It’s staggering to think that as we march toward a seventh year at war, Iraq (let alone Afghanistan) is hardly an issue on the campaign trail. Of course, nobody has forgotten about the war. But there’s been no substantive debate on it, either.

John McCain, echoing many conservatives, regularly touts the supposed gains of the “surge.” Upon his return from visiting Iraq, he declared, “We’re succeeding. I don’t care what anybody says. I’ve seen the facts on the ground.” Barack Obama even grudgingly conceded, at one point, that the “surge” was working. And when liberals do challenge President Bush’s war policy, they complain not about its goals, but about the crushing financial cost.

The war’s a backburner issue in the campaign because — strange as it may sound — critics and cheerleaders of the President’s policy judge it by the same spurious benchmark. They focus myopically on whether insurgents have been kicked out, for the time being, from one street, in some neighborhood of Baghdad. If that’s success, then the issue can be pushed out of mind.

But nobody would have bought that as a vision of success, in the devastating aftermath of 9/11. And nobody should buy it now. The only rational benchmark for success is whether Washington’s policies have made the lives of Americans safer from the threat of Islamists. Judged by that standard, Bush’s war policy is an abject failure.

Bush vowed to “pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism,” and warned that either “you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Bush’s war policy, however, was not to target the greatest threat, but instead to minister to those in greatest need. It was to show compassion to oppressed Iraqis and Afghans, to raise them out of poverty, to give them elections.

Six-plus years into a “war on terror,” Washington has done nothing to counter the spearhead of the global jihadist movement, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States has allowed it to grow stronger. Iran races to acquire nuclear weapons; it taunts and threatens our naval vessels; it arms and trains insurgents in Iraq in attacking Americans; it backs jihadists across the region — all with impunity.

What about Iraq? Four thousand-plus U.S. troops died so that hostile Iraqis could elect a new gang of anti-Americans to sit in Baghdad’s parliament. Iraq’s government is still dominated by Islamist groups, which still operate death squads, and it is still deep, deep in Iran’s pocket.

Across the Middle East, Washington campaigned for elections in the strongholds of various Islamist groups — such as Hamas and Hezbollah — that it should have worked to destroy. Many people, true to their ideological beliefs, voted to give these groups more political power. Naturally, the jihadists feel encouraged. According to a new study, the Iranian-backed Hamas has amassed at least 80 tons of explosives in Gaza since 2007, and it has also got its hands on anti-tank weapons. So expect another Islamist war emanating from the terrorist proto-state of “Hamas-stan,” which Bush’s policy helped create.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to the U.S. National Intelligence Director, al Qaeda is gaining in strength and prepping new recruits who can blend into American society and attack domestic targets. Jihadists are now fighting to re-conquer Afghanistan, and to “Talibanize” large patches of Pakistan. The Afghan-Pakistan border, reports the National Intelligence Director, “serves as a staging area for al-Qaeda’s attacks in support of the Taliban in Afghanistan as well as a location for training new terrorist operatives, for attacks in Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the United States.”

This is what Bush’s war policy has achieved: an enemy that has no fear of us, that spits in our face, and that is gearing up to kill more of us.

This is what a “compassionate” war policy, aimed not at defeating our enemies but at serving the welfare of Iraqis and Afghans, had to achieve. It is a policy that put their lack of freedom and lack of wealth ahead of our moral right to end the threat of Islamist aggression. Bush’s policy held that it was our duty to enable these hostile peoples to vote their political conscience — while evading the fact that so many avidly support jihadist goals.  

Shame on Republicans for promising to stay the same disastrous course and toss thousands more troops onto the sacrificial pyre of Iraq. Shame on Democrats for squandering the opportunity of a campaign year to offer us a real Plan B — an alternative policy that would actually combat state-sponsors of terrorism.

Each of us deserves — and should demand — more of our leaders. We deserve a foreign policy that truly upholds our right to security.

About The Author

Elan Journo

Senior Fellow and Vice President, Content and Advanced Training, Ayn Rand Institute

In a speech from New Orleans last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain lashed out at the Bush administration for its response to Hurricane Katrina. McCain’s remarks, which appeared calculated to make disaster relief a key campaign issue, revived harsh memories of the savage storm that inundated the Mississippi Delta in late August 2005, leaving more than 1,800 people dead and causing widespread property damage.

Although the floodwaters long ago receded, government officials are still counting the disaster’s costs. Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers disclosed that 489,000 claimants are seeking damages caused by poorly designed levees. Of those claimants, 247 want more than $1 billion each, including one whopper for $3 quadrillion (a stack of a quadrillion dollar coins would reach beyond Saturn).

The tax dollars spent resolving those claims will augment the tens of billions already paid to restore and repopulate New Orleans, a below-sea-level bowl situated precariously amidst a lake, a major river, and a gulf, in a known path for hurricanes.

Disasters can sometimes shock a nation into questioning entrenched practices. But Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the worst natural disaster ever to befall America, has failed to spark serious challenge to long-standing government policies that actively promote building and living in disaster-prone areas.

The Katrina tragedy should have called into question the so-called safety net composed of government policies that actually encourage people to embrace risks they would otherwise shun — to build in defiance of historically obvious dangers, secure in the knowledge that innocent others will be forced to share the costs when the worst happens.

Without blaming the victims for having followed their own government’s lead, it is time to question whether those policies should continue.

The first strands of today’s safety net were spun in the nineteenth century, as the Army Corps of Engineers shouldered the burden of constructing and maintaining levees and other flood controls along the Mississippi River. From then to now, Congress and the states have responded to each new flood by installing newer, higher, and stronger barriers at public expense, as if the preservation of a city like New Orleans in its historical location were a self-evident necessity.

Throughout the twentieth century, new strands were woven into the safety net, first in the form of loans to disaster victims, then by direct grants, infrastructure repairs, loan guarantees, job training, subsidized investments, health care, debris removal, and a host of similar rehabilitative measures.

In 1968, the National Flood Insurance Program began supplying subsidized coverage for structures and their contents in flood-prone areas. Similar state-subsidized insurance programs arose for hurricanes in Florida and earthquakes in California. In 1978, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was created to coordinate the increasingly complex job of government disaster response.

At each juncture, more aid was funneled to disaster victims without serious challenge to the wisdom of encouraging people to occupy vulnerable locations.

In response to Mississippi floods, Florida hurricanes, and California earthquakes, the number of major disaster declarations almost doubled from the 1980s to the 1990s, from an annual average of 24 up to 46. At century’s end, Congress was paying an average of $3.7 billion a year in supplemental disaster aid, with state taxpayers contributing many millions more. As of August 2007, Katrina relief alone had cost federal taxpayers $114 billion.

By gradual steps, this disaster safety net became part of the legal landscape, taken for granted by private investors and owners deciding to undertake new projects or rebuild storm-damaged areas. Relief programs — by minimizing, disguising, and shifting the real risks of defying natural hazards — became an active force distorting private decision-making and inviting even worse future tragedies.

Thus if a pre-Katrina Mississippian asked himself, “Should I build my house 10 feet above sea level, a quarter-mile from the Gulf Coast?” the answer came back: “Sure, why not? The government will look after me if disaster strikes.”

This entitlement mentality ensured that each new tragedy would generate fresh demands to expand the safety net. In Katrina’s aftermath, those demands centered on State Farm, which dared to deny certain claims under homeowners policies that covered wind damage but expressly excluded floods. Mississippi’s attorney general immediately sued to void flood exclusion clauses as “unconscionable” and “contrary to public policy” and even launched a criminal investigation of State Farm’s claims adjusting practices.

Last year, a jury inflamed by adverse public opinion awarded $1 million in punitive damages against State Farm for having stood on its contract rights in a dispute involving a single house. That case was recently reversed on appeal, but the victory is cold comfort for State Farm, which in the meantime elected prudently to calm the litigation storm by paying tens of millions of dollars to settle claims for unproven wind damage. Voila! The safety net had a brand new strand, woven at the insurance company’s expense.

Disgusted, State Farm announced last year that it would cease writing new homeowners policies in Mississippi.

As more private insurers withdraw from high-hazard areas — or raise their rates to reflect the staggering legal and public relations costs of offering disaster insurance — a predictable lament arises: the free market has failed, and government must fill the vacuum so that the statist safety net remains strong. Thus it surprises no one to hear Florida Gov. Charlie Crist challenging this year’s presidential candidates to support creation of a federal catastrophic fund that would keep insurance premiums artificially low in disaster-prone areas across the country.

But the solution is not more of the market distortions and perverse incentives that have lured so many people into harm’s way. The solution is to replace the prevailing entitlement mentality with a free market in disaster prevention, insurance, and recovery.

In a free market — without tax-paid levees, government disaster relief, or subsidized insurance — anyone who contemplates building or buying property in a high-hazard area will need to face hard facts about the local history of natural disasters, the efficacy and cost of preventive measures, and the availability of insurance.

For example, the high price — or total unavailability — of private insurance will resound like a clanging alarm bell, signaling the market’s objective view that a particular building plan is abnormally risky compared to less dangerous locales.

With their own lives and wealth at stake, people will have every incentive to evaluate risks objectively. And if hardy souls still choose to occupy and fortify New Orleans, or build on an earthquake fault, or live in a tornado alley, the risk and reward will be theirs alone. No longer will government make disasters more disastrous by pretending that citizens have a right to defy the forces of nature at others’ expense.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

Your taxes are overdue, if you’re just reading this now. But the fact is that every day is April 15 for Jane and John Smith, America’s most tax-savvy couple.

They awaken in their highly mortgaged house (interest deduction), make breakfast for their adopted child (tax credit and exemption), then drive their hybrid cars (more tax credits) to work. John, at his office, signs a contract for solar energy panels (tax credit), but he turns down a promotion that would launch the couple into a higher tax bracket. Meanwhile, across town, Jane signs an application to get historic preservation status (tax credits) for her office building.

Back home that evening, the Smiths write a few tax-deductible checks to charities and then discuss where to put their savings — into a tax-free retirement account, or a start-up business whose income would be taxed at the highest marginal rate? Just before sleep, their thoughts drift to energy-efficient appliance credits and carbon-emission taxes.

Since it’s an election year, the presidential candidates are busy figuring ways to add still more carrots to the tax code — so that the Smiths will become still more entangled in a tax policy that fears and distrusts the goals that individuals would select if guided only by rational self-interest.

Tax policy works by attaching financial incentives to a long list of values deemed morally worthy. If you want to maximize your wealth come tax time — and who doesn’t? — you must look at the world through tax-colored glasses, “voluntarily” adjusting your behavior to suit social norms and thereby qualifying for tax breaks. In this way, the social engineers of tax policy preserve the impression that you’re exercising free choice, while they’re actually dispensing with your reason and your judgment.

As an example, consider the choice between buying and renting a home. In a free market, a dollar paid in rent is equivalent to a dollar paid for mortgage interest. But when the federal government offers a mortgage interest deduction — based on some alleged need for an “ownership society” — then each purchase dollar saves a few pennies in tax that a rental dollar does not. So the path to wealth maximization suddenly veers away from renting and toward home ownership.

Over the past century, such social engineering has inflated the nation’s tax laws to an estimated 66,000 pages of statutes, regulations and rulings. At the core of this unreadable agglomeration is the most arrogant scheme of all, the progressive income tax. Its basic idea is that the more productive you are, the more you should pay in taxes. If you dare to suggest that penalizing success is neither a moral ideal nor a practical tax policy, you will be told that all such questions must be decided by reference to the good of society.

And now the presidential candidates want to bulk up this already bloated system. For instance, Hillary Clinton wants you to take care of your elderly relatives ($3,000 “caregiver’s credit”), Barack Obama wants you to keep your company’s headquarters and jobs in America (“Patriot Employer” program) and both Obama and McCain want you to fund more research and development (making an existing credit permanent).

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with caring for grandparents, hiring local people or spending on R&D — if a rational thought process leads you to conclude that those choices actually serve the self-interest of you or your company. But government has no right to influence your decisions one way or the other.

Here’s the point: Government’s job is not to dictate your values but to protect them. In a free country, you choose values and then use your own money as a tool to achieve them. But a value-rigged tax policy reverses this cause and effect — it uses your money against you, bribing you with tax breaks that let you keep some of your earnings in exchange for abandoning your preferred values.

Clearly, we have slid a long way downhill from this nation’s founding, when political leaders respected individuals’ ability to make rational decisions for themselves about how to pursue their own health, wealth and happiness. Today, it is commonly accepted that Uncle Sam has a right to reach not only into your wallet but into your soul, through tax policies that substitute some version of the “public interest” for your own rational desires.

Of course, tax policy is only one form of “social engineering” — spending and direct regulation are other coercive methods of substituting collective values for private choice. But when it comes to micro-managing our lives, there are two reasons why tax incentives remain one of politicians’ favorites.

First, people find comfort in the illusion of self-direction that goes along with tax incentives — they would rather be lured by a tasty carrot than beaten with a stick. Second, tax law is an easy mechanism through which politicians can dispense favors to supporters, as Clinton, Obama and McCain have each pledged to do. Every year numerous pages are added to the long list of politically correct values.

In place of the limitless variety that emerges when individuals plan their own lives in a free society, tax laws strive to impose a dreary sameness — as if every individual should get married, have children, buy a home and save for retirement on a government-approved schedule — and as if every company should look to bureaucrats for the one true path to selecting real estate, equipment, fuels, employees and financing. Such artificial homogeneity has no place in the tax policy of a government dedicated to protecting individual rights.

If government were restricted to its proper functions — police, courts and a strong military to defend individual rights against physical force and fraud — our 66,000-page coercive tax code would be a thing of the past. What’s more, a great burden would be lifted, not just from the economy, but from our lives.

Imagine reasserting ourselves as rational, sovereign individuals, whose rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness include the right to choose values without asking society’s permission — and without chasing our own money, like lab rats sniffing cheese, down the twisting corridors of a labyrinthine tax code.

About The Author

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Rocked by a nationwide storm of criticism, the Los Angeles County court that declared homeschooling illegal in California has agreed to rehear the case in June. At issue is Justice H. Walter Croskey’s Feb. 28 decree, which ordered the parents of “Rachel L.” to send her away to a public or private school, where she can get a “legal education.”

Justice Croskey’s edict interpreted state education laws that govern all children, whatever their home situation and “whatever the quality” of their home education. Except for the rare case when parents already hold state teaching credentials, parents who find public schools intolerable and cannot locate or afford a suitable private school were branded by the decree as outlaws if they choose to instruct their child at home.

California legislators were entitled to enact this blanket prohibition, according to the judge, because they feared the supposed social disorder that would result from “allowing every person to make his own standards on matters of conduct in which society as a whole has important interests.”

“Allowing”? By what right does government presume to “allow” (or, in this case, forbid) you to make your own standards concerning your child’s education?

Government has no such right. Neither the state nor “society as a whole” has any interests of its own in your child’s education. A society is only a group of individuals, and the government’s only legitimate function is to protect the individual rights of its citizens, including yours and your children’s, against physical force and fraud. The state is your agent, not a separate entity with interests that can override your rights.

If Justice Croskey’s description of California law is correct, then the state’s educational policy is at odds with America’s founding principles. Parents are sovereign individuals whose right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness includes the right to control their child’s upbringing. Other citizens, however numerous or politically powerful, have no moral right to substitute their views on child-raising for those of the father and mother who created that child.

Instead, a proper legal system recognizes and protects parents’ moral right to pursue the personal rewards and joys of child-raising. At every stage, you have a right to set your own standards and act on them without government permission. This parental right to control your child’s upbringing includes the right to manage his education, by choosing an appropriate school or personally educating him at home.

Of course, there are certain situations in which government must step in to protect the rights of a child, as in cases of physical abuse or neglect. But no such concern for individual rights can account for California’s arrogant assertion of state control over the minds of all school-age children residing within its borders.

Education, like nutrition, should be recognized as the exclusive domain of a child’s parents, within legal limits objectively defining child abuse and neglect. Parents who starve their children may properly be ordered to fulfill their parental obligations, on pain of losing legal custody. But the fact that some parents may serve better food than others does not permit government to seize control of nutrition, outlaw home-cooked meals, and order all children to report for daily force-feeding at government-licensed cafeterias.

The shockwaves from Justice Croskey’s decision will likely impact not just homeschoolers but also the apologists for government education — teachers’ unions, educational bureaucrats, and politicians. Their political and financial survival depends on a policy that treats children as, in effect, state property — but only rarely is the undiluted collectivism of that policy trumpeted so publicly.

What if, in the harsh glare of the “Rachel L.” case, parents start asking whether the state has any right at all to be running schools and dictating educational standards for children, in order to advance society’s “interests”? This calls into question the moral foundation of public education as such. In this light, one wonders if the court’s decision to rehear the case could be a first step toward muting, and muddying, the controversy.

For their part, the defenders of public schooling can be expected to stay busy papering over their system’s own failures — the very failures that helped fuel the homeschooling movement, by driving desperate parents to seek refuge at home from the irrationality, violence, and mediocrity that have come to characterize government education, in California and elsewhere.

For now, at least, the battle lines are clearly drawn. Are parents mere drudges whose social duty is to feed and house their spawn between mandatory indoctrination sessions at government-approved schools? Or are they sovereign individuals whose right to guide their children’s development the state may not infringe?

The answer could determine not only the future of homeschooling but the future of education in America.

About The Author

Tom Bowden

Analyst and Outreach Liaison, Ayn Rand Institute

On his recent visit to the Middle East, Vice President Cheney voiced the Bush administration’s belief that a Palestinian state is “long overdue” and vowed to help make that goal a reality. Many conservatives and liberals agree with the administration that America should help fulfill the long-deferred Palestinian aspirations to statehood. The idea is that in doing so we would go a long way toward dousing the flames of Islamist terrorism.

But does U.S. backing for Palestinian statehood advance our security?

Only if you think we’re better off fostering a new terrorist state.

That may seem excessively harsh given President Bush’s mantra that Palestinians just want “the opportunity to use [their talents and] gifts to better their own lives and build a future for their children.” The Bush line we keep hearing is that the terrorists and their supporters are but a fringe element that will be marginalized under the new state, which will coexist “side by side in peace” with Israel and the Western world.

But listen to Palestinian clerics at Friday sermons, calling for violent attacks on Israel. Look at the lurid posters in the homes and shops of ordinary Palestinians, passionately glorifying “martyrs” and terrorist kingpins. Look at their coordinated digging of tunnels to smuggle in weapons and explosives. Look at the popular collusion with Islamist militants and their stream of recruits. Recall the years of ferocious attacks against Israeli towns.

If the mass of Palestinians just want peace and a better life, they would not despise and war against the only state in the region, Israel, that protects individual rights and that offers a standard of living far superior to (even the richest) Arab regimes. They would be far better off, freer and safer, if they put away their rocks, bullets and dynamite belts and sought to live and work in Israel (as some once did).

Instead, they flood the streets to protest negotiations about peaceful co-existence with Israel. Ideologically, their dominant factions are the Islamic totalitarians of Hamas and the nationalist terrorists of Fatah. These differ only in their form of dictatorship — religious or ethnic. Both promise their followers, one way or another, to wipe out Israel.

That hostility to Israel, the only free nation in the Middle East, should make any U.S. president stand firmly against the Palestinian cause. Particularly in a post-9/11 world, Washington should recognize that U.S. security is strengthened by preventing Islamist terrorists from securing another stronghold and training ground.

Given the overwhelming evidence that it would undermine U.S. security, what explains the Bush administration’s come-hell-or-high-water promise to do “everything we can” to back a Palestinian state? It is the administration’s belief that America has a duty to ease the suffering of the world’s wretched, regardless of the cost in lives to us.

That’s why, after Palestinians brought Hamas to power in a landslide, Washington responded with “compassion” for their “humanitarian” needs. Of course the United States and its European allies felt compelled to “isolate” the Hamas regime by cutting off direct aid to the Palestinian Authority. But they refused to believe the Palestinians themselves should be held responsible for how they voted, because they’re already dirt poor. This meant suspending our judgment and absolving Palestinians of culpability for choosing murderers to lead them. So, despite the embargo on aid to the Hamas-led government, in 2006 U.S. aid to Palestinians increased by 17 percent to $468 million, propping up their terrorist proto-state.

This policy’s result is to endorse, facilitate, and vitalize Palestinian aggression. We’ve seen the unleashing of a popularly supported Hamas-Hezbollah war against Israel in 2006 and ongoing attacks springing from Gaza. Al Qaeda has reportedly already set up shop alongside other jihadists in the Palestinian territories. Just imagine the mushrooming of terrorist training camps and explosives factories under a sovereign Palestinian state. Imagine how emboldened jihadists will feel operating under a regime that Washington has created and blessed.

This is the price of a policy based not on furthering U.S. security, but on undeserved pity. This is the price of willfully ignoring the vile nature of Palestinian goals, treating these hostile people as above reproach and rewarding their irrationality.

Isn’t it time we demand a policy that puts our security first?

About The Author

Elan Journo

Senior Fellow and Vice President, Content and Advanced Training, Ayn Rand Institute

In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII established our modern calendar and fixed the rules determining the date of Easter. This year Easter falls on March 23, but from year to year it can shift by as much as a month on the Gregorian calendar.

Finding Easter’s date for a given year requires a surprising degree of scientific acumen. The last things one might expect to see in, say, the Book of Common Prayer are tables of numbers and rules for mathematical calculations — but there they are, nevertheless.

At first glance, this seems to exemplify a kind of harmony between religion and science, a peaceful concord between faith and reason. Indeed, a variety of public figures — from prominent scientists to the Pope — have promoted the view that science and religion are not adversaries but complementary and mutually supporting fields. “Truth cannot contradict truth,” they declare, implying that the truths discovered by reasoning from sensory evidence cannot clash with the “truths” of religious dogma.

A closer look, however, reveals the long history of the hostility of faith towards reason — which continues to this day. Violent clashes between the two are not only possible but unavoidable, and the notion that religion can coexist on friendly terms with science and reason is false.

For reasons both biblical and astronomical, Easter is defined as the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox (the first day of spring). To get his calendar rules right, Pope Gregory had to rely on some of the best astronomers and mathematicians of his day. Ironically, one of these was Nicolas Copernicus, whose sun-centered astronomy engendered one of history’s most famous clashes between science and religion.

A faithful canon of the Catholic Church, Copernicus supported the calendar project happily. His scientific work was partly motivated by the goal of predicting more accurately the first day of spring and the subsequent full moon. He modestly expressed the hope that by facilitating the calculation of Easter his labors would “contribute somewhat even to the Commonwealth of the Church.”

At first Copernicus’s work was warmly accepted by Church officials — but only because they didn’t take it seriously. Sixteenth-century common sense held that the Sun orbits the Earth, which is motionless at the center of the universe. More important, Church scholars held that the true structure of the world is established not by science but by official interpretation of Scripture. Hence, they regarded the motion of the Earth as nothing more than a convenient mathematical assumption — an idea justified solely by its utility in making astronomical predictions. Thinking they could evade a clash between reason and revelation, they denied the reality of the Earth’s motion but used the Copernican theory nonetheless.

This contradiction became inescapable decades after the Gregorian reform when Galileo removed the objections from common sense by explaining the physics of the moving Earth. But the objections from faith proved more intractable. Galileo’s outspoken defense of the Earth’s motion as a serious physical idea forced Church leaders to take a stand — and when they got off the fence, they came down firmly against science. That the Church persecuted Galileo for defending Copernican theory is well-known. Less frequently acknowledged is the utter hypocrisy of that act: the Church persecuted Galileo for defending the very ideas on which its Easter reform depended.

In 1992 Pope John Paul II grudgingly admitted — 350 years too late — that his predecessors had been wrong. He called the Church’s persecution of Galileo a “sad misunderstanding” that “now belongs to the past.”

But does it?

Although few would now declare the Earth the motionless center of the universe, it is not difficult to find those who claim it to be 6,000 years old and deny the long, slow evolution of its species. More alarming is that the same Dark Ages mentality that dragged Galileo before the Inquisition now seeks to prohibit entire fields of scientific research, such as therapeutic cloning. The war of religion against science has merely shifted to new battlegrounds, but it still rages on.

Religion’s alleged harmony with science is a fraudulent masquerade, extending only insofar as religious dogmas are not called into question. True defenders of science must be committed to reason as an absolute principle — following facts wherever they lead and bowing to no authorities but logic and reality. And they must understand that the servile obedience demanded by faith is wholly incompatible with science — and with the rational thinking on which all human progress and prosperity depends.

About The Author

Keith Lockitch

Vice President of Education and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

This presidential campaign will be, by far, the most expensive in U.S. history. And it is ironic that John McCain, the co-author of McCain-Feingold, is one of the candidates hustling to raise tens of millions of dollars. One thing is for sure: No matter who wins, the call for more campaign finance legislation will intensify — all in the name of combating the allegedly corrupting influence of money on politics. This is ominous, because what campaign finance restrictions actually do is subject political speech to the corrupting influence of government control.

Under current law, we are severely limited in how much we can donate to candidates, political parties and political committees. We are also subject to bans on radio and TV ads that might — crime of crimes — impact the victory or defeat of a candidate we favor or oppose. What justifies these restrictions on our freedom?

Without them, advocates say, the wealthy would control political speech. They would use their vast resources to promote their candidates while locking out those unable to run expensive ads. Americans would be left without access to the information necessary to make informed political decisions. Elected politicians would be beholden to rich financial backers, whom they’ll have to pay off with special favors. The solution to this mess, the argument goes, is obvious: The government must “level the playing field” by limiting wealthy Americans’ ability to use their money in the political debate.

But let us, as Ayn Rand so often advised, check our premises.

What is the actual effect of wealth on political speech? Is it true that a diversity of political viewpoints would be shut out without campaign finance restrictions? Clearly not, when wealthy Americans include a vast diversity of individuals, and when we are free to watch Fox News or CNN, read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, listen to Rush Limbaugh or Air America, visit Instapundit or Daily Kos. No private citizen (or corporation), however wealthy, has the power to censor the speech of others. He can refuse to support, finance or promote ideas or candidates he disagrees with — which is his inalienable right — but he cannot forcibly suppress them. Jack Welch could choose not to contribute to MoveOn.org; he can’t forbid them to speak or us to listen.

It’s ludicrous, not to mention insulting, to American voters, to think that elections are won by the candidate with the most ads. Huckabee spent $13 million on his campaign; Giuliani, $64 million; Romney, $105 million. Why did Huckabee garner so much more support? The fact is, whether rich or poor, candidates must persuade voters.

A wealthy individual can spend lavishly on ads, even buy an entire newspaper or broadcast station, to convince Americans of his viewpoint; he cannot force us to listen or agree. At the same time, a candidate lacking money is free to seek financial support from citizens who agree with him, whether it be a few wealthy individuals or millions of like-minded Americans who are willing to put their money where his mouth is. This is what explains the unexpected financial success of Ron Paul’s and Barack Obama’s campaigns — and note that current restrictions actually make fund-raising for this type of outside candidate more difficult.

It’s true that in a free system, money does give you a greater ability to get your message out; this is precisely one of the reasons it’s desirable to earn wealth. If this is what campaign finance advocates regard as corrupt, which system would they regard as uncorrupt? One in which a person’s ability to promote his viewpoint is unrelated to the financial resources he’s earned (whether personally or through voluntary contributions).

This is why campaign finance advocates have not been appeased by McCain-Feingold, and are calling for complete public financing of political elections. Under such a system, candidates would no longer have to financially earn the platform from which they speak; instead, the government would furnish candidates with your tax dollars. Of course, not every potential candidate could receive public funding under such a system: Only “serious” candidates would.

Who decides which candidate is serious? Those presently holding government power. There is no surer way to create a political aristocracy in America.

Only the government has the power to stifle free speech and replace persuasion with coercion. Although the advocates of campaign finance “reform” have not managed a complete government takeover of election financing yet, they have already managed to deprive many Americans of their freedom.

What have the current restrictions actually meant in practice? They have meant that the makers of a documentary critical of Hillary Clinton have been banned from broadcasting their film on television. They have meant that a grass-roots organization seeking to evaluate political candidates (on their commitment to free speech, ironically) must go to court to plead government permission to do so.

They have meant that untold numbers of Americans — both potential candidates and supporters — have abandoned political participation rather than face the difficulty of fund-raising under current restrictions, and the possibility of crippling fines and harsh prison sentences should they unknowingly fail to comply with today’s tortuously convoluted campaign finance laws. One survey found that only 41% of participants could correctly complete all the required campaign finance disclosure forms, a prerequisite for engaging in virtually any kind of organized political activity.

And current campaign finance restrictions already seem to be moving us toward a political aristocracy. Incumbent politicians typically go into elections with massive advantages in name-recognition and fund-raising ability. To have a hope of unseating them, challengers often need large cash infusions from a small number of donors — something expressly forbidden by campaign finance laws. The Center for Competitive Politics notes that “since contribution limits were first enacted at the federal level, successful challenger campaigns have plummeted by 50%.” Campaign finance reform has done nothing to get corruption out of politics, but it has been effective at keeping (corrupt) politicians in politics.

Yet despite all this, you might still be wondering: Can’t large contributions buy political favors? They can — when politicians have power to grant special favors to special interests in the first place. In today’s Washington, it’s not just money that purchases favors. Politicians dispense favors for the sake of prestige (say, their name on a bridge), for the purpose of appeasing vocal critics lobbying against them, for the attempt to win your vote (say, a pet project in your district that will create jobs), etc.

It’s not money that corrupts — it’s the lure of arbitrary political power. A true crusader against political corruption would not strip American citizens of their right to free speech; he would seek to put an end to the government’s power to grant special favors to any group.

Sen. McCain was once asked whether McCain-Feingold abridges freedom of speech. He implicitly admitted that it does: “I would rather have a clean government than one where quote ‘First Amendment rights’ are being respected that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.” We should tell Sen. McCain and those who agree with him that a government which strips us of our right to free speech is by that very fact corrupt.

It’s time to reject this pernicious view and restore the First Amendment. It’s time to abolish campaign finance laws.

About The Author

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

The theory of evolution is often disparaged by its opponents as being “just a theory” — i.e., a speculative hypothesis with little basis in hard, scientific facts. But this claim carries with it the implied accusation that Charles Darwin was “just a theorist” — i.e., that he was merely an armchair scientist and that his life’s work was nothing more than an exercise in arbitrary speculation. A look at Darwin’s pioneering discoveries, however, reveals the grave injustice of this accusation. Darwin was not “just a theorist” and evolution is not “just a theory.” In this talk, Dr. Lockitch explores Darwin’s life and work, focusing on the steps by which he came to discover and prove the theory of evolution by natural selection. (Recorded March 18, 2008.)

About The Author

Keith Lockitch

Vice President of Education and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

While some in Washington are quibbling about the details of the economic stimulus package, nearly everyone agrees with its basic idea: that our ailing economy needs Uncle Sam to play doctor and hand out some $150 billion in consumer spending money. But this sort of government intervention is not the cure for our economic troubles. It is the cause.

To understand why, we must first recognize that the key economic activity that causes growth is not consumer spending but production.

Economic growth means an increase in the amount of wealth that exists in a country–and all wealth must be produced. Houses, health care, air-conditioning and transportation do not come ready-made from nature. We have them only to the extent that individuals and businesses bring them into existence.

The focus of today’s stimulus packages on consumer spending is therefore completely backward. Consumption is a consequence of production. This fact is ignored by the Bush plan, which attempts to achieve prosperity through $100 billion in deficit-spending. Though this might bring the appearance of prosperity, in the same way that an unemployed man appears prosperous if he goes on a shopping spree with his credit cards, the reality will be the opposite.

The fact is that consumer spending is slowing because production is slowing. There have been massive misallocations of capital–witness, for instance, the housing market–which are now coming home to roost. The resulting financial losses, economic uncertainty and more tenuous job market are all contributing to the American consumer’s inability or unwillingness to spend.

If the Bush spending plan can’t productively stimulate the economy, what government economic plan can? None. Production does not need stimulation from the government; it needs liberation from the government. What a productive, dynamic economy requires of a government is that it restrict itself to protecting property rights from force and fraud, and refrain from interfering in free production and trade.

Now it is of course popular practice to blame economic problems, not on government intervention but on the free market. But observe that all of the most prominent problems today–problems with housing, financial markets, health care, oil–involve some of the least-free sectors of our economy, those with the most government intervention.

Consider the extent of government culpability in the current subprime meltdown. There is the Federal Reserve, which wrought havoc with the markets by manipulating interest rates, first setting them below the rate of inflation and then quintupling them.

The Fed’s initial policy convinced subprime borrowers that if they took out mortgages tied to Fed rates, they could afford homes that they ordinarily couldn’t. The Fed’s artificially low rates fueled a borrowing spree and housing bubble that were instrumental in the subprime meltdown. Then there is the network of entities backed by the government, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , which were big champions of subprime lending and big propagandists for the idea that everyone needs to own a home to live the American Dream. Finally, there is the government’s long-standing policy of assuring large financial institutions that they are “too big to fail,” which encourages short-range, high-risk investments.

Given all these influences, is it any surprise that so many people with poor credit bought expensive homes, that so many financial institutions lent them the money and that all hell broke loose once the unsustainable could no longer be sustained? In an unhampered market, private lenders and borrowers don’t behave this way.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of how our government today stifles economic productivity through its gargantuan regulatory and welfare state. Try to project the impact on productive businesses of the vast burden of federal and state regulations–regulations that render off-limits a huge range of productive endeavors.

For example: If a fast-growing software company needs to quickly import a dozen eager and talented Indian programmers, it can’t, thanks to our immigration laws. If a company needs to fire a group of incompetent employees to make its workforce more productive, it risks a million-dollar lawsuit. If a developer seeks to offer low-cost housing in the vast, unused tracts of land in expensive California districts, too bad–that would go against environmentalist “open space” laws.

If a health insurance company tries to win more customers with deductibles, coverage and limits that will make insurance far more affordable, the idea is sunk; states dictate the terms of health insurance contracts. If a group of venture capitalists want to invest in new nuclear power, to supply cheap energy to a new market, it cannot–environmental regulations have prevented any new plants for decades, despite the technology’s stellar safety record.

If the board of a struggling public company wants to hire a top-flight CEO to turn its company around, its job is much harder (and more expensive) thanks to the CEO-repelling climate created by Sarbanes-Oxley, whose vague laws and new criminal penalties make managing a firm much riskier. Even the simple project of building a larger facility to house a growing business can easily be held up for six months, while the owner must glad-hand zoning and permit bureaucrats.

And this is just the smallest indication of the regulatory strangulation that American businesses suffer. Imagine the economic stimulus, the explosion of productivity, that would occur if these regulatory nooses were removed.

For that matter, consider how our government wreaks economic destruction by taxing the wealth of the productive and diverting it unproductively. Americans pay trillions of dollars in taxes annually–the vast majority of which is not for the agencies that protect our rights (police, military and courts), but for regulations and for entitlement programs that transfer wealth from productive individuals who have earned it to those who haven’t.

Over the years, these programs have prevented individuals from investing trillions of dollars in new ventures. It took a million dollars to start Google ; if the government hadn’t drained us of millions of dollars, picture what other amazing technologies, products and services we would be enjoying today.

The economic stimulus that would result from drastically cutting government regulation and spending (and thus taxation) is almost unimaginable.

Faced with recession, therefore, we should be asking not, “What can the government do to stimulate the economy?” but “What can it stop doing?” Washington should be debating which disastrous programs to phase out first: Sarbanes-Oxley, or the constellation of agencies that distort the housing market, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Politicians should be committing to drastically cutting government spending, so that Americans can have real and lasting tax relief.

What our economy needs is not a stimulation package, but a liberation package.

About The Author

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

With the primary season in full swing, the presidential candidates are fighting over what to do about the spiraling cost of health care–especially the cost of health insurance, which is becoming prohibitively expensive for millions of Americans.

The Democrats, not surprisingly, are proposing a massive increase in government control, with some even calling for the outright socialism of a single-payer system. Republicans are attacking this “solution.” But although they claim to oppose the expansion of government interference in medicine, Republicans don’t, in fact, have a good track record of fighting it.

Indeed, Republicans have been responsible for major expansions of government health care programs: As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney oversaw the enactment of the nation’s first “universal coverage” plan, initially estimated at $1.5 billion per year but already overrunning cost projections. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who pledged not to raise any new taxes, has just pushed through his own “universal coverage” measure, projected to cost Californians more than $14 billion. And President Bush’s colossal prescription drug entitlement–expected to cost taxpayers more than $1.2 trillion over the next decade–was the largest expansion of government control over health care in 40 years.

Today, nearly half of all spending on health care in America is government spending. Why, despite their lip service to free markets, have Republicans actually helped fuel the growth of socialized medicine and erode what remains of free-market medicine in this country?

Consider the basic factor that has driven the expansion of government medicine in America.

Prior to the government’s entrance into the medical field, health care was regarded as a product to be traded voluntarily on a free market–no different from food, clothing, or any other important good or service. Medical providers competed to provide the best quality services at the lowest possible prices. Virtually all Americans could afford basic health care, while those few who could not were able to rely on abundant private charity.

Had this freedom been allowed to endure, Americans’ rising productivity would have allowed them to buy better and better health care, just as, today, we buy better and more varied food and clothing than people did a century ago. There would be no crisis of affordability, as there isn’t for food or clothing.

But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product–for which each individual must assume responsibility–had given way to a view of health care as a “right,” an unearned “entitlement,” to be provided at others’ expense.

This entitlement mentality fueled the rise of our current third-party-payer system, a blend of government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, together with government-controlled employer-based health insurance (itself spawned by perverse tax incentives during the wage and price controls of World War II).

Today, what we have is not a system grounded in American individualism, but a collectivist system that aims to relieve the individual of the “burden” of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. For every dollar’s worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out-of-pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14%.

The result of shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them was an explosion in spending.

In a system in which someone else is footing the bill, consumers, encouraged to regard health care as a “right,” demand medical services without having to consider their real price. When, through the 1970s and 1980s, this artificially inflated consumer demand sent expenditures soaring out of control, the government cracked down by enacting further coercive measures: price controls on medical services, cuts to medical benefits, and a crushing burden of regulations on every aspect of the health care system.

As each new intervention further distorted the health care market, driving up costs and lowering quality, belligerent voices demanded still further interventions to preserve the “right” to health care. And Republican politicians–not daring to challenge the notion of such a “right”–have, like Romney, Schwarzenegger and Bush, outdone even the Democrats in expanding government health care.

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a “right” to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a “right” to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services–no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a “right” to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

So long as Republicans fail to challenge the concept of a “right” to health care, their appeals to “market-based” solutions are worse than empty words. They will continue to abet the Democrats’ expansion of government interference in medicine, right up to the dead end of a completely socialized system.

By contrast, the rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights would provide the moral basis for real and lasting solutions to our health care problems–for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the government incentives that created our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care.

Such sweeping reforms would unleash the power of capitalism in the medical industry. They would provide the freedom for entrepreneurs motivated by profit to compete with each other to offer the best quality medical services at the lowest prices, driving innovation and bringing affordable medical care, once again, into the reach of all Americans.

About The Author

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute