The cause of the U.S. health-care mess is governmental interference. The solution, therefore, is not more governmental control, whether via nationalized medical insurance or a government takeover of medicine.
Health insurance costs so much today because the government, on the premise that there exists a “right” to health care at someone else’s expense, has promised Americans a free lunch. When a person can consume medical services without needing to consider how to pay for them — Medicare, Medicaid, or the individual’s employer will foot the bill — demand skyrockets. The $2,000 elective liver test he or she would have forgone in favor of a better place to live suddenly becomes a necessity when its cost seems to add up to $0.
As the expense of providing “free” health care erupts accordingly, the government tries to control costs by clamping down on the providers of health care. A massive net of regulations descends on doctors, nurses, insurers, and drug companies. As more of their endeavors are rendered unprofitable, drug companies produce fewer drugs, and insurers limit their policies or exit the industry.
Doctors and nurses, now buried in paperwork and faced with the endless, unjust task of appeasing government regulators, find their love for their work dissipating. They cut their hours or leave the profession. Many young people decide never to enter those fields in the first place.
What happens when demand skyrockets and supply is restricted? The price of medicine explodes. What was once to serve as a free lunch for everyone becomes lunch for no one.
The solution? Remove all controls. Recognize each citizen’s right and responsibility to pay for his or her own health care, and return to insurers the entrepreneurial freedom to come up with innovative products.
True freedom would bring health care into the reach of the average U.S. citizen again — just as it has done for other goods and services, such as computers, cell phones and food.
On May 27, environmentalists will celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson, the founding mother of their movement.
But Carson’s centenary is no cause for celebration. Her legacy includes more than a million deaths a year from the mosquito-borne disease malaria. Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, has been essentially discarded — discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma advanced by Carson.
The crusade against DDT began with Carson’s antipesticide diatribe Silent Spring, published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence — Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson’s book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT’s crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.
Instead, Carson filled her book with misinformation — alleging, among other claims, that DDT causes cancer. Her unsubstantiated assertion that continued DDT use would unleash a cancer epidemic generated a panicked fear of the pesticide that endures as public opinion to this day.
But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost sixty years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began — with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT — yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature “has not even one peer reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome.” Indeed, in a 1956 study, human volunteers ate DDT every day for over two years with no ill effects then or since.
Abundant scientific evidence supporting the safety and importance of DDT was presented during seven months of testimony before the newly formed EPA in 1971. The presiding judge ruled unequivocally against a ban. But the public furor against DDT — fueled by Silent Spring and the growing environmental movement — was so great that a ban was imposed anyway. The EPA administrator, who hadn’t even bothered to attend the hearings, overruled his own judge and imposed the ban in defiance of the facts and evidence. And the 1972 ban in the United States led to an effective worldwide ban, as countries dependent on U.S.-funded aid agencies curtailed their DDT use to comply with those agencies’ demands.
So if scientific facts are not what has driven the furor against DDT, what has? Estimates put today’s malaria incidence worldwide at around 300 million cases, with a million deaths every year. If this enormous toll of human suffering and death is preventable, why do environmentalists — who profess to be the defenders of life — continue to oppose the use of DDT?
The answer is that environmental ideology values an untouched environment above human life. The root of the opposition to DDT is not science but the environmentalist moral premise that it is wrong for man to “tamper” with nature.
The large-scale eradication of disease-carrying insects epitomizes the control of nature by man. This is DDT’s sin. To Carson and the environmentalists she inspired, “the ’control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.” Nature, they hold, is intrinsically valuable and must be kept free from human interference.
On this environmentalist premise the proper attitude to nature is not to seek to improve it for human benefit, but to show “humility” before its “vast forces” and leave it alone. We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead “a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.” If the untouched, “natural” state is one in which millions contract deadly diseases, so be it.
Carson’s current heirs agree. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman writes: “Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”
In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, over a thousand people have contracted malaria and half a dozen have died. This is the life-or-death consequence of viewing pestilent insects as a “necessary” component of a “vibrant biosphere” and seeking a “reasonable accommodation” with them.
Rachel Carson’s birthday should be commemorated, not with laudatory festivities, but with the rejection of the environmental ideology she inspired.
The House of Representatives recently passed the “say on pay” bill proposed by Congressman Barney Frank. The bill forces all corporations to allow shareholders a non-binding vote on CEO compensation. The idea is to shame directors into lowering CEO pay, which the bill’s supporters claim is out of control.
Although the bill is touted as a means of protecting the interests of shareholders, what it actually represents is a usurpation of corporate control. It is therefore a violation of shareholders’ rights.
Those clamoring for this bill insist that legislation is necessary to give shareholders a “say on pay.” But shareholders already have a say on pay — i.e., a means of exercising control over corporate governance. If a shareholder is upset about CEO pay or any other management issue, he has three legitimate, free-market options: 1. “Vote with his dollars” by selling his shares; 2. Accumulate a controlling interest in the company (typically 51 percent) and impose a new board of directors; 3. Persuade a majority of shareholders to replace the board with people sympathetic to their concerns.
If enough shareholders really wanted a vote on CEO pay, they could demand a change to their company’s bylaws. But very few companies have adopted such changes, suggesting that most shareholders are not actually interested in this control. After all, one of the great benefits of the corporate structure is a clear division of labor: shareholders invest capital, but leave the business management to an elected board and its chosen executives. Rational shareholders do not want to micromanage public companies by participating in such decisions as setting CEO pay.
It is a minority of “activist” shareholders — together with antibusiness politicians — who are shrieking about “outrageous” CEO pay packages. And it is highly revealing that, instead of pursuing one of the above methods that respects everyone’s freedom, they are agitating for legislation — seeking to wield the power of government to force their views of corporate governance and CEO pay on the majority of shareholders.
What motivates these activists is not the wellbeing — i.e., the wealth — of fellow shareholders, but an antiprofit, anticapitalist social agenda. It is they who call for corporate “social responsibility” — the idea that executives and shareholders should sacrifice money-making for the sake of sundry “stakeholders.” This is incompatible with the purpose of business and with the responsibility of corporate leaders to maximize shareholder wealth.
Indeed, if these activists were truly concerned with the shareholder and the quality of boards of directors and CEOs that he can hire, they would be advocating for less government regulation not more. Regulations today prevent market forces from fully operating in corporate America.
For instance, the Williams Act restricts stock accumulation, and other regulations place strict constraints on board membership and hostile takeovers, all of which make ousting incompetent management more difficult. Sarbanes-Oxley, that incredible perversion of justice, has cost innocent businessmen billions of dollars in the name of fighting the misdeeds committed by others. This has made running an honest business more precarious and less enjoyable.
Anyone truly concerned about shareholders — and about the health of corporate America — should be campaigning for the repeal of these regulations.
But far from fighting government controls, shareholder “activists” fight to hand control over American corporations to government — or to organizations controlled indirectly by politicians, such as public pension plans. Indeed, this is already beginning, prompting many businesses to flee to the relative safety of private ownership — i.e., being owned and run by professionals — so that they can continue to maximize their wealth.
With this ever-increasing web of regulations, does anyone really believe that the government will stop at non-binding shareholder votes, that the next step won’t be the imposition of binding votes and, longer-term, government limits on CEO pay? Congressman Frank doesn’t. Frank — who has supported outright caps on CEO pay — has threatened that if “say on pay” does not sufficiently reduce CEO compensation relative to that of other employees, “then we will do something more.”
Don’t be fooled by those who say they just want to give shareholders a say. The real issue is who has the right to decide how a business is run: its owners or “activists” who have seized the power of governmental coercion?
In today’s America, our laws do little to protect U.S. property owners from either dictators abroad or government bureaucrats at home. How did this come to pass in a country founded on the principle that all men have the inalienable right to life, liberty and property? This lecture will answer this question by tracing the rise and fall of property rights in America. Professor Mossoff will first discuss the intellectual history of the right to property, explaining how the Founders turned seventeenth-century theory into eighteenth-century practice. He then describes how early-twentieth-century Progressives sought to destroy the right to property in order to remove this fundamental obstacle to their implementing the modern regulatory and welfare state. The result has been the disintegration of property rights at both the constitutional level and in basic legal protections.
Ultimately, the lesson to be learned is that a renaissance in the protection of property rights cannot occur solely through political or legal action — such a renaissance as its essential precondition requires the justification of property as a fundamental moral right. (Recorded May 16, 2007.)
About The Author
Adam Mossoff
Adam Mossoff is professor of Law and co-director of Academic Programs and a senior scholar in the Center for Protection of Intellectual Property at George Mason University.
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Atlas Shrugged — America's Second Declaration of Independence
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson announced to the world America’s plans for independence. For the first time in history, there was to be a nation and a government dedicated to the individual’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But from inception, and from both within and without, the ideals of the new nation were under attack. Without a full justification of an individual’s moral right to pursue his own life and happiness — not serve his neighbors, God or country — the nation was vulnerable, and its founding principles were slowly chipped away. In 1957 the missing justification came with the publication of <em>Atlas Shrugged</em>. On this, the book’s 50th anniversary, we will examine the moral revolution launched by Ayn Rand, without which the political revolution of the Founding Fathers had to remain incomplete. We will see what this moral revolution has meant for America so far, and what it promises for the future. We will see why <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> should be considered America’s second Declaration of Independence — a declaration not of political but of moral independence. (Recorded March 1, 2007.)
The Bush administration claims to have a way to deter the militant theocracy of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons — and thwart its ambition to bring “death to America.” Washington’s plan aims to pressure Teheran, financially and psychologically. The idea is to cut off Iran’s nuclear program from banks and businesses in other nations, and to undermine the confidence of Iranian officials. The right amount of pressure, we are told, can induce Teheran to give up its nuclear program.
In fact this policy is a pathetic sham. It is a cover-up for Washington’s abdication of the responsibility to protect American lives.
When you consider the plan in detail, it is incredible that anyone thinks it could thwart Iran. The financial “pressure” so far includes a prohibition on the Iranian Bank Sepah from completing transactions in U.S. dollars. That bank is “the financial linchpin of Iran’s missile procurement network,” according to a Treasury Department official. The ban means Bank Sepah can no longer facilitate sales of oil in dollars — but Teheran has announced that it is now selling oil in euros.
To extend its financial “pressure” overseas, Washington hopes to persuade foreign governments, international banks and companies not to lend Iran money or sell it technology or nuclear expertise. This entails groveling before the likes of France and Germany, keen appeasers of Iran, and Russia, which gutted the already toothless U.N. sanctions against Iran. Even if some companies or countries, like Japan, agree to reduce some of their trade with Iran — the regime is about to open a brand new Russian-built reactor believed capable of producing weapons-grade nuclear material, and apparently begin industrial-scale efforts to produce uranium.
Washington’s scheme also calls for undermining the self-assurance of Iran’s zealous leadership by responding “firmly” to Iranian hostility. In one notable case, four Iranian officials were detained in Iraq on suspicion of abetting insurgents, but after protests from Teheran and Baghdad, the officials were promptly released. Preposterously, this catch-and-release scheme is allegedly “precisely the type of thing that will chip away at their confidence,” as one European diplomat approvingly confided to the New York Times. Recently, U.S. forces detained other Iranian operatives (releasing some of them) and raided an Iranian consular office in Iraq. While our troops are now permitted to kill Iranian operatives in self-defense, these measures, in sum, are but pinpricks.
How could such a feeble policy fail to encourage Iran’s belief that it is free to pursue its hostile goals with impunity?
This plan is not some mistaken or naive attempt to deal with Iran. It is an evasion of Iran’s nature and goals — an evasion of the need to eliminate the Iranian menace.
Iran’s nuclear quest (like its funding of insurgents who slaughter our troops in Iraq) is just the latest in a series of hostilities stretching back to the 1979 invasion of our embassy. To protect American lives, we must recognize Iran as an enemy stained with U.S. blood and assert ourselves militarily to make it non-threatening. This does not mean an Iraq-like crusade to bring them elections; it means protecting U.S. lives by destroying Iran’s militant regime. But that is precisely what our leaders refuse to do.
Washington has resigned itself to the emergence of a nuclear Iran (and an endless insurgency in Iraq), because our leaders do not believe we have the moral right to stop it. To do that would be self-assertive: it would mean putting America’s interests first. Today’s prevailing ethical standard condemns such action as selfish, and therefore immoral. Washington’s moral premise rules out as illegitimate the dedicated pursuit of American self-defense. But wishing to evade the self-destructive implications of their moral principle, our leaders concoct a plan that creates the illusion of their commitment to our defense.
The squeeze-Iran policy is a ruse that must be repudiated as impractical because immoral. We, the people of America, have a moral right to pursue our happiness in freedom. We owe it to ourselves to demand that our government actually fulfill its obligation to defend our freedom — not merely pretend to.
Critics of CEO pay are lampooning the $210 million Robert Nardelli received after a disappointing six-year tenure at Home Depot. Rep. Barney Frank, the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, calls Nardelli’s pay package “confirmation of the need to deal with a pattern of CEO pay that appears to be out of control.”
By what right does the government, or anyone else, claim the power to dictate what owners of Home Depot or any other private company can pay someone to run their company? It’s their company. If through error or irrationality they overpay (or underpay, and so fail to attract good managers), as Home Depot may have done, the loss is theirs.
The only valid reason to be concerned about CEO pay is that our government actively prevents market forces from operating. For instance, restrictions on board membership and hostile takeovers today stop large shareholders with extensive business knowledge, especially financial institutions, from influencing CEO pay. Anyone concerned about the health of corporate America would demand repeal of all such regulations.
But far from demanding repeal of the regulations, critics of CEO pay agitate for ever more control over corporate governance. They are not concerned with corporate wealth creation, but with “corporate social responsibility” — the idea that executives and shareholders should be forced to sacrifice moneymaking for the sake of sundry “stakeholders.” These critics demand that companies staff boards with labor activists, invest in irrational environmental schemes and provide above-market health benefits with no regard for the cost to shareholders.
This vision of corporate altruism is not only destructive, it is immoral. America is the land in which every individual, including a CEO, can pursue happiness through productive work. Morally, CEOs should focus on creating wealth and making profits for their shareholders, and they should be regarded as heroes, not villains, for doing so. Theirs is an enormously demanding job, with billions of dollars riding on their judgment. They should be paid handsomely for their services.
How much? That is for the owners of each company — and more widely, the participants in a truly free market — to establish.
The Iraq Study Group has issued many specific recommendations, but the options boil down to a maddeningly limited range: pull out or send more troops to do democracy-building and, either way, “engage” the hostile regimes in Iran and Syria. Missing from the list is the one option our self-defense demands: a war to defeat the enemy. If you think we’ve already tried this option and failed, think again. Washington’s campaign in Iraq looks nothing like the war necessary for our self-defense.
What does such a war look like?
America’s security depends on identifying precisely the enemy that threatens our lives — and then crushing it, rendering it a non-threat. It depends on proudly defending our right to live free of foreign aggression — by unapologetically killing the killers who want us dead.
Those who say this is a “new kind of conflict” against a “faceless enemy” are wrong. The enemy Washington evasively calls “terrorism” is actually an ideologically inspired political movement: Islamic totalitarianism. It seeks to subjugate the West under a totalitarian Islamic regime by means of terrorism, negotiation, war — anything that will win its jihad. The movement’s inspiration, its first triumph, its standard-bearer, is the theocracy of Iran. Iran’s regime has, for decades, used terrorist proxies to attack America. It openly seeks nuclear weapons and zealously sponsors and harbors jihadists. Without Iran’s support, legions of holy warriors would be untrained, unarmed, unmotivated, impotent.
Destroying Islamic totalitarianism requires a punishing military onslaught to end its primary state representative and demoralize its supporters. We need to deploy all necessary force to destroy Iran’s ability to fight, while minimizing our own casualties. We need a campaign that ruthlessly inflicts the pain of war so intensely that the jihadists renounce their cause as hopeless and fear to take up arms against us. This is how America and its Allies defeated both Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan.
Victory in World War II required flattening cities, firebombing factories, shops and homes, devastating vast tracts of Germany and Japan. The enemy and its supporters were exhausted materially and crushed in spirit. What our actions demonstrated to them was that any attempt to implement their vicious ideologies would bring them only destruction and death. Since their defeat, Nazism and Japanese imperialism have essentially withered as ideological forces. Victory today requires the same: smashing Iran’s totalitarian regime and thus demoralizing the Islamist movement and its many supporters, so that they, too, abandon their cause as futile.
We triumphed over both Japan and Germany in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. Yet more than five years after 9/11, against a far weaker enemy, our soldiers still die daily in Iraq. Why? Because this war is neither assertive nor ruthless — it is a tragically meek pretense at war.
Consider what Washington has done. The Islamist regime in Iran remains untouched, fomenting terrorism. (And now our leaders hope to “engage” Iran diplomatically.)
We went to battle not with theocratic Iran, but with the secular dictatorship of Iraq. And the campaign there was not aimed at crushing whatever threat Hussein’s regime posed to us. “Shock and awe” bombing never materialized. Our brave and capable forces were hamstrung: ordered not to bomb key targets such as power plants and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest we offend Muslim sensibilities. Instead, we sent our troops to lift Iraq out of poverty, open new schools, fix up hospitals, feed the hungry, unclog sewers — a Peace Corps, not an army corps, mission.
U.S. troops were sent, not to crush an enemy threatening America, but (as Bush explained) to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers,” putting the lives of Iraqis above their own. They were prevented from using all necessary force to win or even to protect themselves. No wonder the insurgency has flourished, emboldened by Washington’s self-crippling policies. (Perversely, some want even more Americans tossed into this quagmire.)
Bush did all this to bring Iraqis the vote. Any objective assessment of the Middle East would have told one who would win elections, given the widespread popular support for Islamic totalitarianism. Iraqis swept to power a pro-Islamist leadership intimately tied to Iran. The most influential figure in Iraqi politics is now Moktadr al-Sadr, an Islamist warlord lusting after theocratic rule and American blood. When asked whether he would accept just such an outcome from the elections, Bush said that of course he would, because “democracy is democracy.”
No war that ushers Islamists into political office has U.S. self-defense as its goal.
This war has been worse than doing nothing, because it has galvanized our enemy to believe its success more likely than ever — even as it has drained Americans’ will to fight. Washington’s feeble campaign demonstrates the ruinous effects of refusing to assert our self-interest and defend our freedom. It is past time to consider our only moral and practical option: end the senseless sacrifice of our soldiers — and let them go to war.
From the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in the classroom to federal prohibition on the funding of stem cell research to the Terri Schiavo case, religion is playing an increasing role in America’s public life. The advocates of religion claim that only religion can restore values to America — by combating moral skepticism and relativism with an absolute view of right and wrong, applicable to everyone. If God is dead, it is often thought today, then everything would be permitted. But does morality rest on religion? Can it rest on religion? Are moral absolutes possible with religion? Without religion? What approach to morality can actually bring values to American culture? These are the questions this talk addresses. (Recorded October 18, 2006.)
The World Health Organization has announced that it will encourage the use of DDT to fight malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that kills a million people a year. This announcement is a positive development, but it is tragic that malaria was allowed to persist unchecked for so long.
Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, had been essentially discarded — discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma.
The environmental crusade against DDT began with Rachel Carson’s antipesticide diatribe Silent Spring, published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence — Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson’s book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT’s crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.
Instead, Carson filled her book with misinformation — alleging, among other claims, that DDT causes cancer. Her unsubstantiated assertion that continued DDT-use would unleash a cancer epidemic generated a panicked fear of the pesticide that endures as public opinion to this day.
But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost sixty years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began — with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT — yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature “has not even one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome.” Indeed, in a 1956 study human volunteers ate DDT every day for over two years with no ill effects then or since.
Abundant scientific evidence supporting the safety and importance of DDT was presented during seven months of testimony before the newly formed EPA in 1971. The presiding judge ruled unequivocally against a ban. But the public furor against DDT — fueled by Silent Spring and the growing environmental movement — was so great that a ban was imposed anyway. The EPA administrator, who hadn’t even bothered to attend the hearings, overruled his own judge and imposed the ban in defiance of the facts and evidence. And the 1972 ban in the United States led to an effective worldwide ban, as countries dependent on U.S.-funded aid agencies curtailed their DDT use to comply with those agencies’ demands.
So if scientific facts are not what has driven the furor against DDT, what has? Estimates put today’s malaria incidence worldwide at around 300 million cases, with a million deaths every year. If this enormous toll of human suffering and death is preventable, why do environmentalists — who profess to be the defenders of life — continue to oppose the use of DDT?
The answer is that environmental ideology values an untouched environment above human life. The root of the opposition to DDT is not science but the environmentalist moral premise that it is wrong for man to “tamper” with nature.
The large-scale eradication of disease-carrying insects epitomizes the control of nature by man. This is DDT’s sin. To Carson and the environmentalists she inspired, “the ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.” Nature, they hold, is intrinsically valuable and must be kept free from human interference.
On this environmentalist premise the proper attitude to nature is not to seek to improve it for human benefit, but to show “humility” before its “vast forces” and leave it alone. We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead “a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.” If the untouched, “natural” state is one in which millions contract deadly diseases, so be it.
Carson’s current heirs agree. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman writes: “Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”
In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, over a thousand people have contracted malaria and half a dozen have died. This is the life-or-death consequence of viewing pestilent insects as a “necessary” component of a “vibrant biosphere” and seeking a “reasonable accommodation” with them.
The WHO’s support for DDT use is an encouraging step toward stopping this global health catastrophe. But even more important is to reject the environmental ideology on which opposition to DDT is based.
