Even as a proposed truce fails, and Israel’s military is set to “intensify” retaliation against the barrage of Hamas rockets, the admonitions have started. The UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights has expressed “serious doubt” that Israel’s military strikes comply with international norms of war. But it is the laws of war themselves that must be questioned.

The international laws of war are widely esteemed as necessary to civilize warfare by limiting the humanitarian impact of armed conflict. They mandate, for example, the avoidance of harm to noncombatants and the “proportional” use of retaliatory force.

We can all agree that civilian casualties are an unwelcome fact of war, but these laws are rigged against Israel in this conflict — rigged against any free nation acting in self-defense. The more scrupulously Israel complies with these norms, the more it abets Hamas and undercuts its self-defense.

Morally, in defending itself, Israel’s priority must be eliminating the threat from Hamas. Hamas has declared 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, the laws of war enjoin Israel to practice restraint and to subordinate the objective of self-defense in the name of safeguarding civilians in a war zone.

Embracing the laws of war, the Israeli military dutifully goes far out of its way to warn of impending strikes. It drops thousands of leaflets in Arabic warning Gazans to avoid certain areas that may be targeted. It calls and texts people living in buildings where a rocket is about to hit, giving them time to evacuate. Often it fires “a knock on the roof” warning rocket, before leveling the building. It has aborted missions if civilians are spotted nearby the target.

For Hamas and allied Islamists, these Israeli measures are a tactical gift. For example, during the 2008–9 Gaza war, Hamas deliberately stashed weapons and ammunition, including Grad missiles, in private homes. And it continues to do that and to situate rocket launchers in densely populated areas. Last week, in an interview on Al-Aqsa TV, a Hamas spokesman called on Palestinians to climb to their roofs to serve as human shields against Israeli bombardment (which some Palestinians eagerly do). When a rocket lands, Hamas and its allies can stand next to corpses of its accomplices, portray them as civilians, and scream about Israeli “war crimes.”

By any rational standard, the aggressor in war is culpable for the death or injury of civilians on both sides. But the laws of war effectively push the blame from Hamas to Israel.

Or, take another principle in the laws of war: that retaliatory military force be “proportional” to the attack. Sounds sensible in the abstract, right? But it stands at odds with a free nation’s moral obligation to defend its citizens’ lives. In the name of proportionality, should Israel’s military be limited to using the same primitive, often imprecise, mortars that Hamas fires from Gaza, and nothing more? (Or: should American retaliation against Pearl Harbor have been confined to bombing precisely the same number and size Japanese warships?) The sheer fact of Israel’s military superiority casts any step it takes as presumptively disproportionate.

Compliance with the laws of war means Israel has to soften its blows, even pull its punches — and thereby, enable Hamas to continue imperiling Israeli lives.

It is a bitter but inevitable truth that, as the scholar
Peter Berkowitz has noted, the armies of Israel and the United States “devote untold and unprecedented hours to studying and enforcing the laws of war,” yet they are the most vociferously attacked for supposed violations of these norms.

Witness the UN’s notoriously tendentious Goldstone Report on the 2008–9 Gaza conflict, which lapped up Hamas allegations at face value and presumed Israel’s guilt (the lead author, Judge Richard Goldstone, later backtracked from the report). If the past is prologue, expect a replay. Following Operation Protective Edge, legions of laws-of-war enforcers at NGOs and the UN will doubtless vilify Israel (yet again) for “war crimes,” while downplaying and turning a blind eye to the heinous tactics and goal of Hamas and its allies. Already Amnesty International has demanded a UN investigation of violations of international law.

The laws of war favor the terrorist aggressors and subvert the state fighting them. None of that should surprise us, because there’s an insoluble conflict between these laws and a free nation’s moral right to self-defense. Effective self-defense means using the force necessary to defeat an aggressor. But adhering to the laws of war means a nation like Israel must fight with its own hands tied. The inevitable result? More deadly Islamist attacks on Israel.

There are of course crucial moral issues in the conduct of war. But none can be answered properly, unless we start by accepting the principle that it is the paramount responsibility of Jerusalem (and every free nation) to safeguard the lives and freedom of its citizens.

About The Author

Elan Journo

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

You know your critics are desperate when they accuse you of hypocrisy without bothering to investigate your stated principles. The desperation is especially palpable if you’ve explained how those principles apply to the very action you’re being criticized for.

So it is with Ayn Rand and Social Security.

When fans voice her moral critique of the welfare state, many opponents respond by attacking her. She collected Social Security, they say, even though she opposed the program’s very existence. What a hypocrite! But what a gift, because she’s shown that her philosophy is unlivable. Case closed.

If only real thinking were this easy.

From the archival evidence I’ve seen, Rand did collect Social Security. But isn’t it relevant that Rand argued in print for the consistency of this position, a fact any informed critic should know? We might end up disagreeing with Rand’s analysis, but doesn’t plain decency require that we first examine it? So let’s do that.

Rand morally opposes the welfare state because she’s an unwavering advocate of the individual’s moral right to his life, his liberty, his earned property, and the pursuit of his own happiness. She viewed America as putting an end to the idea that the individual must live for king, neighbor or pope. For the first time in history the individual was declared free to live for himself. It was not handouts or entitlement programs that the millions of individuals who came to America’s shores sought, but freedom. The freedom to rise as high as their minds, abilities and hard work would take them.

Rand argues that a country dedicated to individualism must oppose every “redistribution” of wealth for a simple but profound reason: it’s not our wealth to redistribute. If I walk into your garage and drive your Camry across the street to your neighbor’s garage, I haven’t redistributed our “collective” wealth, I’ve stolen yours. If I help pass a law that allows the government to “redistribute” your Camry to your neighbor, I’ve only made the situation worse by legalizing the theft.

Yet this is what programs like Social Security do. In essence, Social Security seizes the money of a young worker and gives it to an older person to pay for his retirement. This is combined with the grisly hope, falsely labeled a promise, that when this young victim reaches retirement age, there will be enough new young workers earning enough money for the government to now victimize them to pay for his retirement.

What’s moral about this? If you and I wrote a computer program to siphon a few percent from young people’s bank accounts and deposit the proceeds into the accounts of the elderly, we would be branded criminals. What makes it moral if the government does it? The fact that a lot of us voted for it? Should we say the same about Prohibition or segregation laws?

Of course, proponents of Social Security will cite eighty-year-old ladies who, through misfortune, were unable to save enough for retirement and now live off of Social Security. Conveniently unmentioned and unseen are the young victims, whose earnings were seized: the young man who can’t afford both to work and go to college, the young couple unable to put aside money for a down payment on a house, the young woman unable to save enough to start her own business.

Rand rejects the collectivist notion behind all these “redistribution” schemes: that individuals are the chess pieces of bureaucrats, who get to decide which pawns will be sacrificed and to whom. In America, each person must earn his own way. The pursuit of happiness does not guarantee you success. Those who fail, perhaps through no fault of their own, like the eighty-year-old lady, are free to seek the help of others. But there is no place for the idea, as Rand puts it, that “the misfortune of some is a mortgage on others.”

This is why Rand opposes every “redistribution” scheme of the welfare state.

Precisely because Rand views welfare programs like Social Security as legalized plunder, she thinks the only condition under which it is moral to collect Social Security is if one “regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism” (emphasis hers). The seeming contradiction that only the opponent of Social Security has the moral right to collect it dissolves, she argues, once you recognize the crucial difference between the voluntary and the coerced.

Social Security is not voluntary. Your participation is forced through payroll taxes, with no choice to opt out even if you think the program harmful to your interests. If you consider such forced “participation” unjust, as Rand does, the harm inflicted on you would only be compounded if your announcement of the program’s injustice precludes you from collecting Social Security.

This being said, your moral integrity does require that you view the funds only as (partial) restitution for all that has been taken from you by such welfare schemes and that you continue, sincerely, to oppose the welfare state.

In contrast, the advocate of Social Security on Rand’s view is not the victim but the supporter of legalized plunder, whether he realizes it or not. This fact morally disqualifies him from accepting the spoils “redistributed” by the welfare state.

Rand’s position on the welfare state is no doubt controversial. But for critics to dismiss it as hypocrisy is a confession of ignorance or worse.

Unfortunately, there exists a long history of Rand’s opponents distorting her positions to attack straw men. With Rand now so prominent in our national debate, let’s try to raise the level of conversation and discuss her actual arguments.

About The Author

Onkar Ghate

Chief Philosophy Officer and Senior Fellow, Ayn Rand Institute

In 1976, the Wall Street Journal criticized the Supreme Court for creating a “half-dead monster” out of the campaign finance laws in a seminal case called Buckley v. Valeo. The Court recognized that limiting the amount of money someone can spend to get a candidate elected necessarily limits the amount of speech they can produce, so it struck down spending limits under the First Amendment. But it split the baby, upholding limits on contributions to candidates as an allegedly minimal intrusion on First Amendment rights.

As the Wall Street Journal had predicted, the campaign finance monster continued to stalk political speech for decades to come. In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld McCain-Feingold, which prevented many groups from even mentioning a candidate near an election.

In recent years, the five conservative Justices on the Court seem to be awakening to the threat these laws pose to First Amendment rights. In Citizens United, the Court struck down a ban on political spending by corporations and unions. In this year’s McCutcheon v. FEC, the Court invalidated a limit on the aggregate amount individuals can give to all politicians. The First Amendment, under the majority’s view in these cases, protects our right to think for ourselves. Some may want to spend their own money on their own speech, others may want to work with advocacy groups, still others may want to support one or more candidates directly. In all events, the decision is theirs to make, not the government’s.

Unfortunately, these cases have only wounded campaign finance laws, and now a number of groups are trying to keep them alive by amending the Constitution. The latest proposal, authored by Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), was taken up by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Udall’s proposal would let Congress and the states limit contributions to candidates and spending by and on behalf of them. To see where this would lead, consider that the law at issue in Citizens United prevented an advocacy group from distributing a film that criticized Hillary Clinton while she was running for president. During oral arguments in the case, the government’s lawyer admitted that the logic of the law would apply to books as well.

Amending the Constitution is a long shot, and this effort will almost definitely fail. But the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices won’t be around forever, and the many people who despise the Court’s recent cases defending political speech are not going to give up. If we really want to kill off the campaign finance monster, we need to drive a stake through the wrong-headed view of free speech at its heart. This view holds freedom of speech not as an inalienable individual right — a right to say what you wish regardless of what others think — but as a kind of privilege that we exercise at the sufferance of “the public,” “society,” or “the people.”

This is the prevailing view among many intellectuals and politicians today. Justice Breyer embraced it in his dissent in the McCutcheon case, joined by his three colleagues on the left. According to Breyer, the First Amendment doesn’t just protect individuals, it also protects the “public’s interest” in having its “collective speech” matter. “Where enough money calls the tune,” according to Justice Breyer, “the general public will not be heard.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, echoed this view in his statement announcing this week’s hearing: “The Court has repeatedly used the First Amendment — not to protect the voices of all Americans, but as an instrument to amplify the voices of billionaires and corporations.”

This is a fashionable view these days — rich and powerful “special interests” are drowning out the voice of “the public,” so we need campaign finance laws to prevent them from speaking too loudly. But being fashionable doesn’t make the idea sensible or true.

After all, who is this “public” that allegedly isn’t being heard? Does it include those who run and write for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and hundreds of other publications? Broadcasters at MSNBC and Fox News? The thousands of bloggers and millions of Facebook and Twitter users who express themselves every day? Donors to politicians and advocacy groups from all political persuasions? Jaw-boning politicians? Voters? Is the problem that none of these people are being heard or that too many of them are? It’s hard to tell, since “the public” is such a fuzzy term.

The fact is, there’s no such thing as “the public.” “The people,” as an entity, doesn’t exist. Only individuals do. And unless terms like these are used to refer, literally, to every last person who lives in society — which they never are — they end up being used to refer to one group of people who supposedly has the right to use the force of law against the others.

Consider how easy it is to define “the public” as consistent with your ideological agenda. According to Harry Reid and his allies, “the public” doesn’t include the Koch brothers, whom they have attacked repeatedly as “un-American” plutocrats whose “shadowy” network of groups is trying to undermine government as we know it. Nor does it include the Tea Party groups that the IRS targeted in its investigations of nonprofits. But, in the left’s view, “the public” does include unions, environmental groups, and pretty much anyone else who supports more regulation, higher taxes, and more entitlements.

This isn’t to say that the right never plays this game as well. Republicans have certainly supported some campaign finance laws, typically to go after unions. And they invoke the “public interest” often in other areas. But that’s part of the point. The fuzzy notion of the “public interest” can be invoked to justify any restriction on speech. No one ever admits that they really want to silence people with whom they disagree, so they invoke the magic concept of “the public” to do that dirty work for them.

And make no mistake: shutting people up is the point of the campaign finance laws. Yale law professor Owen Fiss summed up the idea succinctly in his 1996 book The Irony of Free Speech. According to Fiss, the government may “have to silence the voices of some in order to hear the voices of others. Sometimes there is simply no other way.” Silencing the loudest voices is the only way to accomplish the goal of making sure “the public” gets heard over individuals.

The inevitable result of campaign finance laws is to restrict any form of speech about politics, because when faced with one restriction, people will find other ways to speak out. Limit direct contributions to candidates, and people will spend money on their own independent ads. Prevent people from saying “vote for” or “vote against” and they will criticize candidates without relying on such “express advocacy.” That’s why the “half-dead monster” the Supreme Court created in Buckley led to McCain-Feingold’s ban on even mentioning candidates. No restrictions on spending for speech can be successful unless all spending is restricted.

We can’t rely on the Supreme Court to prevent this creeping censorship forever. The solution has to come from a popular defense of free speech as a right, not a privilege. That right does not protect our “voices”; it doesn’t guarantee that we will be heard or will have as much “influence” as others. It protects our freedom to speak. Whether we are loud enough, persistent enough, or articulate enough is up to us. Fortunately, in today’s world there are many ways to amplify your voice.

Today’s effort to amend the Constitution will almost definitely fail. But tomorrow’s may not. If you value the right to speak your mind and to try to convince others to change theirs — which is the very heart of a free society — now would be a good time to start making yourself heard.

About The Author

Steve Simpson

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

Despite two years of courting by the United Auto Workers union, Volkswagen employees in Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently rejected UAW representation in a 712 to 626 vote. This is a major blow to organized labor, whose numbers are dwindling. “When you see what the UAW did in Detroit, you have to worry about what it will do here,” says Mike Burton, a leader among VW workers who opposed the union.

Burton’s distrust of the UAW reflects the broader history of union antagonism toward businesses. Unions are infamous for bogging down businesses with counterproductive work rules, damaging industries with frequent strikes, instilling an “us versus them” attitude among employees, and strong-arming employers into giving more and more raises and benefits regardless of the long-term consequences to the company.

Why can unions get away with such hostility?

Unions per se are not the problem, but it is a problem that labor laws grant unions coercive powers they wouldn’t otherwise have. If labor relations were completely voluntary, then business leaders would not be forced to submit to unreasonable demands from unions, and business leaders and employees would be protected from union interference and harassment if they choose to work in a nonunionized environment.

Today, however, the government does not protect employers from such things. Instead, it forces employers to deal with unions through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — also known as the Wagner Act. This law forces business leaders to recognize a union as an exclusive bargaining agent if the union gets enough votes, forbids them from disassociating with any union, and legally requires them to negotiate with such unions “in good faith,” as determined by National Labor Relations Board judges.

In practice, the Wagner Act allows unions to make unreasonable demands, and forces business leaders to choose between caving in to some of these demands and facing costly and time-consuming litigation. Hence, the United Steel Workers can strong-arm steelmakers into accepting work rules that require several men to complete tasks that could easily be done by one. The UAW can pressure Chrysler into reinstating employees who were fired for drinking alcohol and smoking pot on the job. The International Longshoremen’s Association — a union of dockworkers — can get away with threatening to shut down ports across the East Coast if shippers ceased paying “container royalties,” which are essentially bribes paid to union workers since the 1960s in exchange for not fighting the introduction of shipping containers. The Bakers’ Union can refuse to work out a mutually agreeable solution with Hostess, despite the dire realities of the company’s financial situation, and instead push the whole company to liquidate. For many businesses, having a union means being trapped in a relationship with a partner who can be utterly shameless about seeing how much they can get away with at your expense.

And unions wield their government-granted coercive power against employees. They can force all employees to pay union dues, even the ones who strongly object to the union’s goals, policies, and attitude. The International Association of Machinists — a union representing Boeing employees in Washington State — can try to legally forbid Boeing from giving manufacturing jobs to nonunion workers in South Carolina, by agitating for an NLRB lawsuit. The United Food and Commercial Workers can force the supermarket Giant Eagle to rescind pay raises it gave to outstanding employees, demanding they be compensated the same as those who don’t go the extra mile.

In a world in which labor relationships were completely voluntary, unions would have to work with employers if they want to be welcome in a factory, and they would have to offer values to employees if they need to retain members. But today, because the government forces businesses to deal with them, unions can get away with antagonizing employers and employees.

The rejection of the UAW in Chattanooga should prompt us to recognize how coercive labor laws can allow a union to poison relationships between business and labor.

About The Author

Doug Altner

Doug Altner was an analyst and instructor at the Ayn Rand Institute between 2011 and 2014.

We’re told that the gap between the poor and the rich has widened. Many decry the “injustice” of income and wealth inequality. But is it actually a problem and are the proposed remedies truly just? What is a fair “distribution” of income and wealth? Is “equality” a valid concept?

In this talk, Dr. Yaron Brook argues not only that the egalitarian notion of equality is inherently unjust — since it amounts to cutting down the most able, intelligent and productive — but also that laissez-faire capitalism is the real system of justice. (Recorded March 5, 2014.)

About The Author

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Is today’s government dysfunctional? Of course. But not because it can’t get things done. The problem is that it does so many things that it shouldn’t.

Happiness, prosperity and innovation aren’t gifts from politicians. They are achievements of the free human mind. We need government to protect that freedom. When it instead tramples on individual rights in pursuit of whatever politicians feel is in the public interest, it abandons defined limits and becomes an enemy of freedom and progress.

And yet, as then-Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., said in 2010, “The federal government, yes, can do almost anything in this country.”

The NSA peeks into our phone records at will. The IRS taxes away so much of our income that we effectively work more than a quarter of the year without pay. Social Security and Medicare turn seniors into government dependents.

The Federal Register, which lists federal government regulations, takes up more than 30 feet of bookshelf space, and our ever-growing regulatory regime costs us an estimated $1.5 trillion a year.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department put their antitrust cross hairs on any innovator who has the gall to make large profits. And, of course, there’s Obamacare, which nationalizes one-sixth of our economy.

Does this sound like a government that isn’t doing enough?

The question we need to ask, however, is not whether the government should do more or less, but what should it do.

For our money, that answer has already been supplied by thinkers such as Ayn Rand and the Founding Fathers.

“The sum of good government,” said Thomas Jefferson, is “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

This was the philosophy that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in history. If we want a better, brighter future, the key isn’t a more powerful government — but a free market revolution.

About The Authors

Don Watkins

Former Fellow (2006-2017), Ayn Rand Institute

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

This 75-minute lecture by Leonard Peikoff is a brief introduction to the philosophy of Objectivism. Following the lecture, Dr. Peikoff answers questions from the students. (Recorded in 1995.)

With Obamacare in shambles and President Obama proposing his newest one-year plan to fix it, Republicans are experiencing a moment of schadenfreude. That’s understandable, but focusing on the Democrats’ failures will not lead the Republicans to success. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) understands this, and he is busy trying to articulate the Republican vision for America. Unfortunately, while the senator’s fans may view him as a champion of free enterprise, Lee’s vision isn’t fundamentally different from the president’s.

We know what President Obama’s vision is. America is a welfare state in which wealth and prosperity don’t come from free individuals working hard to improve their lives and be happy. They come from society. “No single person can train all the math and science teachers,” or “build the roads and networks and research labs,” said the president in his second inaugural address. Instead, “we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.”

This is the vision of “you didn’t build that.” Everyone built it. And if everyone built it — if “one nation and one people” are responsible for it — then why should you get to keep it? We know the left’s answer: you shouldn’t. Hence, businessmen, the wealthy — the hated “1 percent” — are castigated for their wealth, taxed to the hilt, and called upon to “give back.”

It is the vision of Obamacare. When the government is making medical and insurance decisions for “one nation and one people,” why would your desire to keep your own policy matter?

For the president and his allies, the essence of America is not individualism, but a mushy form of collectivism. Did you get good grades and major in something marketable? Did you work hard for that year-end bonus? Did you risk everything to build a successful business? You didn’t earn that! You are not ultimately responsible for your success, “we” are. And as “our” agent, the government’s job is to spread the fruits of your labors throughout society in the form of taxes, subsidies, and entitlements.

So what is Sen. Lee’s vision? A ringing endorsement of the American spirit of independence and productivity? Hardly.

“The United States did not formally launch our war on poverty in 1964, but in 1776,” the senator said at a recent Heritage Foundation poverty forum. Since then it “has waged the most successful war on poverty in the history of the world” by becoming the wealthiest nation on earth.

Really? American colonists fought the most powerful nation on earth as a precursor to a mid-20th century welfare program? Would it be too much to expect a simple “you did build that” from a senator put in office by the Tea Party? Apparently so.

“For all America’s reputation for individualism and competition, our nation has from the beginning been built on a foundation of community and cooperation.” Our political system is distinctive, according to Lee, not because it recognizes that we are independent individuals, but because it assumes that we are all dependent on one another. “Freedom means ‘we’re all in this together.’ The conservative vision for America is not an Ayn Rand novel. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting, or a Frank Capra movie: a nation ‘of plain, ordinary kindness, and a little looking out for the other fellow, too.’”

In short, the essence of America is . . . togetherness?

Sen. Lee no doubt views himself as a champion of America’s founding principles. But how do his views really differ from President Obama’s? They both think America’s defining purpose is its ability to solve big social problems. They both think America’s wealth comes from some group — “community and cooperation” in the senator’s view and “one nation and one people” in the president’s. Their only dispute seems to be about how we should distribute it. Lee opposes government enforced charity and cooperation. But if you concede that wealth, success, and prosperity come from “community and cooperation” rather than individual initiative, why shouldn’t government force us to “give back”? The government would never stand by while some people stole property from others. If we really think groups produced the nation’s wealth, then it is groups that own that wealth and government should “redistribute” it. “We’re all in this together,” under Sen. Lee’s view, becomes just a conservative version of “you didn’t build that.”

Is that really what America is all about? Of course not.

America was founded on the principle that each individual has the right to live for his own sake and to pursue his own happiness. The Declaration of Independence makes this pretty clear. The purpose of government, as the Founders understood, is not to implement the grand social welfare plans of any political party, but to protect our rights.

Does individualism rule out cooperation? Obviously not, and neither Ayn Rand nor the Founders thought anything of the kind. Cooperation is hugely important in a free society. But individuals can cooperate and build communities only when they are free to think, work, and produce as individuals. And, contrary to President Obama’s view, it is only individuals who think, work, and produce; groups — which are just collections of individuals — do not. For example, Steve Jobs did not create the iPhone alone. But he was the creative spark and the driving force behind it. And everyone who worked with him was responsible for his or her own contribution as an individual. They succeeded as a group only because each was allowed to work and succeed as an individual.

So Sen. Lee has it backwards. The true foundation of America is individualism, not “community and cooperation.” And President Obama is equally wrong to claim that only groups are responsible for success because cooperation is often necessary to get things done. Individuals built this nation and created the wealth and prosperity that pulled us out of poverty. Sometimes they worked together, sometimes they worked alone. But individuals built it, and they will keep building it, only if we recognize that individuals — their initiative, their thought, and their work — are the fountainhead of all progress.

There’s a reason many tea party protestors display signs with “Who is John Galt?” or quotes by the Founders, rather than pictures of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms. They understand that what makes America great — and what separates it from all other nations — is its individualism. Ayn Rand and the Founders understood this. Maybe it’s time for all Republicans to understand it as well.

About The Authors

Steve Simpson

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

Yaron Brook

Chairman of the Board, Ayn Rand Institute

Observe any hiring center for a new Walmart and you will see thousands of individuals eager to become a Walmart associate. Many already have jobs at fast food restaurants, supermarkets, or other retail stores. LaShawn Ross, 29, worked for McDonald’s and Winn-Dixie before taking a job at a brand new Walmart in Pinellas Park, Florida. Ross aptly summarizes the sentiments of many applicants: “They are huge, so I know there is a huge amount of opportunity.”

Yet, a few pundits, policymakers, and activists insinuate that these people should not be excited, but outraged at the company for its wages—and some groups are even calling for protests on Black Friday.

Walmart “can easily afford to pay $15 an hour,” says Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley, who is also urging shoppers to “[B]oycott Walmart on the most important sales day of the year, November 29.” “Their net income was $17 billion,” says Vincent Orange, a D.C. city councilman who voted to force Walmart to pay a minimum wage of $12.50 per hour in the nation’s capital, adding, “You don’t want to share a little bit with the citizens? Come on.” OUR Walmart—a union-backed activist group—accuses the company of showing disrespect to its employees because it doesn’t pay so-called living wages.

Well, nobody has to work at Walmart if he feels underpaid or underappreciated. He can always seek another job. So why do 1.4 million Americans choose to work at Walmart, many for well under $12 per hour?

Many entry-level Walmart jobs consist of comparatively safe and non-strenuous work such as stocking shelves, working cash registers, and changing price labels. Walmart also pays competitive wages, which, for these jobs, are generally under $12 per hour, because these positions require little or no work experience or technical skills. For anyone with modest credentials, these jobs provide good work experience—experience which they can use to eventually land a higher paying job.

Listen to the critics, though, and you’ll hear Walmart portrayed as if it is holding its employees down. But in fact the company offers incredible opportunities for any hard-working, ambitious person who wants to work his way up in retail. Three out of four Walmart store managers started out as hourly associates, and those managers can earn up to $170,000 per year. Some former hourly associates, such as Patricia Curran, have worked their way up to top executive positions. Curran was named by Fortune magazine as one of the 50 most powerful women of 2006. Walmart even encourages associates to complete training courses during fully paid work time and offers raises to associates who complete these courses.

Little wonder that when Walmart opens a new store, it’s not uncommon for as many as 10,000 people to apply for just 300 jobs.

For Walmart, the pay, opportunities, and perks it offers must serve its goals for long-term growth and profitability. It offers training and development because it judges this to be good business. Such programs reward talent, motivate employees and recruit managers with extensive firsthand knowledge of store operations. With regards to wages, the company pays what it needs to in order to recruit an enormous number of competent and content associates. And it recognizes that it does not make business sense to pay more than it needs to.

This is what many Walmart critics detest: the company will not offer higher wages and benefits when it calculates that it will not be good business. According to these critics, every Walmart employee should be paid at least $12 – $15 per hour, regardless of the role he fills, regardless of whether he has the skills or experience to justify such a wage, regardless of whether he is a model employee or a slouch, regardless of how many other individuals are willing and able to do his job for less, regardless of whether raising wages will be good for the company’s bottom line. In effect, their premise is that $12+ per hour wages shouldn’t have to be earned or justified; they should be dispensed like handouts.

Walmart’s relationship with its employees is win-win. Every wage that it pays is one that the employee accepts and a large number of individuals have successfully worked their way up the retail giant. So, let’s stop attacking Walmart for paying market wages.

About The Author

Doug Altner

Doug Altner was an analyst and instructor at the Ayn Rand Institute between 2011 and 2014.

Imagine that your neighborhood is overrun by a gang. These brutes are wielding crowbars, knives, and pistols in a frenzied spree of home break-ins and mugging and murder. Now suppose the police reveal that their grand strategy for dealing with this gang is to block them from getting submachine guns — as if without such weapons, the gang would no longer bother people.

Would you sleep soundly at night?

Or would you be outraged? Of course you would, because this gang — even without more powerful weapons — is already a serious menace that must be stopped.

Now, what would you say if this ridiculous what-if scenario resembled our actual response to the very real threat from Iran?

Ever since taking U.S. embassy staff hostage in 1979, the Islamist regime in Teheran has led an international spree of bombings, hijackings, and other terrorist attacks on Americans and Westerners. Now politicians and diplomats, who put up with Iranian aggression for years, are loudly promising to block Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

On the campaign trail, for instance, the candidates debate how (i.e., with or without preconditions) they’d negotiate to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuke — on the idea that without such a weapon in Iranian hands, everything will be hunky-dory.

But the uncomfortable truth is that if the mullahs got a nuke, Iran would not suddenly undergo a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation from a friendly neighbor into a rabid enemy. Iran long ago proved itself a threat that must be stopped; a nuclear arsenal would only make it a far worse threat.

For three decades the ayatollahs of Iran have been using proxies — such as Hezbollah — to carry out murderous attacks. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps helped create and train Hezbollah, which hijacked a TWA airliner and which kidnapped and tortured to death American citizens. Iran pulled the strings behind the 1983 bomb attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon and later the barracks of U.S. Marines, killing 241 Americans. Iran also orchestrated the 1996 car bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, where 19 U.S. servicemen died.

There’s more: The 9/11 Commission found that “senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives,” and that “8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.” During the Afghanistan war, Iran welcomed fleeing al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Today, according to the U.S. military, Iran is running training camps near Teheran for Iraqi insurgents, who return to Iraq to practice and train others in their bomb-making skills. There’s also growing evidence that Iraqi insurgents get bomb technology from Iran. 

What’s going on here?

A rational assessment of Iran would have to recognize that the mullahs in Teheran have been conducting a proxy war against America. The inspiration for this war is Iran’s jihadist goal of imposing Islamic totalitarianism globally. Iran is a leading sponsor of jihadists and the self-identified role model for exporting its Islamic revolution to other countries. It is the sworn enemy of the West. We should take seriously its call to bring “Death to America!” — because it has already done so.

But too many American diplomats and commentators refuse to judge Iran. Instead, they regard its past hostility as a string of disconnected crises, unrelated to Iran’s ideological agenda. They avoid naming the nature of the regime and behave as if its acquisition of a nuclear weapon would be the decisive event. But that particular weapon — despite its power — cannot be the whole story, since we don’t worry about other countries, such as France and Britain, having nukes. The rarely admitted difference is that the regime in Iran would eagerly press the launch button.

This fear-the-weapon-not-the-killer mentality refuses to understand the threat posed by Iran right now. This view holds that only the concrete facts about Iran’s arsenal have any practical significance, while its abstract, ideological goals and character can be disregarded with impunity. But whether Iran uses one nuke, or attacks with more conventional weapons, its victims are still dead.

Our leaders’ narrow concern with Iran’s nuclear capability cannot make the regime’s longstanding hostility to America go away. Americans should face the real character and conduct of the Iranian regime, before it is too late.

About The Author

Elan Journo

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