying us legitimate pleasures to literally killing us: from the healthy 26-year-old unable to enjoy a trans-fatty food to the 75-year-old man unable to take an unapproved, experimental drug without which he will certainly die.

By employing government coercion to deprive us of the freedom to judge for ourselves what we inhale or consume, the anti-smoking movement has become an enemy, not an ally, in the quest for health and happiness.

About The Author

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Washington — The House Ways and Means Committee is now reviewing President Obama’s “Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee,” a bank tax that will fall on some institutions that never asked for money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, never took TARP money, or already paid back TARP money. In promoting the measure, supporters have been invoking widespread anger over bank bailouts, brazenly ignoring the fact that this punitive tax would punish businesses that eagerly fed at the public trough in the wake of the crisis as well as those that did not.

Since the advent of capitalism, businessmen have been denounced for the corrupt actions of a few political profiteers. To help understand that there is a distinction, consider two characters in Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. In the book, Rand describes two opposite kinds of businessmen — those she calls the “producers” and those she calls the “looters.”

The producers, such as Hank Rearden, inventor of a new metal stronger and cheaper than steel, work tirelessly to create products that improve human life. The looters are basically pseudobusinessmen, like the incompetent steel executive Orren Boyle, who get unearned riches by getting special favors from politicians. Their business isn’t business, but political pull.

It is the producers who make life possible: who keep grocery shelves stocked; who discover new lifesaving drugs; who make computers faster, buildings taller, and airplanes safer.

The looters, on the other hand, leech off the wealth created by producers.

The novel rejects the widespread notion that both the producer Reardens and the looter Boyles are fundamentally united by a desire for profit. Only the Reardens, she argues, deserve to be called profit-seekers, because they earn rewards through productive effort; the Boyles are antieffort parasites seeking unearned loot.

But it’s not only unearned wealth the looters want. In Atlas Shrugged, Boyle uses his influence to throttle Rearden with progressively harsher government controls and regulations, because he can’t survive except by hindering the competition.

Producers, however, don’t need special favors, only freedom: the freedom to produce, to trade voluntarily, and, if they succeed, to keep the profits. As a country becomes less free, it creates and unleashes more and more Boyles, who succeed at the expense of the Reardens.

America, today, is still a land of producers. Our country is full of industrialists, managers, and financiers who display the ruthlessly high standards, exceptional intelligence, and extraordinary work ethic that are characteristic of a producer.

When Apple was nearly ready to release the first iPhone, for instance, CEO Steve Jobs looked at the enclosure design and announced to his team, “I just don’t love this. I can’t convince myself to fall in love with this.” Mr. Jobs was asking his team to toss out a year’s work and start over. “And you know what everybody said?” Jobs later noted. “Sign us up.” That is the mentality of a producer — the commitment to settle for nothing but one’s best. It’s a mentality you can still find in many sectors of the economy.

But the Boyles are on the rise, growing fat on bailouts, handouts, and other sundry opportunities for political profiteering. For every producer like BB&T bank’s John Allison, who opposed Washington’s bailouts and was forced to accept government money, there seem to be ten like former General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, demanding tax dollars to prop up their failing companies.

Meanwhile, today’s real-life Boyles constantly lobby for government restraints on their more able competitors. Remember when the überproductive Bill Gates started giving away free Web browsers to his customers, and Netscape ran to Washington demanding that Microsoft be shackled via antitrust laws?

Yes, it can sometimes be hard to tell the producers from the looters. As government becomes more entangled in our economic affairs, even the Reardens of the world are forced to lobby Washington — not to reap unearned rewards, but to protect themselves from the Boyles. (It’s no accident that before Microsoft came under antitrust fire, it spent virtually nothing on lobbyists, while today it spends many millions.) What’s more, many businessmen are mixed cases — part producer, part political profiteer.

However difficult it may be to classify individual businessmen, though, it’s crucial to keep the two categories separate when praising or condemning the businessmen who appear in the headlines and before congressional panels. If we don’t, it’s the Boyles who benefit and the Reardens who suffer.

About The Authors

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

The Federal Communications Commission’s Chief Diversity Officer, Mark Lloyd, wants government to socialize the media. In his 2006 book Prologue to a Farce, Lloyd calls for a far-reaching government program that would straitjacket private media companies and funnel tens of billions of dollars into a tax-supported “public” media — an agenda shared by many of his associates. A massive nonprofit media run by the state would better inform Americans, Lloyd claims, although, feeling generous, he allows that “there should be a place for private communications services in a republic.”

You might think this radical call for government control of the media is at odds with the First Amendment and the ideals of its authors. Not according to Lloyd and his fellow travelers, who portray their vision of a government-funded press as a continuation of the American tradition. The Founders, they say, weren’t committed to protecting a profit-seeking press from government control. Instead, their primary concern was making sure the press could effectively educate and inform Americans, and they obsessively sought to subsidize the press in order to achieve that goal.

Let’s review the facts. During the founding era, America was buzzing with newspapers — all of them privately owned and for-profit. Profit-seeking was so much a part of the American press that, as Professor Paul Starr notes, “The word ‘advertiser’ appeared in the title of 5 of 8 dailies published in 1790 and 20 of 24 dailies in 1800.” The Founders did not curtail this profit-seeking press or supplement it with a government press. Instead they created a limited, rights-protecting government that secured freedom of speech and of the press. They were keenly aware that a free country depended on the free communication of ideas; indeed, it was America’s burgeoning press that had helped transform the colonists from loyal subjects into intransigent rebels, something that would have been impossible had the British government controlled or restricted the press.

Lloyd’s plan is point for point a repudiation of the Founders’ ideals.

Lloyd advocates billions in new taxes on the private media, while the Founders reviled the 1765 Stamp Act, which sparked the chain of events climaxing in the Revolution, in large measure because it taxed the press.

Lloyd calls for “federal regulations over commercial broadcast and cable programs regarding political advertising and commentary, educational programs for children” and even “the number of commercials” they can run, while the Founders solemnly declared that “Congress shall make no law” abridging the freedom of speech.

Lloyd advocates a government-run “public” media that would force you to support through taxes ideas you may oppose, while the Founders recognized the individual’s freedom of conscience, which includes the right not to support views you object to.

The most Lloyd can dig up to substantiate his claim that a sprawling “public” press and crippling restrictions on the private press are consistent with the Founders’ ideals is an obscure 1792 act that reduced postal shipping rates for newspapers. According to Lloyd, the Founders’ “advocacy of the Postal Act of 1792 put communication service and a subsidy for political discourse at the center of our republic.”

It was not a subsidy but freedom that the Founders put at the center of our republic. Even if we grant Lloyd that the Founders supported the Postal Act because they saw a modest role for government in promoting the spread of news, an objective assessment of such support would have to conclude that it contradicts their fundamental commitment to a free press. The reporting of news must be left to the voluntary actions of private individuals — any news subsidy inevitably sets the stage for government control of the press (just observe Washington’s intrusion into the affairs of today’s bailout recipients).

At the deepest level, Lloyd’s is an act of moral embezzlement. He is using what is at most a minor inconsistency on the part of the Founders to smash their achievement and destroy America’s free press. The FCC’s adoption of his proposals would not continue the American tradition. It would end it.

About The Author

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

I’m an atheist, and I love Christmas. If you think that’s a contradiction, think again.

Do you remember as a child composing wish lists of things you genuinely valued, thought you deserved, and knew would bring you pleasure? Do you remember eagerly awaiting the arrival of Christmas morning and the new bike, book, or chemistry set you were hoping for? That childhood feeling captures the spirit of Christmas and explains why so many of us look forward to the season each year.

You may no longer anticipate Christmas morning with that same childhood excitement. After all, even if you still make a wish list, couldn’t you just go out and buy the items yourself? Yet the pleasure of exchanging gifts as a token of friendship and love remains. Particularly when you receive (or purchase) a gift that could come only from someone who knows you well — say, a shirt that broadens your style or a new wine that becomes one of your favorites — it serves as a material reminder of a spiritual bond.

More widely, through cards, telephone calls, parties, long-distance travel, and vacation, Christmas serves as a time to reconnect with cherished family and friends, to share important events of the past year, and to look forward to the next. It’s a time to enjoy delectable chocolates, spiced eggnog, four-course meals, festive music, and party games.

Christmas is a spiritual holi­day whose leitmotif is personal, selfish plea­sure and joy. The season’s commercialism, far from detracting from this celebration, as we’re often told, is integral to it.

“The best aspect of Christmas,” Ayn Rand once observed, is “that Christmas has been commercialized.” The gift buying “stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by departments stores and other institutions — the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors — provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.”

Before Christians co-opted the holiday in the fourth century (there is no reason to believe Jesus was born in December), it was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, of the days beginning to grow longer. The Northern European tradition of bringing evergreens indoors, for instance, was a reminder that life and production were soon to return to the now frozen earth.

This focus on earthly joy is the actual source of the emotion most commonly identified with Christmas: goodwill. When you genuinely feel good about your own life and when you’re allowed to acknowledge and celebrate that joy, you come to wish the same happiness for others. It is those who despise their own lives who lash out at and make life miserable for the rest of us.

The commercialism of Christmas reinforces our goodwill. When you scour the malls in search of the perfect gift for a loved one and witness the cornucopia of goods and lights and decorations, you can’t help but feel that your fellow human beings are not enemies to be feared or fools to be avoided but fellow travelers and potential allies in the quest for joy. It’s no accident that America, the world’s most productive country, is also its most benevolent.

Christmas’s relation to goodwill leads many to believe the holiday is inseparable from Christianity, allegedly the religion of goodwill. But the connection is tenuous. A doctrine that tells you that you’re a sinner — that you must seek redemption but cannot earn it yourself and that Jesus, sinless, has endured an excruciating death to redeem you, who doesn’t deserve his sacrifice but who should accept it anyway — can hardly be characterized as expressing a benevolent view of man.

Christianity from the outset has been suspicious of human, earthly pleasure and joy. At best, these are seen as unbecoming a sinner, who should be busy repenting and fretting over his fate in an imagined next life. There once existed a war against Christmas — when religionists held sway in America. The Puritans canceled Christmas; in Boston from 1659 to 1681, the fine for exhibiting Christmas merriment was 5 shillings.

Christmas as we know it, with its twinkling lights, flying reindeer, and dancing snowmen, is largely a creation of 19th-century America. One of the most un-Christian periods in Western history, it was a time of worldly invention, industrialization, and profit. Only such an era would think of a holiday dominated by commercialism and joy and sense the connection between the two.

Christmas in America is not a Christian holiday. And besides, in a country that separates church from state, no national holiday can be regarded as the purview of a religion.

But any celebration can be corrupted. It’s not uncommon today to hear people say Christmas is their most stressful period. Pressed for time (and this year probably for money, too), they feel there are just too many lights to put up, meals to cook, and gifts to buy. Seeking something to blame, they blame the commercialism of the season. But there is no commandment, “Thou shall buy a present for every­one you know.” This is the religious mentality of duty rearing its ugly head again. Do and buy only that which you can truly afford and enjoy; there are myriad ways to celebrate with loved ones without spending a cent.

But whatever you do end up doing, don’t let the state of the economy rob you of the gaiety of the season. Perhaps now more than ever, we all need to remind ourselves that reaching joy on this Earth is the meaning of life.

Merry Christmas!

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

Eight years after 9/11 and in the shadow of two protracted U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East, the enemy is not only undefeated but emboldened and resurgent. What went wrong — and what should we do going forward?

Winning the Unwinnable War shows how our own policy ideas led to 9/11 and then crippled our response in the Middle East, and it makes the case for an unsettling conclusion: By subordinating military victory to perverse, allegedly moral constraints, Washington’s policy has undermined our national security. Owing to the significant influence of Just War Theory and neoconservatism, the Bush administration consciously put the imperative of shielding civilians and bringing them elections above the goal of eliminating real threats to our security. Consequently, this policy left our enemies stronger, and America weaker, than before. The dominant alternative to Bush-esque idealism in foreign policy — so-called realism — has made a strong comeback under the tenure of Barack Obama. But this nonjudgmental, supposedly practical approach is precisely what helped unleash the enemy prior to 9/11.

The message of the essays in this thematic collection is that only by radically rethinking our foreign policy in the Middle East can we achieve victory over the enemy that attacked us on 9/11. We need a new moral foundation for our Middle East policy. That new starting point for U.S. policy is the moral ideal championed by the philosopher Ayn Rand: rational self-interest. Implementing this approach entails objectively defining our national interest as protecting the lives and freedoms of Americans — and then taking principled action to safeguard them. The book lays out the necessary steps for achieving victory and for securing America’s long-range interests in the volatile Middle East.

• Read chapters 6 and 7 in the PDF.
• Buy the book
• See also: An Unwinnable War?

About The Author

Elan Journo

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

When President Obama addresses the AFL-CIO on Sept. 15, he is expected to reiterate his support for the so-called Employee Free Choice Act. Congress is sharply divided over the proposed law, which would change the voting and arbitration procedures by which federal law forces companies to deal with labor unions.

Because the changes favor Big Labor, pro-union Democrats have been locked in a prolonged partisan squabble with their Republican opponents, and legislative compromise seems likely. But that’s really beside the point. Instead of quibbling over the methods by which unions can be forced upon unwilling employers and employees, Congress should be debating how to make the labor market truly free — free from government coercion.

For more than seventy years, Congress has maintained a statutory scheme that fastens coercive labor monopolies on individual companies. Starting with the Wagner Act in 1935, any union that wins a simple majority of employee votes becomes, by force of law, the exclusive bargaining agent for every single employee in that workplace. Such a victory slams the door shut on individuals who want to deal directly with the company, and leaves the union with a government-protected stranglehold on that firm’s labor supply. Predictably, these company-by-company labor monopolies have had the kind of deadening effects that come with all coercive monopolies.

Here’s how it works in practice: Each company is required by law to “bargain in good faith” with the union before making any important decision affecting jobs, wages, or working conditions. The union, in its legally privileged position, can just say no. When pressed, it can mobilize a crippling strike even if thousands of employees would rather keep working — because here, too, the outcome of an employee majority vote binds everyone. Usually, however, the mere threat of such a strike is enough to keep employers in line.

Now suppose a unionized firm wants to sell or close an unprofitable plant, or revamp a workflow to save expenses. At the “bargaining” table, the union’s predictable resistance is typically followed by one of two results. Either the union stands firm, in which case the unprofitable practices continue — or the union acquiesces, in exchange for higher wages and benefits, or a job for the shop steward’s son, or some other favor. This is not genuine bargaining but organized extortion, made possible by federal labor law.

So, while non-unionized competitors charge ahead with nimble, inventive, rapid responses to market challenges, unionized companies learn to slow down, “negotiate,” compromise, draw up rules — in other words, kowtow to the union. The inevitable results are bloated prices and declining product quality, as witness the domestic auto industry.

Detroit’s automakers, having suffered through painful work stoppages in the decades following World War II, discovered they could avoid labor unrest by caving in to the United Auto Workers’ demands. Over the years, meeting those demands gave rise to labor agreements as thick as telephone books, testaments to the stultifying regimentation that sapped Detroit’s competitive juices.

Because car manufacturing is complex and capital intensive, many years passed before competitors from Japan, Korea, and Germany could establish non-unionized plants in America’s southland. Now, however, the sun is setting on Detroit. GM and Chrysler are writhing in red ink, drained to the point of bankruptcy by costly union concessions, and Ford struggles to survive.

Not all labor unions wield UAW-level power, but most would like to. That’s why the Employee Free Choice Act would eliminate secret ballots in union elections and replace them with individually signed cards, open to union inspection. This would allow union organizers to more easily target, and intimidate, anti-union employees — and therefore win more often. The Act would also allow government arbitrators to impose initial “contract” terms if the union and employer disagree. That’s contrary to existing law, which allows for a no-contract impasse in that situation.

Congress should not only reject the transparent power grab known as the Employee Free Choice Act, it should start hacking at the root of the complex federal regime that denies free choice in bargaining. That means repealing the Wagner Act, so that labor law can recognize and protect the absolute right of companies and employees to deal with each other on an entirely voluntary basis.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute