Rand: Introduction to Objectivism: Politics &
Capitalism © Susan
Fleck
1) Politics defines the principles of a proper
social system, including the proper functions of government (normative branch)
a)
Living in the right kind of society is a value to man; the wrong kind, like any wrong course of action, is a threat to man
b) Only one standard to guide a thinker in
defining the right kind: man’s code
of moral values—the principles of ethics
i) Politics rests on ethics (and thus, on
metaphysics and epistemology)
ii)
It is an application of ethics to social
questions: it is not any system’s start
or any kind of primary
(1)
What type of society conforms to or reflects the
principles of morality?—question asked by philosophical politics
(2)
Objectivist:
What type conforms to the requirements of man’s life?
(a)
What
type makes possible the virtues we have been studying? . . . represents the
supremacy of reason?
c) Basic
principle of politics is the one endorsed by U.S. Founding Fathers: individual rights
i)
Rand:
Rights are a moral concept—provides logical transition from principles guiding
an individual’s actions to principles guiding his relationship with others
(1) the
concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context
(2)
the link
between the moral code of man and the legal code of a society; between ethics
and politics
(3)
Individual rights are the means of
subordinating society to moral law
d)
Rand: A
“right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action
in a social context
i) The
opposite of acting by right is acting by permission
(such as in dictatorships)
ii)
Innocents
can be robbed or enslaved: victims’ rights are still inalienable: they remain
with victim—criminal is wrong
2) U.S.
Founding Fathers recognized one fundamental
right, which has several derivatives: Right to Life
a) means
right to sustain and protect one’s life
b) Major
derivatives: right to liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness
i)
liberty:
right to use one’s method of survival—to use one’s rational faculty to gain
knowledge and choose values
ii)
property:
man needs to create material means to his survival: this is the right to this process—to gain, to keep,
to use and to dispose of material values
iii)
happiness:
to sustain his life, man needs to be governed by a certain motive—his purpose
must be his own welfare
(1)
this is
the right to this motive—to live for one’s own
sake and fulfillment
3) Samuel
a)
contradiction:
to tell a man he has a right to life, but that he needs permission of others to
think or act, or to produce or consume, or to pursue any personal motive
without the approval of the government
4)
Right to
life, liberty, and happiness are given some lip service, but implicitly
denied by most intellectuals in the West
a)
Right to
property is regularly opposed: they claim this clashes with the very principle
of human rights
b)
Rand: modern
mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights”
versus “property rights,” as if one could exist without the other, are
making a grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body.
i)
only a
ghost can exist without material property (and no such thing as ghosts); only a
slave can work with no right to the product of his effort
ii)
their
doctrine of ‘human rights’ as superior means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others
iii)
since
the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of
the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle
iv)
Whoever
regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of “human.”
c)
There can be no right to act apart from the right to own: action requires the use of material
objects (even speaking: place)
5)
Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom
cannot exist without economic
freedom; a free mind and a free market
are corollaries
6)
Logical
validation of Objectivist Politics: Each of man’s rights has a specific source
in Objectivist ethics
a)
beneath
that, in Objectivist view of man’s metaphysical nature, which in turn rests on
Objectivist metaphysics and epistemology
b)
A proper
philosophy is an integrated system: each right
rests ultimately on all principles
which precede the issue of rights
i)
All
rights rest on the fact that man’s life is the moral standard; and on facts
that man survives by means of reason; that man is a productive being
c) Rights,
however, are not “self-evident” as the Framers claimed. They are corollaries of ethics as applied to
social organization—if one holds the proper ethics (otherwise, none of them
stands)
7)
Life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness:
the only rights treated by philosophical politics: the only ones resting directly on universal ethical principles
a)
The numerous applications and implementations
of these rights—freedom of press, trial by jury, or others detailed in the Bill
of Rights, belong to the field of philosophy of law; their validations is by way of reduction to man’s philosophic rights
b)
Right to
life (to a process of self-preservation) does not mean others must give someone food when he is
hungry, medicine when he is sick, a job when unemployed, a home when homeless
i)
Right to
property does not mean the right to be given property (money) by the
government, but to produce and earn
it
ii)
Right to
pursuit of happiness: pursuit is not
necessarily attainment—otherwise one could claim infringement of one’s right if someone withholds favors
c) Detaching
the concept of “rights” from reason and reality leads to false concepts such as
“Economic rights” and “Collective rights.”
i) “Economic
rights” in this context means a man’s right, simply by virtue of existing, to
man-made goods and services
(1)
food, clothing, home, job, education, day
care, medical care, pension
(2)
involves
a contradiction: if my right to life entails a right to your labor or its
product, you cannot have a right to liberty or property: “Free milk for part of
the population means slave labor for the rest.”
(3)
True
Economic ‘rights’ are in the form of the right to property, the right to free
association, and free trade—all aspects of liberty
ii)
“Collective
rights” means rights belonging to a group qua group—rights allegedly
independent of those possessed by the individual: we hear of special rights of
workers, farmers, consumers, the young, the old, the students, the women, the
race, the class, etc.
(1)
Spokesmen
of such groups present demands that violate legitimate rights, either of
individuals outside the group and/or of those inside it: demands range from
financial favors to special powers or privileges
(2)
Rand: A
group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a
free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its
members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement . . . merely the application of these
individual rights to a specific undertaking. . . . (e.g. unions)
d)
Rights can be violated only by the use of
physical force: The protection of
rights involves a single function: protecting the innocent from such action.
This follows from ethics—the moral
evil of initiating physical force (that negates victim’s mind)
i)
An
individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men’s irrationality,
dishonesty, injustice; he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices
of someone he had once trusted or loved
(1)
as long
as his property is not expropriated and he remains unmolested physically, the
damage is essentially spiritual, not physical: the victim alone has the power
and responsibility of healing his mental wounds
(a)
he
remains free: free to think, to learn from experiences, to look elsewhere for
human relationships
(b)
he
remains free to continue, or start afresh, pursuing his happiness
(c)
only the
crime of force is able to render its victim helpless: moral responsibility of
organized society lies in a single obligation: to banish this crime—to protect
individual rights
ii) Reason
has one and only one social
requirement: freedom—such is the essence of the case for man’s rights
(1)
Metaphysically,
the individual is sovereign (a being of self-made soul)
(2)
Ethically,
he is obligated to live as a sovereign (as an independent egoist)
(3)
Politically,
he must be able to act as a sovereign
e) Rand:
The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law
of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights
are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival.
If man is to live on earth, it is right
for him to use his mind, it is right
to act on his own free judgment, it is right
to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is
his purpose, he has a right to live
as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.
i)
Primacy-of-existence orientation: The world, including man, is a certain way; therefore, if man
wishes to survive, he must act accordingly
ii) An
“individualist” social system is one that upholds individual rights
iii)
In the social subjectivist view: the source
of rights is the feelings or laws of the group: this represents an explicit
denial of rights—man’s rights are nothing but permissions granted to him
(temporarily) by other men
f) Philosophical
competitor of individualism is collectivism: an application to politics of the
ethics of altruism
i)
Man
exists only to serve other men (the “collective”); individual rights are a myth
ii)
the group is the unit of value and the
bearer of sovereignty
iii)
Problem
with this view: no one can turn man into a cog of society; not into a thinking cog
(1)
Man’s
mind must be destroyed in any attempt to accomplish such a society
(2)
Like any form of irrationality, a
collectivist system is necessarily self-defeating—no matter what its specific policies or leaders—evil is impotent in
every version and in every field, politics included
(a)
victims
of Marx, without understanding or ideology, fleeing to some form of market economy
(to freedom)
8) Government
as an Agency to Protect Rights: Force can be stopped only by force
a)
Citizens
must create an agency with the power to do this job: this agency is the government
b)
Rand: A government is an institution that
holds the exclusive power to enforce
certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.
c)
Gov’t is
a social creation; “society” consists of individuals: Any powers of
government must derive from those individuals
i)
proper society: government is the servant of
citizens, not their ruler; specifically,
it is the agent of man’s self-defense
ii)
It has a
single power, inherent if the individual’s right to life: power to use
force in retaliation against those
persons (or nations) who start its use.
(1) By
its nature, government has a monopoly on the use of force: individuals agree to
delegate their right to self-defense and the right to retaliate after crimes
are committed—to police, to judges, to armed forces
(a)
Individuals use force only in emergencies before police can be summoned
(b)
the use of
force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another
(c)
without
such delegation, every person would need to live and work armed and ready for
possible trouble; or would form packs, or gangs—peaceful coexistence among men
would be impossible (as is so with gangs)
9)
Freedom requires a government of objective
laws: objective in regard to their
validation and, therefore, their interpretation
a)
A proper
society must remove the retaliatory use of force methodically from the realm of
whim
i)
Every aspect
of such use must be defined, validated, codified: under what conditions force
can be employed, by whom, against whom, in what forms, to what extent. Rand:
this requires---
(1)
objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it
(2)
objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures
(a)
Men who
attempt to prosecute crimes without such rules are a lynch mob
b)
The
individual is able to know, prior to action, whether or not the law forbids it
and what are consequences of disobedience
c)
Meaning
of laws is independent of the claims of any interpreter—it can be grasped from
statement of the law itself
i)
Laws
that are not defined in terms of specific
physical acts are not valid objective
laws—e.g., laws against--
(1)
blasphemy,
obscenity, immorality, restraint of trade, unfair profits
(2)
Even
when the terms are philosophically
definable, it is not possible to know from statement of the law what existential acts are forbidden: Men are
reduced to guessing what was in the
legislator(s) mind(s)
(3)
In
practice, meaning of such laws is decided arbitrarily, on a case-by-case basis
(case precedence vs. constitution)
(a)
decided
by tyrants, bureaucrats, or judges, according to methods that no one, including
the interpreters, can define or predict
d)
Some
laws are objectively definable but are indefensible; e.g. a law forbidding the
sale of alcoholic beverages
i)
Such a
law must ultimately rely on a nonobjective standard of ethics such as the
“public welfare”
(1)
Thus the
law is nonobjective at its core
ii)
Only
objective laws that confines legislation to the protection of rights are
defensible
e)
Totalitarian
theorists and leaders understand this—they insist on nonobjective legal codes:
their goal—to inculcate servility
i)
citizens
spend their lives trying to anticipate the government’s next whim: a potent
method of breaking men’s spirit
10) Need
for a government of objective laws extends beyond the issue of stopping
criminals (or other nation aggressors)
a)
Even if
every citizen were completely virtuous, disagreements among men would still be
possible
i)
Man is
not omniscient or infallible: contracts can be made, yet one or more parties
may fail to understand the terms
(1)
People
take actions honestly believing justice is on their side, while others honestly
believe those actions violate their rights
b) Immense
field of civil law indicates the range and kinds of disagreements possible to
non-criminals
i) An
essential function of government: the
protection and enforcement of contracts, including the resolution of disputes
ii)
Here,
too, government acts to defend men’s rights and thus to prevent any arbitrary
use of physical force
iii)
Rand:
proper civil courts are the most
crucial need of a peaceful society: Criminals are a small minority, but
contractual protection for honest undertakings is a daily necessity of
civilized life
11) Government’s
purpose to bar men’s use of physical
force against others entails only three
functions
a)
The police,
to protect men from criminals
b)
The armed
services, to protect men from foreign invaders
c)
The law
courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws
d) Any
other additional function would have to involve the government initiating force
against innocent citizens
i)
Such a
government acts not as man’s protector, but as a criminal
ii)
Government is inherently negative: The power of force is the power of destruction,
not of creation
(1) It
should be used only to destroy
destruction
(2)
For
society to inject this power into any
creative realm, spiritual or material, is a lethal contradiction
(3)
The state must not intervene in the
intellectual or moral life of its citizens: it has no standards to uphold and no benefits to confer in regard to
education, literature, art, science, sex, or philosophy
(a)
Its
function is to protect freedom, not truth or virtue
(b)
If the
agency with a monopoly on coercion undertakes to enforce ideas, it becomes the enemy, not the protector, of the free mind
and thus loses its moral basis for existing
(c)
The goal
of a proper society is not to compel
truth or virtue (which would be a contradiction in terms), but to make them possible—by ensuring that men are left
free
(4) For
same reason, the state must not intervene in another aspect of intellectual
life: the realm of production and trade
(a) It
must not undertake to provide men
with economic standards or benefits
(i)
It protects
against thieves, swindlers, and killers, not from reality or the need to create
one’s values by one’s own mind and labor
(ii)
Politicians
must have nothing to do with production or distribution: they may not build,
manage, or regulate schools, hospitals, utilities, roads, parks, post offices,
railroads, steel mills, banks, etc.
1. nor
may they hand out subsidies, franchises, tariff protection, social insurance,
minimum-living standards, minimum-wage laws, parity laws for farmers,
fair-price laws, etc.
(b)
No one but
the creator may dispose of the products of his thought or determine the process
of creating them and distributing them
12) In a
proper society, citizens have rights, but the government does not: it acts by
permission, as expressed in a written constitution that limits public officials
to defined functions and procedures
a) First
and best example was the original American system with its brilliantly
ingenious mechanism of checks and balances
i)
Its purpose was to protect the individual from two potential tyrants: the
government and the mob—to thwart
both the power lust of an aspiring dictator and any momentary, corrupt passion
on the part of the general public
ii) A
Republic not a Democracy: A full democracy means a system of unlimited majority
rule--
(1)
unlimited
means unrestricted by individual rights: such an approach is not a form of
freedom, but of collectivism
(2)
A
Republic is a system restricted to the protection of rights: majority rule
applies only to some details (live voting for certain personnel)—Rights,
however, remain an absolute
(a)
Rights—the
principles governing the government are not subject to vote
(b)
“consent of the governed” does not mean that
the citizens can delegate powers they do not posses; not that anything to which the governed consent is thereby proper or a
proper function of government
iii)
Source
of a government’s power is not arbitrary consent, but rational consent, based on an objective principle: the rights of
man
13) Statism
as the Politics of Unreason: any system that concentrates its power in the
state at the expense of individual freedom
a)
theocracy,
absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism,
‘unadorned’ dictatorship
i)
variants
differ on matters of form, tactics, and/or ideology
(1)
Some
nationalize means of production—others allow façade of private ownership but
give the state control over the use and disposal of property
(2)
Some
invoke social subjectivism, citing the needs of the race, the nation, the
class, “mankind”
(3)
Some
rulers oversee subjects’ every more; others allow men a long leash—one that can
be reined in at will
b)
Essence
of their policy is the same: war against man—against his mind, body, and
property alike
i)
Result
of such war has always been the manufacture of corpses: an expression, in
negative terms, of the principle that freedom is the social requirement of
man’s tool of survival
ii) History
of Russia, China, Germany, Iran—by now, one should understand the philosophy,
the cause, and the effect of statism
14)
System that rules the West today: Middle-of-the-roaders in politics: union
of individualism and statism: the mixed
economy
a)
A mixture of freedom and controls: defenders argue, rejects absolutes and
offers ‘best of both worlds’
i)
It
combines self-interest and duty
(1)
independence
for the individual and compulsion in service of a higher cause
(2)
private property as engine of production and
a compassionate government to
regulate the producers and redistribute their products
b)
Theory of the mixed economy is a blatant
contradiction: It advocates rights
and no rights
i)
an
unphilosophical, unprincipled approach
to political questions:
(1) How
is a “mixed” society to determine its proper course in any given issue?
(2)
How is
it to know when to respect rights and when to infringe them?
(3)
In the
absence of principle, men act without knowledge or vision: they act short-range
and by feeling—their own or their
gang’s—guessing case by case what policy will “work” at the present time
(a) This
spectacle is what people now call “pressure-group warfare”
(b)
act by feeling about what is “too much
selfishness”
(4)
Solution
offered by our press and politicians: imperative
no matter what the claims: Don’t’ be rigid—compromise
c)
Theory
of mixed economy rests on the philosophy of pragmatism (subjectivism and
intrinsicism)
i)
causes
men to disdain principles—it leads in politics to eclecticism: attempt to
combine in one system essentials taken from contradictory approaches
(1) Subjectivist
pragmatists assert any social demand that wells up from their subconscious or
subculture
(a)
they specialize in manufacturing false rights: everyone is entitled to a satisfying job; better
medical care, education, TV programs; obscenity-free library; evolution-free
curriculum, sodomy-free bedroom, abortion-free hospital; etc. –therefore,
“government ought to pass a law”
d)
As
virtue of integrity tells us, compromise between good and evil leads to the
triumph of evil—applies to every field of human action, politics included
i)
If one believes that individual rights may be
overridden by government sometimes—when the public welfare (or God)
necessitates it—then one has conceded that rights are not inalienable, but are conditional
on requirements of a higher value: man exists not by right, but by the
permission of society or God
(1)
principle
of rights are thrown out in favor of the principle of statism—which wins out in
practice
e)
Within
limits, the course of a mixed economy is erratic: a country may waver between
freer and more controlled periods
i)
it may
reach ultimate outcome slowly or rapidly—but nature of outcome is unaffected if
statist elements are not rejected in
principle and repealed in total
(1) The
economic mechanism ensuring a result
of statism: principle that controls
necessitate further controls
ii) History
of the West in past century demonstrates that the mixed economy is not a “third
way” between capitalism and socialism—it is merely a transition stage,
careening from freedom to dictatorship
f) Usually
calls for more controls are not
originated by the general public (people who are busy earning a living), but by
two groups of intellectuals. In America these groups are called “liberals” (now
“progressives”) and “conservatives”
i)
Both are
opposed to capitalism; both endorse a highly controlled stage of the mixed
economy; both reject the principle of individual rights
ii) Liberals
tend to advocate intellectual freedom, while demanding economic controls
iii)
Conservatives, though they endorse some
economic controls, tend to advocate economic freedom, while demanding
government controls in all the crucial intellectual and moral realms
iv) Both,
then subscribe to and reflect the mind-body dichotomy
(1)
Conservatives, whose roots lie in religion, are what Rand calls “mystics of spirit”
(2)
Liberals, whose roots lie in Marxism, are “mystics of muscle”
(3)
Is it a
paradox that spiritualists advocate economic freedom, while the materialists
advocate intellectual freedom?
(a)
Rand:
each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important
(b)
. . .
each grants freedom only to the activities it despises
(c)
. . .
neither camp holds freedom as a value.
(d)
The
conservatives want to rule man’s consciousness; the liberals, his body
v)
Conservatives
pretend to be defenders of “free enterprise” or “the American way of life”
while spreading opposite ideas and laws: they are the more harmful since they
purport to be fighting “big government”
(1)
they are
the main source of political confusion in the public mind: they give people the
illusion of an electoral alternative—thus the statist drift proceeds unchecked
and unchallenged
(2)
From the
Sherman Act, to Herbert Hoover, to the Bush Administration—government has
gotten ‘bigger and badder’
(3)
In
philosophic terms, “conservative” here subsumes any “rightist” who attempts to tie the politics of the
Founding Fathers to unreason in any
form
(a)
e.g.--whether
he is a Protestant fundamentalist, a Catholic invoking Papal dogma,
(b)
a
libertarian invoking anarchism, a Southerner invoking racism,
(c)
or a
Republican invoking “states rights (a man seeking fifty tyrannies instead of
one)
vi) Objectivists
are not “conservatives”—they do not seek to preserve the present system, but to
change it at the root
(1)
In the literal sense of the word,
Objectivists are radicals—radicals
for freedom, radicals for man’s rights, radicals for capitalism: No choice in
this matter because, in philosophy, Objectivists are radicals for reason.
15)
Capitalism: Politics is to economics as mind is to body: The right political system includes the right economic system.
a)
Morality
determines politics as its application to organized human interaction; politics
then determines economics, as its
application to the field of production and trade
i)
Purpose
of science of economics is to identify how the principles of a proper politics
actually work out in regard to men’s productive life; and what happens to
production under an improper system
(1)
Morality
and proper politics tells us that man has the right to property
(2)
An
economist should answer questions about the economy by completing the case for
man’s rights—by showing that, here as elsewhere, the moral is the practical
(3)
Hierarchically,
science of economics is a derivative which succeeds philosophy; since economics
presupposes politics, it also presupposes morality (ethics)—beneath that,
metaphysics and epistemology
(a)
Economics
cannot alter philosophic truths—without the right philosophy, an economist can
neither identify economic laws nor predict a country’s long-range economic future
(4)
Despite
intimate relationship to philosophy, economics is not a part of philosophy (in
college subject matter)—its concern is not universal principles of human
action, but a specialized subject matter—as if divorced from Reality
(5)
What
philosophic and moral principles does
the capitalist system embody? What is the effect of the system on man’s life?
(a)
Flaws in
classical economics (
(i)
Capitalism
is not perishing from such flaws in those theories—it is perishing from the
absence of a rational philosophy
(b)
Like a
body without a mind, science of economics is worthless and impossible apart
from philosophy
b) Capitalism
as the Only Moral Social System
i)
Rand:
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights,
including property rights, in which all property is privately owned
(1)
definition
in terms of fundamentals, not of
consequences: it may not be defined
as “system of competition”
(a)
Competition
for power and wealth exists in most societies, including totalitarian ones
(b)
Capitalism
involves a unique form of competition, along with other desirable social
features—but all of them flow from a single root cause: freedom
(2)
Under
capitalism, state and economics are separated just as state and church are separated
and for same reasons.
(a)
Producers
must obey the criminal law, uphold contractual agreements, and abide by
decisions of courts
(i)
Otherwise,
the policy of the government is: hands off! Term “laissez-faire capitalism” is a
redundancy
(b)
Capitalism
is the system of Laissez-faire—it is
not the mixture of political opposites that now rules the West
(i)
In a
free market, there are no government controls over the economy—men act and
interact voluntarily, by individual choice and free trade
(3) Historically,
pure capitalism has never existed—it was approached during the period of the
Industrial Revolution, with best example as America in the 19th
century
(4)
A free
market is a corollary of a free mind—a free mind is a corollary of a free
market—every other social system clashes with every essential aspect of the
mind’s function
ii) Identifying
relationships between capitalism and most important expressions of rationality
covered in Ethics—the six derivative virtues and the principle of egoism
(1) Independence:
man’s primary orientation to reality, not to other men
(a)
A man
yoked by law to decisions of others must place people first in mental
hierarchy, above reason & reality
(i)
others
become his means of survival—controlling his material tools, the means of
production
(ii)
the
man-made (laws and controls) replace conformity to the metaphysically given—the
man-made sets the terms of behavior—the rulers demand obedience at the point of
a gun
(iii)
Degrees
are irrelevant here: From the moment of a free society’s first conscious breach
of individual rights, the principle of independence has been dropped in favor
of the principle of social conformity
1.
The
arena open to independence starts to shrink and goes on shrinking—barring a fundamental change in the society’s
philosophy
2.
Either
independence, like every other virtue, is upheld as an absolute or not at
all—the only system that can uphold
it as an absolute is the one that respects freedom as an absolute
(b)
Intellectually,
independence requires that one form one’s own judgments
(i)
A paternalistic society accepts the opposite
premise: men are incompetent to think for themselves—the government will do the thinking for them, by defining the right
ideas and behavioral standards—then sending out the appropriate enforcement
squads
1.
the food police, the green police, the safety
police, the rent-control police, etc. etc.
(c)
Materially,
independence requires that one support himself by the work of his own mind
(i)
presupposes
a political system without government favors or favorites—without looters,
moochers, rulers
1.
Character
of rulers is irrelevant: no moral or practical difference whether kind or cruel
(ii) “responsible”
planners running a socialist economy have to set terms for legitimate use of
public property
1.
must
define men’s permissible course of thought and action
2. specify
scientific theories worthy of laboratory research; inventions worthy of
economic investment; art worthy of public funding; men worthy of employment and
promotion in every field; what can be taught in public schools, etc.
3.
planning
in a semisocialistic country: what companies to invest public (tax) funds
(Solyndra example)
a.
study
volumes of regulations issued by Washington—defining what businessmen, physicians,
educators, et al. must, can, and cannot do when they spend federal funds
(iii) if
planners not responsible or rational—decrees and regulations according to whim
of moment
(d) Throughout
history, great innovators flourished in the freer periods—contrast:
(i)
freer
cities of ancient Greece with stagnation across millennia of theocracy of
ancient Egypt
(ii)
progress
of Renaissance with retrogression under Church & Kings’ rule in the Middle
ages
(iii)
wealth
from blossoming of Industrial Revolution during 19th century with Marxism,
Nazism, Facism, wars, Socialism, Progressivism, Conservativism, Religious
Dictatorships of 20th century
(iv) Best
evidence: “brain drain” as scientists and intellectuals (and others) fled to
the United States
1.
Within
the U.S. now, a similar flight—away from “almost fully socialized” fields like
manufacturing and medicine to the less controlled professions
(e)
Individualism
and independence rise and fall together: Any other politics represents
opposite—form of slavery
(2) Justice:
the virtue of judging men morally and of granting to each that which he
deserves
(a)
Moral
judgment by the individual is intolerable to the statist. Authorities must have
men who will obey them in all matters, including human interaction and
association
(b) Politicians
of a mixed economy count on pressure groups who will compromise: to praise, blame, “negotiate,” or stay
neutral, according to requirements of “the community” (2021 – WOKENESS)
(i)
Regarding
self-protection garnered by justice, by one’s own judgments: Politicians
answer—since the government educates
the citizens morally, it thereby assures everyone’s well-being
1.
or, go
further and claim it is wrong to consider one’s own well-being at all (“selfish”)—one must love one’s fellow beings
(no matter how hurtful) because they are the moral beneficiary for whose sake
the individual is living and toiling
(c)
An
individual under freedom chooses his own actions, his own career—he is
responsible for choices
(i)
Man
under compulsion cannot be held responsible
(d)
Just man
seeks and grants the earned, both in spirit and in matter: essential rule is
the Trader Principle
(i)
Trade
assumes voluntary exchange of values;
you do not “trade” your wallet to a hold-up man in exchange for him letting you
flee for your life
(ii)
It
requires a government that is forbidden to emulate hold-up men (force in areas
of economics)
(iii)
Free-market
system—every man must pay his own way—he can claim from others only what he has
earned, as judged by the parties’
mutual, uncoerced evaluations
1.
To the
nonearners and nontraders—the system is fully as “cruel” (i.e., as just) as its
enemies say
2.
It
offers people no alibis, no welfare workers, no booty
3.
No man’s
achievements or troubles, whatever their nature or source, are assets or
liabilities belonging to other men
4.
Rand: an
end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors [or
accidents] of another
(e) Intellectuals
who claim that socialism is unjust in practice but idealistic in theory, does
not understand that injustice is the essence of its theory
(3) Productiveness:
Root of capitalism’s productiveness is that it is the system of free thought and thereby of creativity
(a)
A
creative life entails a private career chosen as a long-range purpose: this
demands an individualist politics
(i)
Privacy
without the principle of egoism to sanction it is impossible—so is a long-range
approach without freedom from interference
(ii)
No
personal career for a person whose destiny is public service—so, no chosen, sustained
course of action for a person at the mercy of clashing pressure groups (or a
dictator switching orders)
(iii)
No
purposefulness in the moral sense apart from the right to set one’s purposes, i.e., the right to the pursuit of happiness
(b)
No one
in a free society has a customer, a supplier, a job, an insurance policy, or
bank loan by force
(i)
no laws
to entrench mediocrity and bar the path of talent—every chance exists for the
innovator
1.
to place
on the market the work of his mind, to fight slothful opposition, to rise to
the top and be rewarded
2.
Source
of capitalism’s creativity may be described as “competition,” but it is the
kind which rests on the fact that each man is free to offer his best, and that
other producers (workers who earn money) are free to decide whether or not to
buy it
3.
The real
source, in a word, is freedom, which clears the road for the active, creative
mind
(c) Capitalism
is the system of wealth because it is
geared to requirements of the creative process
(i)
This
system has no competition in regard to the achievement of material abundance
1.
Enemies
of capitalism turn this fact into an objection:
a.
advocates
of the mind-body dichotomy say that capitalism gives too much importance to
“materialistic concerns”
b.
anti-effort
mentalities add that economic growth under capitalism is excessive
i.
complaining
that someone is always
revolutionizing the methods of production: there is never time to “rest”
c.
Both of
these objections are true in essence; capitalism is the system of this
material world, and it is, a “rat
race”—but so is life
i.
Life is
motion, one way or the other, forward or backward, in the direction of
self-preservation or of destruction
ii. Capitalism
is the forward system; it is the “progressive” system, using “progress” for
once in the literal sense!
2. Not
even Ivy League professors any longer try to pretend that dictatorship leads to
prosperity
a.
State of
a country’s freedom has always been correlated with its standard of living
(4) Integrity:
the refusal to permit a breach between thought and action
(a)
Presupposes
an individuals’ freedom in regard to both mind and body
(i)
A breach
between the two is inherent in statism—even leaving aside torture or
brainwashing—
1.
dictatorships
take over a country’s physical resources, making it impossible for an
individual to act on his mind’s conclusions
(5) Honesty:
the selfish refusal to fake reality, requires a system geared to selfishness
and to reality
(a) Under
statism, some form of faking reality is unavoidable: survival entails some
public adherence to state opinions, no matter what the pretense, flattery,
hypocrisy, or plain lying this involves
(i)
How can
one live a normal life in a
dictatorship?
(6) Pride:
the sum of the virtues, requires the moral ambitiousness of seeking to observe
every moral principle
(a)
Presupposes
a system in which moral principles can be practiced
(b)
Who can
achieve self-esteem in a system that degrades him to the status of helpless
social atom?
(7) Principle
of egoism: a requirement of life & a presupposition of rights—it is
inherent in the system of life and
rights
(a)
Under capitalism, as a mater of fundamental law, man is an end in himself
(i) He
is free to live for others if he chooses, but each is expected by the nature of
the system to be the beneficiary of his own actions: he gains values by
pursuing his own life, prosperity, and happiness
(ii)
Capitalism
rewards the pursuit of rational
self-interest
(iii) He can act irrationally under capitalism;
but he cannot run to the government for any bailout
1.
There
are no “no fault” clauses: either one adheres to nature/reality, or, in due
course, nature takes care of the matter
(b)
Capitalism
counts on the profit motive—a man’s
incentive to work in order to gain something for himself
(i)
to make
money and, if a business owner, to earn capital to be invested in new products,
expansion, etc.
1. money
is earned (just)—one pays his own way and uses for material values
2.
money
invested by business—rational, but risk-laden decisions: profit represents
success
(ii) Socialists
used to speak of “production for use” as against “production for profit”—what
they meant was “production by one man for the unearned use of another”
c) How
statists use terminology of life-sustaining virtues to defend a politics that destroys those virtues; they say--
i)
We demand a rationally planned economy, let us plan the future—while denying the social condition (freedom)
required for man to act long-range or to function rationally himself
ii)
Let us have true independence, the independence of the poor from the rich—by making necessary for everyone, rich and
poor alike, to become a second-hander (work for others, live by means of
others)
iii)
Let us protect our integrity from the seductions of the moneyed elite—by making men’s abandonment of principle a
condition of survival
iv) Give
us justice, social justice—which
consists in sacrificing Fountainheads of the world to the Roosevelts & the
Stalins
v)
Let us
have abundance for everyone—by making production
impossible
vi)
Let us
take moral pride in our species—by
enacting into law the anti-morality of sacrifice
vii)
They
tell us proudly and loudly that when they come to power, they will eradicate selfishess
(1)
This is
what they have struggled to accomplish when in power, with results on a
world-wide scale that are by now self-evident
d) Moral
justification of capitalism is not
that it serves the public—yet, this is how it is defended (wrongly)
i) Rand:
public ownership of the means of production means public ownership of the mind
ii)
Capitalism
does achieve the “public good” –but
this is an effect, not a cause; a secondary consequence
iii)
Justification
is that it is the system which implements a scientific code of morality—it
recognizes man’s metaphysical nature and needs; it is based on reason and
reality
(1)
any
group of men who lives under it and acts properly has to benefit (“public
good”)
iv) From
(1)
Individual
freedom has been defended an ethically neutral means to this end (common
Enlightenment attitude), or, after Kant, as a necessary evil
(a)
Interpretation
is that it converts the amorality of “prudence” or the “wickedness” of “greed”
into the nobility of social work
(2) They
minimize the primary cause
(egoism/freedom) and emphasize the social effect—which,
to them, is the moral primary
(3) Thus,
they find themselves drawn irresistibly to compromise—cutting back one step at
a time on the element (freedom) they regard as neutral; allowing “some
controls” and then more and still more
(4) For
the “reluctant individualist,” after a certain point, his altruism requires him to rethink the causal laws involved
(a)
he accepts the notion that egoism (“Selfishness”)
is evil—he has not understood the objective ethical cause behind the profit motive; therefore, he decides
that unrestrained capitalism “sometimes” (then “often”) hurts the “public”
(which are individual people)
(b)
John
Stuart Mill, the Utilitarian, had once been an ardent supporter of
laissez-faire. He stated: We are all socialists now.
e) Capitalism
as the System of Objectivity: it implements the right code of morality, based
on right view of metaphysics and epistemology: It is the system of virtue because it is the system of objectivity
i) Laissez-faire
does not mean that “anything goes;” in a republic, “nothing goes” that
infringes man’s rights
ii)
Objectivity
of economic value—term subsumes all
forms of price, including wages, rents, and interest rates
(1)
prices on a free market are determined by the
law of supply an demand: market
price of a product is determined by conjunction of two evaluations—by the voluntary agreement of sellers and
buyers
(a)
If
seller wants to charge $1,000 for barrel of flour, there will be no buyers; if
buyers decide to pay only a nickel, there will be no sellers
(b)
market
price is not based on arbitrary wishes but on definite mechanism: it is at once
the highest price sellers can command and the lowest price buyers can find
(quality factors being equal)
(2)
Man is
left free to judge the worth of various products—the worth to him in accordance with his own needs and goals—as he himself
understands these to apply in a particular context
(3)
Market
value thus entails valuer, purpose, beneficiary, choice, knowledge—all marks of
objective value
(4)
under
capitalism irrational men suffer the consequences: e.g. set prices too high, or
not willing to pay market value
iii) Important
distinction between two forms of the objective: philosophically objective value and socially objective
(1)
e.g. it
can be rationally proved that the works of Victor Hugo are objectively of immeasurably greater value to man (at his best) than
the true-confessions magazines.
(a)
But if a
given man’s intellectual potential can barely manage to enjoy true confessions,
there is no reason why his earnings, the produce of his effort, should be spent on books he cannot read or enjoy
(b)
or, that
his taxes should be spent on
subsidizing the airplane industry when his
own transportation needs require only a bicycle
(2)
the free
market value of goods or services does not necessarily represent their philosophically objective value, but
only their socially objective
value—the sum of the individual judgments of all the men involved in trade at a
given time; the sum of what they
valued, each in the context of his own life
iv)
Competition:
The free market is greatest of all educators: Rand—
(1)
it is a continuous process that cannot be held
still, an upward process that demands the best (most rational) of man and
rewards him accordingly
(a)
While
the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative
minority introduces the airplane: the majority learn by demonstration—the
minority is free to demonstrate
(b)
Within
every category of goods and services it is the sellers of the best product at
the cheapest prices who wins greatest financial rewards in that field
(i)
rewards
are not automatic nor immediate, but by virtue of the free market, which teaches every participant to look for
the objective best within the
category of his own competence, and penalizes those who act on irrational
considerations
(c)
If one
invests his cash in the horse and buggy while sneering at the automobile—he
loses out: the system institutionalizes, but it cannot compel, respect for
reality; men’s economic (and other) evaluations are set accordingly
(d)
The
creative minority grasps the philosophically objective value of a good or
service (e.g. personal computer), then teaches it to the public, which is
eventually lifted to the creators’ level of valuing it.
v) The
dominant view today is that economic value (like all values) is not objective,
but arbitrary:
(1) Subjectivists
claim:
(a)
Monopolists
or other “exploiters” charge any amount they feel like charging
(b)
Landlords
and bankers set rents or interest rates at whim
(c)
Employers
pay whatever niggardly wage their avarice decrees
(2)
Economic
theory and history alike prove that capitalism does not work this way: they
make clear what happens in a free market to over-chargers, under-payers, and
any other fiat-mongers—they lose their customers, their workers, and ultimately
their shirts
(a)
Subjectivists,
cannot acknowledge any such proof—they do not acknowledge the possibility of
consciousness perceiving existence—cannot accept the possibility of an objective economy
(3) Standard
cure for capitalism’s “arbitrary prices:” Government must legislate an inherently “fair price” independent of
market conditions—this is intrinsicism
posing as the solution to subjectivism
(a) Fairness
doctrine applies to “minimum wages,” “fair taxes,” “fair rent,” etc.
(i)
“Fairness” (justice) in an economic context
means free trade—the government under capitalism does not legislate prices; it
does not legislate any
value-judgments, economic or otherwise
(b)
To
determine the intrinsic “fair” value,
subjectivists count on revelation,
not from God, but from the caprice of politicians reacting to the caprice of
pressure groups
(i) The
subjectivist intellectual, in effect, causes people to turn in self-defense to
the intrinsicist leader, who acts as a spokesman for a different group of
subjectivists
1. This
kind of vicious circle extends far beyond the realm of politics and economics
vi)
Profit,
as well as economic value, is objective: no such thing as an intrinsically
“fair” profit, or an “excess” or “arbitrary” profit: There is only the profit
men earn
(1)
Since
material goods and services are evaluated objectively, their creators’
(long-range) compensation is equally objective
(2)
A man’s
wealth depends on two factors: his own creative achievement (knowledge and
labor), and on the choice of others to recognize it
(a)
Some
highly specialized fields do not necessarily produce wealth in relation to
knowledge and labor—e.g. the best epistemologist will never attain the market
or income available, say, to a novelist or shoe maker
(i)
Their
money, however, is not taken from him
vii) The love
of money is the root of all good—theme of Francisco’s speech in Atlas Shrugged
(1)
Have you
ever asked what is the root of money?—it is a tool of exchange, which can’t
exist unless there are good produced and men able to produce them
(a)
Such a
tool presupposes everything on which goods and their exchange depend
(b) America
is a country of money—Philosophically, this means that it is a country of
reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement
(c) Americans’
proudest distinction: created the phrase
“to make money.” No other nation used
these words before
(i) men
had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged,
inherited, shared, looted, or obtained by favor
(ii)
Americans were first to understand that
wealth has to be created. Words “to
make money” hold the essence of human
morality
(2) Like
Art and Happiness, Money (as a concept) is a kind of summation: it is a token
of an entire philosophy—a philosophy of selfishness, worldliness, and cold
calculation (rationally committed to reality).
(a) This
is why intellectuals of unreason
denounce the “almighty dollar” and why heroes of Atlas Shrugged adopt the dollar sign as their trademark: the symbol
of free trade and therefore of a free mind
(3) Under
capitalism, critics complain, the rich man has too much power: “money talks.”
So it does.
(a)
When it doesn’t, something else does.
Francisco’s money speech ends with: When money ceases to be the tool by which
men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and
guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running
out.
f) Difference
between economic power and political power: in essence the
difference is that between purchase and plunder
i)
Economic
power is the power resulting from the possession of wealth
(1)
Rand: It
is exercised by means of a positive,
by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value
(2)
It is
aimed at man’s faculty of choice (volition)
(3)
It
appeals to motivation by love (values)
ii) Political
power is power resulting from the government’s monopoly on coercion
(1) It
is exercised by means of a negative,
by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction
(2) (in
statist context) It aims to negate the faculty of choice
(3)
It motivates by fear
iii)
Those
who believe that riches are causeless, see no fundamental difference between
the two kinds of power
(1)
There is
only a difference between two kinds of whim: the businessmen’s or “the
people’s”
iv)
In a
free society, no man’s (moral) powers, however great, are a hindrance to anyone
else—they benefit others
(1)
Consider
knowledge as example: If a man enjoys “cognitive power,” he can achieve his
goals better than an ignorant person—then influence his fellow humans in a way
that ignoramuses cannot match
(a)
Does not
mean that knowledgeable men succeed by exploiting fools
(b)
The
cognitive beginner in the era of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein enjoys an
incomparably greater return for the same mental effort than his counterpart did
in the era of Ptolemy
(2) The
more wealth there is in the world, the easier it is for everyone to flourish
economically
(a)
Thus the relative riches of the poorest
Western workers, thanks to the “robber barons,” as against the standard of
living of the most industrious serf under King Louis IX
(3) Rand’s
pyramid of ability: Material products
can’t be shared, they belong to ultimate consumer—only the value of an idea can be shared with unlimited numbers of men—making
all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or loss
(a)
It is
the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the
weak
(i)
letting
them work on the jobs he created, while devoting his time to further
discoveries
(ii)
mutual
trade to mutual advantage
(b)
in
proportion to the mental energy he
spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of
his value in terms of material payment—no matter what fortune he makes
(i)
The
janitor in the factory producing that invention receives an enormous payment in
proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him.
(ii)
The same
is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability—the man at
the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him
1.
He gets
nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from
others to add to the value of his time
2.
The man
at the bottom, left to himself, may starve—contributes nothing intellectually
to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains
(c)
Such is
the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of the
intellect; such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which so many have damned
the strong
(i)
When the
strong are left free to function, everyone benefits; when they are enslaved or
regulated, everyone is doomed
(4) “Defenders”
of capitalism have been more openly irrational than its attackers
(a) Herbert
Spencer was the system’s leading 19th century champion: he spread
the notion that capitalism means death for the weak—he held that capitalism
permits only the “survival of the fittest”
(i)
during
the time that intellectuals attempted to deduce all kinds of theories, in many
different fields of knowledge, based on Darwin’s theory of evolution
(ii) since
animals survived by fighting over a limited food supply, Spencer argued in
essence, so does man
(iii) This
“defense” of laissez-faire has been more harmful than anything uttered by Marx
1.
The wrong arguments for a position are more
costly than plain silence, which at least allows a better voice to be heard if
such should speak out (as Rand did finally)
(b)
There is
no clash in a free society among any groups who choose life as their standard
(i)
The
welfare of all alike depends on the same social condition: When men’s rights
are respected and equal before the law, they are therefore equal in nature and
equal in the marketplace—they are “equal” in the sense of being free
(ii)
Under
capitalism, men enjoy “equality of opportunity” in legitimate sense of that
usually statist term: each has the right to act on his mind’s conclusions and
keep its products
1.
This is
the only “opportunity” a person needs or has any grounds to demand
g) Opposition
to Capitalism—Dependent on Bad Epistemology
i)
Moral
issue has been settled: one cannot combine the ethics of sacrifice with the
politics of individualism
(1)
If what
one wishes to practice is power lust; going “back to nature;” sacrificing the
able; and/or sacrificing everybody (egalitarianism)—then capitalism is not
practical—it represents the opposite of all such practices
ii) The
deepest root of politics is not morality, but its root, epistemology (combined with metaphysics)
(1)
Advanced topic, but here is the result: Most
anti-capitalism charges are wrong by themselves, but when presented in pairs,
we see contradictory, self-cancelling falsehoods
(a)
Capitalism
is the system of coercive monopolies—and—Capitalism is the system of cutthroat
competition
(b)
Capitalism
debases men by creating hunger—and—Capitalism subverts morality by creating
affluence
(c)
Capitalist
greed causes inflation—and—The gold
standard leads to an inadequate supply of money and credit
(d)
Capitalism
is another name for militaristic imperialism—and—Conscription (draft) is
necessary because no one would fight even a war of self-defense under a free
system
(e)
Capitalism
is hostile to invention [followed by stories about industrialists allegedly
suppressing new discoveries]—and—Capitalism leads to an intolerable rat-race of
inventions
(f)
Capitalism
is fine for the productive genius, but what about the common
man?—and—Capitalism is fine for the common man, but what about the genius?
[because a rock star makes more money than a physicist]
(g)
Capitalism
is impracticable in our complex modern world; we are too advanced—and—Capitalism
is impracticable in the undeveloped world; they are not advanced enough
(2)
Aristotelian
logic is old-fashioned these critics would say: We use a dynamic, dialectic,
and/or multi-valued approach to thought [whatever-the-heck that means]
(3)
An
honest but non-philosophical man can recognize the rising prosperity of 19th
century America; but he will not know the implication of his observation for
today’s world
(a)
He will
not know why freedom is essential to prosperity, or what freedom has to do with
man’s mind
(b)
or how
to answer the people telling him that the cause of wealth was natural
resources, government subsidies, or the unlimited frontier—that “It’s a
changing world” and that capitalism does not apply any longer
(c)
He can
see the worldwide failure of statism, but will not know how to answer those
telling him that the failure stems not from the nature of statism, but from its perversion, from the wrong leaders
or the wrong tactics—the people who claim “Our gang would do it better” [Like
the current ‘gang’ in Washington?]
(d) He
can see that something is wrong in
America, and may not even know that the system is a mixture of opposites—he is vulnerable to those who clamor that
what is wrong is that there is still too much capitalism in the country
(4) No
amount of historical, economic, journalistic data by themselves will change
men’s mind on the issue of capitalism vs. statism (mixed economy, or
socialism).
(a) The
battle for the world is not a battle between two political ideals. It is a
battle between two views of the nature of thought
(b) If
men are ever to reach a world where man is free, free not by permission but on
principle, they must first enact the cause of freedom: they must grasp and
accept the intellectual base it requires