Every day Ayn Rand’s books are freely shared with students and teachers around the world, thanks to the generous support of our donors. You can help deliver Ayn Rand’s books to eager readers today.
So far as we can tell, Americans haven’t exactly been taking to the streets demanding that people trade Christmas ornaments for welfare programs, but Peck’s article is interesting for what it reveals about those who are fighting to expand America’s welfare state.
According to Peck, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says it could end “homelessness” if only its annual budget to fight the problem ballooned from $1.9 billion to $20 billion. That’s dubious — financial reasons seldom account for why a person ends up living on the street or under a bridge. But set that aside. Peck goes on to acknowledge: “By any measure $20 billion is a lot of money, but the figure is far less daunting when placed in context.” What’s the relevant context in his view? The nearly $40 billion Americans spend on Christmas decorations and flowers.
Now pause for a second on what that money buys you. For many of us, that $75 buys us a lifetime of joyful memories. Aren’t some of your happiest recollections decorating the Christmas tree with your family? Yeah, ours too.
With that in mind, let’s restate Peck’s proposition: Let’s have the government seize $75 of the income you worked for and would use to create lasting memories for you and your family, and transfer it (minus transaction costs) to people you don’t know, and might not approve of if you knew.
Here’s a question: If that was so clearly an enticing proposition, then why should Peck and his friends in government need to force it on you? Why not just persuade you to spend more of your income on helping people? Precisely because Peck knows that, absent forcing his priorities on you, you’ll very likely go right ahead pursuing your own priorities and your own individual happiness.
For a welfare statist, though, your happiness is not a morally legitimate goal. What is? Los Angeles Times columnist David Lazarus, in the course of praising Peck’s column, hands us a clue: “[T]he guy whose birthday we’re supposedly celebrating built his ministry out of helping the downtrodden and less fortunate. So it’s perhaps fair to ask the old question: What would Jesus do? I’m guessing he’d go easy on the tinsel and focus more on the good deeds.”
And why is that Lazarus’s guess? Because a basic moral principle inculcated by Christianity is that you are your brother’s keeper. Your moral duty is to serve and sacrifice for the poor and the meek, and if you are so selfish as to value your Christmas fun and lifelong memories over “helping the homeless,” well, you should be ashamed of yourself.
This is the same moral perspective that is at the root of every other welfare state program. Whether it’s Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or public housing or public schooling or farm subsidies, the moral justification is always the same: You don’t get to spend your money on your priorities, you have to spend it to serve the needs of others. Their need matters. Your happiness? Not so much.
So should we all be Scrooges, indifferent to people suffering hardships? Of course not. But the first political priority should be securing everyone’s freedom to pursue his own happiness, which includes his right to spend his income on his own happiness. That’s what free markets do, and it’s free markets that are the best way of making sure individuals can prosper. Then, if you want to, you can help anyone you choose in any way you choose—not as a guilty duty, but as a voluntary action aimed at your own personal happiness.
But helping others through hardship is a side issue. The purpose of your life is not to help the Tiny Tims of the world. It is to do everything in your power to create a life filled with joyous memories.
That, by the way, is why we urge you to celebrate Christmas. We don’t believe Christmas is essentially a religious holiday or that it should be about serving the downtrodden. It’s about celebrating earthly prosperity and happiness.
Israel is at the crux of a “new struggle over the international laws of war.” So argues Peter Berkowitz, a legal scholar at the Hoover Institution, in his new and important book on the subject.
Exhibit A in Berkowitz’s case is the United Nations’ putative fact-finding mission on the 2008–9 Gaza war — an investigation which culminated in the notorious Goldstone Report. Exhibit B: the furor over the 2010 Gaza flotilla. According to Berkowitz, these incidents of maltreatment of Israel and efforts to criminalize the exercise of its right of self-defense “threaten to effect legal transformations that will impair the ability of all liberal democracies to defend themselves.”
By exposing what he regards as abuses of the international laws of war, Berkowitz intends to contribute to their defense. The book’s evidence, though, renders that hope forlorn.
With lawyerly precision, Berkowitz dissects the Goldstone Report, highlighting the extent to which it is riddled with inaccuracies, half-truths, and Hamas propaganda uncritically reported at face value. For example, the report found that Israel illegitimately destroyed a family home in Gaza. But in reality, Hamas had used that home as a storage facility for weapons and ammunition, including Grad missiles, rendering it a legitimate military target. Moreover, in the eyes of the Goldstone team, Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but merely one of several “Palestinian armed groups.” The report downplays the 8,000+ rockets and mortars launched from Gaza, as if they were causally unrelated to Israel’s decision to retaliate. Berkowitz deftly argues that the report’s application of relevant norms of war is legally unsound, and that its recommendation that the UN Security Council refer the matter to the International Criminal Court is baseless.
Procedurally, Berkowitz contends, the UN infringed on Israel’s right to apply the norms of war when it prematurely authorized an investigation, before the fighting ended and before Israel could reasonably carry out its own preliminary assessments. Stoking suspicions that the investigation’s verdict was a foregone conclusion, the UN General Assembly endorsed the Goldstone Report 114–18 (with 44 abstentions) — despite the report’s embarrassingly numerous (yet thematically on-message) factual and legal defects. Curiously, nearly a year-and- a-half later, Justice Richard Goldstone, who headed the investigation, retracted some of the most egregious claims; tellingly, however, the other UN team members unapologetically rejected the need to revise, let alone retract, the report.
What Berkowitz illustrates is a pattern wherein the international laws of war operate like a fulcrum for shifting blame from terrorists to the states fighting them.
This pattern was manifest in the outcry over the Gaza flotilla. That convoy, posturing as a humanitarian mission yet closely tied to an Islamist group, sought to pierce Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. After Israeli commandos boarded one recalcitrant vessel, the Mavi Marmara, a number of flotilla activists attacked them with axes, pipes, and knives. Nine activists were killed in the process, and several dozen more were injured. The chorus of condemnation was instant, shrill, and one-sided. The call for a UN investigation, Berkowitz observes, was intended not “to determine wrongdoing but rather to place an official stamp on Israel’s guilt.” The UN Human Rights Council — which has been notably mute over the years on incontestable violations of rights globally — bestirred itself to issue a resolution singling out Israel as the aggressor.
Critics warped the international laws of war to argue that Israel was forbidden to engage in the blockade, because it remained an occupying power in Gaza — even though Israel withdrew from Gaza completely in 2005, and Hamas violently took over the territory some two years later.
Berkowitz convincingly demonstrates that Israel cannot legally be regarded an occupier, and, piece by piece dismantles the sophistry employed to deny the blockade’s legitimacy.
Dismayed at how the international laws of war are deployed to undercut free nations, Berkowitz notes a paradox: no armies in the history of warfare have devoted greater attention than Israel and the United States to complying with laws of war, yet no armies today “come under greater worldwide attack for violating” those laws.
That moral inversion, Berkowitz suggests, could be rectified by clarifying and upholding the international laws of war. But on this point, the case is unconvincing. The laws of war are themselves deeply problematic. Take the idea, of which Berkowitz approves, that military retaliation must be “proportional” to the attack. Arguably, that precept stands at odds with a free nation’s moral right to defend its citizens’ lives. In the name of proportionality, should the U.S. retaliation for Pearl Harbor have been limited to bombing the same number of Japanese warships, and nothing more? Should Israel’s retaliation against Hamas be confined to firing the same primitive, imprecise mortars at Gaza, and nothing more? Berkowitz calls for a “balance” between military necessity and the need to avoid civilian casualties. But surely the fundamental moral imperative must be the military objective, with the culpability for the unwelcome but sometimes inevitable collateral damage falling to the aggressor.
Compounding the problem is that the UN and related bodies enforce these so-called laws of war. It is not the Russias or Chinas or Irans of the world, but the United States, Israel, and a small number of other free nations that strive to comply with these laws, thereby lending them moral credibility. But the UN is dominated by authoritarian and terrorist- sponsoring regimes, making subversion of those laws all but assured.
Berkowitz assumes that the international laws of war are indispensable. The book’s two case studies, however, should lead the reader to question that assumption. It is true that soldiers (indeed, all citizens) of a free nation need to have a sense of justice in their military cause. Yet moral guidance in war is the task not of some international organization but of a sovereign nation’s foreign policy and moral principles; these should define the objective and appropriate means in a military conflict — just as they should inform decisions on alliances, treaties, and international organizations. What Berkowitz advocates — championing the international laws of war but reserving prime responsibility of enforcement to nation-states — leaves the moral high ground open for the usual suspects to seize it anew.
With this book, though, Berkowitz has masterfully exposed how the international laws of war have become a favorite bludgeon wielded against Israel. By bringing greater attention to the nature and provisions of those laws, the book serves as an urgent reminder of the need to scrutinize this doctrine and the international institutions that have become its champions.
This election Paul Ryan and other Republicans dared approach the third rail that is Medicare, and Democrats upped the voltage, branding Republicans every chance they got as wanting to “end Medicare as we know it.”
But whatever you thought of Ryan’s particular proposals for Medicare, and whoever you voted for, there’s one thing we must all come to agree on now — it is high time we unplug the third rail.
According to Medicare’s trustees, Medicare will go bankrupt in the next 12 years (some argue it could happen as early as 2016). The program is already running combined deficits of close to $290 billion, and its long-term unfunded liabilities top $30 trillion (some argue they could be more than $89 trillion). Cato’s Michael Tanner puts the lower estimate of Medicare’s unfunded liabilities in perspective: “[W]e could confiscate every penny belonging to every millionaire and billionaire in America and still cover less than a third of Medicare’s red ink, even using the lowest estimate for its unfunded liabilities.”
Despite these facts, we continue to treat Medicare as untouchable. Observe how both parties bent over backwards trying to convince us that it’s their party that wants to preserve Medicare as we know it. Romney accused Obama of “robbing” Medicare, insisting that what the Republicans want to do is “save it.” Meanwhile, Obama maintained his health care law “strengthened” Medicare and that it was really Romney who has a “very different plan.” Meanwhile, neither Obamacare nor the Republican proposal makes a serious dent in Medicare’s spending (spending actually increases under both plans).
Why, despite its impending fiscal collapse, is Medicare untouchable? Because we view the program as performing a crucial government function: paying for seniors’ medical bills. That the government should do this, too many of us hold as sacrosanct, and it’s why any proposal that seniors pay for a greater share of their medical care is met with ads showing granny being pushed off a cliff.
It’s past time to question this, to question whether Medicare’s basic purpose is proper.
Medicare is often characterized as an “earned benefit” — a fund you pay into during your working years and then become eligible to collect from once you retire. But in reality Medicare is no such thing — it’s a redistribution program that taxes the income of current workers to pay the medical expenses of current seniors.
The portion of your wealth that is seized today for the program is not invested for your future medical costs, nor is it saved for you in a vault marked with your name until you turn 65. The Medicare “trust fund” is, in fact, a myth.
Any money the government collects from you is spent the minute it is received on today’s seniors. Those over 65 today collect at least $3 in benefits for every dollar they paid in payroll taxes during their working years, which is only possible courtesy of today’s working population. And when you turn 65, Medicare will only exist to the degree the government taxes the then-working population.
Is it proper for the government to force people into such a scheme? Is it right to make the medical expenses of some the unchosen obligation of others? Is Medicare compatible with the founding principle of America — that each individual has a right to live for the sake of his own happiness and not have the fruits of his productivity confiscated for others?
These are the kinds of fundamental questions we must be willing to ask. It really should not be surprising that when we divorce benefits from costs — a person’s consumption from his production — as Medicare does, bankruptcy looms.
Ultimately, we will need to discuss the possibility of ending Medicare as we know it — of no longer forcing some people to pay the medical bills of others.
Instead, Romney, under immense voter scrutiny, recoiled earlier this year from a provision in Ryan’s plan that cut a mere $716 billion from Medicare (Ryan also distanced himself from that provision). This kind of unprincipled backpedaling is the exact opposite of the leadership we need.
America is surely heading toward a financial reckoning. Let’s face this reality, unplug the third rail and have a real debate about the future of Medicare.
About The Author
Rituparna Basu
Rituparna Basu was a researcher and analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute between 2011 and 2016.
SHARE
I’ll Buy My Own Contraception, Thanks
by Rituparna Basu | November 13, 2012 | Townhall.com
This election season, perhaps in an attempt to win the so-called women’s vote, the marketing efforts for Obamacare targeted my gender. “Thanks to the Affordable Care Act,” Representative Nancy Pelosi and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius cheered in one editorial, “a new day for women’s health has arrived.” They’re referring to the provision that all health plans must now include coverage for contraception and other women’s services — and must do so without charging co-pays or deductibles for them.
Given that I have two X chromosomes and am not Catholic, you might be surprised to learn that I’m not cheering along. After all, what woman of child-bearing age would be against free, FDA-approved birth control?
But the alternative is not really between free contraception and contraception I have to pay for. It’s between two visions of the American health care system: one in which I’m free to make decisions and one in which that freedom is eroded.
For other types of insurance, I have much more control over the coverage I judge best for my individual situation. If I lived in Oklahoma, I may want to choose a policy with robust windstorm coverage, since the region is more prone to tornados. Damage from earthquakes is rare in the state, so I may decide to forego buying coverage for that. But if I lived in the earthquake-prone state of California, as I do, I may choose to load up on earthquake-damage protection. If I lived along the Gulf Coast, on the other hand, I may decide it’s a good idea to purchase protection from hurricane damage.
I can hardly make the same kinds of decisions when it comes to my health insurance, which is much more heavily controlled by the government. For example, when the government mandates that all health plans include coverage for contraception (never mind without co-pays or deductibles), what that means is everyone, including every man and every woman who is past child-bearing age, is required to purchase coverage for that benefit. The purpose is to make us pay a portion of its cost for those women who use it.
Mandating that certain benefits be included in insurance policies is not a phenomenon new to Obamacare. Fueled by the view that it is permissible to force the medical expenses of some onto others, states have imposed benefit mandates in various forms for more than sixty years. Men are routinely forced to pay for services only women use. Non-addicts are forced to pay for the alcohol and drug rehabilitation of addicts. Bachelors are forced to pay for the marriage therapy of couples. Couples who can conceive on their own are forced to pay for the in vitro fertilization of those who can’t.
According to the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, each mandated benefit can raise the price of our insurance policies by up to 10 percent, and some states mandate more than sixty different benefits.
In a similar vein, Obamacare now requires that “essential health benefits” — benefits within ten federally determined categories — must be included in all policies sold on the individual and small-group markets. State governments and the thousands of lobbyists buzzing in their ears recently wrapped up the process of deeming what counts as “essential.” According to one pressure group, massage therapy, yoga and meditation instruction certainly do.
What this means is not only more expensive premiums but further entrenchment of a health care system in which my individual judgment is declared irrelevant.
As a young and relatively healthy person trying to save for a down payment on a house, I may decide to insure only against catastrophic events. As a female who one day wants children, however, I may want to add coverage against the risk of being unable to conceive.
But instead of leaving insurers free to offer such tailored policies and leaving me free to decide the coverage that best meets my individual needs, the government today dictates to us the coverage that may be bought and sold.
This is the opposite of the direction I want to see our health care system moving.
If an insurance company is willing to offer me coverage for contraception, and if such coverage makes financial sense to me, that’s great. But if the alternative is between being left free to make this choice and being coerced into a policy constructed by a government bureaucrat, I’d rather buy my own contraception, thank you very much. Walmart sells a $9 monthly supply.
About The Author
Rituparna Basu
Rituparna Basu was a researcher and analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute between 2011 and 2016.
The growth of government intervention over the last century was built on the back of a handful of myths. A generation ago, the dominant myth was that free markets had caused the Great Depression, a falsehood ultimately debunked by economists like Milton Friedman. Today, the key myth is that financial deregulation caused the 2008 financial crisis.
What deregulation? There aren’t many possibilities. Despite what we hear, regulation of the financial industry substantially increased over the last thirty years. Government spending on financial regulations, to take one measure, ballooned from $725 million in 1980 to $2.07 billion in 2007 (in 2000 dollars). Anyone looking to blame deregulation for the crisis faces slim pickings.
By far, the single most cited example of this financial “deregulation” is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB), which partially repealed the Glass-Steagall Act thirteen years ago today. Regulatory evangelists including Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and recent senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, not to mention the Occupy Wall Street protesters, have named the overthrow of Glass-Steagall as public enemy number one.
Stiglitz, for instance, in a lengthy piece for Vanity Fair,could only muster two examples of the deregulation he thinks bears primary responsibility for the crisis: the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the SEC’s 2004 decision to raise banks’ debt-to-capital ratio from 12:1 to 30:1. The latter, of course was not deregulation, but re-regulation. For the regulatory evangelists, the repeal of Glass-Steagall is all they’ve got — and what they’ve got ain’t much.
Glass-Steagall was enacted in 1933 to create a firewall between commercial and investment banks: commercial banks could not underwrite or deal in securities, and investment banks could not accept deposits. The Act also restricted commercial banks from being affiliated with any company that underwrote or dealt in securities.
But by the 1990s, the affiliation provision was widely viewed as unnecessary and even harmful to financial institutions. In 1999, President Clinton signed GLB into law. Although it left the bulk of Glass-Steagall in place, it ended the affiliation restrictions, freeing up holding companies to own both commercial and investment banks.
There is zero evidence this change unleashed the financial crisis. If you tally the institutions that ran into severe problems in 2008–09, the list includes Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, none of which would have come under Glass-Steagall’s restrictions. Even President Obama has recently acknowledged that “there is not evidence that having Glass-Steagall in place would somehow change the dynamic.”
As for the FDIC-insured commercial banks that ran into trouble, the record is also clear: what got them into trouble were not activities restricted by Glass-Steagall. Their problems arose from investments in residential mortgages and residential mortgage-backed securities — investments they had always been free to engage in.
GLB didn’t cause the financial crisis — and, when push comes to shove, the regulatory evangelists must admit as much. Stiglitz, in the same Vanity Fair article, concedes that Glass-Steagall did nothing to “directly” cause the crisis. Warren, meanwhile, confessed to New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin that Glass-Steagall would probably not have stopped the financial crisis, but that she was pushing to reinstate it because, in Sorkin’s words, “it is an easy issue for the public to understand and ‘you can build public attention behind.’”
The reason deregulation is blamed for the crisis is not because there’s proof that GLB was responsible. It’s because people like Stiglitz and Warren have an ideologically based suspicion of markets and the self-interest they unleash.
You can think of it as the “greed” explanation: bankers and financiers are not selfless “public servants,” but “greedy” profit-seekers out for themselves. Unless carefully controlled and limited by government regulators, the story goes, this “greed” is inevitably a destructive force that will foster short-range and often predatory decisions.
Is it any wonder that those who held this view did not feel the need to investigate what led to the financial crisis, but “just knew” the answer had to be a lack of government control? “Wall Street has betrayed us,” John McCain declared just one day after Lehman’s collapse. “This is a result of excess and greed and corruption. . . . And we got [sic] to fix it and we’ve got to update our regulatory system.”
If one understood that the pursuit of profit in a free market does not favor a short-term, cut-every-corner mentality, one’s approach would be very different. One would consider real the possibility that government interference with market forces led to the irrationality and value-destruction of the financial crisis. Indeed, that’s precisely what a growing body of literature suggests.
The definitive history of the financial crisis remains to be written. But one thing is for sure: it shouldn’t be written by those who have a quasi-religious conviction that the freedom to pursue profits is the cause of all the world’s problems, and that government regulation is the unfailing elixir.
It’s no secret that the right is awash in Ayn Rand. Tea Partiers carry signs like “Who is John Galt?” and, astonishing for a novel published 55 years ago, sales of Atlas Shrugged topped 445,000 last year.
All of this has prompted researchers like Yale historian Beverly Gage to wonder, “Why is there no liberal Ayn Rand?” Good question. Liberals today, Gage observes, have no long-term goals or vision, no big ideas, no canon.
Here’s a radical thought. Instead of liberals dismissing Rand’s appeal to the American spirit of individualism and independence, as President Obama recently did in his Rolling Stone interview, why don’t liberals make Rand part of a new canon? Why let conservatives monopolize her?
Rand herself I suspect would have welcomed this. In a talk in Boston in 1961, she lamented the fact that both liberals and conservatives were ideologically bankrupt, with too many liberals turning sympathetically to unlimited government and too many conservatives turning back to the Middle Ages. She was seeking to address, she said, “the ‘non-totalitarian liberals’ and the ‘non-traditional conservatives'” in the audience.
Her message that night was the need for a principled, uncompromising fight for a moral ideal she thought long abandoned by both sides, the rights of the individual. This means life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness: your moral right to follow your own reasoned judgment in earning your way in the world and achieving your happiness.
Religious conservatives like Paul Ryan have to distance themselves from Rand’s philosophy. Theirs is an inconsistent position. Ryan, for instance, wants to be seen as an advocate of individual rights while simultaneously making a mockery of a woman’s right to the pursuit of happiness by proposing to force her to bring a pregnancy to term even in the case of rape.
Rand rejects such medievalism. Precisely because raising a child is a personal and immense undertaking, a woman must have the freedom to judge whether and when to have children. To equate an embryo with a human being, a potential with the actual, and then to declare the willful ending of a pregnancy murder, is to abandon reason and science in favor of mystical Church dogmas. No government, Rand argued, should have the power to dictate to a woman in such matters; it’s her life and her decision.
The same principle — the individual’s moral right to his own life — put Rand on the side of other supposedly liberal causes: she was a staunch defender of free speech and immigration and a staunch opponent of racism. But this very principle led Rand to reject what too many liberal-leaning people seemingly dare not even question: the modern regulatory-welfare state.
What in the end is the regulatory-welfare state but a massive and growing attempt to override our reasoned choices and decisions: to dictate to us whose permission we must obtain to drive a taxi or serve alcohol in a restaurant, what questions we’re allowed to ask in a job interview, whose health care we must pay for and in what way, how much we must “save” for retirement (which the government then proceeds to spend), and on and on and on.
Take the case of but one regulatory agency, the FDA. The FDA wasn’t created to outlaw fraud, which was already illegal. It exists to tell us which drugs we can buy, companies which drugs they can sell, how those drugs must be tested and how manufactured. What if people rationally disagree with the government’s dictates? What if a company thinks it has developed a better way of testing for efficacy or an unconventional but superior manufacturing process? What if a patient is willing to risk known and even unknown side effects because of the unusual severity of his disease? If the decision about abortion should be left to a woman (in consultation with her doctor), why shouldn’t these important decisions be solely between the individuals involved? Because they are economic in nature, and therefore subject to majority vote?
This is precisely one issue on which Rand challenges modern liberals: whether it’s consistent to advocate an individual’s intellectual and personal liberty while denying him economic liberty.
It wasn’t always so. Liberals in the nineteenth century were champions of science and at the forefront of abolishing slavery and securing a woman’s individual rights. But they were also champions of private property, free trade and economic liberty. It is this combination that produced the individual’s unprecedented progress in that century. Modern liberals, however, abandoned the right to private property in favor of various socialistic visions, which have since faded with awareness of what socialism and communism actually wrought. The result is what Gage notes: modern liberals bereft of an ideal.
Any liberal-leaning person today who seeks long-term goals and a new vision, but will not touch the political right because of conservatives’ anti-evolution, anti-immigration, anti-abortion platforms, would do well to remember nineteenth-century liberalism. Perhaps the two alternatives confronting us, a government with virtually unlimited power to dictate our personal lives or our economic lives, are both defective.
For anyone willing to explore this possibility, I can think of no better place to start than with Ayn Rand.
What is Barack Obama’s vision for America? Here’s one telling clue. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the president declares that the individualist credo of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand misses “what’s best in America.”
Really?
Rand, who immigrated to America from Soviet Russia when she was 21, praised this country as “the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”
America’s greatness, in Rand’s judgment, lay in the fact that it was the first nation in history to treat government as the individual’s servant rather than his master. As she put it, “All previous systems had held that man’s life belongs to society, that society can dispose of him in any way it pleases, and that any freedom he enjoys is his only by favor, by the permission of society, which may be revoked at any time. The United States held that man’s life is his by right . . . that a right is the property of an individual, that society as such has no rights, and that the only moral purpose of a government is the protection of individual rights.”
In America, the government’s only job was to protect the individual’s right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness from violation by physical force or fraud. In this atmosphere of freedom, individuals flourished. From the founding through the beginning of the twentieth century, government kept Americans free to create, innovate, and compete, to keep the results if they succeeded, and to try again if they failed.
It was during this era that immigrants flocked here by the millions and America became known as “the land of opportunity” — not the land of handouts (there was no welfare state in America during this time) or of guaranteed success, but of freedom to make your own way without obstruction. Today the supporters of Big Government are fond of telling us that “a hungry man is not free.” Those who immigrated to America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries knew otherwise. They arrived poor — even famished — but ambitious.
The results are a matter of historical record. Untold numbers went from rags to riches, while the great majority of individuals were able to live better than their parents and grandparents had. Average wages for workers, for instance, more than tripled during the nineteenth century while working hours declined by nearly a third.
Obama mocks this as a society where “you’re on your own.” But Americans during this era were not “on their own” in the lone-wolf, asocial sense he insinuates. Free Americans developed complex webs of association based on voluntary agreement. As Tocqueville famously observed at the time, “Americans of all ages, all stations of life and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand types.” There were businesses, charities, social clubs, private insurance agencies to protect against disease and injury, and a whole lot more. By limiting government, Americans unleashed voluntary association.
In a sense, however, Americans were “on their own.” Limited government meant that other people’s wants and needs were not your unchosen responsibility. The corollary was that you and you alone were responsible for securing your own wants and needs. You were responsible for developing the knowledge, skills, and traits of character you needed to earn a living. You were responsible for saving to meet life’s unexpected twists and turns. You were responsible for educating your children. You could ask for help from other people during hard times — but you could not demand it as a right. You were on your own.
That was not a bug but a feature: it meant that the bad choices of your neighbor didn’t constitute a claim on your time and wealth: you could go right ahead and focus on making something of your life, rather than be dragged down in the muck of his.
This is the America that Rand upheld and fought for. But Obama thinks this is not “what’s best in America.” Then what is? Basically, it’s everything that’s not distinctively American: entitlement schemes, rampant economic controls and regulations, and government infrastructure projects copied from other countries. For Obama, caring about others doesn’t mean respecting their freedom or helping them voluntarily when they hit tough times — it means enacting collectivist policies that restrict economic freedom and redistribute earned wealth.
In short, what’s best in America according to Obama is everything that came after the era when government’s power was limited by the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
That, not Rand’s individualism, is what’s truly un-American.
Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan has credited philosopher Ayn Rand with inspiring him to enter politics — and made her 1,000-plus-page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, required reading for his staff. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he said in 2005 at a gathering of Rand fans. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” It is a theme that pervades Rand’s corpus.1 While Ryan has distanced himself from Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, he continues to express admiration for Atlas Shrugged.
The addition of the Wisconsin congressman to the GOP ticket naturally unleashed a flash-mob of analysts parsing his speeches, articles, and signature proposals for evidence of her influence. On domestic policy, the impact2 of Rand’s ideas3 on Ryan’s outlook4 is marked, though uneven and sometimes overstated. Religion, in particular, has driven a wedge between
Ryan, who would enact Catholic dogma into law5, and Rand, an atheist, who championed the separation of church and state. But what has received far less attention is Ryan’s outlook on foreign policy — and whether it bears the mark of Rand’s thought.
Ayn Rand’s foreign policy, if we can construct one from her writings, would be grounded in her view of man’s rights and the nature of government.6 Like the Founding Fathers, Rand argues that the ideal government is the servant, not the master, of the individual. In her view, it is a vital institution strictly limited to one function: to safeguard individual rights. By “rights,” Rand means freedom to take “all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.” Critically, the protection of an individual’s rights “does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.” 7
Domestically, this outlook entails a truly free market8 with absolute legal protection of private property, and without regulations, bailouts, corporate handouts, or entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. (Ryan breaks with Rand by attempting to save, rather than end these programs.) In Rand’s political philosophy, however, there is no gulf between economic rights and personal and intellectual ones: for instance, she wrote passionately of the crucial importance (contra Ryan) of the right to abortion,9 and regarded freedom of speech10 as sacrosanct.
Like her views on domestic policy, a Randian foreign policy would be guided exclusively by the goal of protecting the individual rights of Americans, and only Americans. Accordingly, the U.S. government shouldn’t issue handouts to other countries (through foreign aid or international welfare schemes), nor treat its citizens as cannon fodder (through a military draft). Indeed, Rand was scathing in her analyses of the Vietnam War, arguing that it did not serve America’s national interest. “[I]t is a pure instance of blind, senseless altruistic self-sacrificial slaughter,” she wrote in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.11
Of course, there are times when government is obligated to go to war, according to Rand. The crucial standard here is whether the lives and property of Americans are imperiled. The only morally justifiable purpose for war, she wrote, is self-defense. This rules out so-called humanitarian missions, like the tragic 1992 – 93 mission in Somalia, and the notion that the United States is somehow obliged to serve as the world’s policeman. The primary function of the military, in Rand’s eyes, should be to deter, and when necessary, defeat foreign aggressors.
Rand regarded any form of pacifism12 (including Ron Paul-esque passivity) as destructive to national defense. And undoubtedly she would have supported a
strong military response to the 9/11 attacks (though, as I have argued in my book13 and sketch out below, she would have rejected George W. Bush’s conception of the enemy and his entire prosecution of the war).
Rand viewed deterrence as an especially important — and effective — method of defending American freedom. In her view, the power of a morally confident, assertive United States was considerable, though largely unappreciated. For instance, she believed that if the West had truly stood up to the Soviet bloc by withdrawing its moral sanction, ending the flow of aid, and imposing an airtight boycott, the Soviet threat would have disintegrated many years before it actually did, without the need for war.
Perhaps most importantly, Rand argued in favor of genuine free trade — without trade barriers, protective tariffs, or special privileges. In her words: “the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international trade and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another.” In the 19th century, she argued, free trade liberated the world by “undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.” Not coincidentally, she observed, this era enjoyed the longest period of general peace in human history (roughly from 1815 to 1914).14
Taken together, Rand’s approach entails a foreign policy based on the morality of “rational self-interest.” To illustrate what that would look like, let us bring Rand’s approach to bear on several of today’s major foreign policy issues, starting with Iran.
Tehran is a leader of the Islamist movement, the cause animating al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood and kindred groups. Iran has inspired and funded jihadist
terrorism and cast itself as an embodiment of the movement’s political ideal. It’s a regime that tramples on the rights of its own citizens. It ambitiously seeks to kill and subjugate beyond its borders, and, owing to its jihadist ideology, is vociferously anti-American. From Washington’s capitulation in the hostage crisis of 1979 – 80, the regime concluded that it could get away with committing an act of war against America. Rand noted at the time that because we failed to march in with force within days after the hostage taking, the repercussions would be severe.
Since then U.S. policymakers in effect rewarded Iran’s aggression with bribes and conciliation, and thereby encouraged a spiral of further Iranian-backed attacks.15 Witness the Hezbollah hijacking of a TWA airliner; the kidnapping and torture of Americans in Lebanon; the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and, later, the barracks of U.S. Marines, killing 241 Americans. The 9/11 Commission linked16 Tehran to at least eight of the suicide hijackers. Later, Iranian forces trained and armed Iraqi and Afghan insurgents,17 who murdered U.S. troops. Considering the U.S. failure to recognize the Iranian regime’s character and goals, and assertively end its aggression, Tehran’s defiance over its nuclear program should hardly surprise.
We are at war with Iran, but only that country knows it; in the name of self-defense, the U.S. government is morally obliged to eliminate this enemy. A military option is a non-starter, however, in the shadow of the Iraq and Afghanistan failures (more on those in a moment). But even when we have the opportunity to morally support the Iranian people in attempting to remove from power a regime hostile to the freedom of Americans and Iranians alike, as we did with the Green Movement, which arose after the 2009 elections, we refuse to
do so. The reputedly crippling sanctions now in place are of course a forlorn hope, especially considering the large-enough-to-drive-a-truck-through exemptions18 that have already been granted.
Part of what has magnified the tragedy of 9/11 is the failure of policymakers to properly identify and vigorously pursue the enemy that attacked us. It was not simply the hijackers’ al Qaeda cell, but the jihadist movement, spearheaded by Tehran and bankrolled by Saudi wealth, which had been waging attacks against us for years. In my book, Winning the Unwinnable War,19 I discuss the nature and malignant goal of that movement, and explore what went wrong in the U.S. response and particularly the policy fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The goal uniting these two wars was Bush’s messianic policy of “nation building” and bringing the vote to the oppressed and needy of the Middle East. Clearing out sewage pipes, fixing up hospitals, printing textbooks — these welfare and social services projects may be the province of the Peace Corps, but not the Army Corps, nor is it right to risk the lives of American soldiers for the sake of the world’s needy. Just as Rand decried Vietnam as a selfless, purposeless war, so that same criticism applies, as strongly, in Iraq. Much of what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan stemmed from a policy of putting an altruistic welfare agenda first, above the self-interested goal of eliminating whatever threat we faced in those countries.
Tragically, despite its unparalleled military strength, the United States mired itself, needlessly, in no-win wars. Baghdad is now under Tehran’s sway.20 The continuing strife in Iraq, marked by only occasional suicide bombings,21 is a testament to how the notion of success has been progressively defined down. In Afghanistan there are no longer
good options. A minimum step toward the right policy — one with a modicum of justice to the now 2,000 Americans who perished there — is to properly redefine the mission from perpetual “nation building” to expunging the Taliban and allied Islamist forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands.
One recent bright spot, seemingly, was the Arab Spring. But the upheavals across the Middle East, it turned out, shared only superficial similarities. One trend that did emerge, though, was the ascendance, notably in Egypt and Tunisia, of political parties sympathetic to or fully embracing Islamist goals. Here, then, is the consummation of Bush’s “nation-building” democracy crusade. We now must contend with the emerging threat of an Egypt dominated by Islamists — a regime that our diplomats have been falling over themselves to encourage. At minimum we should refuse to endorse the regime (even though popularly elected) and even shun it. 22 To embrace it is to lend the regime an undeserved legitimacy; if any genuinely freedom-seeking Egyptians remain, would they feel anything but demoralized at the spectacle?23
U.S. policy has galvanized one group: Islamists. Further evidence of that came on Sept. 11, 2012, in the form of the conspicuously timed attacks on our embassies in Cairo and Benghazi.
Storming the sovereign territory of the world’s militarily strongest nation requires considerable temerity. Islamists in Egypt, however, thought nothing of attempting to invade the mission in Cairo and hoisting their flag. In Libya, in what looks like a meticulously calculated assault, the self-professed soldiers of Allah managed to murder the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The uproar and riots across the
region, putatively in reaction to a YouTube video critical of Islam, brought to the surface (yet again) the assertiveness of those who seek obedience to religious dogma and revile the free mind and the individual’s freedom of speech. What inspires not fear but contempt in the hearts of our Islamist enemies is the meekness of American foreign policy across decades.24
Meshing with that broad pattern, the Obama administration’s response to the embassy crisis was deplorable. It’s hard to imagine a more self-abasing reaction than to have the Cairo embassy apologize to the raging mob, while disparaging free speech. Nor can anyone take our government’s commitment to freedom of speech seriously when it tries to lean on YouTube to take down the video, and rather than committing to protect the safety of the man behind the film, gives him a perp walk. Compared with that, the Romney-Ryan response was better: Yes, America has projected weakness; yes, Washington has undercut real allies, for example, by seeking to distance itself from Israel.
But that’s far short of what was necessary. At minimum, our leaders should declare that American lives are untouchable and that our freedom of speech is inviolable, and demonstrate a willingness, in action, to retaliate with force. (When questioned about the embassy crisis in the vice-presidential debate, Ryan was handed an opportunity to speak forcefully in defense of freedom of speech and the sanctity of the rights of Americans. He dodged it.)
Consider, finally, our defense budget.25 Clouding the debate over defense spending is the fact that our present foreign policy leads us to engage in a mess of contradictions: legitimate, self-defensive operations; illegitimate humanitarian, “nation building” efforts (along with all the
support costs for long-term bases); and the occasional disbursal of bribes26 to our enemies. First, strip out the global-welfare category. Next, consider whether we would need every single one of our permanent overseas bases — if our foreign policy demonstrated in word and deed our willingness, when necessary, to crush enemies. Arguably, we could make do with fewer — and realize considerable savings. To safeguard the freedom of Americans, a powerful, well-equipped and technologically advanced military — one that is peerless, efficient, and formidable — is essential. Yet there’s reason to think, under a principled, self-interested approach, we’d have the strong military we need, at a lesser cost.
What’s distinctive to an approach informed by Rand’s ideas is that it hinges on a rethinking of the moral values that should inform foreign policy. At its core is the idea that the individual27 has a right to his life, that he’s morally entitled to live it in line with his rational judgment,28 and that his freedom to act on his judgment must be safeguarded from aggressors. And, crucially, he bears no duty selflessly to serve others — whether they are next door or overseas. This animating premise enjoins a firm, long-range policy of assertive national defense and strictly rules out altruistic29 missions à la Bush.
Clearly, Paul Ryan does not share Rand’s foreign policy. But is there nevertheless a discernible influence?
Reading Ryan’s most substantive speech30 on foreign policy, delivered at the Hamilton Society in 2011, you can certainly hear the reverberation of Ayn Rand’s ideas. “[I]f you believe these rights are universal human rights, then that clearly forms the basis of your views on foreign policy,” he said, partially echoing the Randian conviction that regimes are moral to the degree that
they respect individual rights. For Ryan, as for Rand, championing rights leads “you to reject moral relativism. It causes you to recoil at the idea of persistent moral indifference toward any nation that stifles and denies liberty.” Though as already noted, Ryan did not speak forcefully in defense of free speech in the aftermath of the Libyan attacks. But at least there is, in line with Rand, a thoughtful promotion of free trade. In his Hamilton Society speech, for instance, he argued in favor of an “expanding community of nations that shares our economic values as well as our political values” in order to “ensure a more prosperous world.”
If these similarities between the two are meaningful, Ryan nevertheless seems to fundamentally part ways with Rand. In particular, he speaks of the need to “renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen,” and sees in the Arab Spring the “long-repressed populations give voice to the fundamental desire for liberty.” (The ethnic-sectarian bloodbath that ensued in Iraq was proof, if any were needed, that political freedom and peace are not an innate yearning of mankind.31) Further, Ryan claims that it is “always in the interest of the United States to promote these principles in other nations.” Like President George W. Bush, whose wars he supported, Ryan appears to subscribe to the quasi-religious view that freedom is written into the soul of mankind, and that it is somehow the moral duty of America, the freest and wealthiest of nations, to go forth and wage wars to unchain the world’s oppressed. In all this, he could not be less aligned with Rand.
Rand certainly believed that the United States benefits from a freer world. Thus, she held, America should speak up for dissidents everywhere who seek greater freedom. But Rand would only ever consider deploying
the military where the rights of Americans hang in the balance — when, in other words, it becomes an issue of self-defense. This critical distinction may well be lost on Ryan, if the media’s parsing of his neoconservative leanings has been fair.
Perhaps, in these waning days of the campaign season, Ryan will consider rereading Rand’s work, and sharing it with his running mate. Anyone seeking to inject more rational and more distinctively American ideas into our nation’s chaotic foreign policy ought to seriously consider Ayn Rand’s refreshingly clear-eyed perspective.
Paul Ryan has been called the “Ayn Rand candidate,” owing to his praise of Rand’s philosophic novel Atlas Shrugged. But her name, and more importantly, her ideas, were absent from last Thursday’s debate.
That should bother those of us concerned about the growth of government intervention in the economy. Rand’s defense of free-market capitalism is potent stuff. Since President Obama was elected, Atlas — which celebrates its fifty-fifth anniversary this month — has sold nearly two million copies. No other thinker in the last century has done more to change people’s minds about markets.
What makes Rand so powerful is that she is not a timid apologist for the free market, but an idealistic champion of it.
Rand’s defense of capitalism is not that it “serves up the goods,” raises GDP, creates jobs, or maximizes “efficiency.” Economists have been showing that since the time of Adam Smith, and although the power of free markets to raise our standard of living is no small matter, it has not by itself been enough to transform people’s attitudes about the market from one of skepticism (at best) to eager embrace.
Nor does Rand rehash clichés about how individuals make better decisions than bureaucrats, or how self-interest, if left unhampered, adds up to “the common good.” She is not your average conservative.
Rand’s defense of capitalism starts by asking a basic moral question: Does the individual have a right to exist for his own sake — or not? Are you the property of the tribe, the king, the church, or “society”? Or does your life belong to you?
Rand’s answer? In Atlas Shrugged, she declares that“your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.” As a result, you have the right — the moral as well as the political right — to spend that life in pursuit of your own happiness.
For Rand, this is not empty rhetoric: it is an ethical principle that should guide and inform all of our political and economic policy decisions.
If your life belongs to you, then no Mullah has the right to dictate what sorts of movies you make. If your life belongs to you, then no bureaucrat has the right to demand you get his permission before you hang up your shingle and have a go at creating a successful business. If your life belongs to you, then if that business succeeds — if dozens or millions of people willingly buy your products — then the money you earn is yours, and no one can confiscate it on the grounds that others “need” it more than you do.
Your life belongs to you, not to others. That is the root of Rand’s opposition to the entitlement state. It’s not because, as she is often accused, Rand hates poor people. It’s that she deeply respects the sanctity of the individual. Morally, no individual, no matter how poor or how rich, exists to serve others.
The opposite, Rand argues, is the principle implicit in the entitlement state: You don’t have a right to exist for your own sake, but have a duty to selflessly serve the needs of others. You may have earned your paycheck through your blood, sweat, tears, and creative thought — but if your neighbor has a need he can’t fulfill — if he “needs” a house or a retirement or a tonsillectomy — your job is to serve his needs, not your own priorities and dreams.
Conclusion? The entitlement state — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, housing subsidies, and all the rest of it — is not just economically destructive but immoral. Instead of leaving us free to make the most of our own lives, it drags us down to the lowest common denominator. The ideal is no longer individual freedom but equal impoverishment.
Rand’s much-needed perspective was nowhere to be found on Thursday night’s stage. Ryan spent the bulk of his time praising entitlements as critical, noble programs that need to be saved, not cut. Maybe that’ll help get Ryan and Romney elected. Very likely Ryan even believes it. But that sort of view will do nothing to further the cause of limited government.
The left’s nuclear weapon against the right has always been the charge that only the heartless and mean-spirited could want to curtail entitlements. By reframing the issue in terms of the individual’s right to his own life and wealth, Rand puts the left on the moral defensive. As Thursday night’s debate made clear, that’s a weapon the right badly needs.
![President Obama Duels With Ayn Rand Over What Makes America Great [Forbes.com]](https://ari.aynrand.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/obama_duels_570.jpg)
