In the legal wrangling over Obamacare, the Obama administration candidly admitted that the individual mandate, which forces Americans to buy health insurance, is the only thing preventing the new health law from eviscerating private health insurance.

The problem, the government said, is that Obamacare requires health insurers to cover individuals with preexisting conditions at the same premiums they charge other customers. Unless everyone is forced to carry health insurance, healthy people will refuse to buy it until they get sick, precipitating a free rider crisis that would ruin insurers.

That strikes us, not so much as an argument for the individual mandate, as an argument against Obamacare’s preexisting condition rule. But whether the mandate lives or dies, the preexisting condition rule is paving the way for socialized medicine.

The preexisting condition rule places crippling limits on the ability of insurers to create policies based on their best assessment of risk. It will turn them into essentially passive middlemen, who no longer appraise and control risk, but who merely perform the administrative function of doling out health care benefits. It’s only a matter of time before people start to ask: Why not save money by cutting out the middleman? (That, indeed, is what happened with student loans. After decades of subsidies and regulations, the government shoved the banks aside and took over the student loan market.)

This could play out in any number of ways, but here are two possible scenarios. If the mandate survives, Washington will denounce the insurance industry for charging premiums that “gouge” customers who have no choice but to buy the industry’s products. If the individual mandate is struck down or otherwise killed, insurers will be forced either to go out of business or jack up their rates. Those that do the latter will face a public outcry. Either way, the public will be told that the “free market” has failed and that the only solution is a complete government takeover of the health insurance market.

That certainly has been the historical pattern. Government has been amassing control over the health insurance market for decades. At every step, the proponents of regulation point to some alleged set of problems in health care, blame them on the market, and call on government to solve them.

But without exception, the actual problems they point to are not caused by the market, but by government intervention — and the outcomes they denounce which are a product of the market are not really problems at all.

Take the preexisting condition “crisis.” On the one hand, there is something wrong when people who are pushed into buying health insurance through their employer and then lose their job, lose their insurance and are unable to buy a new policy thanks to preexisting conditions. But as we’ve argued, that’s a situation created by government intervention, and would not arise in a free market.

On the other hand, is it really a problem that sick people have to pay more for insurance than healthy people?

Well, it’s definitely true that a free market does not promise people unearned health care. In a free market, health care is a good that you have to earn through voluntary trade. Even though there are endless ways that people — including the poorest of the poor — can find innovative solutions to their needs, and even though a free society has always had abundant charity, the basic rule of a free market is that you are responsible for your own life. It’s your job to figure out what your life requires — whether it’s food, a car, a house, or health insurance — and then to go out and earn it through your own productive action.

What’s true of the preexisting condition “crisis” is true of the “health care crisis” more broadly. The market is condemned for producing spiraling health care costs and for failing to achieve “universal coverage.” But in reality, those spiraling costs are the result of government’s relentless intervention in the health care market. Meanwhile, the market’s failure to generate “universal coverage” for Americans, including those who seek a free ride, is a problem only to those who believe that the mere fact of being born entitles you to the wealth and labor of others.

If unearned health care is what the pushers of Obamacare and its preexisting condition rule want, let them argue for it openly — and stop pretending they are trying to solve problems created by the market. And let those who criticize Obamacare for leading America down the road to socialized medicine stop pretending that the preexisting condition scheme is anything but a step down that road.

About The Authors

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

John Allison, who as chairman and CEO made BB&T Corporation the 10th largest financial institution headquartered in the United States, attributes the success of BB&T to the concept of Principled Leadership, based on an uncompromising commitment to fundamental values. In this talk, he explains how Ayn Rand’s ethical system can be used practically to create a competitive advantage in any organization. (Recorded April 4, 2011.)

Imagine a world without health insurance. You’re a young entrepreneur and you notice that a perennial problem people face is how to protect themselves against the risk of incurring costly and unexpected medical expenses. For most, the apparent option — save enough money to cover any medical bill — is impractical: what if they get sick before they save enough? Or what if the cost of treatment exceeds a person’s capacity to save?

You realize that wherever there’s a problem, there’s an opportunity. You could convince some of the people in your town to purchase from you insurance that pays out in the event of accident or serious illness. But starting such a company would require a lot of work, a lot of financial capital, and complex actuarial and business skills that take a long time to acquire.

You would need to set rates to make sure more money is coming in than is going out; process claims to separate the legitimate from the illegitimate ones; and grow your client base. The challenges are enormous, but if you succeed, the value you provide clients would be huge and the profit potential should be as well.

After some careful deliberation, you decide to launch the business. You launch the first health insurance company. Your idea quickly catches on, and soon other health insurance companies spring up in your town and beyond.

One day, a man named Paul walks in to your office. “I’d like to buy some health insurance,” he says.

“That’s great,” you say. “I just need you to fill out a form with a little background information and your medical history.”

“What for?” asks Paul.

“So I can figure out how much to charge you for your insurance policy,” you reply. “I have to assess how likely each one of my customers is to get sick and set my rates accordingly. If I set them too low, I’ll go broke. If I set them too high, my customers will sign up with another insurance company, and I’ll go broke.”

Paul frowns. “That’s not fair. Why should I have to pay more for health insurance just because I’ve had two heart attacks and a stroke?”

“Because you’re more likely to have serious and costly health problems in the future.”

Paul jumps out of his seat. “This is highway robbery! I need health insurance and I can’t afford to pay higher rates.”

“I can’t force you to purchase my insurance,” you say calmly. “I would like to help you — part of the reason I started this business was to help people meet one of their most vital needs. But the fact is, I’m running a business, not a charity. I work — virtually around the clock — in order to earn profits by providing a service that people value. If you don’t think the value I’m providing is worth the price I’m asking, you’re free to go elsewhere.”

“But it’s not my fault I have preexisting conditions.”

“It’s also not mine.”

Paul sits down slowly without looking at you. “So what am I supposed to do? Just go without insurance?”

“I wish you’d come to see me earlier — almost all my clients plan ahead for just this sort of possibility, and I’ve come up with innovative ways to make sure that a serious, ongoing condition doesn’t become a barrier to people continuing to be able to afford their annual health insurance premiums. I insure them against changes in their health status, for instance. They can buy a second insurance contract that pays out should they become sick and more costly to insure in the future. Their annual health insurance premiums will rise, but the payout from the second insurance contract enables them to afford the increase in their annual health insurance premiums. And my competitors may have other solutions.”

“A lot of good that does me now,” Paul says bitterly.

“Well, I could offer you a low-cost insurance plan that excludes any illness related to your preexisting conditions.”

Paul balks. “What am I supposed to do if I get an illness related to my preexisting condition? Just lay down and die?”

“Absolutely not,” you say. “If you get sick, you might need to take out a loan or run up your credit cards. I assume you were willing to take on a big bank debt to buy your house — why wouldn’t you be willing to do the same to keep yourself alive? Or you could use your savings. Or you could ask for help from a friend, or a family member, or a local charity.”

Paul shakes his head. “You don’t seem to get it. I want health insurance that covers everything, and I don’t want to have to pay more for it. Your job is to pay for my health care and you’re not doing your job.”

“That is not my job. I run a profitable business that enables people to manage one of life’s risks by purchasing health insurance. None of my customers would choose to stay with my company if his rates went up because I allowed people who are already sick or very likely to become sick to buy insurance without charging them higher premiums. Why don’t you visit one of the other insurance companies in our area? Maybe they can help you out.”

Paul grins. “I’ve got a better idea,” he says, leaving your office.

The next week, you find a letter from the government. “From now on you must accept all customers, and at the same premium, regardless of medical history.” You close up shop.

About The Authors

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

The financial industry took most of the blame for the 2008 financial meltdown, as it has taken the blame for virtually every economic crisis and disaster in history. In this talk, Yaron Brook will challenge the conventional wisdom and argue that finance is a crucial, productive, and noble undertaking.

Addressing a widespread myth, Dr. Brook will show how the financial industry has long been the most regulated industry in America, and that these regulations were a central cause of the recent financial crisis. Free, unregulated financial markets, he’ll conclude, serve the vital function of providing capital to producers and fueling economic progress.

Dr. Brook will end by exposing the deepest source of hostility toward the financial industry: the widespread hatred of the profit motive. (Recorded February 15, 2011.)

About The Author

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Washington’s control of medicine has grown slowly, evolving piecemeal over decades. Even before Obamacare, half of all heath care spending was controlled by the government.

The general pattern of the expansion works like this: advocates point to some group in real or alleged dire need and declare that Washington has a duty to act; Washington eventually does. It started with the poor (Medicaid) and the elderly (Medicare). Then came the uninsured in need of emergency care (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act). Then came middle-class parents (S-CHIP).

And Obamacare? It was sold to us, in large part, as the indispensible means of addressing the plight of those with preexisting conditions.

In his recent State of the Union, Obama named as the not-to-be-compromised central achievement of his health care bill that it put an end “to the days when insurance companies could deny someone coverage because of a preexisting condition.” Obamacare does indeed make it illegal for insurance companies to refuse to cover people with preexisting medical conditions or to charge them higher prices.

Far from justifying an expansion of the state’s role in medicine, however, the issue of preexisting conditions illustrates how badly we need to disentangle government from American medicine.

It’s a complex story, but let’s start here: too often people automatically ascribe our health insurance problems (before Obamacare) to the inadequacies of the free market.

But what we have today is not a health insurance market — not really. We have instead the crippled remnants of nearly a century of government intervention in the health insurance industry. These interventions are vast and complex, but for the most part they fall into three categories.

First, there’s our tax code. In a sane world, if you had insurance and got sick, you would simply stay with your current insurer. But today, most of us get our health insurance through our employers, so if we lose our jobs — which is not exactly unheard of today — we are likely to lose our insurance. And once we are ill, a new insurer will obviously want to take our preexisting conditions into account when offering to insure us.

Now, we don’t buy food, diapers, or car insurance through our employers, so why in the world do we buy health insurance this way? It’s not because it’s more efficient for every car dealership and paper towel manufacturer to learn the ins and outs of administering a health insurance plan. It’s because we can buy health insurance through our employer with pre-tax dollars. No such luck if you want to buy your own health insurance package. And it’s not really even insurance anymore, since we use it to pay for almost everything, from a routine blood test to a routine physical — which makes about as much sense as using car insurance to pay for an oil change.

Next, there’s each state’s laundry list of health insurance mandates. We aren’t talking about Obamacare’s individual mandate, which forces us to buy insurance whether we want to or not. These state mandates dictate what coverage must be offered in the insurance packages you and I are permitted to buy. Even if you’re young, don’t want kids, and don’t drink, these mandates can force you to pay top dollar for a package that covers everything from in vitro fertilization to liver transplants to alcohol rehab. One result of these mandates? Many of us are priced out of the market; those already facing higher costs because of preexisting conditions are particularly hard hit.

Finally, there is a category best described as “insurance blindfolds,” a category that includes the preexisting condition rule. Insurance blindfolds tell health insurance companies that they dare not take into account certain risk factors when setting insurance rates. The effect of such laws is not to erase the existence of these verboten risks, but to force low-risk patients to shoulder substantially higher premiums.

These are just some of the highlights. So, since there already exist enormous government interventions in health insurance, we can’t simply assume that our problems are caused by the free market and that government is the cure. The market is far from free and the cause of our health insurance problems could be government policy itself.

But to think about this question fully and seriously, we need an idea of what a genuinely free market in health insurance might look like. We’ll take up that issue in our next column.

About The Authors

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

They’re calling it the tea party Congress, and the new leadership is busy snipping earmarks, targeting Obamacare, and quoting the Constitution. But can they succeed where similar conservative backlashes have failed? Whatever your opinion of the whole tea party movement — and mine stops far short of blanket approval — you have to admit it has some interesting qualities that set it apart from conservative approaches of decades past.

By idealistically venerating the founding fathers, the tea party avoids the kind of cynical pragmatism that reigned in Richard Nixon’s era. By steering clear of religiously divisive “social issues,” the tea party avoids the kind of attack on the Constitution’s separation of church and state that characterized Ronald Reagan’s era. And by stressing that both major political parties are guilty of expanding government power without apparent limit, the tea party breaks with the neoconservative, big-government Republicanism that held sway in George W. Bush’s era.

Entrenched thinking

All this has generated a refreshing “clean sweep” sensibility, consistent with a grass-roots movement of Americans who are sincerely focused on individual freedom — and frustrated at the futility of past efforts to combat the seemingly unstoppable encroachment by government power. If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine the tea party making good on its promise to permanently restore some of our freedom. But with eyes wide open, I see a movement imperiled by the same entrenched thinking that has driven government’s growth for more than a century.

One side of the divided tea-party mentality (its “right brain,” so to speak) recoils from the cumulative impact of government programs enacted over more than a century. In the wake of unprecedented “stimulus” spending, Wall Street bailouts, “Government Motors,” and Obamacare’s takeover of health insurance, the movement foresees economic ruin and diminished freedom for all Americans. To combat these evils, the tea party invokes America’s founding ideals of individual rights and limited government, and talks about cutting big government down to size.

Meanwhile, however, the tea party’s “left brain” harbors the same moral impetus that has justified bigger and bigger government since the Progressive Era. The basic idea is that some people’s needs constitute a moral claim on the lives and wealth of others. The list of needs is endless: economic stability, job security, housing, health care, retirement funds. To satisfy those needs, government concocts regulatory and wealth transfer schemes that coercively subject the individual to society. Over the years, each new program — from the Federal Reserve to Social Security, Medicare, and beyond — acquires an aura of moral dignity that renders it politically untouchable by later generations. The needs of others permanently displace the freedom of the individual.

Based on this conflict, my prognosis has the tea party headed for the political equivalent of an epileptic seizure.

Consider that the movement’s once-unanimous rallying cry of “Repeal Obamacare!” has already morphed into “repeal and replace,” so as to “retain some of its more popular provisions.” Indeed, even as House Republicans this week engineered a symbolic vote for repeal (which will be dead on arrival in the Senate), those same members of Congress are setting the stage to make many of Obamacare’s onerous provisions permanent.

And then consider what programs would have to be dismantled just to return to that conservative nirvana, the Reagan era: the Americans with Disabilities Act (enacted under Bush I), State Health Insurance for Children (enacted under Clinton), as well as prescription drugs for seniors and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations penalizing all businessmen (both enacted under Bush II). Can you imagine the tea party seeking to eradicate any of these programs?

They can’t imagine it either, because the scenario for failure is too obvious. The tea party’s adherents know that any attempted repeal would be attacked as “mean-spirited, heartless, and selfish.” And they know that, according to conventional moral standards, they would stand guilty as charged. Paralyzed by this moral conflict, they will simply refrain from starting battles they can’t win.

A difficult moral battle

And winning this kind of moral battle, though possible, would be difficult. The tea party’s adherents would need to discover the moral principle underlying the often quoted but little understood ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They would need to argue that all schemes that sacrifice the individual to society are morally wrong. And they would need to argue that this country’s most rational and industrious citizens — including business leaders, doctors, health insurers, and taxpayers and productive individuals in all walks of life — are oppressed victims who deserve to be liberated, by permanent repeal of laws and regulations that invade their rights.

In short, the tea party would need to fully embrace individualism as a moral ideal. Although the odds against this are exceedingly large, I think there’s some cause for optimism. For the first time, a resistance movement is looking for answers in Ayn Rand’s writings. From the original public rant that inspired the tea party idea (when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli said “at the end of the day, I’m an Ayn Rander”) to last fall’s US Senate victory by Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson (who calls “Atlas Shrugged” his “foundational book”), Rand’s uncompromising defense of individualism has become a part of the tea-party mix.

Can the tea party deliver on its promise to cut back big government? Yes it can, but not unless its supporters awaken to the need for moral intransigency in pursuing individual liberty.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

The recent debate over the Bush tax cuts was filled with enough rich-bashing and envy-stoking to make Karl Marx blush, and while the left may have lost that battle, it just might be winning the war. A recent 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll finds that 61% of respondents advocate raising taxes on wealthy Americans as the “first step” in balancing the budget. (By contrast, only 7% advocate cutting the entitlement programs — Medicare and Social Security — that are chiefly responsible for the budget crisis.)

It doesn’t take an economist to see that our fiscal mess was not caused by rich people keeping “too much” of their wealth, but by the government spending too much of everyone’s wealth. So why have cries to soak the rich started to, well, sink in?

Americans, historically, have not been envious of wealth. The predominant attitude has been: let a person make as much money as he can, provided he earns it. The reason class warfare rhetoric has been effective of late is because the practitioners of class warfare have largely succeeded in painting the rich as unproductive parasites.

Wealthy people are a bunch of Paris Hiltons and bailout recipients, they’ll suggest, even though most wealthy Americans are first-generation rich, and only a tiny sliver were bailed out after the financial crisis. (Whether anyone should have received a bailout is a different question.)

Other class warriors are more subtle. Former President Bill Clinton, for instance, put the matter this way: “I think that the people that benefit most should pay most. That’s always been my position — not for class warfare reasons” –no, never those –”for reasons of fairness in rebuilding the middle class in America.”

But if we’re talking about the creation of wealth in a division of labor economy, the most productive Americans don’t benefit the most: They contribute the most. Thirty years ago, if you were a shop owner, you spent a large chunk of your time poring over inventory, keeping your books, clinking away at your calculator, double checking your numbers, and going through enough correction fluid to whitewash a fence.

But thanks in large measure to software pioneers like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, most of those tasks now take a fraction of the time, can be performed far more accurately and have become so simple that you can probably delegate them to an entry-level clerk. You gave Bill Gates a few hundred bucks; he gave you a better life.

Super-wealthy Americans — men like Gates, Warren Buffett and Fred Smith — are predominantly thinkers and innovators who succeeded by contributing new ideas to the productive process. Not just new inventions, but new methods of organization, marketing, worker motivation and production, distribution and finance. That’s to say nothing of the fact that wealthy people are the primary contributors of capital to the economy — the factories, tools and technology that make the average American worker hundreds of times more productive than his Third World counterpart.

Relative to the new ideas they contribute, the most innovative individuals benefit the least. This is an aspect of what Ayn Rand called the pyramid of intellectual ability. As she observed, “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

Although class warriors like to pit “the rich” against “the working class,” it is the work of a small number of enormously productive individuals that is chiefly responsible for the unrivaled standard of living most Americans enjoy. People forget that before the Edisons, Carnegies, Fords, and Rockefellers of the 19th century, most of the “working class” lived on the edge of starvation — if they lived at all.

Considering how much we benefit from the great producers, it would seem that good manners–to say nothing of fairness and justice–requires a clarion “thank you.” Instead, in the political and public arenas wealth creators are increasingly smeared, spit on, and punished. This is un-American. A nation built on a foundation of individual rights and the pursuit of happiness should celebrate success, not punish it.

About The Authors

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Avastin is a cancer-fighting drug that works by starving tumors of vital nutrients and oxygen. Although Avastin doesn’t cure cancer, it can improve quality of life by slowing the disease’s spread. The Food and Drug Administration approved its use for colon cancer (2004), lung cancer (2006), and advanced breast cancer (2008).

But now the FDA is on the brink of rescinding that last approval, relegating breast cancer to the category of an “off-label” use. In our semi-socialized health care system, that’s significant because government-funded insurance plans (such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare, which serves the military) refuse to reimburse off-label prescriptions, and private insurers generally follow their lead.

Since an Avastin breast cancer regimen costs as much as $88,000 annually, withdrawal of FDA approval would, in effect, lock the medicine cabinet and throw the key onto a high shelf, unreachable by many desperately sick patients.

The FDA is slated to decide whether to follow the advice of its own Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee, which back in July voted 12-1 that Avastin does not “represent a favorable risk/benefit analysis.” Does that mean the drug fails to help any woman more than it hurts her? Not at all — many individual women benefit from the drug. But the FDA regards such facts as sentimental distractions, to be deliberately ignored when deciding the fate of a drug like Avastin. The FDA’s idea of a risk/benefit analysis deals with health in the aggregate, as revealed in statistics involving large populations, not with the health of individuals.

But can risks and benefits really be weighed at the level of society as a whole? A society is only a collection of individuals. A society doesn’t enjoy life, or suffer — only individuals do. Metaphors aside, a society doesn’t get sick and die — only individuals do. To appreciate the difference, consider how a rational patient with breast cancer decides whether to undergo drug treatment.

Such a patient weighs (among other things) the statistical likelihood of a favorable result against the statistical likelihood of painful side effects. At all times, her judgment is individual and personal: How will my life improve if these tumors temporarily stop growing? How might side-effects interfere with my enjoyment of life? How much better will I feel if the results are above average — or how much worse, if the results are below average? How much is an additional year, month, or week of relatively normal life worth to me?

The FDA’s experts take professional pride in refusing to allow such individual considerations to influence their decisions. Instead, they float among the statistical clouds, observing that Avastin delays tumor growth by only 3 to 12 weeks on average and that some patients actually get worse after taking the drug. From behind a veneer of scientific respectability supplied by charts and graphs that ignore the individual patient, these experts then ask a question to which no rational answer can be given: What is the meaning to society of one month in an individual’s life?

At this point, you may be sympathetic to these women’s plight and yet also concerned about the national economy. Won’t cancer patients spend us into bankruptcy with expensive drugs like Avastin? Well, that’s the kind of question that arises only when health care is collectivized by such programs as Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare.

The antidote is to challenge the notion that health care is a right, to be funded by shoving everyone’s wealth into one big pot and spreading it among those in need. On a free market, in which health care is purchased by a combination of private insurance, savings, and charity, your neighbor’s decision to take an expensive drug like Avastin will be no more concern of yours than his choice to wear an expensive watch or drink an expensive wine.

This ongoing Avastin travesty pits a cancer-fighting drug against a drug-fighting cancer — an out-of-control federal agency whose mission unashamedly includes choking off patients’ access to vital drugs. Reform should start by targeting the FDA’s power to substitute collectivized decisions for individual choice.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

The extraordinary achievements in the modern pharmaceutical, biotech, telecommunications and computer industries are dramatic evidence of the significance of intellectual property rights to human life and success. In this talk, law professor Adam Mossoff will explain Ayn Rand’s radical justification for intellectual property rights: that all property is—at root—intellectual property. The property rights that are created and traded in our advanced capitalist system, whether in land, factories, consumer goods, securities, or inventions and books, are born of innovators who first conceived these new values. 

In recognizing this fundamental truth, Rand is the only philosopher who offers a rational alternative to the anti-mind premise of judges, policy activists and professors who smear the owners of intellectual property as evil monopolists who steal from the so-called public domain. Rather, intellectual property rights represent the heart and core of property rights. Thus, every business and every pro-capitalist should embrace and defend the intellectual property rights — the patents, copyrights and trade secrets — that are the lifeblood of our free enterprise system. (Recorded November 30, 2010.)

More than a century ago, America celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage of discovery by hosting an enormous world’s fair on the shores of Lake Michigan. This “World’s Columbian Exposition” featured statues of the great explorer, replicas of his three ships, and commemorative stamps and coins. Because Columbus Day was a patriotic holiday — it marked the opening chapter in American history — the newly written Pledge of Allegiance was first recited in schools on October 12, 1892.

Nowadays, however, an embarrassed, guilty silence descends on the nation each Columbus Day. We’ve been taught that Columbus opened the way for rapacious European settlers to unleash a stream of horrors on a virgin continent: slavery, racism, warfare, epidemic, and the cruel oppression of Indians.

This modern view of Columbus represents an unjust attack upon both our country and the civilization that made it possible. Western civilization did not originate slavery, racism, warfare, or disease — but with America as its exemplar, that civilization created the antidotes. How? By means of a set of core ideas that set Western civilization apart from all others: reason and individualism.

Throughout history, prior to the birth of Western civilization in ancient Greece, the world seemed impervious to human understanding. People believed that animistic spirits or capricious deities had supernatural powers to cure diseases, grow crops, and guide the hunter’s arrow toward his prey. To get the attention of these inscrutable spirits, people resorted to prayer, ritual, taboo, and human sacrifice, relying always on the mystic insights of shamans and priests.

This pervasive mysticism had practical consequences: festering disease, perpetual poverty, and a desperate quest for survival that made offensive warfare against human beings seem as natural as hunting animals. Such was the plight of America’s Indians before 1492 — and such was Europe’s own plight, once the civilizations of Greece and Rome had given way to the mysticism of Christianity and the barbarian tribes.

It was Western philosophers, scientists, statesmen, and businessmen who liberated mankind from mysticism’s grip. Once scientists revealed a world of natural laws open to human understanding, medical research soon penetrated the mysteries of disease and epidemic, allowing us to look back with pity upon American Indians and other historical victims of diseases now preventable and curable.

On a much wider scale, the Industrial Revolution employed science, technology, and engineering to create material goods in profusion, so that even people of average ability could become affluent by historical standards. By demonstrating how wealth can be created in abundance rather than stolen by armed force, America and the West supplied a moral alternative to the bloody tribal warfare of past eras.

Western civilization’s stress on the value of reason led inexorably to its distinctive individualism. Western thinkers were first to declare that every individual, no matter what his skin color or ancestry, is fully human, possessed of reason and free will — a being of self-made character who deserves to be judged accordingly, not as a member of a racial or tribal collective. And thanks to John Locke and the Founding Fathers, individuals were recognized as possessing individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness — rights that made slavery indefensible and led to its eradication, at the cost of a civil war.

These are the facts we are no longer taught — and the measure of that educational failure is the disdain with which Columbus’s holiday is regarded in the country that owes its existence to his courage. It is time to take back Columbus Day, as an occasion to publicly rejoice, not in the bloodshed that occurred before Columbus’s arrival and after, but in our commitment to the life-serving values of Western civilization: reason and individualism. We do so by honoring the great explorer who opened the way for that civilization to flourish in the New World.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute