With Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton leading in the polls, it seems likely she will get the chance to deliver on her promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the court’s 2010 decision allowing corporations to spend money on political advocacy. As president, Clinton would get to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s spot, and she might even get the chance to replace the author of Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is 80 years old. Either way, a Clinton presidency would eliminate the conservative majority that produced the decision, opening the door to its reversal.

This is depressing news for anyone who cares about free speech (all the more so because GOP nominee Donald Trump is no better on free speech than Clinton). Citizens United was based on core First Amendment principles: the right to think and speak your mind, to associate with others and to use your own resources to make yourself heard. Overturning it would be a disaster for free speech.

To see why, start with the facts of Citizens United. The law at issue prevented a nonprofit from distributing a film that opposed Clinton when she last ran for president. The government admitted during the case that the law could be applied to books as well. Central to the very idea of free speech is that it protects the right to criticize government. Yet the result of campaign finance laws is to restrict speech precisely because its subject is politics.

That’s unavoidable given the way the laws function. The purpose of campaign finance laws is to limit the amount of money people can spend to influence politics. But because the chief way to influence politics is to speak to voters and candidates, this necessarily means limiting political speech. To speak effectively, people have to spend money — on things like paper and pencils, signs, computers, printing presses, and broadcast facilities. Limit the money people can spend and you limit the speech they produce.

Campaign finance laws also inevitably expand to cover more and more speech. The reason is simple. When the law eliminates one way to influence politics, resourceful individuals find other ways. Limit direct contributions to candidates, and people will buy newspaper ads. Limit those, and they will turn to television, radio, films, books and the internet. Under the campaign finance laws, every new way to speak about politics becomes a “loophole” that must be closed.

It’s no answer to claim that overturning Citizens United would only affect corporations. True, “corporations aren’t people,” as the familiar refrain goes. They are groups of people. When a corporation “speaks,” the individuals who run it are really doing the speaking. They are exercising their right of association, which follows from the right to free speech — if individuals have the right to speak alone, they have the right to speak in groups. The same principle protects the right to speak through many groups, from political parties to public demonstrations.

There’s no logical reason to limit the reach of campaign finance laws to corporations. Any entity that can spend money can spend it to influence politics. Indeed, before Citizens United was decided, supporters of campaign finance laws targeted unincorporated associations such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and wealthy individuals who spent their own money on political speech. If Citizens United is overturned, everyone’s political speech will be subject to regulation.

Even the media aren’t safe. Most media entities are corporations, and they certainly spend money to influence politics. The media are currently exempt from campaign finance laws, but that exists at the pleasure of Congress. The idea that Congress would go after the media may sound crazy, but is it any crazier than government restricting films? Trump wants to use the libel laws to silence the press. Is it really farfetched to think politicians would use the campaign finance laws for the same purpose?

Silencing disagreeable speech certainly seems to be a motive of Citizens United’s critics. Clinton has called it “a case about a right-wing attack on me and my campaign.” At the Democratic convention, Marissa Barrow of the Progressive Change Campaign said “Hillary Clinton’s commitment to overturning Citizens United . . . [is] key to improving our chances of victory on every other issue.” Translation: Overturning the case will make it harder for Barrow’s opponents to convince politicians to block her policies.

It’s true that Citizens United led to billions more in political spending. But all of it was spent to produce speech promoting political views. From the standpoint of free speech, that’s a good result, not a bad one. True, much of that money is spent by people who want to feed from the public trough. But freedom to spend money on political speech is not the cause of cronyism any more than freedom of the press is the cause of libel.

Overturning Citizens United won’t eliminate government corruption. But it will allow government to limit our speech — and with it, our right to affect the course of our government.

About The Author

Steve Simpson

Former Director of Legal Studies (2013-2018), Ayn Rand Institute

Since 2012, when President Xi Jinping came to power, China has been cracking down on what little free speech the nation has recently enjoyed. Notable examples include harassing foreign nonprofits — a new law requires them to register with the government, disclose detailed financial information, and submit to police searches — and threats against those who make economic forecasts and report data the government deems too negative.

It’s an unfortunate reminder of the nature of authoritarian regimes. To control the economic and political lives of their subjects, they must at some point resort to censorship.

To its credit, the Obama administration has urged China to “respect the rights and freedoms” of nonprofits, businesses, journalists, and other groups, according to the Wall Street Journal. The administration seems to understand that harassing groups for advocating policy changes or threatening legal action against those who report inconvenient truths is no way for a civilized nation to conduct itself.

It would be nice if the administration were willing to apply the same lessons here at home. As the climate-change investigations of ExxonMobil show, many state attorneys general and other U.S. officials don’t respect freedom of speech any more than the Chinese government. The tactics they are using bear a striking resemblance to China’s efforts to censor speech.

This Isn’t Fraud, People

No doubt that sounds hyperbolic. After all, the United States is a far cry from China. We are told the investigations of ExxonMobil are based on allegations of fraud, not any effort to silence speech. As New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, one of the leaders of the investigations, has said, “the First Amendment . . . does not give you the right to commit fraud.” He is certainly right about that. No one has the right to violate the rights of others, even if using speech to do it.

But governments that want to censor speech always manufacture plausible-sounding rationales for their actions. China has claimed it is targeting foreign nonprofits in order to “protect national security.” The fraud allegations against ExxonMobil may sound more plausible, but they don’t stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Fraud is a form of theft — in essence, it is theft by deceit. To commit fraud, the perpetrator must intentionally misrepresent a fact that is material to a transaction, the victim has to reasonably rely on that misrepresentation, and the misrepresentation has to cause the victim actual damages. The arguments against ExxonMobil don’t come close to meeting these conditions.

First, what facts are allegedly being misrepresented? The claim, based on exposés done by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times, is that Exxon knew back in the 1970s that humans were causing catastrophic global warming. But we don’t even know that now. What we have, instead, are predictions about what might happen sometime in the future based on climate models that have been consistently wrong.

It’s true that ExxonMobil conducted research on global warming in the ’70s and ’80s and that some of its scientists expressed concerns over the possible consequences. That put it in the same position as pretty much everyone else who was examining the issue. As David Middleton, writing at the blog Watts Up With That, cleverly put the point: “Way back in 1982, Exxon knew what [NASA scientist James] Hansen knew. They knew that CO2 would cause nearly twice as much warming as would actually transpire over the subsequent 30 years.” In other words, ExxonMobil was just as wrong about predictions of catastrophic global warming as everyone else.

Damages Can’t Be Entirely Made-Up

This illustrates something about the climate change debate that makes the charge of fraud absurd: it’s not clear what impact humans are having on global climate or what the consequences will be. As many people have argued, it’s just as plausible that the effects of global warming will be modest or even beneficial as it is that they will be harmful. In short, the extent and impact of global warming is not a “fact” one can misrepresent. It’s part of a debate over an exceedingly complex scientific issue. It doesn’t matter how many scientists, politicians, and celebrities claim global warming will be a catastrophe. Disagreeing with them is not fraud.

Second, no reasonable person has taken any action on the basis of what ExxonMobil has or hasn’t said. The debate over global warming has raged now for decades. All sides’ views are widely known. No one who buys gas or stock from ExxonMobil can reasonably claim he ignored this very public debate and focused only on ExxonMobil’s views. Laws against fraud are not an excuse for ignorance.

Third, what, exactly, are the damages? If stockholders have anything to worry about, it’s that the government will drum ExxonMobil out of business, but that isn’t the company’s fault. People who buy gas from ExxonMobil are free to walk or ride their bikes. But so long as they drive cars, they are part of the very problem oil companies are accused of causing. Another principle of law is that you don’t have a claim for damages when the cause of those damages is you.

In any event, the alleged harm from global warming is entirely speculative. It’s based on predictions by people who have distinguished themselves by being consistently wrong, and even if they get lucky and turn out to be right, the warming they’ve predicted won’t happen for many decades or even centuries. Laws against fraud don’t protect people who don’t yet exist against alleged damages that have not yet occurred.

These Are Intimidation Tactics

But I’m being far too charitable to the state attorneys general involved in the investigations. Their legal arguments aren’t meant to be taken seriously, which brings me to the next parallel with authoritarian regimes: their intimidation tactics. The actions against ExxonMobil are not designed to prevent fraud; they are designed to scare oil companies into submission and silence dissent. Authoritarians know they can’t shut everyone up, and the authoritarians at the center of the ExxonMobil investigations know the First Amendment prevents them from outlawing dissent on global warming directly. So, like the Chinese government, they threaten a few on the theory that everyone else will self-censor.

That’s the purpose of the demand from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and others last year for information from nonprofit organizations like the Cato Institute, and of the subpoenas demanding ExxonMobil produce communications with nonprofits and others going back decades. Human rights advocates have criticized China’s harassment of foreign nonprofits, because they understand that requiring groups to disclose confidential information and submit to searches will chill their speech. At least the foreign nonprofits that violate China’s law only stand to get kicked out of the country. If we take the arguments against ExxonMobil seriously, the policy organizations that are wrapped up in the investigations are involved in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy. They could face crushing fines and even jail time.

Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of this climate inquisition is that it targets companies whose products have produced incalculable benefits for mankind. Fossil fuels helped usher in the industrial age, lifting most of mankind out of crushing poverty. Yet climate alarmists brand fossil fuel companies and their allies “deniers” and call for them to be imprisoned. Why not just refer to them as “enemies of the state” and conduct a few purges?

Commenting at the press conference that launched the investigations, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said “there’s nothing we need to worry about more than climate change.” Actually, there is. Despotic government. You don’t need complicated models to figure out what happens when governments censor speech. The evidence on that question is solid.

About The Author

Steve Simpson

Former Director of Legal Studies (2013-2018), Ayn Rand Institute

The division between classical and modern liberals is often represented as paralleling the tension between liberty and equality. Where classical liberalism saw individual liberty as the driving force behind peace and prosperity, the modern variety puts more emphasis on equality. But this is a false dichotomy. The only kind of equality that is possible is also the only kind that matters: political equality.

Political equality refers to equality of rights. Before the creation of the United States, every system of government had taken for granted that some people were entitled to rule others, taking away their freedom and property whenever some allegedly “greater good” demanded it. The Founders rejected that notion. Each individual, they held, is to be regarded by the government as having the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as any other individual. So long as he didn’t violate other people’s rights, he was free to set his own course and live on his own terms.

By making the government the guardian of our equal rights rather than a tool for the politically privileged to control and exploit the rest of society, the Founders transformed the state from an instrument of oppression into an instrument of liberation: it liberated the individual so that he was free to make the most of his life. (Unfortunately, they failed to fully implement that principle, above all by allowing the continued existence of slavery, which was a clash of principles that nearly tore the country apart in a civil war.)

Political equality is what made America a land of opportunity. In a world where there were no special privileges and no special obstacles, each individual was free to rise as high as his ability and ambition would take him. This political equality inevitably went hand in hand with economic inequality, as the ability and ambition of some people took them further than others. There was no contradiction in that fact. Political equality has to do with how the government treats individuals. It says that the government should treat all individuals the same — black or white, man or woman, rich or poor. But political equality says nothing about the differences that arise through the voluntary decisions of private individuals. Protecting people’s equal rights invariably leads to differences in economic condition, as some people use their freedom to create modest amounts of wealth while others reach the highest levels of financial success.

Historically, Americans haven’t cared about economic inequality. But that is starting to change. Why? Because there are very real problems in today’s economy — problems that threaten the American Dream — and alarmists have placed the blame for these problems on economic inequality. According to them, the rich are rigging the system in their favor, and the rest of us are stagnating as a result.

There are genuine barriers to opportunity today, and the deck is becoming stacked against us — but not because “the rich” are too rich and the government is doing too little to fight economic inequality. The real threat to opportunity in America is increasing political inequality.

In a land of opportunity, an individual should succeed or fail on the basis of merit, not political privilege. You deserve what you earn — no more, no less. Today, however, some people are being stopped from rising by merit, and others are securing unearned wealth through political privilege. But the real source of this problem is that we have granted the government an incredible amount of arbitrary power: to intervene in our affairs, to pick winners and losers, to put roadblocks in the way of success, to hand out wealth and other special favors to whatever pressure group can present itself as the face of “the public good.” Some of these injustices do increase economic inequality, but it isn’t the inequality that should bother us — it’s the injustices.

When a bank or auto company that made irrational decisions gets bailed out at public expense, that is an outrage. But the root of the problem isn’t their executives’ ability to influence Washington; it’s Washington’s power to dispense bailouts.

When an inner-city child is stuck in a school that doesn’t educate him, that is a tragedy. But the problem isn’t that other children get a better education; it’s that the government has created an educational system that often fails to educate — and that makes it virtually impossible for anyone but the affluent to seek out alternatives.

The same goes for countless other ways the government gives special privileges to some people at the expense of others:

• Cronyism — whether in the form of bailouts, subsidies, government-granted monopolies, or other special favors — benefits some businesses at the expense of competitors and buyers.
• Occupational licensing laws in fields as varied as hair-braiding and interior decorating protect incumbents from competitors by arbitrarily preventing individuals from freely entering into those fields.
• The minimum wage raises some people’s incomes at the expense of employers and customers as well as other low-skilled workers, who are priced out of the labor market and thrown onto the unemployment rolls.
• The welfare state openly deprives some people of their earned rewards in order to give other people rewards they haven’t earned.

We are living at a time of immense political inequality thanks to a government that has grown far beyond the strict limits defined by the Founders. Of course people will try to influence a government that has so much arbitrary power over their lives, and of course those with the best connections and deepest pockets will often be the most successful at influencing it. The question is, what created this situation — and what should we do about that?

Economic egalitarians tell us that the problem is not how much arbitrary power the government has, but whom the government uses that power to help. They say that by handing the government even more power and demanding that it use that power for the sake of “the 99 percent” rather than “the 1 percent,” everyone will be better off.

Only when the government is limited to the function of protecting our equal rights can people rise through merit rather than through government-granted privilege. The cure for people seeking special favors from the government is to create a government that has no special favors to grant.

What’s required to save the American Dream is not to wage war on economic inequality but to recommit ourselves to the ideal of political equality. We need to liberate the individual so that each of us is equally free to pursue success and happiness.

About The Authors

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

March 22: suicide bombings at Brussels airport and on the city’s metro. March 27: a suicide bombing at a crowded park in Lahore, Pakistan. The differences between these attacks are considerable, and a mainstream perspective would have us focus on that data narrowly. But to understand these attacks — and assess the jihadist menace — we need to give serious attention to their underlying commonality.

Look at the particulars in each case, and you find umpteen points of difference.

Behind each attack, a different group. The Islamic State (ISIS) mounted the Brussels attack; the Pakistani Taliban deployed one of its fighters to the park in Lahore. The capabilities of these groups differ. Clearly ISIS has a reach surpassing the Pakistani Taliban. To this you can add that jihadist groups engage in ferocious infighting. Many factions have different state sponsors that despise each other. The more you dig into these groups, the more dissimilar, the more disconnected, they can appear.

But such a concrete-bound perspective subverts our understanding. It opens the way for pseudo-explanations that have hampered our ability to combat this menace. George W. Bush relied on evasive definitions that whipsawed from the nebulous (“terrorists,” “evildoers”) to the ultra-narrow (it’s al-Qaeda!). The Obama administration reprised the generic label “terrorists” and emphasized “al-Qaeda” until the rise of ISIS (supposedly the JV team) made that risible; now we’re supposed to combat “violent extremism,” born of economic privation and lack of political voice.

Say It With Me: Jihadists Share an Ideology

What this betrays is much more than linguistic confusion. It reveals an underlying conceptual failure: the failure properly to understand and define the nature of the enemy. That’s a necessary condition for combatting it effectively, a point Bush and Obama’s policy failures confirm.

 Instead we need to recognize what’s distinctive — and so dangerous — about the jihadists. No, it’s not primarily their use of terrorist means; nor any political or economic hardships. What unites them is their ideological goal. Despite their differences, they do in fact constitute an ideological movement — a movement long inspired and funded by patrons such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. Despite their differences, they do in fact constitute an ideological movement.

Fundamentally, the diverse jihadist factions are united by a common end. They fight to create a society subjugated to religious law (sharia), wherever they can. They seek Islamic totalitarianism. Hearing that, some people balk: Can we really put in one category the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian regime, and many others — despite their sectarian, ethnic, regional, and language differences?

Yes, because what they strive for is essentially the same. How they seek to realize that goal — strategically and tactically — certainly differs: outright war, terrorism, indoctrination and ballot boxes, some combination of these. But these varied means are geared to the same ultimate end.

Of course they fight against one another for dominance, turf, doctrinal reasons (recall how al-Qaeda disowned ISIS). Such infighting is a feature of ideological movements. For example, there are many varieties of socialists. The British Fabians emphasized education; Vladimir Lenin was committed to revolution. There were also notorious intra-movement fights: for example, Joseph Stalin sent a hit squad to liquidate one rival, Leon Trotsky. The Soviets in Moscow were at odds with the communist rulers in China. The broad common aim, however, was to rid the world of capitalism in the name of imposing state control of the means of production.

If We Don’t Understand Them, We Can’t Fight Them

With the jihadists, their common theocratic aim is reflected in how they identify their enemies. Their doctrine holds that the path to political supremacy entails returning to piety and imposing the “Truth” far and wide, putting to death whoever stands in the way. An enemy is anyone who fails to submit to their religious dogma, including (but not limited to) apostates, heretics (e.g., Muslims of the wrong sect), atheists, and assorted unbelievers.

We need to grasp that while Islamic totalitarianism is a multiform movement, it is fundamentally united by its religious doctrine and vicious goal.

For the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a progenitor of the Islamic totalitarian movement, a major focus was on Arab regimes deemed impious. The Islamic State — like al-Qaeda, like the Iranian regime — emphasizes the West, with its secular society, man-made laws, and infidel population.

The Lahore bombing underlines just how wrong the prevailing view of the jihadists really is. It’s common today to hear how jihadists are moved primarily by economic and political grievances. That would mean that those families lining up for the bumper cars at the fairground in Lahore were slaughtered because they had somehow thwarted the Pakistani Taliban from getting decent jobs and the vote. But in reality the Taliban has it in for Pakistan’s Christian minority (who are deemed unbelievers). Many people in the thronged park that day were Christians celebrating Easter.

Moreover, we’ve heard a great deal about the (relative) poverty of the Maelbeek neighborhood in Belgium, and how some of the “martyrs” who carried out the Paris attacks last November had been petty criminals. Relevant, perhaps; causally fundamental, no. In a “martyrdom video” ISIS released in January, what do the Paris jihadists themselves tell us? They’re at war with us because we’re “unbelievers”; they’re angry that we oppose the Islamic State in its quest to entrench a totalitarian Islamic society.

Over the last 15 years, we’ve witnessed two U.S. administrations evade the responsibility of understanding the Islamic totalitarian movement. And we’ve witnessed those two administrations fail to defeat it. If we are to succeed at that goal, a crucial first step is to understand the enemy we face.

We need to grasp that while Islamic totalitarianism is a multiform movement, it is fundamentally united by its religious doctrine and vicious goal. Only then can we fully understand Brussels and Lahore and Paris and Ankara and San Bernardino and Beirut, and the long, bloody trail of jihad. Only then can we grasp the scope of the Islamist menace and effectively combat it, bringing into focus the need to confront the states that inspire and sponsor it.

About The Author

Elan Journo

Senior Fellow and Vice President of Content Products, Ayn Rand Institute

We’ve all heard that the American Dream is vanishing and that the cause is rising income inequality. We’re told that we need to fight inequality through tax hikes, wealth redistribution schemes and a far higher minimum wage. But what if that narrative is wrong? What if the real threat to the American Dream isn’t rising income inequality, but an all-out war on success?

Recorded on April, 19, 2016 at ARI Headquarters in Irvine, California.

About The Author

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

In the wake of the endless controversies surrounding Donald Trump’s campaign, it’s easy to forget that most of us rightfully pride ourselves on our opposition to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of unjust discrimination. But we rarely even discuss another prevalent form of prejudice: the demonization and dehumanization of the successful. This prejudice is central to today’s chief economic concern: the campaign against economic inequality.

Not everyone worried about our economic challenges is bigoted, of course. There are real problems we all should be concerned about, whether it’s declining opportunity (especially for those starting at the bottom), slowing economic progress, the pitiful state of education, or the political favors bestowed on some businesses.

In our new book on inequality, Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, my co-author Yaron Brook and I address those problems and many others. But whatever one’s view of our challenges, nothing can justify the way many — including presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders — are treating those who have achieved economic success.

The Double Standards for Rich People

Consider just a few of the behaviors that inequality critics apparently consider acceptable when dealing with wealthy Americans.

Collective Judgments. Virtually everyone agrees we should judge people by their actions and the content of their character, not by the (real or manufactured) sins or shortcomings of other members of whatever group they happen to belong to.

Replace ‘the rich’ with ‘Hispanics’ or ‘women’ or ‘Jews’ in that sentence, and ask yourself: isn’t this precisely the sort of prejudice we object to when it is targeted at other groups?Regarding businessmen, for example, we should condemn those who lie, cheat, and steal. But we should condemn them as individuals for their dishonest and predatory actions. By the same token, we should praise individuals who earn their wealth through ingenuity and effort—not make them pay for other people’s sins.

Yet what we hear from today’s inequality critics is across-the-board denunciations of successful businessmen. Sanders contends “the business model of Wall Street” — which employees hundreds of thousands of productive Americans — “is fraud.” A headline for a Sean McElwee article in Salon tells us “Rich white people are ruining the planet.” Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett write in their popular book The Spirit Level that “Rather than adopting an attitude of gratitude toward the rich, we need to recognize what a damaging effect they have on the social fabric.” Replace “the rich” with “Hispanics” or “women” or “Jews” in that sentence, and ask yourself: isn’t this precisely the sort of prejudice we object to when it is targeted at other groups?

Dehumanization. Prejudice encourages dehumanization — it encourages demonizing “the other” so they are seen as less than human and therefore unworthy of respect. This is precisely what inequality critics are trying to do to “the one percent.”

To take just one example, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has claimed that rich Americans are “less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder” — they are, in short, “spoiled egomaniacs.” Well, if so, what concern should we have for their rights and their dignity?

The Wealthy Are People, Too

A common myth is that you cannot be a victim of injustice unless you are powerless or disadvantaged, or that an injustice is okay if it’s aimed at someone who isn’t powerless or disadvantaged. But those are nothing more than crude rationalizations for injustice.

Isn’t it an indictment of our society when good people are treated like villains?

We need to ask ourselves: Do we really think of rich individuals as human beings? Or do we view them as cartoon villains — one-dimensional stereotypes not dissimilar to the caricatures propagated by racists, misogynists, and Jew-haters?

When I discuss unfair treatment of successful businessmen, I almost always hear comments like, “Oh, boohoo. What do the rich have to complain about? Look at everything they have!” This reflects a crass materialism, which amounts to the notion that money solves everything, and that no one can be hurt by or object to mistreatment unless he’s poor.

But have we ever stopped to ask ourselves: What if a rich individual’s dreams mean as much to him as my dreams do to me? What if he wants to be respected for his achievements the way I want to be respected for mine? What if he has made himself into a moral human being — doesn’t he deserve respect and admiration, and isn’t it an indictment of our society when good people are treated like villains?

A Cynical Justification for Government-Sponsored Injustice

Exploitation. When prejudice gets injected into the political system, it leads to the government inflicting tremendous injustices on the victims.

All of it is aimed at erasing the knowledge that economically successful individuals are human beings and that exploiting other human beings is wrong.

More and more, our political system treats economically successful Americans as resources for “society’s” desires rather than as sovereign individuals with an inalienable right to their own pursuit of happiness. Witness, for example, the plans Democratic candidates have for this country. Free health care — paid for by “the rich.” Free college — paid for by “the rich.” Larger Social Security payments — paid for by “the rich.”

Of course, these demands are supported by the claim that “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share.” Set aside the fact that affluent Americans bear the vast, vast majority of the tax burden. Do we ever so much as ask: Did they honestly earn their money? Did they gain it by dealing voluntarily with other people, through an incalculable number of win-win trades? Don’t they have a right to use their wealth to pursue their own hopes and dreams — the same way we each have the right to use our wealth to pursue our hopes and dreams?No, we don’t ask those questions. Preventing us from asking those questions is the goal of the demonization and dehumanization of “the rich.” Whether it’s President Obama dismissing individual achievement when he declares “you didn’t build that,” or Sanders claiming it is immoral for some people to prosper while others are struggling, or Barbara Ehrenreich arguing that, “To the extent that any demonization is going on, one can’t help thinking that the rich have been, perhaps inadvertently, asking for it” — all of it is aimed at erasing the knowledge that economically successful individuals are human beings and that exploiting other human beings is wrong.

Stripping the Rewards of Virtue

This is prejudice, plain and simple. What’s worse, it is not directed toward traits that have no bearing on a person’s character, it is directed at something that is in fact a moral achievement.

Business success — that is, making a profit through productive achievement, not special favors from Washington — is something that deserves our respect and admiration. As we argue in Equal Is Unfair, this kind of success is enormously difficult, and it is profoundly virtuous.

We live in an advanced technological society, and enjoy a level of wealth, health, comfort, and opportunity that our ancestors could not have dreamed of. What made it possible? The effort of producers, on every level of ability, but with the most credit going to the men and women of extraordinary ability: the inventors, entrepreneurs, and investors who drive progress — and earn a fortune in the process.

 It’s time we stopped saying “screw you” and started saying “thank you.”

About The Author

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Don’t believe doomsayers like Bernie Sanders, Joseph Stiglitz, and Paul Krugman. America is still the land of opportunity.

If you’re willing to work hard, constantly improve your skills, and hold yourself to a high standard of excellence, you can make something of yourself in this country. But that could change — if we decide to pursue an agenda of “equality of opportunity.”

Equal opportunity appeals to many people because it evokes the idea of a level playing field. We believe everyone should play by the same rules, and that no one should get special privileges at the expense of others. But the people who go around advocating equality of opportunity today often aren’t talking about a level playing field, where the laws apply equally to all.

What they mean is that we should all enjoy an equal chance of success. According to today’s leading critics of economic inequality, if a child born to loving, affluent, educated parents is more likely to achieve economic success than someone born without such advantages, that is an injustice that the government has to fight.

But is that a fight we really want the government to wage?

It would mean, first and foremost, an unprecedented program of wealth redistribution, sapping affluent parents of every honestly earned dollar they’ve made so long as it could be used to give their child a “head start” in life.

And even that wouldn’t come close to achieving equality of initial chances. To approach that goal, parents would not be allowed to provide their children with any opportunities — a better school, a better computer, a better book collection, a trip abroad — if other people’s children did not have the same opportunities.

One philosopher recently mused that it might even be wrong for parents to read to their children since it could give them an “unfair advantage” in life. And after all that, you would “still be left with the great injustice of the smart and the dumb, who are so differently rewarded for comparable effort,” complains leading egalitarian Thomas Nagel.

We can never enjoy equal opportunities. All of us are born with certain advantages and certain challenges, and our happiness depends on maximizing our advantages and overcoming our challenges.

Will the struggle upward be harder for some than for others? No question. If your parents are loving, rich, educated, and well connected, you’ll probably have an easier time building a successful life than if you’re born a poor orphan. This is one reason parents work so hard to provide their children with opportunities: opportunities matter.

But to the extent we live in a free society, even those starting out with limited opportunities can succeed — as evidenced by the remarkable success achieved by many second- (and sometimes first-) generation immigrants.

Trying to equalize opportunities would really mean destroying opportunities. You can’t make parents equally affluent — but you can make them equally impoverished. You can’t make children equally intelligent — but you can throttle the intelligent. You cannot level up. You can only level down. That is not only grotesquely unfair to those with greater opportunities, but it also comes at the expense of those with fewer opportunities.

The favorable circumstances other people enjoy can’t hold us back. Exactly the reverse is true. Part of the reason people flock to the United States is precisely because it is a land in which other people are wealthier, better educated, and more productive than in their home countries. If other people’s opportunities really held us back, then instead of foreigners immigrating to America, Americans should be immigrating to places like Mexico and India, where they would be among the wealthiest and best educated people in the country. The reason this doesn’t happen is because we know in some terms that other people’s successes are a boon to our lives — not a threat. The success of the Walton family hasn’t held anyone back—it’s created opportunities for millions to buy affordable products (and to find employment).

The real source of a level playing field is not economic equality but freedom. In a free society, no one can use the power of the government to gain special privileges that hold us back or exploit us. We all have the liberty to rise by means of our own thought and effort, regardless of where we start.

About The Author

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

When Thomas Piketty published his tome on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he pronounced it inevitable that wealth inequality would grow. What he didn’t explain in any depth was why — even if his thesis were true — we should care.

In a book that runs more than 600 pages, the most Piketty could muster was the worry that wealth will collect in the hands of heirs rather than first-generation entrepreneurs, and consequently “undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”

Solution? Confiscatory inheritance taxes that will swallow up 70 percent to 80 percent of what affluent parents want to leave to their heirs. And it’s that “solution” that should frighten us — not wealth inequality.

Most Americans don’t care about economic inequality per se, but even those who believe that successful wealth creators deserve their fortunes are often suspicious of inherited wealth. It seems unfair for people to benefit from a fortune they haven’t earned.

But a person can have a right to much more than what he has earned. If a person enters a sweepstakes and wins a car, he hasn’t earned it in the sense that he earns his paycheck. But he gained it through a perfectly fair process, and it would be just as wrong for a thief to steal his car as it would be to steal yours. The salient point is that the car offered in the sweepstakes was earned — it was earned by whoever is giving the prize when they bought the car with their own money. They have every right to dispose of their property as they see fit.

The same goes double for inheritances. It is the parents who earned the wealth through their productive efforts, and to prevent them from turning it over to an heir is a monstrous violation of their rights. One of the reasons many parents work so hard is so they can pass on something to their children. If parents judge that their child merits inheriting their money after their death, denying them the freedom to pass on their wealth is no different from denying them the freedom to pay for their child’s education while they’re alive.

And when it comes to the heir, there is an important sense in which his bequest does have to be earned, as illustrated by the fact that so many once-wealthy individuals end up broke. (See 90 percent of retired athletes.) Given the dynamism of a free society, an heir who inherits a business empire will have to be able to improve upon it and outcompete innovative rivals, or else risk going broke.

Even an heir who decides to live off investments has to exercise judgment about how to invest his money. That, too, is a productive achievement, which helps launch new ventures, expand old ones, create new jobs, and fund new research. An inherited fortune, as much as one created from scratch, provides the fuel for economic progress.

Inheritance taxes, on the other hand, undermine investment and production. They are a tax on savings. To the entrepreneur who earns a fortune they are like a giant sign that says, “Don’t save. Spend, spend, spend!” There is nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of your labor, but by depriving successful individuals of the freedom to pass on their wealth to their heirs, it encourages them to consume their fortune even though they might prefer to invest it.

Whether their fortune gets spent on yachts, donated to charity, or seized by the government, it gets taken out of the productive economy. Less savings, less investment, less economic progress. As economist Steven Landsburg concludes, “(Y)ou don’t need rich parents to be a victim of the death tax. You don’t need to own a family business or family farm. You only need to be someone who works in a factory or shops in a grocery store or gets sick and goes to the hospital.”

For those who do own a business, especially a small, family-owned business, it’s worse. A high estate tax can leave an heir with a bill that far surpasses the business’s annual profits, forcing them to sell off the business to pay the tax.

Piketty’s prediction of a future where the ranks of the wealthy are made up mainly of heirs is factually groundless — as just one indication, less than a tenth of those who appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans in 1982 were still there in 2012. But the deeper issue is this: even if it is true that heirs haven’t earned the wealth they inherent, “society as a whole” certainly hasn’t earned it either.

Inequality alarmists like Piketty don’t want to tax inheritances because they have a deep commitment to people getting what they deserve. They are using our skepticism of inheritances to deprive people of what they own and have every right to keep. The death tax isn’t about fairness — it’s about fighting an economic inequality that they regard as inherently immoral.

About The Authors

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

From the attack on Charlie Hebdo to campus speech codes, it is clear that freedom of speech faces significant threats today. Unlike the rest of the world, America has the First Amendment to protect this right. But is the First Amendment enough?

In this talk, ARI director of legal studies Steve Simpson explains why the legal right to free speech won’t survive if people abandon free speech as a moral value. To keep this precious right, he argues, we need to convince people that free speech isn’t just something we must tolerate, but that it is a value we should embrace.

Recorded on March 22, 2016, at ARI Headquarters in Irvine, California.

About The Author

Steve Simpson

Former Director of Legal Studies (2013-2018), Ayn Rand Institute

A horrific news report from Afghanistan brings to light a wider problem afflicting the American, and Israeli, way of war — but, no, it is not what you think.   

Washington faces perpetual allegations of “war crimes” for its military conduct in Afghanistan, and Israel, in Gaza. We’re asked to believe that U.S. and Israeli forces are overly aggressive, but that picture is perversely warped. The truth is that Israel and the U.S. wage self-crippled wars. To begin to understand that phenomenon, start with that sickening tale out of Afghanistan.

The practice of turning boys into sex slaves is rife in Afghanistan, reports the New York Times, “particularly among powerful men, for whom being surrounded by young teenagers can be a mark of social status.”  But if American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan encounter that practice, they “have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases.” Why?

Washington’s turning a blind eye “is intended to maintain good relations with the Afghan police and militia units the United States has trained to fight the Taliban. It also reflects a reluctance to impose cultural values in a country where pederasty is rife.” (Emphasis added.)

Outraged at Washington’s betrayal of individual rights, some American service members pushed back against the policy. But they “have been disciplined or seen their careers ruined because they fought it”. (Read the whole story but be warned: it will turn your stomach.)

Such appeasement of an odious Afghan practice fits the pattern of Washington’s self-effacing way of war. The proper objective in Afghanistan was to defeat whatever threat the Islamists posed, by crushing them militarily. And it entailed recognizing the unwelcome necessity of civilian casualties (for which the Islamists bear full responsibility). Instead, U.S. leaders waged a supposedly compassionate war that put the needs and welfare of Afghans first — ahead of the military objective. I document how this way of war played out in my book Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism. The ultra abridged version: It was a disaster. A few illustrations:

Washington’s war planners defined lists of targets that were excluded from bombing missions. On these “no-strike” lists were cultural-religious sites, electrical plants — a host of legitimate strategic targets ruled untouchable, for fear of affronting or harming civilians. At the start of the war, American cargo planes dropped 500,000-odd Islam-compliant food packets to feed starving Afghans and, inevitably, jihadists. Bombing raids were often canceled, sacrificing the opportunity to kill Islamist fighters. The no-strike lists grew ever longer, giving the enemy more places to hide in and fight from. While handing the Islamists umpteen advantages, which they exploited, this self-crippled way of war tied the hands of American soldiers in combat zones.

That is how the Afghan war was actually conducted, because ultimately Washington believed we have no moral right to defeat the Islamists in the battlefield: the Afghan people had to come first. On that premise, who are we to assert the objective superiority of our moral values by standing in the way of Afghan men who turn boys into sex-slaves?  

Now imagine being an American soldier, witnessing an Afghan leader keeping a boy chained to a bed as a sex slave, and having to decide between complying with orders (ignore it) and doing the right thing (at minimum, speaking up). Defying orders could get you kicked out of the military and destroy your career. Contemplate the psychological toll of looking the other way and plugging your ears.

Soldiers face that same impossible choice — but with their own lives on the line — under the self-crippled rules of engagement on the battlefield. Over the last decade, I’ve met veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars at my public talks. The insanely restrictive rules of engagement are maddening, they tell me: we were supposed to go after the enemy, risking our lives, but we were made to back off, retreat, and let them fight another day. Listening to them is heartbreaking. The tragic story behind Lone Survivor, recently made into a film, is emblematic. The injustice done to them, by the irrational policy of our leaders, has yet to be acknowledged. What must that do to their morale?

Yes, it is astounding that the world’s most powerful military force actually pursued a self-crippled way of war.

But it is not alone: Israel, the Middle East’s most powerful military force, has adopted essentially the same approach. Peter Berkowitz, a legal scholar, has noted the searing irony: the U.S. and Israel are widely accused of “war crimes” but in fact both “devote untold and unprecedented hours to studying and enforcing” the customary rules of war, which enjoin the avoidance of harming noncombatants.  

Look at last year’s Gaza war. Israel’s paramount responsibility was to defend the lives of its own citizens. Morally, in defending itself, Israel’s priority must be eliminating the threat from Hamas. Hamas declares its goal of destroying Israel in no uncertain terms. It is responsible for devastating suicide bombings and, over the years, thousands of rocket attacks from Gaza against towns and cities in Israel. Yet, against this backdrop — and mirroring the U.S. way of war — Israel subordinated the objective of self-defense in the name of safeguarding civilians in a war zone.

Recall, to take just a few examples, how the Israel Defense Force dutifully went far out of its way to warn of impending strikes. It dropped thousands of leaflets in Arabic warning Gazans to avoid certain areas that may be targeted. It phoned and texted people residing in apartment blocks where a rocket is about to hit, giving them time to evacuate. Often it fired “a knock on the roof” warning rocket, before leveling the building. It aborted missions if civilians were spotted nearby the target. Hamas notoriously stashed weapons, ammunition, and missiles in private homes. And it puts rocket launchers in densely populated areas.

Just as America hamstrung its own troops and drew up no-strike lists, handing a tactical gift to Islamists in Afghanistan; so, Israel’s conduct, shaped by the same premise, benefited Hamas.

Consider another parallel. Earlier this year, members of the Knesset read aloud testimony from Israeli soldiers who fought in the 2014 Gaza war. The aim was to rebut a UN report on supposed Israeli war crimes.

“The [Israel Defense Force] followed all the rules to clear areas of civilians, but Hamas cynically forced some to stay,” MK Dani Atar (Zionist Union) said, reading the testimony of a Golani soldier. “[Palestinians] were killed by explosives they didn’t know were there that Hamas planted.”

“We lost our element of surprise, the best of our sons, to make sure we wouldn’t kill civilians that the enemy used as human shields,” he added. . . .

MK Merav Ben-Ari (Kulanu) read a testimony by Dror Dagan, who was injured while arresting a terrorist, and listened from the visitors’ gallery, sitting in his wheelchair.

“When we burst into the house and quickly scanned the rooms, the wife of the terrorist, a senior Hamas member, fainted. As a medic, I did not hesitate and started taking care of her,” Dagan wrote. “Not two minutes passed and it turned out that it was a trap. It was all pretend, a trick to gain time so the suspect could get organized.”

“I was injured, because I was taught the values of the IDF, to take care of anyone who is injured, even if it is the wife of a terrorist,” Dagan added.

The cumulative aim of the statements was to illustrate — as if further evidence were needed — the tragic lengths to which Israel went to avoid harming civilians in the war zone. It’s vital that the lies and distortions about Israeli military conduct be exposed and refuted.

But a fundamental problem common to Jerusalem and Washington is the underlying moral idea shaping their conduct of war. It is the idea that America (and Israel) ought to put their own interests last; that they must sacrifice the lives and security of their citizens to the enemies they are combatting. Both strive to conform to that prevailing norm. The more consistently they conform to it, the more they cripple their ability to engage in self-defense — the prime responsibility of a government to its citizens. The conventional norm shaping the conduct of war subverts free societies that abide by it, while enabling their enemies on the battlefield. Surely it is past time to rethink that way of war.  

About The Author

Elan Journo

Senior Fellow and Vice President of Content Products, Ayn Rand Institute