The California grocery strike has entered its fourth month — and there is no end in sight. Workers are still picketing stores, the shelves are understocked, and profits are dwindling. Talks between the grocery chains and the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union have failed to resolve the mutually harmful conflict. Why?

If the union’s demands are outrageous, why can’t the stores walk away? The stores have hired substitute employees, so evidently some people accept the stores’ working conditions. Why can’t the stores fire the strikers and end the dispute? The stores can neither back out nor dismiss strikers because they are forced by law to deal with the union. That coercive power of the union is a gross violation of the employers’ and workers’ rights.

Imagine if laws existed requiring shoppers to buy groceries from one store only, but allowed some room for haggling over price. Would the trade between a shopper and the store be considered voluntary? No. Everyone would scream that individuals should be free to shop wherever they pleased and not be forced to buy at any one store. When it comes to hiring workers, this is exactly the predicament of employers. By law they must deal only with whatever union is voted for by employees. Just as shoppers have the right to choose the terms of trade, so should an employer.

But the National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, negates that right. The law makes it illegal for employers to refuse to negotiate with a union or get rid of striking union workers. It is no surprise that every round of talks between the grocery stores and the UFCW has collapsed. The union can demand anything, however outrageous, and the stores are obliged by law to negotiate in good faith. Though an employer may hire replacement workers, the law requires him to give strikers first preference for any new vacancies.

The law violates the rights of workers, too. Seventy thousand UFCW members who work in grocery stores in Southern California are on strike or locked out, but a significant number of them did not vote in favor of the strike. Dissenters who think that the strike will cause long-term harm to their employers — and could cost them their jobs if the stores go bankrupt — have little say in the matter. If a majority of workers choose to unionize, the employees (including all future hires) must join and pay dues. None of them can accept a labor agreement other than that approved by the union. (Recently, there have been reports of union workers trying to return to their jobs under assumed names, hoping that the union won’t notice. The union has filed suit to prevent this practice, which it says the stores have connived in.)

What is at issue in this dispute? Facing intensified competition, the stores wanted to lower costs by having workers share a portion of the expense for their medical benefits. Knowing that it can refuse with near impunity, the union rejected the proposed labor agreement. What is important here is the stores’ right to set the terms of employment, which is abrogated. A rational employer expects to pay wages that enable him to earn a profit — not so high that he has to raise prices and lose customers, but not so low that he cannot attract and retain capable workers.

But unions pride themselves in artificially raising wages beyond the market price for such work. When demanding higher wages, unions do not promise employers that union workers will do a better job or be more productive. They don’t have to. The union has a coercive power over employers. The California grocery stores will soon have to compete with Wal-Mart, which plans to open grocery stores in the state. They are right to be worried. At unionized stores in California workers get paid $10 per hour more than those at a nonunion store. Those artificially high wages have an impact on prices: a cart of groceries is 17 to 39 percent cheaper at nonunion stores.

The solution to this strike and all similar disputes is to recognize the rights of traders — be they workers or employers — to reach mutually advantageous agreements voluntarily. The power of unions to coerce unearned benefits for their workers, while crippling employers, is unjust. Repealing the NLRA should be a first step toward restoring the principle of individual rights as the proper basis for interaction among men.

About The Author

Elan Journo

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

In upholding the major provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, the Supreme Court has openly declared that it is legitimate to curtail freedom of speech “marginally” in order to fight government corruption. But the sad reality is that the new laws not only fail to confront the source of corruption in government, by violating free speech they heap even more injustices upon the victims of such corruption.

If stopping the selling of favors in Washington is the goal, why does no one demand that we simply enforce the laws that make such action illegal? After all, we combat police corruption by prosecuting officers who take kickbacks to overlook crimes. We combat judicial corruption by prosecuting judges who accept bribes in exchange for making unjust rulings. Why not similarly go after Congressmen who trade legislative decisions for campaign contributions?

Because the depressing fact is that most of the dispensing of favors, and punishments, is done within the law. Unlike the police or judges, Congressmen (and many other government officials) have legally acquired arbitrary power. They routinely make decisions that are governed, not by objective fact or principle, but by subjective preference.

Suppose that Congress is considering “The Pristine Nature Act,” which would close vast tracts of private land to logging and commercial development. A few timber companies argue that such restrictions on their property would be unfair and hurt their profits. The local homeowners association supports the bill, because it would allow residents to maintain their traditional, bucolic lifestyle. And environmentalists clamor that the trees must be protected from mankind.

What basis should a Congressman use in making his decision? The common answer is that he should do whatever furthers the “public interest.” But which parties count as the “public” and so gain the privilege of having their interests advanced? The timber companies? The neighboring residents? The environmentalists? The trees? The people who would have lived in the houses that would have been built with the timber that would have been harvested? Each is as plausible as the other.

In cases like this, which are endless, the non-objective standard of the “public interest” justifies any decision. Which really means: there is no guiding principle, there is only expediency. A Congressman simply latches on to whatever arguments he finds convenient. The presence or absence of campaign contributions from an affected party is thus as “convincing” a factor as anything else. In fact, this is the essence of lobbying — donating money to an official so that the giver can be granted the magical title of “the public.”

This kind of arbitrary power — not money — is the fundamental source of influence-peddling in Washington. And a true opponent of government corruption would seek to restore the system that was created precisely to eliminate such power: the American system of individual rights. He would advocate the principle that the rights of the individual, including property rights and freedom of speech, are inalienable, and that no invocation of the “public interest” can justify their abrogation. He would realize that the indefinable rule of the “public interest” is what gives government officials unlimited power. He would see that only a severely limited government — limited by the standard of individual rights — has no arbitrary powers to exercise, and to sell.

The proposed campaign-finance reforms, however, target not this power but its principal victims — the people who pay “protection money” to government officials.

Productive businesses today have a gun permanently pointed at their heads — by Washington. They live in constant fear that Congress will pass legislation, in the name of the “public interest,” that can cripple or destroy them. In self-defense, to retain some vestige of control over their fate, they make political contributions to keep the government at bay. They don’t want special favors — they simply want not to be regulated, not to have their property confiscated, not to be denied permission to exist. By permitting restricting on their contributions, the Supreme Court in effect declares: “You, the victim of arbitrary force, will now have virtually no say over your future. You, who want to reduce the power of the state and to fight the cause of government corruption, are to be silenced — in the name of fighting government corruption.” This is unjust and absurd.

True, there are those who make contributions, not to keep what they have earned, but to receive unearned benefits. But here too the solution is to stop the source of those favors, by eliminating the government’s capacity to do whatever it wishes in the name of the “public interest.”

The way to end government corruption is not by further penalizing its victims, but by removing from officials the arbitrary power that they regularly offer up for sale to the highest bidder.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

Although American forces impressively deposed the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein, the nearly two-year-long War on Terrorism is, in fact, going badly.

The tragedy is that we lack not weapons, nor military prowess, nor bravery; our military is the most powerful in the history of the world. The problem lies not with our armed forces, but with the ideas guiding our military campaign. Consider how we fought the two major battles of the war so far: Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Afghanistan we exposed our self-crippling ambivalence about the purpose of the war. If our goal was to wipe out al Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban hosts as a step toward eliminating militant Islam, we should have attacked ruthlessly. But we were tentative. As we dropped bombs, we also showered the country with food and medicines, some of which doubtless made it into the hands of the Taliban.

Early on President Bush had promised: “I will not yield, I will not rest, I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.” Yet in Afghanistan, on orders from Washington, our military did yield–refraining from bombing mosques; it did rest–calling for needless cease-fires during the Tora Bora siege; it did relent–catering to the wishes of our coalition “allies,” who demanded that we limit the number of American ground forces. In deference to the wishes of such “allies” as Saudi Arabia, a known financier of terrorism, our military had to rely largely on proxy soldiers led by venal warlords, who let the enemy flee.

By hampering our military operations, Washington subverted them. The forces of al Qaeda, scattered rather than eradicated, continue to plot against us. American soldiers die almost daily in skirmishes with lingering Taliban and al Qaeda forces.

In the war against Iraq, the timidity of the Administration was obvious. Though President Bush had explained the threat of Iraqi weapons and expertise falling into the hands of terrorists–and our urgent need to act–he dithered, groveling abjectly before the United Nations for approval. The battle plans he finally issued were seemingly calculated to thwart the efforts of our military. Even as we sought to wipe out Hussein’s regime, our goal, apparently, was to avoid upsetting Iraqis. As was true in Afghanistan, high-priority targets such as power stations were to be spared, and our military was ordered methodically to pull their punches. It is much to the credit of our soldiers that they succeeded while bearing only minor casualties, despite Washington’s contradictory injunctions.

The Iraq war, however, has done nothing to quell Islamic terrorism. Whereas Afghanistan, the stronghold of al Qaeda, was a plausible first target, Iraq was not a major base of terrorists, nor the most significant supporter of them. We have let the arch-sponsors of Islamic terrorism–Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran–believe that they are untouchable. Observe that terrorism against American and Western interests–from Indonesia to Kenya to Morocco–continues unabated. The American people, urged by Washington to believe that Iraq was a success, cannot fathom why more of our soldiers are dying there now than during the hostilities. We should not be surprised if our resolve to fight is diminishing.

To defend American lives properly, we should target not terrorism, a tactic, but militant Islam, the ideology that motivates the terrorists. But we have been flailing in unpredictable directions, unsure of where to go next, because the war lacks a clear purpose.

Why? The Bush Administration lacks moral confidence. At every turn we blushingly pretended that we are fighting to liberate the oppressed Afghans or tyrannized Iraqis–anything but confess what we should proclaim loudly: that we value and seek to protect American lives. Facing the prospect of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Administration quailed. It should have asserted that, though such casualties are regrettable, they are the responsibility of the regime that initiated force against us. Instead, America was guilt-ridden, apologetic and appeasing.

We are not winning the war, but we could be.

Our Founding Fathers did not have even one hundredth of America’s present military power, but they were armed with the conviction that political freedom is an ideal worth fighting for. Their moral certainty gave them the courage necessary to fight for their independence from England, the 18th century’s lone superpower. We are at war with militant Islamists who lust for our annihilation. Our survival depends, not only on having a more powerful military, but on the courage to use our might–to act on what is morally proper–to act on our urgent need of ferocious self-defense.

About The Authors

Elan Journo

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

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Initial reports of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum sparked a frenzy of outrage. Denied their desert quagmire, their civilian massacres, their oil-fire eco-disaster, and their inflamed “Arab street,” leftists all but leaped at the opportunity to denounce our armed forces–with some even urging that our soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes for their alleged failure to prevent the looting.

It turns out, though, that our troops were not standing “idly by” but were being fired at from the museum complex. And the number of missing artifacts–initially assumed to be in the thousands–is now thought to be closer to a few dozen. Most significant, however, is the evidence that the looting was an inside job, orchestrated by museum staffers. The most valuable artifacts were taken from locked vaults by thieves who had both the keys and the knowledge of which pieces were most important.

If this is true, then there is a striking–and deeply ironic–similarity between the looting of the Iraqi National Museum and the equally brazen vandalism of American museum holdings–committed eagerly by their curators in full compliance with federal law.

Since the early 1990s, American museums have been under federal mandate to repatriate Native American remains and artifacts to their closest descendents. Collections of enormous scientific value have been decimated and the re-burial of many of these items has eradicated any possibility of further study.

One re-interred collection, for example, from Harvard’s Peabody Museum, consisted of nearly 2,000 skeletal remains from the Pecos tribe, which flourished in New Mexico between 1300 and A.D. 1600. Large enough to be statistically significant, the collection was studied extensively by anthropologists and medical researchers. It yielded invaluable information on conditions ranging from osteoporosis to head injuries and dental cavities. But in 1999 this scientific gold mine was destroyed when Harvard willingly returned the bones to New Mexico for reburial.

Or consider Kennewick Man, a 9000-year-old skeleton found in Washington State in 1996. One of the oldest individuals to have been found in North America, it generated great excitement among anthropologists eager to study the remains. Local Indian tribes, however, declared Kennewick Man an “ancestor” and claimed his spirit cannot “rest peacefully” until he is re-interred. Scientific access has been forbidden while the case is tied up court. Meanwhile, the bones were stored improperly and exposed to damage from moisture and possible contamination with modern DNA. Even worse, the native groups were secretly permitted ceremonial access to the bones. They performed rituals involving the burning of sage and cedar, further tainting the remains with impurities and possibly distorting future scientific study.

How is it possible that artifacts of such enormous scientific value could be routinely destroyed by the very people entrusted with their protection–and with an air of moral righteousness? The answer is the influence of the doctrine of “multiculturalism,” which claims to value all cultures equally and demands our deference for all beliefs and practices, no matter how backward or destructive.

But it is impossible to uphold the values of all cultures at once if those values contradict one another. You can’t both study the bones and rebury them, too. To bury the bones and prevent their study is to reject science in favor of superstition. It is to abandon the rational study of the past–and the pursuit of knowledge and progress–to stagnant beliefs and primitive rituals. This reveals the true essence of multiculturalism: not the veneration of “diversity” but the denigration of Western Civilization, the culture of science and reason.

This explains the left’s hysterical outrage against the loss of a few dozen artifacts in Iraq, from some of the same people who abet the destruction of artifacts at home. It was just another excuse to denounce the West.

Ancient artifacts–whether Mesopotamian or North American–are not valuable as the crude leftovers of the past. They are valuable as objects of rational study, to help us understand mankind’s origins and provide guidance for his future. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, is not valuable merely as cuneiform scratchings on ancient clay tablets. Its value derives from its role in the formation of the concept of law, which reached its culmination in the U.S. Constitution. But the multiculturalists want to tear down this living legacy of Western Civilization, for the sake of the dead superstitions left over from man’s primitive beginnings.

This is an assault on Western ideas and values that makes the Iraqi museum looting seem innocent by comparison.

About The Author

Keith Lockitch

Vice President of Education and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

You are jolted awake at 1:00 a.m. by loud knocking on the door. Alarmed, you and your girlfriend rise to answer. The police barge in and arrest you both on suspicion of having had premarital sex. Sound like something that would happen only in a dictatorship like Iraq’s or China’s? Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that if not overturned will grant legitimacy to such governmental power. (In a disturbing 1986 decision the Court upheld the constitutionality of such power.)

The case is Lawrence v. Texas. In 1998 Texas police, responding to a neighbor’s deliberately false report of an armed intruder in the apartment of John Geddes Lawrence, entered his unlocked apartment. Discovering that Lawrence and Tyron Garner were having consensual sex, the police jailed them on charges of violating Texas’ Homosexual Conduct Law. Lawrence and Garner are now challenging the law.

At issue is not whether a particular sexual practice among consenting adults is in fact moral or immoral. At issue is something much broader: whether the government should have the power to enter your home and arrest you for having sex because it regards your sexual desires as “base,” the power to enter your laboratory and arrest you for running a scientific experiment because it regards your research as “sinful,” or the power to enter your business and arrest you for making money because it regards the profit motive as “wicked.”

At issue is whether the government should have the power to legislate morality.

If you want to live in a free society, the answer is: No.

To answer “No” does not mean we should throw out laws punishing murder. It means the government’s function is not to become the thought police, charged with ensuring that citizens act on correct ideas. The government’s function is only to stop an individual from taking action (e.g., murder) that violates the rights of other individuals. It means that the absolute moral principles at the foundation of a free society preclude the government from becoming policeman of morality.

Our Founding Fathers understood that, like any other form of knowledge, moral knowledge — knowledge of good and evil — requires a mind free to follow the observed facts and evidence wherever they lead. They therefore created a political system that protects the sovereignty of the rational mind — the very source of rights. Each American has the right to think, to express his thoughts in conversations, speeches and books, and then to act on his thought in pursuit of the values his life and happiness require. (So long, of course, as he respects the same rights of others.) He must have these freedoms because knowledge comes not from obedience to authority but from reason. “Fix reason firmly in her seat,” Jefferson explained to his nephew, “and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”

To incarcerate John Lawrence because he engaged in homosexual sex is to do violence to his reason.

According to Lawrence’s judgment, sex with the right, consenting adult represents an important, moral, life-affirming pleasure. The state demands that he discard this judgment — or face jail. But to force someone to obey produces no moral enlightenment in his mind; it only incapacitates his means of understanding. Even granting for the sake of argument only that homosexuality is immoral, in jailing Lawrence and Garner the government does not persuade them that their action is wrong. It merely makes them fear believing and acting on what they continue to think is right. No knowledge, moral or otherwise, can be implanted by the instruments of coercion. “Force and mind,” in Ayn Rand’s memorable words, “are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”

Observe that the need of a mind to be free in order to reach knowledge implies that it has the right to make mistakes (you may think Lawrence and Garner mistaken). There is no such thing as the freedom to think so long as you reach “government approved” ideas. That would make the state guardian of “truth.” That road leads only to what it always has led to: the non-thought of, say, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, Soviet Russia or Europe’s Dark Ages.

In essence the government of a free society bans only one action — the initiation of physical force — precisely because force prevents an individual from following the judgment of his mind. The government of a free society does not seek to control its citizens’ thoughts by, say, jailing homosexuals or hypocrites. Its function is to stop other people from violating one’s rights, not to force them to be good — which is a contradiction in terms.

Force vs. mind, authority vs. reason, obedience vs. thought — that is what is at issue in Lawrence v. Texas. At the birth of this great nation Jefferson swore “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Let us hope today’s Supreme Court remembers his words. Otherwise, the government’s next knock on the door may be for me or you.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

The death of a distinguished scientist or a leading novelist usually attracts public attention. But the recent death of perhaps the most celebrated figure in academic philosophy — Harvard’s Willard Van Orman Quine — attracted virtually none. This lack of reflection on his passing is itself worth reflecting on.

There was a time when philosophy was known as the queen of the sciences and when the death of one of its prominent figures would have been news. But that time has long gone. Why?

Today, people are disdainful of philosophy. They see it as a frivolous discipline. They think it has no practical advice to offer them. And this assessment is perfectly understandable — because, in regard to contemporary academic philosophy, it is perfectly true.

Modern philosophers themselves view their subject as an abstruse parlor game, detached from everyday life. Indeed, the tenet at the heart of contemporary philosophy (placed there primarily by the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant) is that the human mind is incapable of grasping reality. The public has thus taken philosophers at their word and dismissed the entire field as irrelevant to real life.

Quine’s ideas are representative. He held that knowledge of objective reality is impossible and that whatever you happen to believe determines your “reality.” “To be” — as he put it, with characteristic academic obfuscation — “is to be the value of a variable.” Thus Quine claimed that real, physical objects are “comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer,” because both are simply different “values” (i.e., arbitrary nametags) given to what “exists.”

We can be aware of “reality” — the contemporary refrain goes — only as distorted by our impotent minds. If this is what modern philosophy teaches, is it any wonder that it is widely dismissed? Who will seek advice from a science whose own practitioners claim that no one — including, in logic, themselves — is capable of knowing the truth?

But the dismissal, not just of today’s philosophers, but of philosophy as such, is an ominous development for our culture.

Philosophy as it should be (and once was), rather than what it has now become, is an indispensable practical necessity. Philosophy is the queen of the sciences: its crucial task is to provide man with a comprehensive view of the world. In order to guide our lives, we need answers to such fundamental questions as:

Is the world we perceive real, governed by the law of causality, or is it the mere reflection of some supernatural dimension that transcends and controls it? For what purpose should man live his life — to achieve his own happiness or to sacrifice himself to others? By what principles should individuals organize themselves into society? And by what means can one answer all these questions — by awaiting visions from some mystical realm, by following one’s emotions, by accepting the dictates of some authority, or by relying solely on one’s own observations and reasoning?

It is the role of philosophy — a philosophy that takes seriously its task of guiding human life — to provide rational answers to such questions.

But if we brush aside the very subject of philosophy, we will not consciously seek the answers to such questions. Instead, since our choices in life require some answer to these basic questions, we will subconsciously absorb the dominant philosophical ideas taught in our culture. Today, this means absorbing some form of the anti-mind doctrine that Quine advocated and that rules contemporary philosophy.

This is the reason, for instance, behind the ascendance of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism rests on the anti-mind idea that no individual can objectively know reality; he can know only “reality” as filtered by the particular collective he happens to belong to. So males and females, whites and blacks, Westerners and Africans, each inhabit their own “realities” and have their own “truths.”

This is also the reason behind the revival of mysticism: the spread of creationism in the curriculum, the popularity of psychics on television, the reading of tarot cards at corporate functions. If people absorb the idea that the rational mind is incapable of knowing reality, they will turn for guidance to some irrational substitute, such as faith.

Ignoring the death of a leading academic philosopher is not significant. But ignoring philosophy itself is — because it means we will remain in the grip of our culture’s anti-mind philosophy.

As the 21st century begins, we need to revive an active, eager interest in philosophy. We need to seek out those thinkers who, defying the contemporary trend, can show us that reality is real and knowable, that reason is efficacious — and that a proper philosophy can arm us for living successfully on earth.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

As we pause on September 11 to remember the stockbrokers, policemen, firefighters and many other fallen Americans, it is vital also to reflect on the progress of the war. For it was precisely to prevent future September 11ths that America responded with force. How goes the war?

Tragically, not well.

To wage a war in self-defense you must know who your enemy is. But our enemy remains unidentified and, therefore, untargeted. Ours is a war against “terrorism” — a form of violence, not an ideological opponent intent on killing us. Our enemies, however, are dedicated to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, which extols faith, mindless obedience, sacrifice to state and God, primitivism, theocracy. This is why they are at war with the “Great Satan,” America, the foremost embodiment of the opposite values: reason, individualism, the selfish pursuit of happiness, secularism, capitalism. Bin Laden understands this: “Hostility toward America,” he declares, “is a religious duty.” But our politicians, schooled in pragmatism and range-of-the-moment non-thinking, cannot conceive of an ideologically motivated conflict. An individual terrorist brandishing a bomb, like bin Laden, may still be real to them, but the movement for which he fights, Islamic fundamentalism, is not. Thus, we try to kill a few terrorists — but leave untouched the main militant Islamic states breeding the terrorists. We have no long-term plan to achieve victory in the war because we cannot identify the enemy that must be incapacitated. Ask yourself: Would America have been victorious in WWII if our goal had been to destroy “kamikaze-ism,” not Japanese totalitarianism?

Worse, to the extent that our policy makers glimpse the mystical ideology operative in the Middle East, they consider it a positive force. As pragmatists, they are intellectually blind to the historical evidence of centuries of religious wars and are led, instead, by their own religious feelings. They can grasp no connection between faith taken seriously as the ruling principle of every aspect of man’s life — and the attempt to physically force such dogma on nonbelievers. The terrorists, on this approach, are inexplicable aberrations, deluded interpreters of true faith, who, mysteriously, try to spread their mystical doctrines by appeal not to a rational argument but to a gun. We therefore treat as allies such enemies of reason as Saudi Arabia, which spawns Islamic fundamentalists and finances their suicide bombers, and Pakistan, which trained the Taliban and punishes blasphemy with death. Our government even courts Iran, the spearhead of militant Islamic fundamentalism, and works with Iranian officials to foster “religious values” at U.N. conferences.

Predictably, the administration’s actions, guided as they are not by reason but by emotion (including emotions of outrage), are chaotic and contradictory. No one knows what — if anything — America will do next in the war because we ourselves don’t know what we’ll do or why. Bush pays lip service to the correct idea that you are either for America’s ideals or against them, but undermines our strongest ally in the war, Israel. He even promises the Palestinians a provisional state, thereby teaching every would-be killer that to the terrorist go the spoils. In typically empty rhetoric Bush declares that there is an axis of evil in the world, but allows Syria to head the U.N. Security Council and pursues dialogue with axis-of-evil-members North Korea and Iran — all terrorist states according to his own government.

Without actual principles, where will such a mentality turn for moral guidance? The answer is: to others and their moral views. So Bush — programmed by feelings formed from millennia of assertions that it is evil to uphold one’s own interests, that the strong must sacrifice to the weak, that the meek shall inherit the earth — undercuts any genuine action taken in America’s self-defense. In Afghanistan, for instance, morally unsure of his right to safeguard American lives, Bush feared world disapproval over civilian casualties. He would neither commit the number of American ground troops required to capture the enemy nor authorize the kind of massive bombing necessary to kill the enemy before it fled. The result: hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda escaped to plot further American destruction. In the Middle East, uncertain of America’s right unilaterally to defend its interests, the administration obsesses with “coalition-building” (which includes shunning Israel and courting Saudi Arabia) and refuses to proclaim the superiority of America’s ideals over those of medieval barbarism.

Lacking the moral conviction to uphold its values abroad, America increasingly and self-destructively turns inward, shifting its focus to such relatively trivial questions as whether airline pilots should be armed or government bureaucracies reshuffled. Because of our inaction on foreign soil, we resign ourselves to more terrorist attacks like that of September 11.

How then goes the war? An objective answer must be: badly. But our cause is not yet lost. We lack not the wealth nor the skilled military necessary to defeat the enemy, only the ideas and the will. If we articulate and practice a rational foreign policy, one actually premised on America’s self-interest, we will prevail. Nothing more is needed to achieve victory than to replace the pragmatism and self-sacrifice now dictating America’s actions with the principles of reason and rational self-interest; nothing less will do.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

As both Democratic and Republican proposals to provide prescription drug benefits for the elderly failed in the Senate, members of both parties vowed to try to reach a compromise and get a bill passed as early as next week. Any such bill, if approved, would be a violation of the property rights of drug companies.

Such a violation is not a problem for many like former Senator David Pryor, who described the drug companies as “robber barons of the American health care system.” In the name of the elderly and needy, calls for the government to dictate to pharmaceutical companies to whom and at what price they must sell their drugs grow daily. But all of this is profoundly unjust. The drug companies have a right to the drugs they create. We should admire, not vilify, them for their inventions.

Project the enormous thought, effort and risk-taking required to produce a new drug. It takes years of research, of hypotheses tested and rejected, of promising avenues leading only to dead ends, of struggles to raise money–until a potentially viable drug is finally identified. Then the candidate must be refined and rigorously tested for its safety and efficacy, usually resulting in its discard (only 1 in 5,000 compounds tested reaches the market). If the drug proves safe and effective, the company must advertise it and educate the medical community in its use, otherwise all the company’s efforts will have been for naught. On average, it takes $500 million and 12 to 15 years to bring a new drug to market.

The development of Lipitor, the life-saving cholesterol drug that is part of a small class of drugs known as statins, is a good case in point. A chemist at Warner-Lambert (now part of Pfizer) invented the compound. Then a team of Warner scientists in the early 1980s began investigating the compound in earnest, which included a two-year ordeal to discover how to manufacture it without also producing undesirable byproducts. (They created a three-week manufacturing process that included using liquid nitrogen to run their reactions at temperatures below minus 80 degrees Celsius). Nevertheless, after eight years of research, results were less than stellar: animal studies indicated that the drug was no more effective than other statins at lowering cholesterol. Despite the time and money already invested in the drug, some in the company urged that they cut their losses by shelving it. But others countered that animal testing is not always predictive of effects in humans and that the market for statins would eventually be huge, so even if their new drug captured only a small share of that market, it would still generate significant revenues. Fortunately, the second group won and human testing began.

Human trials revealed that Lipitor was the most potent statin yet created.

But naysayers again arose: many claimed a powerful statin was undesirable because they thought lowering cholesterol levels drastically was actually harmful. Warner, however, rightly suspicious of this conclusion, pressed ahead. In 1997 Lipitor was finally approved and the medical community turned to the view that the lower one could bring LDL cholesterol levels, the better. Because of its unprecedented ability to do this, Lipitor became one of the world’s best-selling drugs, saving literally millions of lives. If that were not enough, new research indicates that Lipitor may be useful for treating not just heart disease but also such diverse illnesses as Alzheimer’s, cancer and diabetes.

By virtue of the mental and physical work necessary to create a drug like Lipitor, the inventor acquires a moral right to it–for the same reason that you acquire a moral right to, say, the home or small business you’ve worked years for. The right to property recognizes that those who choose to exert the thought and effort necessary to produce material values have the exclusive right to enjoy and benefit from them. In granting a pharmaceutical company a patent on its invention, therefore, the law is not bestowing an unearned gift on the company: it is simply recognizing the moral right of a creator to his creation.

To dictate to pharmaceutical companies how they must use their property is to deprive them of their freedom. If they do not have the right to control and benefit from their inventions, they in effect become slaves forced to serve those who need their drugs. But need does not give anyone a right to make slaves of others. The need of a bum for shelter does not give him–or the government–the right to expropriate your home (or its basement). Likewise, the need of a patient for a prescription drug does not give him–or the government–the right to expropriate the company’s drug (or control its price).

Do not be so short-sighted as to think that violating the drug companies’ property rights will benefit you. For what is to become of you thirty years from now, when you are stricken with cancer but cannot buy the next Lipitor that would have been invented by the research that would have existed if only drug companies had been free to earn the profits necessary to fuel their vast research programs? It is no accident that despite the massive spending by other countries on health care, America produces most of the world’s new drugs: America most respects intellectual property rights.

Violating the pharmaceutical industry’s property rights undermines the principle of individual rights. Today it is the drug companies who are to be stripped of their property rights, tomorrow, perhaps the big oil companies, the day after, homeowners. When that day arrives, when, say, the government takes your home away from you and gives it to the “homeless,” could you claim you are the victim of injustice? Or would you be reaping what you have sowed?

I for one want the future in which today’s vast potential for medical breakthroughs becomes tomorrow’s reality. I am therefore eager to respect the property rights of the creators of that future–and to pay them what they ask for their achievements.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

According to Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, “infectious greed” is to blame for the scandals engulfing firms like Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing. On this view, which virtually all public voices now embrace, businessmen are a breed of predators, eager to lie, cheat and steal in pursuit of profit. In other words, the extent to which people are motivated by making money is the extent to which they are motivated to be crooks. And it is only through government controls, therefore, that society can be protected against the inherent corruptness of capitalist profit-seeking.

In fact, the opposite is true. Engaging in fraud undercuts a company’s value — as the market is amply demonstrating. What money-making requires is honesty and integrity. And the “greedier” a businessman is, the more committed he must be to scrupulous practices.

The fundamental principle of business is trade: the voluntary exchange of value for value, to mutual advantage. To succeed, companies vie with one another to ensure that what they offer — be it cars, tomato soup or bookkeeping — is of consistently high quality. A company whose product is defective, or which seeks to cheat its customers, loses its business. Consider the fate of Arthur Anderson, Enron’s accounting firm. This spring, although Arthur Anderson’s wrongdoing had not even been established, its major clients swiftly took their business elsewhere. Today, Arthur Anderson is effectively defunct.

The need for straight-dealing is inescapable, even in a company’s own bookkeeping. Companies routinely have to raise capital and must therefore meticulously guard their credit ratings. A corporation’s stock price and financial reports indicate its current worth and its ability to create wealth in the future. By earning a reputation for objective accounting statements, a company secures the trust of bankers and stockholders.

Any stain on its credit rating — or even the suspicion of wrongdoing — could mean overnight bankruptcy. Late last year Enron was accused of trying to inflate its worth by hiding $27 billion of liabilities. As the rumors of malfeasance emerged, Enron’s stock price plummeted, as did its ability to borrow money.

To create wealth means to create goods and services which offer a value to the buyer — and that requires an unremitting dedication to improving the product and to giving the customer exactly what he believes he is paying for. Introducing a new car, for instance, requires about $2 billion dollars of R&D, years’ worth of engineering studies — and considerable risk of failure if the product does not match the market’s demands. It is only the manufacturer’s quest for profits that has transformed the automobile from a luxury to an affordable necessity of every family. Today’s cars are cheaper, safer and better equipped because manufacturers know that the way to make money is by offering us ever-enhanced vehicles — not by fleecing us through shoddy goods.

Far from being too “greedy,” too many of America’s CEOs are not greedy enough. They are pragmatic corner-cutters, who fail to recognize that there is far more wealth to be achieved by a consistent, long-range policy of honesty — by creating a quality product and maintaining the company’s reputation over many years — than by squeezing out some range-of-the-moment advantage.

The antibusiness lobby is clamoring for more regulations to protect consumers and investors. But the laws necessary to prove fraud and to punish the guilty already exist, and should be objectively applied. New regulations won’t deter the dishonest few — but will hamstring the innocent. For instance, one proposed regulation would have CEOs personally certify the accuracy of everything on their financial statements. Imagine the potential for innocent, inconsequential errors on the statements of large corporations. Companies would have to expend far more time and money on their accounting than would be necessary were they assumed innocent until proven guilty. That effort earns them nothing; it merely shields them from the predations of zealous bureaucrats.

Nearly four decades ago, an astute economist got it right when he observed that “it is precisely the ’greed’ of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer.” That economist, writing in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, was . . . Alan Greenspan.

About The Author

Elan Journo

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

As Israel reenters the West Bank in another attempt to drive out the terrorists, President Bush offers his vision for peace in the Middle East. Israel, he says, should withdraw to its pre-1967 borders and the Palestinians (under “new leadership”) should be awarded a state. Tragically but inevitably, Bush’s proposal, like the many “peace” plans before it, will bring, not peace, but more war.

To achieve peace in the Middle East, as in any region, there is one lesson that every party must learn: the initiation of force is wrong. And the indispensable means of teaching it is to ensure that the initiating side is decisively defeated and punished. Retaliatory force must be wielded against the initiator, as Israel has been doing in varying degrees. But so long as there are those who think they will benefit from initiating force against their neighbors, war must result. Yet this is precisely what Bush’s plan gives Palestinians reason to believe.

For years Arafat and the Palestinian leadership, with the aid of such states as Iran, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have been terrorizing Israeli civilians, dispatching suicide-bombers to blow up children on buses. Does Bush demand that the Palestinian authorities be destroyed — as the United States demanded with respect to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban? No: he proposes that Israel give in to its attackers’ insistence on their own state.

It is irrelevant that Bush may be asking the current crop of killers to step down (though he refused to identify Arafat by name and his Secretary of State declines even to rule out future dealings with Arafat). The Palestinians widely endorse Arafat’s bloody campaign — and his opposition comes largely from those who believe he is not militant enough in his terrorist tactics. From kindergarten on, the Palestinians are taught to seek the extermination of the Israelis and their Western, secular allies. These are the people who will be “voting” for this “new leadership,” which will then be given the secure base of a sovereign state from which to operate.

Bush’s demand that Israel withdraw to its pre-1967 borders is equally unjust. The Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip were captured by Israel in response to yet another attempt by Arab nations to annihilate Israel. To give the aggressors back this land only teaches them that they can launch wars against Israel with impunity. That is, if they do not succeed militarily, they need only continue issuing threats against Israel and arming more terrorists — and eventually the land they lost in a war they initiated will be returned to them. And they can then start the process anew.

The reason peace eludes the Middle East is that the lesson Bush is conveying to the Arabs — that the initiation of force is practical — is the same lesson our government’s actions have been teaching them for decades. The Egyptians seized the Suez canal from the French and British — and we demanded that the Europeans not retaliate. Arab tyrants nationalized Western oil — and we stood idly by. Israel had the Palestinian terrorists surrounded in Lebanon — and we brokered their release. Arab despots repress their own subjects — and we treat them as civilized rulers and shower them with aid. Many Arabs idolize a terrorist responsible for murdering civilians — and we pour money into his regime and hail him for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. What possible conclusion could the Arab nations draw but that the initiation of force is desirable? So long as they have grounds to believe that, war is inescapable.

If we truly seek peace, therefore, we must reverse this perverse lesson. We must establish the objective conditions of peace. This means declaring to Arab nations that Israel, as a free country, has a right to exist, that the Arabs and Palestinians are the initiators of the conflict and that aggression on their part will not be tolerated. And it means encouraging Israel not to negotiate and compromise with its current assailants — as we did not bargain with bin Laden — but to eliminate them. Only when the initiators of force learn that their actions lead not to land and power, but to their own destruction, will peace be possible in the Middle East.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute