On July 01, 2013, Forbes.com reprinted this article. Introductory note by Thomas Bowden.

Affirmative action survives in university admissions, for the time being at least, owing to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Texas case. What would novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand say about it? Today’s readers might be surprised at Rand’s distinctive, illuminating approach to the sensitive theme of racism.

Fifty years ago, at the height of the American civil rights movement, Rand wrote this short essay condemning racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” Analyzing racism in several dimensions — philosophical, moral, psychological, and political — she decried the “shameful” policy of Southern states toward blacks and called legally imposed racial discrimination “blatantly inexcusable.”

Rand was writing in part to distance herself from so-called conservatives (not limited to Southerners) who claimed to defend capitalism and individual freedom while advocating racism at the same time. Rand was not a “conservative” but a thoroughgoing individualist. Racism, she argued in the essay, is incompatible with the principles and practice of capitalism. Under capitalism, racists cannot forcibly prevent a university from admitting students of any race, or prevent the rest of society from rejecting racist attitudes and adopting individualism across the board.

But Rand was also no “liberal.” In the essay she challenged the idea that “liberals” are defenders of the individual, even calling into question the Civil Rights Act passed the following year. “The smallest minority on earth is the individual,” Rand wrote. “Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”

On the issue of racial quotas, a precursor of affirmative action, Rand had choice words: “Racial quotas have been one of the worst evils of racist regimes. There were racial quotas in the universities of Czarist Russia, in the population of Russia’s major cities, etc. One of the accusations against the racists in this country is that some schools practice a secret system of racial quotas. It was regarded as a victory for justice when employment questionnaires ceased to inquire about an applicant’s race or religion.

“Today, it is not an oppressor, but an oppressed minority group that is demanding the establishment of racial quotas. (!)”

To understand Rand’s views fully, the following essay is required reading.

Note: This essay was written in 1963 and employed the then-current usage “Negro.” In Rand’s later writing (she died in 1982), she dropped that term and referred to “blacks.”

BUY THE BOOK

---

Racism
by Ayn Rand

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas — or of inherited knowledge — which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to “protect the family name” (as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) — the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at Carnegie Hall (as if the achievements of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) — the parents who search genealogical trees in order to evaluate their prospective sons-in-law — the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history — all these are samples of racism, the atavistic manifestations of a doctrine whose full expression is the tribal warfare of prehistorical savages, the wholesale slaughter of Nazi Germany, the atrocities of today’s so-called “newly emerging nations.”

The theory that holds “good blood” or “bad blood” as a moral-intellectual criterion, can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice. Brute force is the only avenue of action open to men who regard themselves as mindless aggregates of chemicals.

Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members. The frequent historical spectacle of a great innovator who, in his lifetime, is jeered, denounced, obstructed, persecuted by his countrymen, and then, a few years after his death, is enshrined in a national monument and hailed as a proof of the greatness of the German (or French or Italian or Cambodian) race — is as revolting a spectacle of collectivist expropriation, perpetrated by racists, as any expropriation of material wealth perpetrated by communists.

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements — and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Even if it were proved — which it is not — that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one’s judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race — and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has “produced” some brutes — or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has “produced” Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.

These are not two different claims, of course, but two applications of the same basic premise. The question of whether one alleges the superiority or the inferiority of any given race is irrelevant; racism has only one psychological root: the racist’s sense of his own inferiority.

Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge — for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment — and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).

To ascribe one’s virtues to one’s racial origin, is to confess that one has no knowledge of the process by which virtues are acquired and, most often, that one has failed to acquire them. The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a “tribal self-esteem” by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe. Observe the hysterical intensity of the Southern racists; observe also that racism is much more prevalent among the poor white trash than among their intellectual betters.

Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to “society,” to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force — and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.

The absolute state is merely an institutionalized form of gang rule, regardless of which particular gang seizes power. And — since there is no rational justification for such rule, since none has ever been or can ever be offered — the mystique of racism is a crucial element in every variant of the absolute state. The relationship is reciprocal: statism rises out of prehistorical tribal warfare, out of the notion that the men of one tribe are the natural prey for the men of another — and establishes its own internal subcategories of racism, a system of castes determined by a man’s birth, such as inherited titles of nobility or inherited serfdom.

The racism of Nazi Germany — where men had to fill questionnaires about their ancestry for generations back, in order to prove their Aryan descent — has its counterpart in Soviet Russia, where men had to fill similar questionnaires to show that their ancestors had owned no property and thus to prove their proletarian descent. The Soviet ideology rests on the notion that men can be conditioned to communism genetically — that is, that a few generations conditioned by dictatorship will transmit communist ideology to their descendants, who will be communists at birth. The persecution of racial minorities in Soviet Russia, according to the racial descent and whim of any given commissar, is a matter of record; anti-Semitism is particularly prevalent — only the official pogroms are now called “political purges.”

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

Individualism regards man — every man — as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights — and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

It is not a man’s ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly.

No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.

A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semifree economies of the nineteenth century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country’s freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany — and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

It is capitalism that gave mankind its first steps toward freedom and a rational way of life. It is capitalism that broke through national and racial barriers, by means of free trade. It is capitalism that abolished serfdom and slavery in all the civilized countries of the world. It is the capitalist North that destroyed the slavery of the agrarian-feudal South in the United States.

Such was the trend of mankind for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years. The spectacular results and achievements of that trend need no restatement here.

The rise of collectivism reversed that trend.

When men began to be indoctrinated once more with the notion that the individual possesses no rights, that supremacy, moral authority and unlimited power belong to the group, and that a man has no significance outside his group — the inevitable consequence was that men began to gravitate toward some group or another, in self-protection, in bewilderment and in subconscious terror. The simplest collective to join, the easiest one to identify — particularly for people of limited intelligence — the least demanding form of “belonging” and of “togetherness” is: race.

It is thus that the theoreticians of collectivism, the “humanitarian” advocates of a “benevolent” absolute state, have led to the rebirth and the new, virulent growth of racism in the twentieth century.

In its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earth — and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of all races came here, some from obscure, culturally undistinguished countries, and accomplished feats of productive ability which would have remained stillborn in their control-ridden native lands. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. America had been called “the melting pot,” with good reason. But few people realized that America did not melt men into the gray conformity of a collective: she united them by means of protecting their right to individuality.

The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. It was a problem originated and perpetuated by the noncapitalist South, though not confined to its boundaries. The persecution of Negroes in the South was and is truly disgraceful. But in the rest of the country, so long as men were free, even that problem was slowly giving way under the pressure of enlightenment and of the white men’s own economic interests.

Today, that problem is growing worse — and so is every other form of racism. America has become race-conscious in a manner reminiscent of the worst days in the most backward countries of nineteenth-century Europe. The cause is the same: the growth of collectivism and statism.

In spite of the clamor for racial equality, propagated by the “liberals” in the past few decades, the Census Bureau reported recently that “[the Negro’s] economic status relative to whites has not improved for nearly 20 years.” It had been improving in the freer years of our “mixed economy”; it deteriorated with the progressive enlargement of the “liberals’” Welfare State.

The growth of racism in a “mixed economy” keeps step with the growth of government controls. A “mixed economy” disintegrates a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another.

The existence of such pressure groups and of their political lobbies is openly and cynically acknowledged today. The pretense at any political philosophy, any principles, ideals or long-range goals is fast disappearing from our scene — and it is all but admitted that this country is now floating without direction, at the mercy of a blind, short-range power game played by various statist gangs, each intent on getting hold of a legislative gun for any special advantage of the immediate moment.

In the absence of any coherent political philosophy, every economic group has been acting as its own destroyer, selling out its future for some momentary privilege. The policy of the businessmen has, for some time, been the most suicidal one in this respect. But it has been surpassed by the current policy of the Negro leaders.

So long as the Negro leaders were fighting against government-enforced discrimination — right, justice and morality were on their side. But that is not what they are fighting any longer. The confusions and contradictions surrounding the issue of racism have now reached an incredible climax.

It is time to clarify the principles involved.

The policy of the Southern states toward Negroes was and is a shameful contradiction of this country’s basic principles. Racial discrimination, imposed and enforced by law, is so blatantly inexcusable an infringement of individual rights that the racist statutes of the South should have been declared unconstitutional long ago.

The Southern racists’ claim of “states’ rights” is a contradiction in terms: there can be no such thing as the “right” of some men to violate the rights of others. The constitutional concept of “states’ rights” pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities, and serves to protect the states from the Federal government; it does not grant to a state government an unlimited, arbitrary power over its citizens or the privilege of abrogating the citizens’ individual rights.

It is true that the Federal government has used the racial issue to enlarge its own power and to set a precedent of encroachment upon the legitimate rights of the states, in an unnecessary and unconstitutional manner. But this merely means that both governments are wrong; it does not excuse the policy of the Southern racists.

One of the worst contradictions, in this context, is the stand of many so-called “conservatives” (not confined exclusively to the South) who claim to be defenders of freedom, of capitalism, of property rights, of the Constitution, yet who advocate racism at the same time. They do not seem to possess enough concern with principles to realize that they are cutting the ground from under their own feet. Men who deny individual rights cannot claim, defend or uphold any rights whatsoever. It is such alleged champions of capitalism who are helping to discredit and destroy it.

The “liberals” are guilty of the same contradiction, but in a different form. They advocate the sacrifice of all individual rights to unlimited majority rule — yet posture as defenders of the rights of minorities. But the smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

This accumulation of contradictions, of shortsighted pragmatism, of cynical contempt for principles, of outrageous irrationality, has now reached its climax in the new demands of the Negro leaders.

Instead of fighting against racial discrimination, they are demanding that racial discrimination be legalized and enforced. Instead of fighting against racism, they are demanding the establishment of racial quotas. Instead of fighting for “color-blindness” in social and economic issues, they are proclaiming that “color-blindness” is evil and that “color” should be made a primary consideration. Instead of fighting for equal rights, they are demanding special race privileges.

They are demanding that racial quotas be established in regard to employment and that jobs be distributed on a racial basis, in proportion to the percentage of a given race among the local population. For instance, since Negroes constitute 25 percent of the population of New York City, they demand 25 percent of the jobs in a given establishment.

Racial quotas have been one of the worst evils of racist regimes. There were racial quotas in the universities of Czarist Russia, in the population of Russia’s major cities, etc. One of the accusations against the racists in this country is that some schools practice a secret system of racial quotas. It was regarded as a victory for justice when employment questionnaires ceased to inquire about an applicant’s race or religion.

Today, it is not an oppressor, but an oppressed minority group that is demanding the establishment of racial quotas. (!)

This particular demand was too much even for the “liberals.” Many of them denounced it — properly — with shocked indignation.

Wrote The N. Y. Times (July 23, 1963): “The demonstrators are following a truly vicious principle in playing the ‘numbers game.’ A demand that 25 percent (or any other percentage) of jobs be given to Negroes (or any other group) is wrong for one basic reason: it calls for a ‘quota system,’ which is in itself discriminatory. . . . This newspaper has long fought a religious quota in respect to judgeships; we equally oppose a racial quota in respect to jobs from the most elevated to the most menial.”

As if the blatant racism of such a demand were not enough, some Negro leaders went still farther. Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, made the following statement (N. Y. Times, August 1):

The white leadership must be honest enough to grant that throughout our history there has existed a special privileged class of citizens who received preferred treatment. That class was white. Now we’re saying this: If two men, one Negro and one white, are equally qualified for a job, hire the Negro.

Consider the implications of that statement. It does not merely demand special privileges on racial grounds — it demands that white men be penalized for the sins of their ancestors. It demands that a white laborer be refused a job because his grandfather may have practiced racial discrimination. But perhaps his grandfather had not practiced it. Or perhaps his grandfather had not even lived in this country. Since these questions are not to be considered, it means that that white laborer is to be charged with collective racial guilt, the guilt consisting merely of the color of his skin.

But that is the principle of the worst Southern racist who charges all Negroes with collective racial guilt for any crime committed by an individual Negro, and who treats them all as inferiors on the ground that their ancestors were savages.

The only comment one can make about demands of that kind, is: “By what right? — By what code? — By what standard?”

That absurdly evil policy is destroying the moral base of the Negroes’ fight. Their case rested on the principle of individual rights. If they demand the violation of the rights of others, they negate and forfeit their own. Then the same answer applies to them as to the Southern racists: there can be no such thing as the “right” of some men to violate the rights of others.

Yet the entire policy of the Negro leaders is now moving in that direction. For instance, the demand for racial quotas in schools, with the proposal that hundreds of children, white and Negro, be forced to attend school in distant neighborhoods — for the purpose of “racial balance.” Again, this is pure racism. As opponents of this demand have pointed out, to assign children to certain schools by reason of their race, is equally evil whether one does it for purposes of segregation or integration. And the mere idea of using children as pawns in a political game should outrage all parents, of any race, creed or color.

The “civil rights” bill, now under consideration in Congress, is another example of a gross infringement of individual rights. It is proper to forbid all discrimination in government-owned facilities and establishments: the government has no right to discriminate against any citizens. And by the very same principle, the government has no right to discriminate for some citizens at the expense of others. It has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments.

No man, neither Negro nor white, has any claim to the property of another man. A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him. Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine — but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist’s freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist’s right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue — and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism.

Needless to say, if that “civil rights” bill is passed, it will be the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject.*

It is an ironic demonstration of the philosophical insanity and the consequently suicidal trend of our age, that the men who need the protection of individual rights most urgently — the Negroes — are now in the vanguard of the destruction of these rights.

A word of warning: do not become victims of the same racists by succumbing to racism; do not hold against all Negroes the disgraceful irrationality of some of their leaders. No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation.

In conclusion, I shall quote from an astonishing editorial in The N. Y. Times of August 4 — astonishing because ideas of this nature are not typical of our age:

But the question must be not whether a group recognizable in color, features or culture has its rights as a group. No, the question is whether any American individual, regardless of color, features or culture, is deprived of his rights as an American. If the individual has all the rights and privileges due him under the laws and the Constitution, we need not worry about groups and masses — those do not, in fact, exist, except as figures of speech.

 

*The bill was passed in 1964, including the sections that violate property rights.

The text of this essay, originally published in the September 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter, was included as chapter seventeen of Rand’s volume on ethics: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism.

BUY THE BOOK

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

ARI’s Point of View on A Free Society’s Foundations

For Ayn Rand, politics is not a starting point in our thinking about man and society, but a conclusion that rests on deeper philosophical principles. Advocates of her philosophy of Objectivism, she writes, “are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.”

At the foundation of a free society, Objectivism holds, is the metaphysical-epistemological principle that the individual survives by choosing to use his mind and the moral principle that the good is to pursue his self-interest and achieve his own happiness.

In her essay “Man’s Rights,” Rand explains why the widely misunderstood and often distorted concept of individual rights presupposes this philosophical foundation and is the key concept to creating a society consistent with man’s nature and the freedom he requires to live, think and flourish. In “The Nature of Government,” she explains why government is necessary to secure and protect the rights of the individual — and why government is legitimate only when this is its sole function.

It is from the perspective of individual rights, including the concept’s philosophical foundations, that ARI approaches every issue of governmental policy.

BUY THE BOOK

---

Man’s Rights
by Ayn Rand

If one wishes to advocate a free society — that is, capitalism — one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so-called “conservatives.”

“Rights” are a moral concept — the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others — the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context — the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Every political system is based on some code of ethics. The dominant ethics of mankind’s history were variants of the altruist-collectivist doctrine which subordinated the individual to some higher authority, either mystical or social. Consequently, most political systems were variants of the same statist tyranny, differing only in degree, not in basic principle, limited only by the accidents of tradition, of chaos, of bloody strife and periodic collapse. Under all such systems, morality was a code applicable to the individual, but not to society. Society was placed outside the moral law, as its embodiment or source or exclusive interpreter — and the inculcation of self-sacrificial devotion to social duty was regarded as the main purpose of ethics in man’s earthly existence.

Since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men, this meant, in practice, that the rulers of society were exempt from moral law; subject only to traditional rituals, they held total power and exacted blind obedience — on the implicit principle of: “The good is that which is good for society (or for the tribe, the race, the nation), and the ruler’s edicts are its voice on earth.”

This was true of all statist systems, under all variants of the altruist-collectivist ethics, mystical or social. “The Divine Right of Kings” summarizes the political theory of the first — ”Vox populi, vox dei” of the second. As witness: the theocracy of Egypt, with the Pharaoh as an embodied god — the unlimited majority rule or democracy of Athens — the welfare state run by the Emperors of Rome — the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages — the absolute monarchy of France — the welfare state of Bismarck’s Prussia — the gas chambers of Nazi Germany — the slaughterhouse of the Soviet Union.

All these political systems were expressions of the altruist-collectivist ethics — and their common characteristic is the fact that society stood above the moral law, as an omnipotent, sovereign whim worshiper. Thus, politically, all these systems were variants of an amoral society.

The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law.

The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system — as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.

All previous systems had regarded man as a sacrificial means to the ends of others, and society as an end in itself. The United States regarded man as an end in himself, and society as a means to the peaceful, orderly, voluntary coexistence of individuals. 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 (which means: by moral principle and by his nature), 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.

A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action — which means: the 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. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a “right” pertains only to action — specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive — of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The right to life is the source of all rights — and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God — others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man’s nature.

The Declaration of Independence stated that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Whether one believes that man is the product of a Creator or of nature, the issue of man’s origin does not alter the fact that he is an entity of a specific kind — a rational being — that he cannot function successfully under coercion, and that rights are a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival.

“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A — and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” (Atlas Shrugged)

To violate man’s rights means to compel him to act against his own judgment, or to expropriate his values. Basically, there is only one way to do it: by the use of physical force. There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two — by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first.

The Declaration of Independence laid down the principle that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” This provided the only valid justification of a government and defined its only proper purpose: to protect man’s rights by protecting him from physical violence.

Thus the government’s function was changed from the role of ruler to the role of servant. The government was set to protect man from criminals — and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government — as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.

The result was the pattern of a civilized society which — for the brief span of some hundred and fifty years — America came close to achieving. A civilized society is one in which physical force is banned from human relationships — in which the government, acting as a policeman, may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.

This was the essential meaning and intent of America’s political philosophy, implicit in the principle of individual rights. But it was not formulated explicitly, nor fully accepted nor consistently practiced.

America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.

It was the concept of individual rights that had given birth to a free society. It was with the destruction of individual rights that the destruction of freedom had to begin.

A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency — so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated “rights” that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these “printing-press rights” negate authentic rights.

Consider the curious fact that never has there been such a proliferation, all over the world, of two contradictory phenomena: of alleged new “rights” and of slave-labor camps.

The “gimmick” was the switch of the concept of rights from the political to the economic realm.

The Democratic Party platform of 1960 summarizes the switch boldly and explicitly. It declares that a Democratic Administration “will reaffirm the economic bill of rights which Franklin Roosevelt wrote into our national conscience sixteen years ago.”

Bear clearly in mind the meaning of the concept of “rights” when you read the list which the platform offers:

“1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

“2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.

“3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

“4. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad.

“5. The right of every family to a decent home.

“6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

“7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents and unemployment.

“8. The right to a good education.”

A single question added to each of the above eight clauses would make the issue clear: At whose expense?

Jobs, food, clothing, recreation(!), homes, medical care, education, etc., do not grow in nature. These are man-made values — goods and services produced by men. Who is to provide them?

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as “the right to enslave.”

A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.

Observe, in this context, the intellectual precision of the Founding Fathers: they spoke of the right to the pursuit of happiness — not of the right to happiness. It means that a man has the right to take the actions he deems necessary to achieve his happiness; it does not mean that others must make him happy.

The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.

The right to property means that a man has the right to take the economic actions necessary to earn property, to use it and to dispose of it; it does not mean that others must provide him with property.

The right of free speech means that a man has the right to express his ideas without danger of suppression, interference or punitive action by the government. It does not mean that others must provide him with a lecture hall, a radio station or a printing press through which to express his ideas.

Any undertaking that involves more than one man, requires the voluntary consent of every participant. Every one of them has the right to make his own decision, but none has the right to force his decision on the others.

There is no such thing as “a right to a job” — there is only the right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man chooses to hire him. There is no “right to a home,” only the right of free trade: the right to build a home or to buy it. There are no “rights to a ‘fair’ wage or a ‘fair’ price” if no one chooses to pay it, to hire a man or to buy his product. There are no “rights of consumers” to milk, shoes, movies or champagne if no producers choose to manufacture such items (there is only the right to manufacture them oneself). There are no “rights” of special groups, there are no “rights of farmers, of workers, of businessmen, of employees, of employers, of the old, of the young, of the unborn.” There are only the Rights of Man — rights possessed by every individual man and by all men as individuals.

Property rights and the right of free trade are man’s only “economic rights” (they are, in fact, political rights) — and there can be no such thing as “an economic bill of rights.” But observe that the advocates of the latter have all but destroyed the former.

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. Private citizens are not a threat to one another’s rights or freedom. A private citizen who resorts to physical force and violates the rights of others is a criminal — and men have legal protection against him.

Criminals are a small minority in any age or country. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal when compared to the horrors — the bloodshed, the wars, the persecutions, the confiscations, the famines, the enslavements, the wholesale destructions — perpetrated by mankind’s governments. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is men’s deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written.

Now observe the process by which that protection is being destroyed.

The process consists of ascribing to private citizens the specific violations constitutionally forbidden to the government (which private citizens have no power to commit) and thus freeing the government from all restrictions. The switch is becoming progressively more obvious in the field of free speech. For years, the collectivists have been propagating the notion that a private individual’s refusal to finance an opponent is a violation of the opponent’s right of free speech and an act of “censorship.”

It is “censorship,” they claim, if a newspaper refuses to employ or publish writers whose ideas are diametrically opposed to its policy.

It is “censorship,” they claim, if businessmen refuse to advertise in a magazine that denounces, insults and smears them.

It is “censorship,” they claim, if a TV sponsor objects to some outrage perpetrated on a program he is financing — such as the incident of Alger Hiss being invited to denounce former Vice-President Nixon.

And then there is [Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission] Newton N. Minow who declares: “There is censorship by ratings, by advertisers, by networks, by affiliates which reject programming offered to their areas.” It is the same Mr. Minow who threatens to revoke the license of any station that does not comply with his views on programming — and who claims that that is not censorship.

Consider the implications of such a trend.

“Censorship” is a term pertaining only to governmental action. No private action is censorship. No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one’s own antagonists.

But according to such doctrines as the “economic bill of rights,” an individual has no right to dispose of his own material means by the guidance of his own convictions — and must hand over his money indiscriminately to any speakers or propagandists, who have a “right” to his property.

This means that the ability to provide the material tools for the expression of ideas deprives a man of the right to hold any ideas. It means that a publisher has to publish books he considers worthless, false or evil — that a TV sponsor has to finance commentators who choose to affront his convictions-that the owner of a newspaper must turn his editorial pages over to any young hooligan who clamors for the enslavement of the press. It means that one group of men acquires the “right” to unlimited license — while another group is reduced to helpless irresponsibility.

But since it is obviously impossible to provide every claimant with a job, a microphone or a newspaper column, who will determine the “distribution” of “economic rights” and select the recipients, when the owners’ right to choose has been abolished? Well, Mr. Minow has indicated that quite clearly.

And if you make the mistake of thinking that this applies only to big property owners, you had better realize that the theory of “economic rights” includes the “right” of every would-be playwright, every beatnik poet, every noise-composer and every nonobjective artist (who have political pull) to the financial support you did not give them when you did not attend their shows. What else is the meaning of the project to spend your tax money on subsidized art?

And while people are clamoring about “economic rights,” the concept of political rights is vanishing. It is forgotten that the right of free speech means the freedom to advocate one’s views and to bear the possible consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition, unpopularity and lack of support. The political function of “the right of free speech” is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression — not to guarantee them the support, advantages and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.

The Bill of Rights reads: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .” It does not demand that private citizens provide a microphone for the man who advocates their destruction, or a passkey for the burglar who seeks to rob them, or a knife for the murderer who wants to cut their throats.

Such is the state of one of today’s most crucial issues: political rights versus “economic rights.” It’s either-or. One destroys the other. But there are, in fact, no “economic rights,” no “collective rights,” no “public-interest rights.” The term “individual rights” is a redundancy: there is no other kind of rights and no one else to possess them.

Those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.

 

---

The Nature of Government 
by Ayn Rand

A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.

Do men need such an institution—and why?

Since man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions-the basic condition he requires is the freedom to think and to act according to his rational judgment. This does not mean that a man must live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his needs. Men can derive enormous benefits from dealing with one another. A social environment is most conducive to their successful survival—but only on certain conditions.

“The two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or on a self-sustaining farm.

“But these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive, independent men in a rational, productive, free society.” (“The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness)

A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment-a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a desert island is safer than and incomparably preferable to existence in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

If men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal with one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle without which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of individual rights.

To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man’s nature for his proper survival.

Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

The necessary consequence of man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

If some “pacifist” society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage and reward it.

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistoric savages.

The use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice-the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

Visualize, for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be a proof of guilt.

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason, its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.

Under a proper social system, a private individual is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

This is the means of subordinating “might” to “right.” This is the American concept of “a government of laws and not of men.”

The nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government’s authority are both to be derived from the nature and purpose of a proper government. The basic principle of both is indicated in the Declaration of Independence: “to secure these [individual] rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”

Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.

The source of the government’s authority is “the consent of the governed.” This means that the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of the citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.

There is only one basic principle to which an individual must consent if he wishes to live in a free, civilized society: the principle of renouncing the use of physical force and delegating to the government his right of physical self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must acceptthe separation of force and whim (any whim, including his own).

Now what happens in case of a disagreement between two men about an undertaking in which both are involved?

In a free society, men are not forced to deal with one another. They do so only by voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract. If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other—and the victim would have no recourse except to seize the offender’s property as compensation. But here again, the use of force cannot be left to the decision of private individuals. And this leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.

Criminals are a small minority in any semicivilized society. But the protection and enforcement of contracts through courts of civil law is the most crucial need of a peaceful society; without such protection, no civilization could be developed or maintained.

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by acting on the range of the immediate moment. Man has to project his goals and achieve them across a span of time; he has to calculate his actions and plan his life long-range. The better a man’s mind and the greater his knowledge, the longer the range of his planning. The higher or more complex a civilization, the longer the range of activity it requires—and, therefore, the longer the range of contractual agreements among men, and the more urgent their need of protection for the security of such agreements.

Even a primitive barter society could not function if a man agreed to trade a bushel of potatoes for a basket of eggs and, having received the eggs, refused to deliver the potatoes. Visualize what this sort of whim-directed action would mean in an industrial society where men deliver a billion dollars’ worth of goods on credit, or contract to build multimillion-dollar structures, or sign ninety-nine-year leases.

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner’s consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

Some of these actions are obviously criminal. Others, such as a unilateral breach of contract, may not be criminally motivated, but may be caused by irresponsibility and irrationality. Still others may be complex issues with some claim to justice on both sides. But whatever the case may be, all such issues have to be made subject to objectively defined laws and have to be resolved by an impartial arbiter, administering the laws, i.e., by a judge (and a jury, when appropriate).

Observe the basic principle governing justice in all these cases: it is the principle that no man may obtain any values from others without the owners’ consent—and, as a corollary, that a man’s rights may not be left at the mercy of the unilateral decision, the arbitrary choice, the irrationality, the whim of another man.

Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a government: to make social existence possible to men, by protecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another.

The proper functions of a government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.

These three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues—and their implementation in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors and many disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle that the purpose of law and of government is the protection of individual rights.

Today, this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present state of the world, with mankind’s retrogression to the lawlessness of absolutist tyranny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force.

In unthinking protest against this trend, some people are raising the question of whether government as such is evil by nature and whether anarchy is the ideal social system. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy: it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called “competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists—who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government ownership of business—the proponents of “competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since competition is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens, with every citizen free to “shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a competition in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is obviously devoid of any understanding of the terms “competition” and “government.” Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

The evolution of the concept of “government” has had a long, tortuous history. Some glimmer of the government’s proper function seems to have existed in every organized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena as the recognition of some implicit (if often nonexistent) difference between a government and a robber gang—the aura of respect and of moral authority granted to the government as the guardian of “law and order”-the fact that even the most evil types of government found it necessary to maintain some semblance of order and some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition, and to claim some sort of moral justification for their power, of a mystical or social nature. Just as the absolute monarchs of France had to invoke “The Divine Right of Kings,” so the modern dictators of Soviet Russia have to spend fortunes on propaganda to justify their rule in the eyes of their enslaved subjects.

In mankind’s history, the understanding of the government’s proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the nature and the needs of a free society, but they devised the means to translate it into practice. A free society—like any other human product—cannot be achieved by random means, by mere wishing or by the leaders’ “good intentions.” A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free-a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

Now consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in today’s prevalent view of government. Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

It has often been remarked that in spite of its material progress, mankind has not achieved any comparable degree of moral progress. That remark is usually followed by some pessimistic conclusion about human nature. It is true that the moral state of mankind is disgracefully low. But if one considers the monstrous moral inversions of the governments (made possible by the altruist-collectivist morality) under which mankind has had to live through most of its history, one begins to wonder how men have managed to preserve even a semblance of civilization, and what indestructible vestige of self-esteem has kept them walking upright on two feet.

One also begins to see more clearly the nature of the political principles that have to be accepted and advocated, as part of the battle for man’s intellectual Renaissance.

 

BUY THE BOOK

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

ARI’s Point of View on Health Care and a Free Society

Government’s role in U.S. medicine has been growing for more than half a century. What explains this trend and why have opponents found it impossible to stop?

In this article, originally delivered as a talk in February 1963, two years before the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, Ayn Rand develops her distinctive view that philosophic ideas — above all, ideas about morality — have shaped the debate over government’s role in health care.

According to Rand, the welfare state is based on the premise that a person’s need gives him a right to the unearned. We have been moving toward socialized medicine, she argues, because its advocates wield that premise as a moral weapon, while opponents concede the premise and meekly try to appease the push with a “policy of caution and compromise.”

To reverse course, Rand counsels opponents of socialized medicine that they must be willing to challenge this moral framework: “Only a strong, uncompromising stand — a stand of moral self-confidence, on clear-cut, consistent principles — can win.”

Taking that counsel to heart, ARI’s advocacy of freedom — in health care and throughout society — is predicated on the moral principle of individual rights.

BUY THE BOOK

---

How Not To Fight Against Socialized Medicine
by Ayn Rand

(This is a condensed version of a talk given by Miss Rand on February 6 at a meeting of the Ocean County Medical Society, Ocean County, N.J. The membership of that society includes Dr. J. Bruce Henriksen and his associates who, in May, 1962, signed his resolution declaring that they refused to participate in the care of patients under the provisions of the King-Anderson bill or similar legislation.)

I am happy to have this opportunity to express my admiration for Dr. Henriksen and the group of doctors who signed his resolution. 

Dr. Henriksen and his group took a heroic stand. The storm of vicious denunciations unleashed against them at the time, showed that they had delivered a dangerous blow to the welfare-statists. More than any other single factor, it was Dr. Henriksen’s group that demonstrated to the public the real nature of the issue, prevented the passage of the King-Anderson bill and saved this country from socialized medicine — so far. 

Their action was an eloquent example of the fact that only a strong, uncompromising stand — a stand of moral self-confidence, on clear-cut, consistent principles — can win.  

But there are grave danger signs that the medical profession as a whole — like every other group today — will ignore that example and pursue the usual modern policy of caution and compromise. Such a policy is worse than futile: it assists and promotes the victory of one’s own enemies. The battle is not over. The King-Anderson bill will be brought up again, and if the doctors are defeated, they will be defeated by their own hand, or rather: by their own mind.  

I want, therefore, to make certain suggestions to the medical profession — on the subject of how not to fight against socialized medicine.  

The majority of people in this country — and in the world — do not want to adopt socialism; yet it is growing. It is growing because its victims concede its basic moral premises. Without challenging these premises, one cannot win.  

The strategy of the Kennedy administration, and of all welfare-statists, consists of attempts to make people accept certain intellectual “package-deals,” without letting them identify and differentiate the various elements — and equivocations — involved. The deadliest of such “package-deals” is the attempt to make people accept the collectivist-altruist principle of self-immolation under the guise of mere kindness, generosity or charity. It is done by hammering into people’s minds the idea that need supersedes all rights — that the need of some men is a first mortgage on the lives of others — and that everything should be sacrificed to the undefined, undefinable grab bag known as “the public interest.”  

Doctors have no chance to win if they concede that idea and help their enemies to propagate it.  

Yet the ideological policy of most spokesmen for the medical profession — such as the A.M.A. — is as permeated by the collectivist-altruist spirit as the pronouncements of the welfare-statists. The doctors’ spokesmen declare, in net effect, that selfless service to their patients is the doctors’ only goal, that concern for the needy is their only motive, and that “the public interest” is the only justification of their battle.  

The sole difference is this: the voices of the welfare-statists are brazenly, self-righteously overbearing — while the voices of the doctors’ spokesmen are guiltily, evasively apologetic.

Whom can one expect the people to believe and to follow?  

People can always sense guilt, insincerity, hypocrisy. The lack of a morally righteous tone, the absence of moral certainty, have a disastrous effect on an audience — an effect which is not improved by the triviality of the arguments over political minutiae. And the terrible thing is that the doctors’ spokesmen give an impression of guilty evasiveness while the right is on their side. They do it by being afraid to assert their rights.  

They are afraid of it because they do not believe that they possess any rights — because they have conceded the enemy’s premises — because they have no moral base, no intellectual guide lines, no ideology, no defense.  

Consider, for instance, the outcome of the Canadian doctors’ struggle in Saskatchewan. The doctors had gone on strike against the full-scale socialized medicine instituted by the provincial government. They won the battle — and lost the war; in exchange for a few superficial concessions, they surrendered the principle for which they had been fighting: to permit no socialized medicine in the Western hemisphere.  

They surrendered, even though the overwhelming sympathy and support of the Canadian people were on their side (except for the intellectuals and the labor unions). They were defeated, not by the power of the socialists, but by the gaping holes in their own ideological armor.  

They had been fighting, properly, in the name of individual rights, against the enslavement of medicine by totalitarian-statist controls. Then, under the pressure of the usual intellectual lynching, under the hysterical, collectivist charges of “anti-social selfishness and greed,” they made a shocking change in their stand. Declaring, in effect, that their rebellion was not directed against socialized medicine as such, but against the high-handed, arbitrary manner in which the government had put it over, their spokesmen began to argue that the government plan did not represent “the will of the people.” The ideological kiss of death was a statement by Dr. Dalgleish, the strikers’ leader, who declared that if a plebiscite were taken and the people voted for it, the doctors would accept socialized medicine.  

Could they deserve to win, after that? They could not and did not.  

Consider the full meaning of Dr. Dalgleish’s statement. It meant the total repudiation of individual rights and the acceptance of unlimited majority rule, of the collectivist doctrine that the people’s vote may dispose of an individual in any way it pleases. Instead of a battle for the integrity of a doctor’s professional judgment and practice, it became a battle over who should violate his integrity. Instead of a battle against the enslavement of medicine, it became a battle over who should enslave it. Instead of a battle for freedom, it became a battle over a choice of masters. Instead of a moral crusade, it became a petty quarrel over political technicalities.  

This led to the ludicrous spectacle of the alleged individualists arguing for democratic mob-rule, and the socialists righteously upholding the parliamentary form of government.  

Those who doubt the power of ideas, should note the fact that the doctors’ surrender took place five days after Dr. Dalgleish’s statement.  

The text of the agreement reached between the doctors and the government, contained the following horrifying sentence: “The doctors fear that if the government becomes their only source of income they are in danger of becoming servants of the state and not servants of their patients.” (Italics mine.)  

A more abject statement of self-abnegation could not be hoped for or extorted by the most extreme collectivist.  

No self-respecting labor union would declare that its members are “servants” of their employers. It took so-called “conservatives” to declare that professional men — and of so responsible, so demanding, so unusually skilled a profession as medicine — are the “servants” of their patients or of anyone who pays them.  

The concept of “service” has been turned into a collectivist “package-deal” by means of a crude equivocation and a cruder evasion. In the language of economics, the word “service” means >work offered for trade on a free market, to be paid for by those who choose to buy it. In a free society, men deal with one another by voluntary, uncoerced exchange, by mutual consent to mutual profit, each man pursuing his own rational self-interest, none sacrificing himself or others; and all values — whether goods or services — are traded, not given away.

This is the opposite of what the word “service” means in the language of altruist ethics: to an altruist, “service” means unrewarded, self-sacrificial, unilateral giving, while receiving nothing in return. It is this sort of selfless “service” to “society” that collectivists demand of all men.  

One of the grotesque phenomena of the twentieth century is the fact that the “package-deal” of “service” is most vociferously propagated by the “conservatives.” Intellectually bankrupt, possessing no political philosophy, no direction, no goal, but clinging desperately to the ethics of altruism, such “conservatives” rest their case on a cheap equivocation: they proclaim that “service” to others (to one’s customers or clients or patients or “consumers” in general) is the motive power and the moral justification of a free society — and evade the question of whether such “services” are or are not to be paid for.  

But if “service” to the “consumers” is our primary goal, why should these masters pay us or grant us any rights? Why shouldn’t they dictate the terms and conditions of our work?  

If socialized medicine comes to the United States, it is such “conservatives” that the doctors would have to thank for it, as well as their own spokesmen who recklessly play with an intellectual poison of that kind.  

Doctors are not the servants of their patients. No free man is a “servant” of those he deals with. Doctors are traders, like everyone else in a free society — and they should bear that title proudly, considering the crucial importance of the services they offer.  

The pursuit of his own productive career is — and, morally, should be — the primary goal of a doctor’s work, as it is the primary goal of any self-respecting, productive man. But there is no clash of interests among rational men in a free society, and there is no clash of interests between doctors and patients. In pursuing his own career, a doctor does have to do his best for the welfare of his patients. This relationship, however, cannot be reversed: one cannot sacrifice the doctor’s interests, desires and freedom to whatever the patients (or their politicians) might deem to be their own “welfare.”  

Many doctors know this, but are afraid to assert their rights, because they dare not challenge the morality of altruism, neither in the public’s mind nor in their own. Others are collectivists at heart, who believe that socialized medicine is morally right and who feel guilty while opposing it. Still others are so cynically embittered that they believe that the whole country consists of fools or parasites eager to get something for nothing — that morality and justice are futile — that ideas are impotent — that the cause of freedom is doomed — and that the doctors’ only chance lies in borrowing the enemy’s arguments and gaining a brief span of borrowed time.  

This last is usually regarded as the “practical” attitude for “conservatives.”  

But nobody is as naive as a cynic, and nothing is as impractical as the attempt to win by conceding the enemy’s premises. How many defeats and disasters will collectivism’s victims have to witness before they become convinced of it?  

In any issue, it is the most consistent of the adversaries who wins. One cannot win on the enemy’s premises, because he is then the more consistent, and all of one’s efforts serve only to propagate his principles.  

Most people in this country are not moochers who seek the unearned, not even today. But if all their intellectual leaders and the doctors themselves tell them that doctors are only their “selfless servants,” they will feel justified in expecting and demanding unearned services.  

When a politician tells them that they are entitled to the unearned, they are wise enough to suspect his motives; but when the proposed victim, the doctor, says it too, they feel that socialization is safe.  

If you are afraid of people’s irrationality, you will not protect yourself by assuring them that their irrational notions are right.  

The advocates of “Medicare” admit that their purpose is not help to the needy, the sick or the aged. Their purpose is to spare people “the embarrassment” of a means test — that is, to establish the principle and precedent that some people are entitled to the unrewarded services of others, not as charity, but as a right.  

Can you placate, conciliate, temporize or compromise with a principle of that kind?  

As doctors, what would you say if someone told you that you must not try to cure a deadly disease — you must give it some chance — you must reach a “compromise” with cancer or with coronary thrombosis or with leprosy? You would answer that it is a battle of life or death. The same is true of your political battle.  

Would you follow the advice of someone who told you that you must fight tuberculosis by confining the treatment to its symptoms — that you must treat the cough, the high temperature, the loss of weight — but must refuse to consider or to touch its cause, the germs in the patient’s lungs, in order not to antagonize the germs?  

Do not adopt such a course in politics. The principle — and the consequences — are the same. It is a battle of life or death.

BUY THE BOOK

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

In this 1963 radio talk, Ayn Rand offers her assessment of President Kennedy’s signature New Frontier program. In doing so, Rand identifies a fundamental principle that Kennedy’s program shares with the fascist states of twentieth century Europe: the “subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the collective.” This principle, Rand argues, is the “ideological root of all statist systems, in any variation, from welfare statism to a totalitarian dictatorship,” and it was ubiquitous in the political dialogue of 1960s America.

A version of this talk was originally delivered live at the Ford Hall Forum on December 16, 1962. An edited version of this talk is available in The Ayn Rand Column, a collection of articles by Rand. The talk is 58 minutes long.

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

In this 1962 radio talk, Ayn Rand argues that America’s intellectuals defaulted on their responsibility to understand and defend capitalism. In particular, Rand contends that intellectuals failed to grasp the source of businessmen’s productivity and the destructive effects of collectivist schemes implemented by government coercion. By failing to uphold the value of individual liberty, intellectuals paved the way for authoritarian states and the decline of freedom in the twentieth century.

A version of this talk was originally delivered live at the Ford Hall Forum on December 17, 1961. An edited version of this talk is available in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, a collection of essays by Rand and others. This recording is 50 minutes long.

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

ARI’s Point of View on Regulation in a Free Society

The government’s sole function, according to Ayn Rand, is to secure and protect the rights of the individual. Proper laws define the crimes and other actions that violate rights and establish the rules by which government may prosecute these crimes and settle disputes among men. Proper laws thereby place the government’s use of force under objective control.

But when laws are non-objective, they enslave rather than liberate. The best example of non-objective laws today are the thousands and thousands of pages of impenetrable regulations, whose meaning and purpose you as a citizen must try to guess and whose actual enforcement is determined by the whims of some bureaucrat, which you must try to predict. “Non-objective law,” according to Rand, “is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves.”

Rand provides a glimpse of how this regulatory process works in “Have Gun, Will Nudge.” In this essay she discusses the actions of the FCC in the early 1960s to pressure broadcasters to “improve” the quality of their programming. Rand’s observations about the destructive impact of that by-now-forgotten episode of non-objective law apply to the hundreds of other regulatory agencies — from the FDA to the EPA to the SEC — that control an ever greater part of our daily lives.

It is for this reason that ARI makes a sharp distinction between law and regulation. Laws that protect individual rights are necessary and proper. But in a free society there is no place for regulation: for any attempt to control the individual’s thought, production or trade.

BUY THE BOOK

---

Have Gun, Will Nudge
by Ayn Rand

Mr. Newton N. Minow, Chairman of the F.C.C., is performing a great, educational public service — though not in the way he intends. He is giving the public an invaluable object lesson on the nature and results of a “mixed economy.”

The basic evil in any theory of a “mixed economy” — an economy of freedom mixed with controls — is the evasion of the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force and that political power is the power of coercion. While a dictatorship rests on a blunt acknowledgment of this fact, on the motto that “might is right” — a “mixed economy” rests on pretending that no such distinction exists, that might and right can be safely scrambled together if we all agree never to raise this issue.

The current policy of the F.C.C. has provided a spectacle of not raising that issue, on a grand scale.

First, Mr. Minow announces that any television or radio station which does not satisfy his unstated criterion of an unspecified public service, will lose its license, that is: will be silenced forever. Then, while the victims mumble feeble protests, vaguely referring to censorship, Mr. Minow assumes an air of injured innocence and asserts that his sole intention is “to nudge, to exhort, to urge those who decide what goes on the air to appeal to our higher as well as our lower tastes.” And President Kennedy declares: “Mr. Minow has attempted not to use force, but to use encouragement in persuading the networks to put on better children’s programs, more public service programs.”

No one has stepped forward to ask Mr. Kennedy whether his word usage is correct; and, if it is, whether we should claim that a holdup man who points a gun, is not attempting to use force, but to use encouragement in persuading a citizen to hand over his wallet.

No one has challenged Mr. Minow’s description of censorship: “I dislike censorship as much as anyone else. Yet today we have censorship in a very real sense . . . There is censorship by ratings, by advertisers, by networks, by affiliates which reject programming offered to their area. I want to free expression rather than stifle it. All sections of the community should be served rather than have them cut out by censorship which decrees they cannot see or hear something.” (Show Business Illustrated, September 19, 1961.)

Let’s see whether we can adopt Mr. Minow’s concept of censorship: it would mean that the failure of a bad play is “censorship by the box office” — that the frustration of a lady who, weighing three hundred pounds, does not get a chance to model filmy negligees, is “censorship by advertisers” — that the plight of an inventor who finds no backers for his perpetual motion machine, is “censorship by bankers” — that the bankruptcy of a manufacturer who offers us gadgets which we don’t buy, is “censorship by consumers” — and that free expression is stifled, whenever a manuscript molders in its author’s trunk, cut out by “the censorship of publishers” who decree that we cannot read or hear something. What, then, is non-censorship? Mr. Minow’s edicts.

So long as people evade the difference between economic power and political power, between a private choice and a government order, between intellectual persuasion and physical force — Mr. Minow has reason to assume that he can safely stretch their evasions all the way to the ultimate inversion: to the claim that a private action is coercion, but a government action is freedom.

It is true, as Mr. Minow assures us, that he does not propose to establish censorship; what he proposes is much worse. Censorship, in its old-fashioned meaning, is a government edict that forbids the discussion of some specific subjects or ideas — such, for instance, as sex, religion or criticism of government officials — an edict enforced by the government’s scrutiny of all forms of communication prior to their public release. But for stifling the freedom of men’s minds the modern method is much more potent; it rests on the power of non-objective law; it neither forbids nor permits anything; it never defines or specifies; it merely delivers men’s lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim. It spares the bureaucrat the troublesome necessity of committing himself to rigid rules — and it places upon the victims the burden of discovering how to please him, with a fluid unknowable as their only guide.

No, a federal commissioner may never utter a single word for or against any program. But what do you suppose will happen if and when, with or without his knowledge, a third-assistant or a second cousin or just a nameless friend from Washington whispers to a television executive that the commissioner does not like producer X or does not approve of writer Y or takes a great interest in the career of starlet Z or is anxious to advance the cause of the United Nations?

What makes it possible to bring a free country down to such a level? If you doubt the connection between altruism and statism, I suggest that you count how many times — in the current articles, speeches, debates and hearings — there appeared the magic formula which makes all such outrages possible: “The Public Interest.”

What is the public interest? No specific definition has ever been or ever can be given by anyone. Since the concept is not used in its literal meaning, to designate the personal interest of every citizen of a country, but is used to imply and establish a conflict, the opposition of private interests to public interest — its use can convey only one meaning: the right of some men (those who, by some undefined criterion, are the public) to sacrifice the interests of other men (of those who, for unspecified reasons, are not the public). Once that collectivist formula becomes the moral standard of a society, the rest is only a matter of time.

Mr. Paul Rand Dixon, F.T.C. Chairman, has announced: “Private rights are important but the public interest is a greater right.”

An article entitled “His Master’s Voice?” by Shirley Scheibla in Barron’s magazine for January 1, 1962, offers the following warning: “The [Communications] Act gives the [Federal Communications] Commission a broad grant of authority to regulate broadcasting ‘in the public interest.’ Since neither Congress nor the courts ever have been able to agree on a working definition of what constitutes the ‘public interest,’ the commissioners need only decide that it is served by the way they happen to vote.”

That such is the ultimate goal of our present trend, is indicated in Mr. Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech of May 9, 1961. While all the concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment modern mentalities have been clamoring over the issue of Westerns versus spelling-bees, the ominous key-sentence of that speech has been passed by in comparative silence: the threat to “those few of you who really believe that the public interest is merely what interests the public.”

Here is an open declaration that the public is not competent to judge its own interest. Who, then, is? Who will be its guardian and determine its interest, which supersedes any individual rights? Mr. Newton N. Minow.

Consider the implications. If the public is not competent to judge television programs and its own entertainment — how can it be competent to judge political issues? Or economic problems? Or nuclear policies? Or international affairs? And since — on the above premise — the answer is that it can’t, shouldn’t its guardians protect it from those books and newspapers which, in the guardians’ judgment, are not consonant with the public interest and would only confuse the poor incompetent that’s unable to judge?

Today — when rule by precedent has all but replaced rule by law, and nothing protects us from enslavement but the fragile barrier of custom — consider the consequences of a precedent such as Mr. Minow is seeking to establish.

Bear in mind what I said about the issue of Antitrust last month, when you evaluate the significance of the following: the article “His Master’s Voice?” mentions that General Electric and Westinghouse have both applied for renewal of their broadcasting licenses, and: “Although FCC officials are unable to explain how they would improve program quality by forcing these two companies out of the field, the Commission currently is pondering whether the applications should be turned down on the ground that both firms have been convicted of antitrust violations.”

Do you observe the nature of the pincer-movement or the squeeze-play — and the nature of the possibilities inherent in non-objective law?

For the special consideration of all those who are engaged in any branch of the communications industry, I submit the following: In January, 1961, in a case involving censorship of motion pictures (Times Film Corp v. City of Chicago), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the censor, by a majority of one (in a five to four decision). The dissenting opinion, written by Chief Justice Warren, stated: “The decision presents a real danger of eventual censorship for every form of communication, be it newspapers, journals, books, magazines, television, radio or public speeches…. I am aware of no constitutional principle which permits us to hold that the communication of ideas through one medium may be censored while other media are immune…. It is not permissible, as I read the Constitution, for government to release one movie and refuse to release another because of an official’s concept of the prevailing need or the public good.”

That is the reason why one should fight against the terrorization and enslavement of television. That is the issue at stake in the F.C.C. hearings — not the issue of whether today’s television programs are good or bad (most of them are atrocious, particularly in the public affairs department) — not the issue of whether some cowboys, gangsters and private-eyes should be sacrificed in favor of more newsreels, slanted documentaries and panel discussions of political topics, with big close-ups of selfless public servants from Washington.

BUY THE BOOK

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

In this 1961 talk, Ayn Rand argues that “every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced towards businessmen” under America’s antitrust laws. Rand catalogs the injustices of antitrust, decries the scapegoating of businessmen, analyzes particular cases, rejects antitrust laws as non-objective and calls for their ultimate repeal.

An edited version of this talk is available in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, a book of essays by Rand and others. This presentation is 59 minutes long, followed by a 35-minute Q&A period.

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.

ARI’s Point of View on Foreign Policy and a Free Society

The twentieth century was bloody, with two world wars and dictatorships arising around the globe. In Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia and elsewhere, individuals numbering in the millions were systematically murdered. What is the deepest cause of this warfare and destruction?

In a sweeping 1960 talk, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World” (reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It), Ayn Rand locates the cause in mankind’s embrace of mysticism and altruism. Only when we learn to reject faith in the name of reason and self-sacrifice in the name of a new morality of self-interest, will freedom and peaceful co-existence be possible.

This is the perspective from which ARI approaches every issue of foreign policy. We advocate reason, self-interest and the freedom of laissez-faire capitalism; as a consequence, we uphold a foreign policy of genuine free trade and the moral right of a free nation to use retaliatory force in self-defense.

---

About The Author

Ayn Rand

Learn more about Ayn Rand’s life and writings at AynRand.org.