In the aftermath of the bombings in London, Prime Minister Tony Blair has asked the British people to remain calm and maintain their daily routines; the terrorists win, he says, if one gives in to fear. This, you may remember, was also George W. Bush’s response after Sept. 11, when he called on Americans to return to our shopping malls and not be afraid.

But we should be afraid — precisely because of Blair’s and Bush’s policies.

We face an enemy, Islamic totalitarianism, committed to our deaths. Its agents have shown an eagerness to kill indiscriminately in London, Madrid, New York and elsewhere, even at the cost of their own lives. They continually seek chemical and nuclear weapons; imagine the death toll if such devices had been used in London’s subway bombings. In the face of this mounting threat, what is our response?

Do we proudly proclaim our unconditional right to exist? Do we resolutely affirm to eradicate power base after power base of the Islamic totalitarians, until they drop their arms, and foreign governments and civilian populations no longer have the nerve to support them?

No. Blair’s response to the London bombings, with Bush and the other members of the G8 by his side, was, in meaning if not in explicit statement, to apologize and do penance for our existence.

Somehow we in the West and not the Palestinians — with their rejection of the freedoms attainable in Israel and their embrace of thugs and killers — are responsible for their degradation. Thus, we must help build them up by supplying the terrorist-sponsoring Palestinian Authority with billions in aid. And somehow we in the West and not the Africans — with their decades of tribal, collectivist and anticapitalist ideas — are responsible for their poverty. Thus we must lift them out of their plight with $50 billion in aid. This, Blair claims, will help us “triumph over terrorism.”

The campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq might be considered exceptions to this orgy of penance, but that would be an error. In neither war was the aim to smash the enemy. Unlike in WWII, when the Allies would flatten cities to achieve victory, the American and British armies, by explicit order, tiptoed in the Middle East. Terrorists and insurgents went free, free to return to kill our young men, because we subordinated the lives of our soldiers to concern for the enemy’s well-being and civilian casualties. Our goal was not victory but, as Bush so often tells us, to bestow with our soldiers’ blood an unearned gift on these people, “freedom” and “democracy,” with the hope that they would then stop killing us.

According to Blair, our duty is to shower the globe with money. According to Bush, our duty is to shower the globe with “democracy.” Taken together, the meaning of their foreign policy is clear. The West has no moral right to exist, because it is productive, prosperous and free; materially and spiritually, with its money and its soldiers’ lives, the West must buy permission to exist from the rest of the world. But the rest of the world has an unquestionable right to exist, because it is unproductive, poor and unfree.

Until we in the West reject this monstrous moral premise, we will never have cause to feel safe.

What we desperately need is a leader who proclaims that the rational ideals of the West, reason, science, individual rights and capitalism, are good — that we have a moral right to exist for our own sake — that we don’t owe the rest of the world anything — and that we should be admired and emulated for our virtues and accomplishments, not denounced. This leader would then demonstrate, in word and deed, that if those opposed to these ideals take up arms against us, they will be crushed.

Support for totalitarian Islam will wither only when the Islamic world is convinced that the West will fight — and fight aggressively. As long as the insurgents continue with their brutal acts in Iraq, unharmed by the mightiest military force in human history, as long as the citizens of London return to “normal” lives with subways exploding all around them, as long as the West continues to negotiate with Iran on nuclear weapons — as long as the West continues to appease its enemies, because it believes it has no moral right to destroy them, totalitarian Islam is emboldened.

It is the West’s moral weakness that feeds terrorism and brings it fresh recruits. It is the prospect of success against the West, fueled by the West’s apologetic response, that allows totalitarian Islam to thrive.

Bush has said repeatedly, in unguarded moments, that this war is un-winnable. By his foreign policy, it is. But if the British and American people gain the self-esteem to assert our moral right to exist — with everything this entails — victory will be ours.

About The Authors

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

In a step fraught with danger, Israel is uprooting its citizens and withdrawing its military from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. That Palestinian terrorists are rejoicing over this momentous pullout is hardly shocking. That the United States is also applauding is contemptible. Worse still, America is demanding more concessions of land: Secretary of State Rice has insisted, “It cannot be Gaza only.”

Why is America urging Israel to make such perilous concessions? The rationale is that the withdrawal will open an unobstructed path for the “downtrodden” Palestinians toward a self-governed ethnic state. Such a state, Washington hopes, will alleviate their suffering and establish peaceful co-existence between Israel and the Palestinians.

But such a state will intensify the misery of the few genuinely freedom-seeking Palestinians by entrenching a tyrannical regime. The Palestinian Authority, a provisional governing body, has drained the lifeblood out of its citizens, trampled on their rights and, despite receiving billions in foreign aid, kept them in devastating poverty. Under the PA’s anarchic reign, rival “security forces” arbitrarily seize property, arrest and jail people without charge, and summarily execute dissidents.

The actual victors of the withdrawal are terrorists and their vast legions of reverent supporters in the Palestinian population. The motto emblazoned on banners throughout Gaza expresses their belief, borne out in practice, that violence works: “Gaza Today. The West Bank and Jerusalem Tomorrow.” The withdrawal has strengthened their resolve, not to achieve peace, but to destroy Israel. “We’re going to keep our weapons,” one terrorist told reporters, “because the battle with the enemy is a long one.” A cleric allied to Hamas, which has carried out umpteen suicide bombings in Israel, observed that “when we offer up our children [as ’martyrs’], it is much better than choosing the road of humiliation and negotiations.”

As some have observed, with a populace and leadership so hospitable to terrorists, in time the Palestinian territories may succeed Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as a training ground for jihadists, lusting to murder not only in the streets of Jerusalem and Baghdad, but also London and New York.

Israel’s retreat from Gaza — rightly celebrated by terrorists — is neither a means of fostering peace, nor a solution for the plight of innocent Palestinians. Why, then, does America support it?

Because Washington holds that Israel has no moral right to assert its interests, but the Palestinians do. Their quest for statehood enjoys Washington’s wholehearted support, encouragement and financing as an incontestable entitlement — even if they tyrannize themselves and terrorize Israel. But if Israel pursues its interests, by contrast, Washington considers that a moral transgression. Israel could, and for a time did, easily protect the lives and property of all individuals within its borders and the contested territories, by smashing aggressors and imposing its rule of law on Palestinians (which innocent Palestinians welcomed). But Washington refuses on principle to endorse such assertions of Israeli interests.

Why this double standard? Our leaders believe in altruism: the view that one’s highest moral duty is to selflessly serve the needy — and thus that the world’s “haves” must sacrifice for the sake of its “have-nots.” The productive, on this abhorrent view, have no moral right to pursue their own interests; their only justification for existing is to serve the needy. Because Israel is strong and prosperous, it is thereby forbidden from imposing its will on the destitute Palestinians — even though it is the innocent victim of Palestinian aggression. Because the Palestinians are weak and poor, they may demand anything they wish — including a state with which to terrorize Israel.

It might seem that President Bush is being hypocritical: forbidding an ally, Israel, from fighting terrorism effectively even as U.S. forces wage a “war on terror.” But observe that in fact he is being devastatingly consistent. For Bush, Iraqis are entitled to the sanctity of their Mosques — but our troops are forbidden from rooting out insurgents hiding and sniping from within; Iraqis are entitled to textbooks, hospitals, sewers, roads — but, in defending themselves, our troops must place the lives of Iraqi civilians (some of whom are or aid insurgents) above their own. Attesting to the cost of this sacrificial policy is the burgeoning U.S. death toll.

And Washington has refused to impose on Iraq a constitution that would make the new regime non-threatening — as we did in Japan after World War II. In the name of satisfying the poor Iraqis’ demand for “self-determination,” President Bush has pledged to recognize as sovereign whatever regime the Iraqis vote for — even a militantly hostile Islamic theocracy that, in unison with Iran’s mullahs, clamors for “Death to America.”

Neither Israel nor the United States can vanquish Islamist terrorism unless it repudiates the corrupt morality of altruism, which enjoins the sacrifice of the successful as an ideal. Victory can only be achieved if one is convinced of one’s moral right to live and to act consistently to achieve one’s goals. Every self-effacing step that Israel takes — in lockstep with America and with our blessing — encourages the terrorists with the belief that their success is achievable.

About The Author

Elan Journo

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

Legal and political battle lines have been drawn across the country over the teaching of “intelligent design” — the view that life is so complex it must be the product of a “higher intelligence.” The central issue under debate is whether “intelligent design” is, in fact, a genuine scientific theory or merely a disguised form of religious advocacy — creationism in camouflage.

Proponents of “intelligent design” aggressively market their viewpoint as real science, insisting it is not religiously based. Writes one leading advocate, Michael Behe: “The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself — not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs.”

Proponents of “intelligent design” claim that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally flawed theory — that there are certain complex features of living organisms evolution simply cannot explain, but which can be explained as the handiwork of an “intelligent designer.”

Their viewpoint is not religiously based, they insist, because it does not require that the “intelligent designer” be God. “Design,” writes another leading proponent, William Dembski, “requires neither magic nor miracles nor a creator.”

Indeed, “design” apparently requires surprisingly little of the “designer’s” identity: “Inferences to design,” contends Behe, “do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer.” According to its advocates, the “designer” responsible for “intelligent design” in biology could be any sort of “creative intelligence” capable of engineering the basic elements of life. Some have even seriously nominated advanced space aliens for the role.

Their premise seems to be that as long as they don’t explicitly name the “designer” — as long as they allow that the “designer” could be a naturally existing being, a being accessible to scientific study — that this somehow saves their viewpoint from the charge of being inherently religious in character.

But does it?

Imagine we discovered an alien on Mars with a penchant for bio-engineering. Could such a natural being fulfill the requirements of an “intelligent designer”?

It could not. Such a being would not actually account for the complexity that “design” proponents seek to explain. Any natural being capable of “designing” the complex features of earthly life would, on their premises, require its own “designer.” If “design” can be inferred merely from observed complexity, then our purported Martian “designer” would be just another complex being in nature that supposedly cannot be explained without positing another “designer.” One does not explain complexity by dreaming up a new complexity as its cause.

By the very nature of its approach, “intelligent design” cannot be satisfied with a “designer” who is part of the natural world. Such a “designer” would not answer the basic question its advocates raise: it would not explain biological complexity as such. The only “designer” that would stop their quest for a “design” explanation of complexity is a “designer” about whom one cannot ask any questions or who cannot be subjected to any kind of scientific study — a “designer” that “transcends” nature and its laws — a “designer” not susceptible of rational explanation — in short: a supernatural “designer.”

Its advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, “intelligent design” is inherently a quest for the supernatural. Only one “candidate for the role of designer” need apply. Dembski himself — even while trying to deny this implication — concedes that “if there is design in biology and cosmology, then that design could not be the work of an evolved intelligence.” It must, he admits, be that of a “transcendent intelligence” to whom he euphemistically refers as “the big G.”

The supposedly nonreligious theory of “intelligent design” is nothing more than a crusade to peddle religion by giving it the veneer of science — to pretend, as one commentator put it, that “faith in God is something that holds up under the microscope.”

The insistence of “intelligent design” advocates that they are “agnostic regarding the source of design” is a bait-and-switch. They dangle out the groundless possibility of a “designer” who is susceptible of scientific study — in order to hide their real agenda of promoting faith in the supernatural. Their scientifically accessible “designer” is nothing more than a gateway god — metaphysical marijuana intended to draw students away from natural, scientific explanations and get them hooked on the supernatural.

No matter how fervently its salesmen wish “intelligent design” to be viewed as cutting-edge science, there is no disguising its true character. It is nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on science, and should be rejected as such.

About The Author

Keith Lockitch

Vice President of Education and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

They call themselves “people of faith,” and they are waging war against a basic principle of American government: the separation of church and state. Complaining that our secular culture has improperly banished God from government, religious conservatives are working tirelessly to inject faith-based decision-making into America’s legal system.

This conservative onslaught requires a bold defense of the secular state — by people of reason.

Although that defense must encompass all branches of government, today’s battleground is the courtroom, where judges find themselves under relentless pressure to legitimize religious dogmas such as the sanctity of the God-given soul (the Terri Schiavo case, anti-abortion laws, stem cell research), the literal truth of holy scripture (laws against homosexuality, displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses), and the recognition of God as master of the universe (creationism, prayer in public schools). The First Amendment, conservatives declare, guarantees only freedom “of” religion, not freedom “from” religion.

To their credit, secular judges have valiantly resisted the religious right’s persistent advances. In response, frustrated conservatives are leveraging their newfound dominance over Congress and the presidency in a crusade to emasculate the judiciary. Whether it’s senators limiting filibusters, or Congress threatening to reorganize the court system, or President Bush decrying “judicial activism” while nominating compliant federal judges, conservatives are targeting secular judges as enemies.

No, the “people of faith” are not calling for a Christian theocracy — yet. For now, they simply want to establish religious faith on an equal footing with reason as a legitimate method of governmental decision-making. But if they succeed in this, the eventual emergence of government by clergy is all but assured.

A proper defense of the secular state must penetrate to fundamentals. It is insufficient, for example, to criticize Christian evangelicals for imposing their own narrow creed on a diversely religious citizenry. Such superficial criticism implies that faith-based governmental action is permissible if representative of all beliefs, when in fact our Constitution forbids it.

America was established for a secular purpose: the protection of individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution neither mentions God (except to forbid religious tests for public office) nor imbues government with any religious purposes.

Individual rights can be protected only by a secular state whose every action is grounded in objective fact and guided by reason, not blind faith. By way of illustration, consider the importance of rational methodology in the field of criminal justice.

To justify an arrest in a proper legal system, the police must have probable cause, and to win a conviction, a prosecutor must establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, based on objective evidence. If justice is to prevail, each governmental decision must be taken without regard to anyone’s religious faith.

Any admixture of religious faith guarantees injustice. In the Dark Ages, a prosecutor would submerge the defendant’s arms in boiling water, and if the scalded flesh became infected, that was taken as a sign of God’s disfavor, mandating a guilty verdict. Adopting that benighted era’s essential methodology, today’s conservatives demand that judges accept “God’s will” as a legitimate basis for punishing homosexuals, science teachers, stem cell researchers, and a host of others. This is the collapse of criminal justice, as surely as if Jewish judges were rejecting testimony from atheists, or Catholic jurors were relying on scripture to convict Protestants.

Centuries of history demonstrate that faith-based governments spawn persecution, torture, and endless bloody warfare. Today’s religionists may insist that this time will be different, but their evasions cannot eradicate the inherent connection between faith and force. Since faith entails overriding reason in favor of emotion, religious disputes are necessarily unresolvable through rational persuasion, leaving force as the only weapon against heretics and infidels. No wonder religionists so often lust after government power.

If “people of faith” choose to act irrationally in their private lives, they are free to do so. But if there is one institution that must be held rationally accountable for every single action it takes, it is the agency that can lawfully use guns, prisons, and lethal injections against legally disarmed citizens.

Separating church from state does not guarantee victory for the rational protection of individual rights — secular irrationality is possible, indeed commonplace — but such separation is indispensable nonetheless. This is why issues like abortion, gay rights, and “Intelligent Design” creationism merit so much attention. Once judges begin accepting religious feelings as valid decisional factors, the secular principle cannot survive, and the disintegration of society into sectarian strife must soon follow.

“People of faith” began this war, and so people of reason must now end it — by zealously defending the secular state, and vowing never to allow faith and force to be united under the American flag.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

Despite worldwide adoration and attention focused on Pope John Paul II and his successor, and now the Vatican’s decision to expedite John Paul’s possible canonization, few have asked an obvious question: What does the Catholic Church stand for today? If one examines this question closely, the answer does not give cause for celebration.

Consider the Church’s recent teachings in regard to the major areas of modern life: rational thought, productive work, and sex.

The Scientific Revolution, begun in the 16th century, demonstrated to man that reason, systematically employed, could unlock the world’s mysteries. From the orbits of the planets to the trajectory of a cannonball, from the atomic nature of matter to the origins of life, from the power of electricity to the causes of disease — everything was open to human understanding. By showing man that his mind, properly used, possesses an unlimited power to grasp the universe, the great scientists taught us a profound self-confidence.

In opposition, John Paul II argues in the encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) for a return to the notion that reason is “limited” and should be the handmaiden of faith. “There exists a knowledge which is peculiar to faith,” he writes, “surpassing the knowledge proper to human reason.” What should you do when the conclusions of reason conflict with the dictates of “faith” — when, say, “faith” declares that you are born with sin but reason teaches you that your moral stature can only be a matter of the choices you make? You must abandon the idea that you — your rational mind — can comprehend the matter. You must bow your head, drop to your knees, and blindly submit to religious authority.

The Scientific Revolution ushered in the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. Armed with the power of scientific knowledge and protected from the machinations of king and pope by the principle of individual rights, the producers appeared. With the freedom to think and to profit from the results of their thinking, individual inventors and innovators transformed every area of human life. Businessmen flourished and created wealth on a heretofore undreamed of scale. The West, and especially America, became the envy of the world. Each of us learned to stand proudly erect, master of the requirements of human survival.

Pope Paul VI’s 20th-century encyclical Populorum Progressio (On the Development of Peoples), however, is a manifesto against capitalism. “Individual initiative alone and the interplay of competition,” he says, “will not ensure satisfactory development.” Instead, the individual thinker and producer must be shackled to the group, forced to abandon the profit motive and minister to the needs of others. Quoting St. Ambrose, Paul writes, “You are not making a gift of your possessions to the poor person. You are handing over to him what is his.” This is communism’s vision (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need), only with different authorities in charge. The result therefore must be the same as wherever communism was tried: back-breaking poverty. Why does the Church advocate that which it supposedly opposes? In destroying the great producers and chaining everyone together, you lose control over your own life — and lose the self-esteem that comes from such control.

Now consider the consequences in the realm of sex. By holding reason as an absolute and productive work as the meaning of life, an individual man or woman reaches a state of earthly success, joy, happiness. He or she will seek to express this profound state with a worthy partner — hence the widespread appearance of romantic love in the freer, capitalist nations. In the appropriate circumstances, sex becomes a celebration of your efficacy and love of life.

In Humanae Vitae (On the Regulation of Birth) Pope Paul VI reiterated the Church’s opposition to contraception. Observe the effects of such a doctrine on sexual pleasure: it introduces fear of an endless stream of unwanted children into the sex act and promotes sexual frustration. Sex is stripped of its status as an end in itself, a celebration of life on earth, and is instead turned into a wearisome duty to procreate.

The Church’s teachings on reason, production, and sex are designed to make men feel impotent, insignificant, and unworthy and incapable of celebrating their own lives. Its recent teachings stand united against a single evil — the sin of pride. Why? Because only broken men will submit to the authority of the Church in the hope that it will save them from their misery — the helpless misery promoted by the Church’s own doctrines.

If success on earth is one’s goal, one needs a philosophy that advocates reason as the only means to knowledge, that affirms each individual’s right to his own life and property, and that upholds happiness as an end in itself. But for such a philosophy one must turn from the Church’s teachings to their 20th-century antipode: the works of Ayn Rand.

About The Authors

Edwin A. Locke

Dean's Professor (Emeritus) of Leadership and Motivation, R.H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

People striving to create free societies properly deserve the moral support of anyone who loves freedom. So it is dismaying that, despite President Bush’s rhetoric about freedom, the United States shuns one brave group of people attempting to escape the clutches of a mighty totalitarian regime — but endorses another group seeking to establish a tyranny.

These two groups — the Taiwanese and the Palestinians — both assert that they are entitled to a sovereign state. Observe that the United States did not laud the huge March 26 rally in Taipei protesting China’s aggression and upholding Taiwan’s independence. But President Bush frequently affirms his support for a sovereign Palestinian state, a sentiment echoed by other world leaders who lately pledged $1.2 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. The U.S. contribution to these “freedom fighters” this year is a hefty $200 million. Taiwan, bereft of diplomatic recognition in Washington and other capitals, is decidedly unwelcome at the United Nations, an organization which once invited former Palestinian leader, arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, to address its General Assembly.

To appreciate the magnitude of the injustice in how the Taiwanese and Palestinians are treated, consider their respective claims to sovereignty.

Palestinian leaders assert that their people would be better off in an ethnic homeland with a sovereign Palestinian government. They demand “liberation” from Israel’s supposed yoke, but their claim is belied by reality. Arabs living under Israeli rule have long enjoyed political rights and a standard of living unmatched by any other Middle Eastern country. For example, Arab citizens can freely air their views without fear of retribution; they can serve as members of parliament; they can seek legal redress under a rule-of-law judicial system.

What is the alternative for which Palestinian leaders are clamoring? It is obvious if you look at the Palestinian Authority, the provisional governing body in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This tyrannical regime has become notorious for systematically trampling its subjects’ rights. Critics of the Palestinian leadership have been brutally silenced, their printing presses burned and broadcasting facilities shut down. There is nothing approaching an objective judiciary: arbitrary arrests and imprisonments are rampant. While many prisoners rot in jail without ever being charged, terrorists are quickly set free or allowed to “escape.” The several competing Palestinian “security forces” are known to confiscate property and murder anyone who stands in their way. What has kept the Palestinians afloat economically is billions of dollars in foreign aid — the most aid per capita for any “people” in the world — money that has helped fund anti-Western terrorist groups.

There is no right to establish (or expand) a tyranny. Sovereignty will not transform the Palestinian regime into a thriving free society, but perpetuate the regime’s hostility to human life. Only those who seek to escape political oppression and create a free state are entitled to invoke a moral right to statehood. That precisely describes Taiwan’s struggle.

Threatening war if Taiwan declares independence, Beijing regards the island as belonging to China and insists on “reunification.” But Taiwan is justified in seeking to preserve its hard-won freedoms from China’s encroachment. Over the last thirty years, the island nation has gradually established a government that protects the rights of individuals. By 1987, more than a decade after the death of its longtime authoritarian ruler, Chiang Kai-shek, martial law was lifted; political dissidents who had been jailed by the government were released; and, two years later, opposition parties were legalized. Today Taiwan is a powerful economic dynamo whose people are free to express their views, to start businesses and keep their wealth, to seek legal redress in the courts, to elect their political leaders.

What would “reunification” with China mean? In the twenty years since government forces slaughtered pro-freedom demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, China has opened itself up to some international commerce — but it remains a dictatorship. Iron-fisted censorship now extends beyond the print and broadcast media to the Internet; those who petition the government for legal redress risk being arrested on ominously vague charges of “disturbing the social order”; “political criminals” are persecuted, imprisoned, and killed. Were it governed by Beijing, Taiwan would see its political freedoms corroded.

Failing to endorse Taiwan’s legitimate claim to independence means consigning its people to the predations of a totalitarian regime. Endorsing the Palestinians’ baseless demand to a state means condemning its subjects to the living hell of tyranny.

If we truly want to see the spread of freedom around the world, we must reverse the contemptible injustice of supporting Palestinian thugs while withholding our moral support from Taiwan.

About The Author

Elan Journo

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

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear argument in the Ten Commandments cases, conservatives can be heard voicing their familiar complaints against “judicial activism,” the supposed tendency of judges to override majority rule by writing their own subjective beliefs into law.

One of the cases arose in Kentucky, where framed copies of the Commandments hang in a courthouse hallway, and the other in Texas, where a stone monument six-feet high, carved with the Commandments’ text, adorns a walkway linking the state’s capitol and highest court. In both cases, plaintiffs contend that the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion forbids such displays on government property.

If the Supreme Court were to order the displays removed, would it be overriding the will of the majority? Most certainly. Opinion polls show that 70 percent of Americans approve of displaying the Ten Commandments on public property.

Is it therefore true that the Supreme Court would be improperly writing its subjective beliefs into law? Not at all. The Court would merely be doing its constitutional job.

This nation was founded on the principle that government exists solely to protect individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution conforms itself to this principle when it places individual rights off-limits, beyond the reach of even the most lopsided democratic vote.

This overriding purpose is reflected in the structure of American government, whose three distinct branches are subject to “checks and balances” that permit and encourage each branch to restrain the others’ powers. To offset the ever-present temptation in all three branches to curry favor with majorities by infringing upon individual rights, courts are endowed with a counterbalancing power to declare such infringements unconstitutional.

This power is known as judicial review.

Judicial review, properly conceived, is merely one method among many by which judges resolve legal conflicts. In the courtroom, for example, judges resolve conflicts between witnesses: Did Smith run the red light, or not? They also resolve conflicts between laws: Was Smith’s violation of the red-light law justified because he was obeying another law giving right-of-way to an ambulance?

Ultimately, judges must also resolve conflicts between the Constitution and the actions of Congress, the President, or the states — especially when those actions purportedly violate individual rights. Constitutional rights furnish an objective standard by which judges can evaluate governmental actions and, when necessary, halt them.

In case after case, the Supreme Court has courageously exercised judicial review. Faced with mandatory prayer sessions in public classrooms, the Court responded with Engel v. Vitale in 1962, holding that such prayers violate the First Amendment. Faced with state laws forbidding abortions, the Court responded with Roe v. Wade in 1973, holding that such bans violate a woman’s right to privacy. And faced with state laws imprisoning homosexuals for pursuing sexual pleasure, the Court responded with Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, holding that such laws violate an individual’s right to liberty.

Conservatives decry such decisions because no rights to prayer-free public education, or abortion, or homosexuality, are expressly listed in the Constitution. But the Constitution cannot be interpreted biblically, as an exhaustive catalog of rules revealed by a superior authority, like a secular Book of Leviticus.

Instead, the Constitution must be interpreted objectively. Although the document contains some simple rules (such as the Presidential minimum age of 35) presenting no interpretive challenge, it also contains carefully formulated principles requiring future generations to identify particular applications that were unknown or unknowable in the 1780s. For example, First Amendment “freedom of the press” protects not only newspapers with printing presses but also television, the Internet, and other media not yet invented. Similarly, the constitutional principle of individual rights embraces blacks, women, and others whose rights as individuals the Founders did not fully understand.

For these reasons, conservatives’ demands for so-called “judicial restraint” — voluntary refusal by judges to exercise their review powers — must be rejected. Because courts provide a last line of defense against the tyranny of the majority, any such judicial self-emasculation would pose a deadly threat to our liberties. Just as Congress would be wrong to renounce its lawmaking power in the name of “legislative restraint,” so the judiciary would be wrong to surrender its precious review power in the name of “judicial restraint.”

If the Supreme Court finds that state-sponsored displays of the Ten Commandments violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom from the establishment of religion, the Court should unapologetically exercise its power of judicial review and order their immediate removal.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

Because the comments he made shortly after September 11 have come to light, obscene comments in which he vilifies the World Trade Center victims as “little Eichmanns” and lauds their killers as “humanitarians,” Professor Ward Churchill has resigned as chairman of the University of Colorado’s ethnics studies department. But, with the support of other faculty, he retains his professorship. Four members of his department have expressed “unconditional support” for his “freedom of expression and First Amendment rights.” The Faculty Assembly of the university, though it regards his words as “controversial, offensive, and odious,” defends his freedom to utter them.

In opposition, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens has called for Churchill’s resignation, saying that taxpayers should not have to subsidize Churchill’s “outrageous and insupportable” views.

Both solutions are incompatible with free speech.

Freedom of speech is an individual’s right to express ideas without coercive interference from the government. Free speech does protect an individual who voices unpopular ideas from governmental force, but it does not require that other citizens support him. If an individual wants others to finance the expression of his ideas, he must seek their voluntary agreement. To force another person to support ideas he opposes violates his freedom of speech.

A journalist, for instance, has the freedom to write what he pleases, but he has no right to demand that Time magazine publish it. That decision belongs to the owners of Time. Similarly, a professor has the freedom to teach any view he wishes, but he has no right to demand that Harvard employ him. That decision belongs to the private owners of Harvard. Freedom of speech is not the right of a Ph.D. to have other citizens provide him with a university classroom.

Yet that in effect is what the professors are demanding.

They maintain that no matter how much the citizens who fund public universities may disagree with a professor’s views, he should be able to continue to exist on the public dole. Taxpayers are to be stripped of their right to choose which ideas their money supports. Why? So that professors can spout whatever theories happen to catch their fancy — including those that brand productive Americans as Nazis and Islamic killers as liberators — without the burden of having to seek the voluntary consent of those forced to sponsor them.

Under the guise of defending free speech, therefore, the professors are actually advocating its destruction.

But it is no solution for the government to put pressure (or worse) on public universities whenever a professor teaches ideas opposed to the views of a majority of taxpayers. The moment the government becomes arbiter of what can and cannot be taught on campus, the moment speech becomes subject to majority vote, censorship results.

What then is the answer? Privatize the universities.

The truth is that public education as such is antithetical to free speech. Whether leftists are forced to pay taxes to fund universities from which their academic spokesmen are barred (as Gov. Owens’ solution requires), or non-leftists are forced to pay taxes to fund professors who condemn America as a terrorist nation, someone loses the right to choose which ideas his money supports.

By its nature, a public university must make decisions about what to include in and to exclude from its curriculum. Of necessity, therefore, some citizens will object to what is being taught in its classrooms. But they are nevertheless forced to finance the communication of those ideas.

To safeguard the right to freedom of speech, the right to private property must be safeguarded. Only private universities can protect free speech. The owners of a university could then hire the faculty they endorsed, while others could refuse to fund the university if they disagreed with its teachings.

However, since privatization would threaten the left’s grip on the universities — as well as any professor who enjoys the unearned privilege of spewing out ideas without worrying about the need to finance their expression — many professors vehemently oppose this solution. In the name of free speech, they denounce as “tyranny of the almighty dollar” the sole means of preserving free speech.

But we must not be fooled by this cry from the professors about their freedom of speech. Freedom is precisely what they don’t advocate. We are right in objecting to being forced to fund their ideas, loathsome or otherwise. The only solution, however, is a free market in education.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

The educational tragedy in Rockford, Illinois, now making national headlines, echoes a larger tragedy. At Lewis Lemon elementary school, with a student body described by The New York Times as “80 percent nonwhite and 85 percent poor,” third graders scored near the top in statewide readings tests. Their results were bested only by students at a school for the gifted. How were the results achieved? Teachers used reading lessons “heavy on drilling and repetition, that emphasize phonics — that is, learning words by sounding them out.” This approach, however, is deemed too extreme by the new school superintendent, who is phasing it out.

In discarding success, Rockford is following the demands of the still-dominant voices in the nation’s schools of education. They insist that phonics instruction be balanced with its antipode, the whole language “method.” Because “reading is such a complex and multifaceted activity,” explains Dr. Catherine Snow, professor of education at Harvard, “no single method is the answer.” This is like saying that because eating is “such a complex and multifaceted activity,” no single method can guide us, and that a proper diet must therefore contain a mixture of food and poison.

The controversy over how to teach reading is not a narrow, technical dispute. It is a broad, philosophic disagreement, with crucial educational implications. The phonics proponents maintain that human knowledge is gained objectively, by perceiving the facts of reality and by abstracting from those facts. These proponents, therefore, teach the child directly and systematically the basic facts — the sounds that make up every word — from which the abstract knowledge of how to read can be learned.

Supporters of whole language, by contrast, believe that the acquisition of knowledge is a subjective process. Influenced by John Dewey and his philosophy of Progressive education, they believe that the child must be encouraged to follow his feelings irrespective of the facts, and to have his arbitrary “opinions” regarded as valid. On this premise, the child is told to treat the “whole word” as a primary, and to draw his conclusions without the necessity of learning the underlying facts. He is taught this — in spite of the overwhelming evidence, in theory and in practice, that phonics instruction works and whole language does not.

In learning to speak, a child has already performed a tremendous cognitive feat. To read, he must now grasp the connection between the black marks he sees on paper — which to him are like hieroglyphs — and the spoken words he already understands. Systematic phonics instruction teaches a child to break the code of written language.

Spoken language is made up of discrete units of sound, called phonemes, like the b sound in “bat” or “boy.” Phonics teaches a child to break down spoken words into their phonemes and to symbolize them by written letters. The child learns how to sound out each word through its component letters. Reducing reading to a manageable set of rules quickly enables a child to read almost any word — and to experience reading as something easy and pleasurable and mind-opening.

This is what supporters of whole language condemn as “constraining” and “uncreative.” Analyzing language by abstract rules that connect phonemes to letters, one of them says dismissively, imposes “an uptight, must-be-right model of literacy.”

Instead, they argue that the child ought to focus on an entire written word, like “hospital” or “boomerang,” and learn it as the teacher pronounces it. Having no method to reduce the tens of thousands of written words to a manageable set of rules, however, the child must treat each word as a unique symbol to be memorized — an impossible feat.

What is the child to do when he encounters a word he has not yet memorized? He must guess. Here is what some whole-language advocates suggest the child do: “Look at the pictures” (what if the book does not contain pictures?); “Ask a friend” (is reading not a solitary activity?); “Look for patterns” (why not systematically teach him “patterns,” that is, phonics?); “Substitute another word” (is this teaching?). Conspicuously absent is: “Look in a dictionary” — because the child crippled by whole language cannot read a dictionary.

Whatever twisted mental processes the child is supposed to go through, it is a linguistic corruption to call this a method of reading.

The use of whole language results in nothing but illiteracy. (California, for example, which tried this approach in the late ’80s, abandoned it after reading scores plummeted.) The seeming “successes” of whole language occur only when phonics is smuggled in — that is, when the child (on his own or with the help of teachers or parents) secretly decodes written language by discovering that, say, the words “banana,” “boat” and “box,” which he has memorized, have a similar initial sound and begin with the same letter.

What our schools need is not “moderation,” but phonics instruction. We would consider it child abuse to add contaminated food to a child’s diet for the sake of “balance.” We should consider it the same when educators add whole language to reading instruction.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

President Bush claims that holding elections on January 30 will bring Iraq a step closer to freedom, an outcome allegedly vital to America’s security. But the Iraqi election will bring neither freedom to Iraq nor security to America.

Consider the beliefs of the Iraqis who will be voting for “freedom” in the upcoming election. Like so many peoples in the Middle East, Iraqis regard themselves as defined by their membership in some larger group, not by their own ideas and goals. Most Iraqis owe their loyalties — and derive their honor from belonging — to their familial clan, tribe or religious sect, to which the individual is subservient. This deep-seated tribalism is reflected in the parties running in the elections: there is a spectrum ranging from advocates of secular collectivist ideologies (communists and Ba’athists) to those defined by bloodlines (such as Kurds and Turkmens) to members of various religious sects.

What will be the result of an election featuring such voters and candidates? Iraqis will merely bring to power some assortment of collectivists and Islamists. Whatever constitution those leaders eventually frame will reflect their desire to arrogate power to their particular group and to settle old scores, such as the longstanding enmity between the Shi’ite majority and Sunnis. It may well permit barbaric treatment of individuals, commonly accepted throughout the Islamic world, such as “honor-killings” of women believed to have had sex before marriage, or the banning of “un-Islamic” speech. And in the long term, the new nation may become an active sponsor of Islamic terrorism.

Perhaps the most alarming outcome for U.S. security would be a popularly elected theocracy aligned with or highly sympathetic to Iran’s totalitarian regime. Iran is reported to have smuggled nearly one million people into Iraq to vote and has donated millions of dollars to sway the election in favor of a Shi’ite-led government. Already, Iranian intelligence officials are said to roam the hallways of Iraqi party offices, on whose walls hang pictures of Iran’s supreme leader.

That a theocracy may rise to power in Iraq appears to be totally compatible with the President’s conception of “freedom.” As he told Fox News in October, if Iraq votes in a fundamentalist government, he would “be disappointed. But democracy is democracy. . . . If that’s what the people choose, that’s what the people choose.”

This certainly is democracy — in its literal sense of unlimited majority rule. But it is not freedom.

Political freedom does not mean the expression of a collective will, nor the granting of power to one pressure group to exploit others. It means the protection of an individual from the initiation of physical force by others. Freedom rests on the idea of individualism: the principle that every man is an independent, sovereign being, that he is not an interchangeable fragment of the tribe; that his life, liberty, and possessions are his by right, not by the permission of any group. Democracy (i.e., majority rule) rests on the primacy of the group; if your gang is strong enough, you can get away with whatever you want, sacrificing the life and wealth of whoever stands in your way. This is why America’s Founders rejected democracy and created a republican form of government, limited by the inalienable rights of the smallest “minority”: the individual. Our system does have elections, of course, but they are only legitimate within a constitutional framework that prohibits the majority from voting away the rights of anyone.

Can freedom be achieved in Iraq? In the near future, no — which is one of many reasons why it is suicidal for Bush to treat Iraqi freedom as the centerpiece of American self-defense. American security does not require that the terrorism-sponsoring nations of the Middle East be free, only that they be non-threatening — a goal that can be achieved by making it clear to the leaders of these nations that any continued sponsorship of terrorism will mean their immediate destruction.

In the long run, if Iraqis or other peoples of the Middle East are to become free — a task that is their responsibility, not America’s — they must first recognize that their current ideas and practices are incompatible with freedom. They must recognize that they need to adopt a philosophy of individualism. A good first step toward teaching this lesson would be not granting them the pretense of elections.

About The Author

Elan Journo

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