As yet another appalling suicide bombing takes place in Israel, killing nineteen people and wounding dozens more on a bus packed with schoolchildren in Jerusalem — as Hamas claims credit for the massacre — America’s policymakers still insist on seeking an “even-handed,” diplomatic solution.

In the past eighteen months, Israel’s six million citizens have suffered 12,480 terrorist attacks. They have buried more than 400 victims — a per-capita death toll six times that of America on September 11. Yet, in an abhorrent act of injustice, Israel continues to be pressured by the United States into making concessions to Yasser Arafat, the archpatron of those terror attacks. In the long run, this means that Israel is being pressured into sacrificing its basic right to exist.

We should be supporting Israel’s right to take whatever military action is needed to defend itself against its nihilistic enemies. Morally and militarily, Israel is America’s frontline in the war on terrorism. If America is swayed by Arafat’s latest empty rhetoric, and allows him to continue threatening Israel, our own campaign against terrorism becomes sheer hypocrisy and will, ultimately, fail.

Consider the facts and judge for yourself:

The Israelis and the Palestinians are not morally equal

Israel is the only free country in a region dominated by Arab monarchies, theocracies and dictatorships. It is only the citizens of Israel — Arabs and Jews alike — who enjoy the right to express their views, to criticize their government, to form political parties, to publish private newspapers, to hold free elections. When Arab authorities deny the most basic freedoms to their own people, it is obscene for them to start claiming that Israel is violating the Palestinians’ rights. All Arab citizens who are genuinely concerned with human rights should, as their very first action, seek to oust their own despotic rulers and adopt the type of free society that characterizes Israel.

Since its founding, Israel has been the victim

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has had to fight five wars — all in self-defense — against twenty-two hostile Arab dictatorships, and has been repeatedly attacked by Palestinian terrorists. Arafat is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Israeli schoolchildren, the hijacking of airliners and the car bombings and death-squad killings of thousands of Israeli, American, Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Today he ardently sponsors such terror groups as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al Aksa Brigade.

The land Israel is “occupying” was captured in a war initiated by its Arab neighbors. Like any victim of aggression, Israel has a moral right to control as much land as is necessary to safeguard itself against attack. The Palestinians want to annihilate Israel, while Israel wants simply to be left alone. If there is a moral failing on Israel’s part, it consists of its reluctance to take stronger military measures. If it is right for America to bomb al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan — and it is — then it is equally justifiable for Israel to bomb the terrorist strongholds in the occupied territories.

Hatred of Israel, and of the United States, is hatred for Western values

Like America’s war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict between opposing philosophies. On the one side are the forces of mysticism, medieval tribalism, dictatorship — and terror; on the other side are the forces of reason, individualism, capitalism — and civilization. Arafat and his sympathizers hate Israel for the same reason that Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers hate America, i.e., for embracing secular, Western values. No “peace process” is possible with such enemies.

This is not an ethnic battle between Jews and Arabs, but a moral battle between those who value the individual’s right to be free and those who don’t. Those Arabs who value individual freedom are enemies of the Arafat regime and deserve to be embraced by Israel; those Jews who do not value individual freedom deserve to be condemned by Israel.

Israelis have a right to the land

Only Israel has a moral right to establish a government in that area — on the grounds, not of some ethnic or religious heritage, but of a secular, rational principle. Only a state based on political and economic freedom has moral legitimacy. Contrary to what the Palestinians are seeking, there can be no “right” to establish a dictatorship.

As to the rightful owners of particular pieces of property, Israel’s founders — like the homesteaders in the American West — earned ownership to the land by developing it. They arrived in a desolate, sparsely populated region and drained the swamps, irrigated the desert, grew crops and built cities. They worked unclaimed land or purchased it from the owners. They introduced industry, libraries, hospitals, art galleries, universities — and the concept of individual rights. Those Arabs who abandoned their land in order to join the military crusade against Israel forfeited all right to their property. And if there are any peaceful Arabs who were forcibly evicted from their property, they should be entitled to press their claims in the courts of Israel, which, unlike the Arab autocracies, has an independent, objective judiciary — a judiciary that recognizes the principle of property rights.

Palestinians are not “freedom fighters”

The Palestinians want a state, not to secure their freedom, but to perpetuate the dictatorial reign of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Arafat’s “police” brutally expropriate property and silence opposing viewpoints by shutting down radio and TV stations. They systematically arrest, torture and murder peaceful dissenters. To call the militant Palestinians “freedom fighters” — when they support the subjugation of their own people, when they deliberately murder children in the streets or gleefully praise such depravity — is a mind-numbing perversion.

Palestinians have consistently sought to destroy Israel

In 1947 the Palestinians rejected the U.N.’s offer of a state larger than the one they are demanding now. Instead, they joined in a war aimed at wiping Israel from the map. Today, that hostility has only hardened. For example, in a televised public sermon, a Palestinian Imam declared: “God willing, this unjust state [of] Israel, will be erased.” Palestinian textbooks are filled with vile, anti-Jewish propaganda, such as this exhortation from a fifth-grade Arabic language text: “The Jihad against the Jew is the religious duty of every Muslim man and woman.”

A Palestinian state under Arafat would become a base for terrorism

A Palestinian state headed by Arafat would be a launching pad and a training ground for terrorist organizations targeting, not only Israel, but the United States. Forcing Israelis to accept a Palestinian state under Arafat is like forcing Americans to accept a state the size of Mexico, twelve miles from New York City, ruled by Osama bin Laden. As long as the Palestinians sanction aggression, they should not be permitted their own state.

Arafat’s meaningless words will not restore life to his terror-victims — past or future

No rhetoric by Arafat can change the fact that he is a hater of freedom and a destroyer of innocent human life. Imagine Osama bin Laden being enticed by American diplomats to announce: “We strongly condemn operations that target American civilians, especially the last one in New York. We equally condemn the massacres that have been, and are still being, committed by U.S. occupation troops against Taliban civilians in Kandahar, Shah-i-Kot and Tora Bora.” Would any sane individual thereby endorse an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the creation of a Taliban state, headed by bin Laden, alongside America? If not, why should Israel be expected to act so suicidally?

America, for its own benefit, must allow Israel to uphold the principle of self-defense

The growing demand for Israel to negotiate with Arafat comes from an unprincipled, range-of-the-moment mentality. Surrendering to extortion — which the “land-for-peace” catechism endorses — is profoundly immoral and impractical. In the 1938 version of “land for peace,” Nazi Germany was appeased by being allowed to take over Czechoslovakia as part of the Aryan people’s “homeland”; the result was to encourage Hitler to start a world war.

The Arab-Israeli conflict could become a dress rehearsal for a wider, global conflict. If America now stops Israel from retaliating against Arafat, the father of international terrorism, how can it ever justify retaliation against its own enemies? If we force Israel to appease Arafat, we will be broadcasting, loud and clear, that terrorism can bring America too to its knees.

We should urge our government to recognize that there is only one means of achieving long-term Mideast peace: upholding the principle of a free society, which entails the endorsement of Israel’s sweeping retaliation against the scourge of terrorism.

About The Author

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Fittingly, in the wake of September 11, there is increased appreciation of the vital importance of our police and our military in defending us against attack.

But the terrorist assaults should have also underscored the crucial role of another group of American heroes. The deeds of those individuals, unfortunately, continue to go unrecognized.

Remember that as admirable as our men in uniform are, we would be better off if their courage were not needed — i.e., if there were no criminals to jail or foreign aggressors to defeat. Their actions derive meaning from the values they dedicate themselves to protecting — the values commonly described as the “American way of life.” But what is that exactly — and who is responsible for creating it?

To those who caught even a glimpse of daily life in Afghanistan, the contrast to life in the United States is shocking. In that primitive country there are few cars or paved roads, no shopping malls or bountiful grocery stores, virtually no high-rises, little in the way of entertainment — be it television or movie theaters or concert halls — few hospitals, no high-tech devices. What there is, in abundance, is the backbreaking labor of a subhuman existence. Unlike America, Afghanistan has scant material wealth and virtually no industrialization.

Why? What explains this lack? Only one factor: the absence of freedom.

Afghanistan has been a country without liberty. Its citizens had no right to think for themselves: their “thoughts” were dictated by the Taliban. They had no right to property: what meager goods they managed to produce was loot for the nearest warlord. They had no right to pursue their own happiness: their lives were supposed to belong to God and to the state.

The American way of life is, fundamentally, a life of individual liberty. Devoid of the freedom that America’s men in uniform safeguard, Afghanistan lacked the type of person who flourishes only under freedom: the businessman. It is the free mind of the businessman that raises the capital and creates the methods by which the discoveries of science are transformed into commercial products.

It is the businessman who invents assembly-line production and turns the automobile from a curiosity into a necessity. It is the businessman who figures out how to deploy the latest discovery in chemistry into a fertilizer that boosts agricultural yields. It is the businessman who coordinates and directs vast amounts of capital and labor in order to build transcontinental railways, colossal dams, ocean-hopping passenger planes, and electrical generating stations. It is the businessman who is among the first to recognize the value of innovations, patiently waiting for others to see what he has seen — and so builds an IBM or a Microsoft, which raises everyone’s standard of living.

The businessman is the one who devotes his mind to producing wealth. The businessman is the creator of the American way of life — a life of prosperity and progress made possible by freedom. Without his present and past actions, our daily lives would resemble the dismal existence of the Afghanis.

The terrorists, who in their words “love death like Americans love life,” understand the connection of business to life. That is why they struck at the symbols of commercial success: the skyscrapers of the World Trade Center. It is time we grasp that same connection.

Rather than denounce businessmen whenever the price of gasoline rises (and, when it falls, take that as proof that the price was too high in the first place) — rather than habitually cast businessmen as the villains in our TV shows and movies — rather than smear all businessmen for the dishonesty of a few who want to get rich not by production, but by fraud — we should praise the producers.

The attacks of September 11 have made people more acutely aware of the value of the American way of life — and of those who defend it. But the many businessmen who perished on that date, and their thousands of brothers-in-spirit who survived, are the individuals who make that way of life a daily reality.

In justice, as we commemorate the anniversary of that tragic day, should we not also pay tribute to these heroes?

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

The historic antitrust case against Microsoft is now entering its final phase: the determination of Microsoft’s punishment. The presiding judge, U.S. District Court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, should be as lenient as legally permissible. (If possible, she should impose only a nominal punishment like a one-dollar fine or, better still, throw the case out entirely.)

To understand why, one needs to understand two points, one general and one particular. First, antitrust laws are nonobjective and unjust. Second, Microsoft is guilty of no actual crime. Let us begin with the first point.

The “actions” that antitrust laws prohibit are vague, contradictory, undefined. For instance, antitrust laws prohibit companies from engaging in “restraint of trade.” But what specific actions constitute “restraint of trade”? If, as is done repeatedly in the business world, a company signs an exclusive distribution agreement with another company, is that “restraint of trade” because now other potential competitors are excluded from that area of the market? Or if a company sells a computer to individual X, is that “restraint of trade” because competing computer companies can no longer sell X a computer since he has need for only one? No — the courts have declared to businessmen — only those “restraints” that are “unreasonable” are illegal. But which specific “restraints” are “unreasonable”? No definition is to be found in the law, so no company can know before it acts which actions are in law legal and which are not.

Consider another example. The antitrust laws prohibit “unfair” trade practices. But again, what counts as an “unfair” practice? Is it any business practice that, for instance, causes bankruptcies among some of a firm’s competitors, because they cannot find a way to compete with the firm’s low prices and/or superior products? Or is it simply any practice that the administration in power disapproves of? Again, no answer is to be found in the law, so it is impossible for a company to determine beforehand which specific actions the law prohibits.

Take one last example. Under antitrust laws, a company can be charged with “predatory pricing” if it sets prices below those of its competitors, because the competitors might as a result go bankrupt. It can be charged with “monopoly pricing” if it sets prices that are deemed too high, because then it is supposedly bilking consumers of their hard-earned income. But if it therefore decides to set prices at the level of those of its competitors — it can be charged with “collusion” or “conspiracy,” because now it is said to be no longer “competing.”

In the nightmarish world of antitrust law, any and no action can be pronounced illegal. There are and can be no definite, objective principles specified in the law-and as a result a businessman has no way to determine, before he acts, whether his action is legal or not. In practice, this means that businessmen are at the mercy of the government. Any moment the government wants to cripple a particular company, it can unleash the antitrust laws against the company. In logic, a business has no possible defense against a charge of “restraint of trade” or “unfair” trade policies or “predatory pricing” because the charge itself has no objective meaning. The antitrust laws, therefore, vest the government with arbitrary power.

The result, unsurprisingly, is that when, say, a bureaucrat is disgruntled with a successful company because it has failed to share (i.e., give away) its wealth or support the government’s particular programs — or when a government official thinks that destroying a powerful company will win him votes with misguided citizens who believe that Big Business is their enemy — or when resentful, envious competitors (like Netscape and Oracle and AOL in the Microsoft case) can persuade their government representatives to cripple a superior competitor — the brunt of the antitrust laws descends upon that company.

It is no accident that it is America’s most successful, most productive, most admired companies — Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Wal-Mart, American Airlines, Standard Oil, etc. — that are subjected to antitrust lawsuits.

As a form of granting arbitrary power to the government, antitrust laws are unconstitutional and un-American. As a means of penalizing the successful for being successful, antitrust laws are a perversion of justice.

Let us therefore now leave to one side antitrust law, under which any action of a company could be considered a crime, and ask whether in actual fact Microsoft is guilty of any crime.

What are the principal accusations against Microsoft?

Microsoft is accused of “unfair” competition. But competition refers to the process by which companies utilize their assets and personnel to build better and/or cheaper products. They thereby seek to earn, through voluntary trade, even greater profits. In a free market, there is no such thing as “unfair” competition. There are only better and worse competitors. In other words, some companies are better than others at research and development, at structuring long-term, mutually beneficial business agreements, at marketing products, at keeping good employees happy yet challenged. Microsoft, for example, excels at all these processes — and many more. (The charge that Microsoft is not innovative is particularly disingenuous given its continual upgrades and improvements to its major products; even Judge Jackson had to concede this point.) The fact that Microsoft is one of the greatest competitors the business world has seen is, in a free nation, not a crime but a virtue.

The only “unfair competition” that exists is in fact not competition. If, say, the Mafia threatens to blow up a shopkeeper’s store unless he gives it a percentage of his sales, the Mafia is not engaged in competition, albeit unfair. It is engaged in coercion — precisely to prevent voluntary trade and the free market from operating. When Netscape loses sales to Microsoft because Microsoft’s browser is better and/or cheaper, Netscape’s loss of sales bears no similarity to a shopkeeper’s “loss” of sales to the Mafia. One must never equate the voluntary (people choose to buy Microsoft’s products) with the coerced (if he had a choice, the shopkeeper would not “deal” with the Mafia).

Second, Microsoft is accused of “predatory pricing.” Translated into reality, this means that Microsoft is able to charge prices below those of its competitors, such as Netscape. Some of these competitors, who cannot match Microsoft’s low prices, lose market share or go bankrupt. But it is Microsoft’s incredible efficiency and productiveness that allows it to undersell its competition yet still make large profits. Again, this represents not criminal behavior but real virtue.

Finally, Microsoft is accused of wielding “monopoly power.” This accusation as well is based on equating the voluntary with the coerced.

It is true that Microsoft has a dominant market position in some segments of the software industry and that some of its competitors have gone out of business. But this is because Microsoft has out-competed them: it is more innovative, more efficient, a better marketer, and/or a better employer than other software firms. Microsoft, in other words, has earned its dominant position.

And it continues to earn it: it faces constant competition, even if there are no actual competitors presently in its market. For whenever another entrepreneur can figure out a way to produce similar software at a cheaper price or better software at an attractive price (or some undreamt of product that makes current software obsolete), he is free to enter Microsoft’s market. And if he has a sound business plan, he will be able to raise the necessary capital even if he himself has none: there are thousands of venture capitalists looking for the next Bill Gates. Microsoft’s dominant position in the software industry, in other words, must be earned anew each day.

So once again, Microsoft is being attacked for its success: in reality it has no monopoly power just brilliant management.

The only monopolies that can in fact exist are government-created ones. Only a government can prevent someone from entering a market and thus eliminate competition. The Post Office, for instance, is a monopoly. There is little doubt that Federal Express could provide better service, more cheaply, and still earn a profit. But the government forcibly prevents it from entering the Post Office’s market. The Post Office’s dominant market position is unearned: it offers sub-par service but because of government coercion faces no competition. Microsoft’s dominant market position, by contrast, is earned: it faces constant competition, which it continues to win. Again, do not equate the voluntary with the coerced.

Microsoft is the epitome of American business success: it produces enormous wealth through intelligence and hard work. Imagine the wealth that would exist — for every firm, for every employee, for every shareholder, for every customer — if all companies in America were run by a Bill Gates. The fact that they are not should not lead us to destroy Bill Gates’s creation but, all the more, to admire and champion it.

Why should Microsoft’s punishment be as lenient as possible (assuming the case cannot be thrown out at this stage in the proceedings)? Because antitrust laws are arbitrary laws that penalize virtue for being virtue — as the specific accusations against Microsoft clearly reveal.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

If President Bush makes the solemn decision to go to war with Iraq in self-defense, he must not shackle our nation — as he did in Afghanistan — with his own personal religious or altruistic notions. As president, he has no right to worry about civilian causalities in enemy territory. As president, his chosen obligation is to achieve U.S. victory while safeguarding the lives of each and every one of the courageous individuals who have volunteered to defend America.

The government of a free nation is simply the agent of its citizens, charged with one fundamental responsibility: to secure the individual rights — and very lives — of its citizens through the use of retaliatory force. An aspect of this responsibility is to uphold each citizen’s right to self-defense, a responsibility our government in part meets by eliminating terrorist states that threaten U.S. citizens.

If, however, in waging war our government considers the deaths of civilians in terrorist states as a cost that must be weighed against the deaths of our own soldiers (or civilians), or as a cost that must be weighed against achieving victory over the enemy, our government thereby violates its most basic function. It becomes not an agent for our self-defense, but theirs.

Morally, the U.S. government must destroy our aggressors by whatever means are necessary and minimize U.S. casualties in the process.

To be victorious in war, a free nation has to destroy enough of the aggressor to break his will to continue attacking (and, then, dismantle his war apparatus and, where necessary, replace his government). In modern warfare, this almost always necessitates “collateral damage,” i.e., the killing of civilians.

In fact, victory with a minimum of one’s own casualties sometimes requires a free nation to deliberately target the civilians of an aggressor nation in order to cripple its economic production and/or break its will. This is what the U.S. did in WWII when it dropped fire bombs on Dresden and Hamburg and atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These bombings were moral acts. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for instance, precipitated Japan’s surrender and so achieved victory with no further U.S. casualties. In that context, to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers in a ground attack on Japan would have been morally monstrous.

But, it will be objected, is it not more monstrous to kill all those innocent civilians?

No. The moral principle is: the responsibility for all deaths in war lies with the aggressor who initiates force, not with those who defend themselves. (Similarly, if in self-defense you shoot a hit man about to kill you, and also strike the innocent bystander the hit man was deliberately using as a shield, moral responsibility for the bystander’s death lies with the hit man not you.)

Moreover, the objection contains a mistaken assumption: it is false that every civilian in enemy territory — whether we are speaking of Hitler’s Germany or Hirohito’s Japan or the Taliban’s Afghanistan or Hussein’s Iraq — is innocent.

Many civilians in the Middle East, for example, hate us and actively support, materially and/or spiritually, those plotting our deaths. Can one seriously maintain, for instance, that the individuals in the Middle East who celebrated by dancing in the streets on September 11 are innocent?

Other civilians in enemy states are passive, unthinking followers. Their work and economic production, however meager, supports their terrorist governments and so they are in part responsible for the continued power of our enemies. They too are not innocent-and their deaths may be unavoidable in order for America to defend itself. (Remember too that today’s civilian is tomorrow’s soldier.)

But what of those who truly are innocent?

The civilians in enemy territory who actually oppose their dictatorial, terrorist governments are usually their governments’ first innocent victims. All such individuals who remain alive and outside of prison camps should try to flee their country or fight with us (as some did in Afghanistan).

And the truly innocent who live in countries that initiate force against other nations will acknowledge the moral right of a free nation to bomb their countries and destroy their governments — even if this jeopardizes their own lives. No truly innocent civilian in Nazi Germany, for example, would have questioned the morality of the Allies razing Germany, even if he knew he may die in the attacks. No truly innocent individual wishes to become a tool of or a shield for his murderous government; he wishes to see his government toppled.

Thus it should be unsurprising that a European think tank reported last year that “a significant number of those Iraqis interviewed, with surprising candor, expressed their view that, if [regime change] required an American-led attack, they would support it.”

As a free nation our goal is our own defense, not civilian deaths, but we must not allow human shields, innocent or otherwise, to deter us from defending ourselves.

The U.S. government recognized the truth of this on September 11 when, in order to defend those citizens it could, it ordered the shooting down of any more airplanes-become-missiles, even though this meant killing not only the terrorists but also the innocent American civilians captive onboard.

The government must now recognize that the same principle applies to civilian captives in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.

War is terrible but sometimes necessary. To win the war on terrorism, we must not let a mistaken concern with “innocents” deter us. As a free nation, we have the moral right to defend ourselves, even if this requires mass civilian casualties in terrorist countries.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

The following article appeared as an advertisement in The New York Times on October 02, 2001
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Fifty years of increasing American appeasement in the Mideast have led to fifty years of increasing contempt in the Muslim world for the U.S. The climax was September 11, 2001.

Fifty years ago, Truman and Eisenhower surrendered the West’s property rights in oil, although that oil rightfully belonged to those in the West whose science, technology, and capital made its discovery and use possible. The first country to nationalize Western oil, in 1951, was Iran. The rest, observing our frightened silence, hurried to grab their piece of the newly available loot.

The cause of the U.S. silence was not practical, but philosophical. The Mideast’s dictators were denouncing wealthy egotistical capitalism. They were crying that their poor needed our sacrifice; that oil, like all property, is owned collectively, by virtue of birth; and that they knew their viewpoint was true by means of otherworldly emotion. Our Presidents had no answer. Implicitly, they were ashamed of the Declaration of Independence. They did not dare to answer that Americans, properly, were motivated by the selfish desire to achieve personal happiness in a rich, secular, individualist society.

The Muslim countries embodied in an extreme form every idea — selfless duty, anti-materialism, faith or feeling above science, the supremacy of the group — which our universities, our churches, and our own political Establishment had long been upholding as virtue. When two groups, our leadership and theirs, accept the same basic ideas, the most consistent side wins.

After property came liberty. “The Muslim fundamentalist movement,” writes Yale historian Lamin Sanneh, “began in 1979 with the Iranian [theocratic] revolution . . .” (NYT, 9/23/01). During his first year as its leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, urging a Jihad against “the Great Satan,” kidnapped 52 U.S. diplomatic personnel and held them hostage; Carter’s reaction was fumbling paralysis. About a decade later, Iran topped this evil. Khomeini issued his infamous Fatwa aimed at censoring, even outside his borders, any ideas uncongenial to Muslim sensibility. This was the meaning of his threat to kill British author Rushdie and to destroy his American publisher; their crime was the exercise of their right to express an unpopular intellectual viewpoint. The Fatwa was Iran’s attempt, reaffirmed after Khomeini’s death, to stifle, anywhere in the world, the very process of thought. Bush Sr. looked the other way.

After liberty came American life itself. The first killers were the Palestinian hijackers of the late 1960s. But the killing spree which has now shattered our soaring landmarks, our daily routine, and our souls, began in earnest only after the license granted by Carter and Bush Sr.

Many nations work to fill our body bags. But Iran, according to a State Department report of 1999, is “the most active state sponsor of terrorism,” training and arming groups from all over the Mideast, including Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Nor is Iran’s government now “moderating.” Five months ago, the world’s leading terrorist groups resolved to unite in a holy war against the U.S., which they called “a second Israel”; their meeting was held in Teheran. (Fox News, 9/16/01)

What has been the U.S. response to the above? In 1996, nineteen U.S. soldiers were killed in their barracks in Saudi Arabia. According to a front-page story in The New York Times (6/21/98): “Evidence suggesting that Iran sponsored the attack has further complicated the investigation, because the United States and Saudi Arabia have recently sought to improve relations with a new, relatively moderate Government in Teheran.” In other words, Clinton evaded Iran’s role because he wanted what he called “a genuine reconciliation.” In public, of course, he continued to vow that he would find and punish the guilty. This inaction of Clinton’s is comparable to his action after bin Laden’s attack on U.S. embassies in East Africa; his action was the gingerly bombing of two meaningless targets.

Conservatives are equally responsible for today’s crisis, as Reagan’s record attests. Reagan not only failed to retaliate after 241 U.S. marines in Lebanon were slaughtered; he did worse. Holding that Islamic guerrillas were our ideological allies because of their fight against the atheistic Soviets, he methodically poured money and expertise into Afghanistan. This put the U.S. wholesale into the business of creating terrorists. Most of them regarded fighting the Soviets as only the beginning; our turn soon came.

For over a decade, there was another guarantee of American impotence: the notion that a terrorist is alone responsible for his actions, and that each, therefore, must be tried as an individual before a court of law. This viewpoint, thankfully, is fading; most people now understand that terrorists exist only through the sanction and support of a government.

We need not prove the identity of any of these creatures, because terrorism is not an issue of personalities. It cannot be stopped by destroying bin Laden and the al-Qaeda army, or even by destroying the destroyers everywhere. If that is all we do, a new army of militants will soon rise up to replace the old one.

The behavior of such militants is that of the regimes which make them possible. Their atrocities are not crimes, but acts of war. The proper response, as the public now understands, is a war in self-defense. In the excellent words of Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, we must “end states who sponsor terrorism.”

A proper war in self-defense is one fought without self-crippling restrictions placed on our commanders in the field. It must be fought with the most effective weapons we possess (a few weeks ago, Rumsfeld refused, correctly, to rule out nuclear weapons). And it must be fought in a manner that secures victory as quickly as possible and with the fewest U.S. casualties, regardless of the countless innocents caught in the line of fire. These innocents suffer and die because of the action of their own government in sponsoring the initiation of force against America. Their fate, therefore, is their government’s moral responsibility. There is no way for our bullets to be aimed only at evil men.

The public understandably demands retaliation against Afghanistan. But in the wider context Afghanistan is insignificant. It is too devastated even to breed many fanatics. Since it is no more these days than a place to hide, its elimination would do little to end terrorism.

Terrorism is a specific disease, which can be treated only by a specific antidote. The nature of the disease (though not of its antidote) has been suggested by Serge Schmemann (NYT, 9/16/01). Our struggle now, he writes, is “not a struggle against a conventional guerrilla force, whose yearning for a national homeland or the satisfaction of some grievance could be satisfied or denied. The terrorists [on Tuesday] . . . issued no demands, no ultimatums. They did it solely out of grievance and hatred — hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage, but abhorred by religious fundamentalists (and not only Muslim fundamentalists) as licentiousness, corruption, greed and apostasy.”

Every word of this is true. The obvious implication is that the struggle against terrorism is not a struggle over Palestine. It is a clash of cultures, and thus a struggle of ideas, which can be dealt with, ultimately, only by intellectual means. But this fact does not depreciate the crucial role of our armed forces. On the contrary, it increases their effectiveness, by pointing them to the right target.

Most of the Mideast is ruled by thugs who would be paralyzed by an American victory over any of their neighbors. Iran, by contrast, is the only major country there ruled by zealots dedicated not to material gain (such as more wealth or territory), but to the triumph by any means, however violent, of the Muslim fundamentalist movement they brought to life. That is why Iran manufactures the most terrorists.

If one were under a Nazi aerial bombardment, it would be senseless to restrict oneself to combatting Nazi satellites while ignoring Germany and the ideological plague it was working to spread. What Germany was to Nazism in the 1940s, Iran is to terrorism today. Whatever else it does, therefore, the U.S. can put an end to the Jihad-mongers only by taking out Iran.

Eliminating Iran’s terrorist sanctuaries and military capability is not enough. We must do the equivalent of de-Nazifying the country, by expelling every official and bringing down every branch of its government. This goal cannot be achieved painlessly, by weaponry alone. It requires invasion by ground troops, who will be at serious risk, and perhaps a period of occupation. But nothing less will “end the state” that most cries out to be ended.

The greatest obstacle to U.S. victory is not Iran and its allies, but our own intellectuals. Even now, they are advocating the same ideas that caused our historical paralysis. They are asking a reeling nation to show neighbor-love by shunning “vengeance.” The multiculturalists — rejecting the concept of objectivity — are urging us to “understand” the Arabs and avoid “racism” (i.e., any condemnation of any group’s culture). The friends of “peace” are reminding us, ever more loudly, to “remember Hiroshima” and beware the sin of pride.

These are the kinds of voices being heard in the universities, the churches, and the media as the country recovers from its first shock, and the professoriate et al. feel emboldened to resume business as usual. These voices are a siren song luring us to untroubled sleep while the fanatics proceed to gut America.

Tragically, Mr. Bush is attempting a compromise between the people’s demand for a decisive war and the intellectuals’ demand for appeasement.

It is likely that the Bush administration will soon launch an attack on bin Laden’s organization in Afghanistan and possibly even attack the Taliban. Despite this, however, every sign indicates that Mr. Bush will repeat the mistakes made by his father in Iraq. As of October 1, the Taliban leadership appears not to be a target. Even worse, the administration refuses to target Iran, or any of the other countries identified by the State Department as terrorist regimes. On the contrary, Powell is seeking to add to the current coalition these very states — which is the equivalent of going into partnership with the Soviet Union in order to fight Communism (under the pretext, say, of proving that we are not anti-Russian). By seeking such a coalition, our President is asserting that he needs the support of terrorist nations in order to fight them. He is stating publicly that the world’s only superpower does not have enough self-confidence or moral courage to act unilaterally in its own defense.

For some days now, Mr. Bush has been downplaying the role of our military, while praising the same policies (mainly negotiation and economic pressure) that have failed so spectacularly and for so long. Instead of attacking the roots of global terrorism, he seems to be settling for a “guerrilla war” against al-Qaeda, and a policy of unseating the Taliban passively, by aiding a motley coalition of native tribes. Our battle, he stresses, will be a “lengthy” one.

Mr. Bush’s compromise will leave the primary creators of terrorism whole — and unafraid. His approach might satisfy our short-term desire for retribution, but it will guarantee catastrophe in the long term.

As yet, however, no overall policy has been solidified; the administration still seems to be groping. And an angry public still expects our government not merely to hobble terrorism for a while, but to eradicate it. The only hope left is that Mr. Bush will listen to the public, not to the professors and their progeny.

When should we act, if not now? If our appeasement has led to an escalation of disasters in the past, can it do otherwise in the future? Do we wait until our enemies master nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare?

The survival of America is at stake. The risk of a U.S. overreaction, therefore, is negligible. The only risk is underreaction.

Mr. Bush must reverse course. He must send our missiles and troops, in force, where they belong. And he must justify this action by declaring with righteous conviction that we have discarded the clichés of our paper-tiger past and that the U.S. now places America first.

There is still time to demonstrate that we take the war against terrorism seriously — as a sacred obligation to our Founding Fathers, to every victim of the men who hate this country, and to ourselves. There is still time to make the world understand that we will take up arms, anywhere and on principle, to secure an American’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on earth.

The choice today is mass death in the United States or mass death in the terrorist nations. Our Commander-In-Chief must decide whether it is his duty to save Americans or the governments who conspire to kill them.

About The Author

Leonard Peikoff

Leonard Peikoff, author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, is the foremost authority on Rand’s philosophy. Learn more at his website.

America is at war.

To win, we must destroy not just individual terrorists like Osama bin Laden and his allies in Afghanistan but the power of brutal, authoritarian governments to send out their armies of terrorists against us. Central among these is Iran, but the enemy includes Iraq, Syria, Sudan, the PLO and others.

The task ahead may be difficult, but we must not waver. We should constantly remind ourselves that these dictatorial regimes are arming themselves with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons aimed at our destruction. We dare not wait for another massacre before we eliminate their ability to attack us.

Many are now wondering, aloud or silently: Should the United States use nuclear weapons to destroy the enemy?

Determining what are the proper military means of achieving America’s objective in the war, and whether those means include nuclear weapons, is an issue for our generals. But the real worry behind the question is whether the U.S. government has the moral right to use its full military arsenal in waging the war. To this question I can say, as a philosopher, that morality answers with an unequivocal “Yes.”

The basic issue is that of self-defense. When men are initiating force against you in order to destroy you, you have the moral right to kill your would-be murderers by any means possible. To think that one thereby descends to the moral level of one’s attackers is as absurd as to think that a policeman descends to the level of Al Capone if he kills Capone in a shootout.

The U.S. government is simply the agent of its citizens, charged with one and only one responsibility: to secure and defend the rights — and very lives — of its citizens against aggressors. If in waging war our government were to consider deaths in enemy countries as a cost that must be weighed against the deaths of American citizens or soldiers, it would be violating its most basic function. It would no longer be an agent for our self-defense, but theirs.

What could be more morally obscene than 20,000 additional Americans killed in another attack on our cities because our government failed to bomb Iran, worried that Iranian casualties would be too high? Equally obscene would be to send our soldiers to war — courageous individuals ready to defend their freedom and ours — and then have our government not do everything in its power to minimize their deaths.

Morally, the responsibility of the U.S. government is to destroy the aggressors and minimize U.S. casualties. If our military decides that in this war, as in WWII, it needs nuclear weapons, so be it.

But what of the “innocent” civilians in enemy states that could be killed in the process?

Many civilians in those states hate us and actively support, materially and spiritually, their tyrannical regimes. They are not innocents. As we drop our bombs, should we worry about the lives of Palestinians who celebrated by dancing in the streets on September 11?

Other civilians in enemy states are passive, unthinking followers. Their work and economic production, however meager, supports their terrorist governments and so they are in part responsible for the continued power of the aggressors. They too are not innocent — and their deaths may be unavoidable in order for America to defend itself.

The civilians in enemy territory who actually oppose their dictatorial regimes are usually the regimes’ first innocent victims. Any such individuals who remain alive and outside of prison camps should try to flee their country or rebel.

Destroying innocents qua innocents should not be our goal — and true innocents should welcome American attack on their country. They know that they might be killed in the process, and even that they are legitimate targets insofar as they are forced to support their dictatorial regimes, but they will also know that it is their only chance at freedom. In WWII, occupied Europe welcomed American invasion, even though this meant that some civilians who actually resisted the Nazis would die in American bombings.

We must not allow human shields to deter us from defending ourselves. The U.S. government, properly and morally, in the name of defending the lives of its citizens, ordered the shooting down of the airplanes-become-missiles, even though this meant killing not only the terrorists but also the innocent American captives onboard. If this principle applies to Americans onboard their own planes, how much more so does it apply to people in Afghanistan or Iran?

The responsibility for all deaths in war lies with the aggressor who initiates force, not with those who defend themselves.

War is terrible but sometimes necessary. To win this war, we must not let an immoral concern with “innocents” weaken our resolve. We must have the profound moral conviction that we have the right to exist. We have the right to destroy those who initiate force to deprive us of our rights and lives. With full moral certainty we must urge our government to defend our lives, even if that requires nuclear weapons and hundreds of thousands of deaths in terrorist countries.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

When a supporter of Tonya Harding attacked Olympic skating rival Nancy Kerrigan back in 1994, clubbing Kerrigan’s right knee and leaving her writhing in pain, the legal system sprang to the victim’s defense. The attacker was caught and punished for his disgraceful attempt to eliminate a superior competitor through brute force.

But now, seven years later, as golfer Casey Martin appears before the Supreme Court asking approval for his own forced elimination of superior rivals, the legal system appears poised to punish the victims and reward the attacker. This sad reversal is made possible by a federal statute that penalizes ability in the name of helping the disabled.

Casey Martin is a talented golfer whose rare circulation disorder prevents him from walking the length of a golf course. This handicap disqualifies him from competing in events run by the PGA Tour, a private organization whose rules require each athlete to walk from shot to shot.

Golf is a game of extreme precision. Tiny variations in the swing of a club determine whether a shot lands on the green or in a sand trap, whether a tricky putt falls in or rims out. Only golfers with great stamina can maintain this precise control while fighting the fatigue that sets in after walking many miles, sometimes over rough terrain, and standing for many hours. The PGA’s rules require and reward such stamina.

But instead of gracefully accepting his inability to beat able-bodied opponents under the rules of an organization he voluntarily joined, Martin chose to force his way into PGA competition by invoking the Americans with Disabilities Act, a law requiring “reasonable modifications” to accommodate the handicapped. At Martin’s request, a federal court forced the PGA Tour to change its rules and let Martin ride in a motorized cart, while everyone else walked.

If the Supreme Court rules in Martin’s favor, as seems likely, it will probably not even pause to identify the innocent victims of such a decision. The first victim is the PGA Tour, which should have an absolute right to set its own rules for its own tournaments. The next victims are the spectators, who want to see professional golf played at its highest level, in PGA competitions winnable only by the ablest athletes.

And there is yet another victim, nameless but equally deserving of sympathy — the able-bodied golfer who is cut from the tournament to make room for Martin, and who is expected to pick up his broken dreams and go quietly home. No newspaper photographs will show the pain in this man’s face, the way they showed Nancy Kerrigan’s anguish after she was assaulted, but one can imagine his torment at the injustice of being penalized simply for having abilities that another man lacks.

The legal and moral principles at stake here extend far beyond the realm of spectator sports.

Under the ADA, which was designed by disability advocates who resentfully describe healthy people as “temporarily abled,” no employers may simply fire disabled employees — or even hire able ones — so long as “reasonable accommodations” might help the handicapped compete. The list of bureaucratically required accommodations, from wheelchair ramps to sign-language interpreters, is endless — and all at the employer’s expense.

In a recent case, a Pennsylvania elementary school fired a psychotic secretary who missed deadlines, forgot to deliver messages, and couldn’t cope with rearranged furniture. When she sued under the ADA, a federal court ruled that instead of firing her, the school should have engaged in an “informal interactive process” to identify “reasonable accommodations” — such as slowing down the rate of change in the office.

The ADA’s backers count on decent people to support the statute as a sympathetic expression of benevolence. But genuine benevolence toward the disabled is possible only through voluntary good will; it cannot be achieved by coercion, which results in punishing the able.

This last point would be more obvious if the government were simply handing Casey Martin a baseball bat and letting him take a swing at Tiger Woods’s knee. Yet the ADA achieves the same end through government force, penalizing mentally and physically superior candidates by making it illegal for employers and other organizations to prefer them over the disabled.

In a rational society, everyone’s life and happiness depend upon finding and rewarding the very best people — the best athletes, the best teachers, the best surgeons. To recognize this simple fact is to see why the Americans with Disabilities Act must be repealed — and why Casey Martin deserves to lose his case.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

As half the nation eagerly awaits the kickoff of the Super Bowl, the other half looks on in wonderment at what could be so enthralling about grown men running up and down a field carrying an oblong ball.

Football fans who cannot articulate why they feel such passion for the game may retreat to their television sets feeling a vague sense of guilt that, perhaps, they are wasting their time.

However, no guilt is called for, because watching sports satisfies a vital human need.

The essential value of spectator sports lies in their capacity to illustrate, in a dramatic way, the process of human goal-achievement. They do this by making the process shorter, simpler, and more visually exciting than it is in daily life–and by giving us heroes to admire.

A process of goal-achievement underlies everything that makes our lives richer, from discovering new medicines to learning about computers, from pursuing a career to enjoying friends and family. But success is not automatic–each such endeavor must be started and maintained, often in the face of great obstacles, by an individual’s choices. To gather the moral courage to make their own difficult choices each day, people need inspiration–the spiritual fuel that flows from the sight of another’s achievement.

Unfortunately, our culture’s traditional sources of inspiration have dried up. Today’s movies give us serial killers or self-mocking secret agents, novels feature the pedestrian and the neurotic, and television news programs expose public figures cravenly compromising their ideals. In this value-challenged milieu, sporting events offer us a rare glimpse of heroes at work.

But how can heroic stature arise from a perfectly useless act like carrying a football across a goal line? The answer is that the non-utilitarian nature of sporting goals provides a limited, safe context in which everyone’s focus can be on the process of goal-achievement as such, not on the particular nature or value of the goal. Just imagine how the carefree joy of watching a Super Bowl would be crushed if, for example, one learned that a friend’s life depended on the outcome.

Spectator sports invite us to take pleasure in our capacity for admiration. Different athletes display different virtues–one performs well under pressure, another shows consistent excellence despite advancing age, a third publicly takes pride in his accomplishments–but each contributes to the vast storehouse of sporting memories that fans draw upon every day, as reminders that difficult goals can be achieved by focused, dedicated effort.

Because physical action is stressed in all spectator sports, some potential fans may be bored by the prospect of watching bodies run around on a playing surface. But in truth, sports–like all human endeavors–have both a mental and physical component, and spectators who learn and follow the intricate strategy behind each play obtain maximum satisfaction from the game.

Sports offer as close to a universal value language as we have left. The sense of brotherhood that sports fans feel makes it possible for complete strangers to find themselves happily discussing the latest exploits (or ruefully noting the recent failures) of their favorite team.

Ultimately, sporting events like football’s Super Bowl offer a microcosmic vision of what “real life” could, and should, be like.

In a society that increasingly rewards weakness and failure, sports fans appreciate that each athlete has to earn his way onto the field by proving his superior ability, and that physical and mental handicaps will be recognized for what they are — obstacles to be overcome on the road to achievement, not values in their own right.

In a nation whose laws are increasingly arbitrary, sports fans look forward to spending time in a world where the rules are explicit, known in advance by all participants, and fair to everyone.

In a culture that preaches the deadening duty of self-sacrifice and service to others, sports fans love to turn on the TV and immerse themselves in an exciting, suspenseful contest for no purpose other than their own personal enjoyment.

In a world of life-and-death conflicts, spectator sports give us a “time-out”–an opportunity to relax and celebrate human skill, dedication, and success in a spirit of simple joy.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

Do parents have the right to decide which friends or extended family their children will spend time with? That’s the specific issue in the case of Troxel v. Granville, scheduled for oral argument January 12 before the Supreme Court. It’s a topic of obvious importance to millions of families, for without the right to control who visits their children, parents cannot possibly govern their children’s upbringing.

But the case presents an even larger issue: Will the Supreme Court reaffirm that the principle of individual rights protects activities, such as child-rearing, not concretely mentioned in the Constitution? Or will the Court add the right to raise one’s children to the growing discard-pile of rights deemed unworthy of protection because the Founding Fathers did not specifically list them? Much more than parental control of visitation hinges on the Court’s choice of constitutional method.

The Troxel case actually consolidates three different disputes, all involving mothers struggling to raise their children in single-parent households, with the fathers missing or deceased. These mothers have been dragged into court by paternal grandparents  — and, in one case, by an ex-boyfriend — under a State of Washington law that permits judges to order visitation by outsiders against a parent’s express wishes if it is deemed “in the best interest of the child.”

But the right to determine a child’s best interests belongs only to its parents, by virtue of the crucial fact that it is their child, not society’s or the State’s. In the absence of demonstrable physical abuse or neglect, parents (including single parents) have the exclusive right to decide what their children will eat, where they will attend school, which morality they will be taught, and with whom they may associate.

Government may properly issue decrees in the best interests of a child only when both parents have relinquished their decision-making rights, as happens for example when a divorcing couple irreconcilably disagrees about where a child should live or attend school. However, the State of Washington law (like similar laws in many other states) improperly dispenses with the requirement of such a forfeiture, thereby making all parental decisions regarding visitation subject to an override by the courts.

Once this collectivist principle is established in law, there is nothing but time and agony between our society and the collectivist hell envisioned millennia ago by the philosopher Plato, who proposed that children be placed at birth in communal houses and brought up according to the wisdom of the community, never even knowing their parents.

Supreme Court precedent supports parents who seek to resist arbitrary governmental control of their children. In the 1923 case of Meyer v. Nebraska, the Court struck down a State law enacted just after World War I that had forbidden the teaching of foreign languages to young children. Rejecting the State’s collectivist premise that such teachings “inculcate in [children] the ideas and sentiments foreign to the best interests of this country,” the Court held that the constitutional right to life and liberty includes, by logical implication, a couple’s right to marry, raise children, and “control the education of their own.”

Two years later, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court struck down an Oregon statute that had effectively outlawed private schools by making public school attendance mandatory. Holding that the law interfered with “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control,” the Court declared that the “child is not the mere creature of the State.”

Applying similar logic, the Supreme Court of Washington last year held the statute in the Troxel case unconstitutional. It stated that “parents have a right to limit visitation of their children with third persons” and that “to suggest otherwise would be the logical equivalent to asserting that the state has the authority to break up stable families and redistribute its infant population to provide each child with the ‘best family.’”

Will the U.S. Supreme Court likewise affirm that the constitutional right to life and liberty includes the right of parents to raise their children without interference from the State? If so, then the three courageous mothers from the State of Washington will have scored an important victory in the battle for individual rights in America.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

In Sunset Boulevard, silent-screen star Norma Desmond listens as a young admirer tactlessly recalls her faded glory. “You used to be in pictures,” says the fan. “You used to be big.”

“I am big,” replies Norma, her voice dripping with contempt. “It’s the pictures that got small.”

If only our fading Constitution could speak, it would summon all the grandeur of its illustrious past and say, echoing Norma Desmond, “I am big. It’s the Supreme Court that got small.”

As the Supreme Court begins its new term, have you found yourself wondering why the Court’s docket always seems to be littered with arcane issues of little consequence, while our vital liberties are being continually eroded by government? You will not find the answer in a typical microscopic analysis of changes in the Court’s thinking from session to session. Only a wider historical perspective, one that penetrates to philosophic fundamentals, will detect the seismic shift that has led the Court to forsake its essential judicial function.

America’s Founding Fathers swept away centuries of tradition in which the individual had been subservient to the collective — to family, community or nation. The Founders held that to protect human life and human progress in society, the individual must be sovereign. They held that each individual has an objective right to his own life and his own happiness — including the right to his property, without which no other rights are possible. They held that individual rights are inalienable, that is, that no force on earth — no monarch, no parliament, no mob or legislative majority — could rightfully violate them.

The Supreme Court was designed to protect these sacred rights against incursion by government. If Congress or any state enacted a law that infringed upon rights, the Court, under the power of judicial review, was to strike it down. The Court was to be the individual’s last line of defense against tyranny — the tyranny of unlimited majority rule.

But today’s leaders have embraced pragmatism, the philosophy that claims there are no absolutes and no principles, only subjective opinions guided by expediency. The only way, therefore, to prevent society from degenerating into anarchy — the pragmatists concluded — is by enshrining unrestrained majority rule.

According to this view, the individual citizen lives, not by right, but by society’s permission — for which the majority can set whatever conditions it wishes. As a chilling example, consider that almost a century ago the grandfather of Supreme Court pragmatism, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, characterized the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech as nothing but an arbitrary “experiment” which, if the citizens tire of it, may be repealed tomorrow with impunity.

Without the unyielding principle of individual rights as the moral yardstick for judging the acts of legislatures and executives, the Supreme Court is impotent to engage in proper judicial review. As a result, government routinely violates individual rights while the Court stands idly by.

Businessmen suffered first, and most, from this dereliction, as the Court permitted once-sacrosanct property rights, such as freedom of contract, to be crushed by majority rule. Few people remember that the Supreme Court once protected property rights, e.g., a company’s right to pay workers any wage they voluntarily accept, or its right to function without a state license — even though they are not concretely listed in the Constitution. The Court used to understand the principle of individual rights. Now, however, the Court allows lawmakers to exercise virtually unlimited power over production, employment and trade.

Because businesses know the Court will not protect them, they see no choice but to compromise when their rights are threatened. For example, the tobacco industry would never have agreed to the unprecedented controls over its right to free trade — the massive fines, the debilitating regulations, the authoritarian censorship — were it not for the Court’s abject surrender of its Constitutional mission.

Other rights have fared no better. Recall what happened in 1986, in Bowers v. Hardwick, when the Court ruled that a homosexual has no right to pursue sexual pleasure in the privacy of his home, if the majority vote of a legislature has prohibited it. And earlier this year, in Washington v. Glucksberg, the Court declared that a terminally ill individual has no right to assisted suicide if a majority of society refuses to allow it.

Indeed, it is only a matter of time before a woman’s right to choose an abortion sinks under this pragmatist/collectivist tide, as the Court permits the gradual demise of Roe v. Wade — the last surviving example of proper judicial review.

Only a philosophical renaissance restoring individual rights to their place of honor in our Constitutional republic will enable the Supreme Court to reclaim its vital role as defender of the individual against the collective.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute