A Passion for Liberty
Tibor R. Machan @ Rational Review
Posts tagged Obama
Column on How To Win This One in November
Feb 5th
How to Win this One in November
Tibor R. Machan
Seeing that it looks like Mitt Romney may well win the Republican nomination–though it’s too early to be sure about that–It has been a concern of freedom loving Americans whether the nod given to human individual liberty by the Tea Party back in 2010 will have staying power. When the Republicans began their primaries it looked like one or another of the champions of serious liberty, such as former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson or Texas representative Ron Paul, could either make it or at least have an influence on who will. This last is still a possibility but not very likely now. With Gingrich injecting the influence of the Beltway Republican insiders into the race and with Mitt Romney derailing any progress toward a consistent political philosophy of liberty among Republicans, prospects for repeating, let alone enhancing, the central trends represented by the Tea Party–which itself has never been fully focused on true liberty–are waning. And that is very disturbing because it looks more and more like Barack Obama has no interest whatever in individual rights, in a bona fide free society and market, or even in civil liberties. What he is after is a populist reformation of the American polity, one that will usher in democratic socialism, with its confusing “market” socialism added.
This is the politics of soft Marxism; which is to say it aims to establish a legal order that’s basically collectivist, communitarian to the core. The idea is that all Americans should be treated as one huge team lead by Obama or some similar minded politician and his or her cronies, with all property (including human labor) treated as public or social, with the serious implementation of the major step Marx and Engels identified on the road to socialism, namely, the abolition of the right to private property. The modern explication of this idea was laid out by NYU professors Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, in their book The Myth of Ownership (Oxford 2002). It is an unabashed attack on the principles of free market economics and individualism (i.e., on a system of law based on Lockean individual rights).
OK, is there any chance to nipping all this in the bud? I can only think of one way to do it, namely, to conduct a political campaign that is relentlessly focused on the threat of the loss of American liberty not just in American but around the globe. This liberty is the true hope of humanity, no the egalitarian nonsense that Obama & Co. preach. What it needed is to run an articulate, self-confident, and unapologetic campaign that emphasises the minimalist thesis of liberty as against the totalitarian thesis that all of us must be herded into a collective mass (of which the best current manifestation is North Korea).
If the Republican candidate for the presidency, or per chance someone else with sufficient support, keeps to this theme and forthrightly refuses to get entangled with side issues like illegal immigration, funding Planned Parenthood, etc., etc.–details that can easily be made to serve to distract Americans from what really is politically important–there is a chance of unseating Obama and his team in time to continue the momentum of the American revolution. The candidate to do this may not yet be in evidence but whoever it will be needs to focus clearly and be superbly articulate and intellectually competent in the effort to advance the cause of liberty.
Now Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney do not sound bad in debate and on the campaign trail but their ideas are muddled and so their leadership is seriously wanting when it comes to opposing Obama’s populist appeal. That appeal rests on phony hopes and aspirations, on false promises and on magical economics. But packaged in the cool style and rhetoric of Obama and absent competent challenge, it can continue to take the country toward a major setback on the road to realizing its destiny, the fulfillment of the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and, less exactly, the Bill of Rights. It is this mission that must be the candidate’s central purpose, put in the clearest and most informed terms that American citizens can appreciate and support. I am convinced it has a chance in November.
Column About the Cain Fracas
Nov 9th
What about the Cain Fracas?
Tibor R. Machan
I am not a devoted supporter of Herman Cain although I do find him an appealing person, someone who seems to be a straight shooter when it comes to discussing the issues facing candidates these days. But I have not committed to him in part because there are others among the Republican lineup whose views I consider much better, e.g., Gary Johnson and Ron Paul.
But the current problems Cain faces seem to warrant a few observations about the matter of the onus of proof when it comes to such “He said, she said” situations. Plainly put, Cain is accused of having harassed some women some years ago who, however, let the matter go for one or another reason. No charges have ever been filed, from what the news reports say. In one case someone who complained quit her job and received severance pay that appears to have been based on the organization’s wish not to deal with the situation any further than that. Over the years none of the women have pursued any grievance procedures until very recently when several have made claims of having been groped and such by Cain, claims that have not been proven true beyond any reasonable doubt beyond some friends of the woman saying they heard them before.
Given that Mr. Cain appears to me, from his various public presentations and discussions, to be a decent and bright enough individual, given that his candidacy is likely to pose a serious obstacle to Mr. Obama’s smooth reelection in 2012, and given the unprincipled conduct of many who support Mr. Obama–they proudly assert that they are pragmatists (who do not hold to any principles at all, thinking them all unfounded and unsupportable)–I admit to favoring Cain’s side in this controversy. “Show me,” as the state motto of Missouri states! Or “where is the beef?” And consider some of the dubious sources involved in the charges, nearly all of them in the Obama camp.
But aside from my own sentiments, there is the more important issue of who has the onus of proof here and what would such proof have to amount to in order for it to be compelling. Eye witnesses who can reasonably be taken to be impartial would work. Some kind of correspondence, emails or notes, telephone messages, etc. could strengthen the case against Mr. Cain but there are no such things in evidence here. It seems quite obviously no more than a case of some people who can reasonably be assumed to be opposed to Mr. Cain’s politics and candidacy making unsubstantiated claims that Mr. Cain had behaved in ways that amount to sexual harassment.
So what is one who has some interest in this matter to believe? Based on the tradition of due process in American criminal law and the common sense idea that when people come forth with damaging claims against others they need to make a good case in order to be taken seriously, the sensible attitude now is to leave Mr. Cain to his campaigning activities and ignore those who keep harassing him with unfounded accusations. Never mind public opinion, which is very largely driven by partisanship in the face of no solid evidence in sight. If such evidence were to emerge, one’s views may need to be updated. But not before then. For the time being Mr. Herman Cain ought not to be regarded as being guilty of any wrongdoing of the kind he is being accused of by the women, anonymous or not.
Is my suspicion that some of this is motivated by politics unreasonable? May there be some echoes of the Clarence Thomas hearings here as well–meaning that the prospect of an intelligent, likable black conservative political figure irritates liberal democrats so much that at least some of them, the more opportunistic, pragmatic types, would be willing to resort to dirty tricks to discredit such an individual? You bet you! But this is not very much more than speculation, an at least not uneducated guess.
Machan’s Archives: Equality or Diversity–a Leftist Conundrum
Nov 1st
Machan’s Archives: Equality or diversity? Which one do Leftists want? You can’t have both
by Tibor R. Machan
For the last couple or so decades the universities and colleges where I have taught–and by all accounts, most of them in the USA–have had two mutually exclusive social objectives. (Yes, Virginia, higher education is now mostly embarked upon pursuing social policies, not so much educating students.) These two are equality and diversity.
On the one hand there is a big push toward eliminating any kind of inequality in the way students are being regarded and treated. Everyone is equal, just as Barrack Obama’s Vice President Joseph Biden insisted in one of his rallying cries. As he put it in the course of a moving eulogy for his mother (according to the Associated Press), “My mother’s creed is the American creed: No one is better than you,” he said. “Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you. My parents taught us to live our faith, and to treasure our families. We learned the dignity of work, and we were told that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough.”
Of course Mr. Biden didn’t mean we are all equal today or will be tomorrow. What he meant is that in a rightly ordered world, one ruled by him and his associates, there would be total equality among human beings, on the model of, say, ants in their colony (excepting the chief ant, of course, just as this would be and has been the case with any large scale egalitarian experiment). I am not exaggerating. Just go and read Vice President Biden’s comment in full (here) and check out the many very prominently published books on the issue denouncing such dastardly inequalities, among others, as being more beautiful than someone else. Take, for example, Naomi Wolff’s The Beauty Myth from the 1980s and the recently published work of Deborah L. Rhode, The Beauty Bias (2010).
But at the same time that the push for full equality among people is carried out with official support, we also find widespread academic support for the idea of diversity –an idea that assumes, of course, that people aren’t the same at all but quite different–so our various prominent institutions must be inclusive of widely different people.
The differences at issue tend, of course, to be controversial. Some support ideological or philosophical or religious differences, so that those with different ideas, faiths, convictions and the like need all to be included. Some focus upon diversity in racial or ethnic or gender membership. Some stress differences in socio-economic status.
Whatever is the sort of diversity being considered, it is evident beyond any reasonable doubt that people are not equal by a long shot and their unequal status needs to be taken account of in how the relevant institutions–universities, high schools, clubs, corporations, etc.–are being managed, administered or governed. This is not merely a fact of life but a celebrated fact of life, given how so much of educational policy and administration is devoted to doing it justice.
One need but take account of the demographics of the United States of America, let alone the globe, in order to apprehend the underlying basis of this fact. People are not only of the same species, homo sapiens, but are at the same time individuals and members of innumerable special groups, most of them entirely legitimate (unlike, say, membership in the Ku Klux Klan or the Mafia). As a favorite social philosopher of mine, Steve Martin the very inventive and funny actor and writer, put it in the novel, The Pleasure of My Company, “People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity was interrupted only by their individual variety.”
So, on the one hand the objective is supposed to be, as VP Biden suggests, to erase all differences and render everyone equal in all important respects. On the other hand, as much of educational administrative policy suggests, diversity is to be celebrated, and the homogeneity that would be part and parcel of an egalitarian world, is to be rejected.
So then which will it be? An acknowledgment of benign human diversity or an insistence of homogenization so as to fulfill the egalitarian dream? There is no doubt about it for me: diversity is not just a fact of human life but a highly welcome one at that.
Column on Obama’s Keynesian Superstition
Sep 8th
Obama’s Keynesian Superstition
Tibor R. Machan
President Obama gave a speech on Thursday afternoon announcing the American Job Creation Act. There were numerous points that were open to criticism but before dealing with a few, it is important to state what creates jobs: Jobs are created when people who have earned an honest buck go to the market and purchase goods and services that other people need to produce. If a good many go to the market to do this, there will be many jobs, if only a few, there will be few jobs. Moreover only if the people get to choose what purchases they make in the market will the resulting jobs be more than make-belief, artificial jobs, like digging holes and filling them up again.
Mr. Obama and his team appear to believe that printing money and handing it to people who may or may not take it to the market and spend it on goods and services serves to create jobs but this is sheer superstition. It is like thinking that steroids produce healthy muscles in one’s body. Such spending is more akin to fueling artificial production–like getting a bunch of extra haircuts with phony money one has obtained from a forger. Or numerous baths or car washes–as if people had no ability to allocate their limited resources prudently but will do well by spending the phony funds (or other peoples’) on duplicate goods and services. So, bottom line: jobs are created from people spending honestly earned income, not from spending phantom income.
Now back to Mr. Obama’s address. He started by telling us all that “the millions of Americans who are watching right now do not care about politics.” Oh? Who are those millions of people who take part in primary elections, in caucuses, and in all the campaigns around election times?
Obama continues: these millions of Americans “have real life concerns,” as opposed to politics. What a thing to say for a lifelong politician. It is a strange confession, to proclaim that politics is not a real life concern. How these little asides turn out to be very revealing from a Harvard educated politician!
Obama also told us that all these Americans “know that Washington hasn’t always put their interests first.” No kidding–”hasn’t always”? How about has very, very rarely. Anyone with only a cursory familiarity with public choice theory–an idea Professors James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock developed (for which Buchanan received the Nobel Prize), in their book The Calculus of Consent (1962)–can appreciate that Obama completely understated the degree to which Washington fails to put the interests of Americans first. For one, Americans are a highly varied lot and they have zillions of interests which plainly cannot be addressed by Washington. Politicians aren’t deities, Mr. President.
Then, also, politicians are mostly busy looking out for their own interests–mostly getting reelected the next time they run for office–except when looking out for the interests of special groups and major donors that happen to further their own. So this entire line of reasoning on which it seems the president is basing his American Job Creation Act is fallacious.
Here is yet another howler from Mr. Obama: “The people in this country work hard to meet their responsibilities.” Well, some do but some don’t. Many people in America believe that they are entitled to benefits from the government simply because they exist, they have been born here, kind of like the what millions of Greek citizens evidently believe. And many believe that they are credit worthy even while being anything but. Which is to say millions of Americans have expected to be provided with loans to buy homes even though they had no idea how to pay them back or had the collateral to back them. This does not testify to what the president has claimed about the people of this country.
The entire plan of the jobs bill amounts to nothing more than artificially manufacturing jobs, from phony money, phony demand. And this doesn’t even address the issue of Mr. Obama’s favorite superstition, namely, his idea that he can somehow turn America into a showcase of green life without incurring massive expenses for this, expenses the country cannot afford. (It is interesting how Obama has avoided the subject of his giving awards to certain companies that went green big time and then went belly up!)
One could go on. Sadly if an Obama enthusiast were to come across these points they would most probably be dismissed as nothing but dirty Republican or Tea Party politics. No one of Obama’s team ever confronts the arguments–they just ridicule the people who put them forth, even demonize them.
And don’t forget the persistent rich bashing that made its appearance in this lecture just as it tends to in every other given to us by Mr. Obama or members of his team. Ok, so some rich folks are doing well even these days. So why begrudge them this? It’s like wanting to injure able bodied folks because there some some who are disabled. Disgusting. Moreover, even as a public finance, the idea of targeting the wealthy is ridiculous. If all those with over $250,000 had their money confiscated by the feds, hardly any dent would be made on the national debt, especially if one subjects the idea to more public choice analysis.
Mr. Obama, you aren’t going to make jobs and you aren’t going to do any good to most Americans apart from some of your pals in the bureaucracy with what you want to do. Take an entirely different approach, namely, remove government regulations and lower taxes for everyone and that will most likely energize the country’s economy.
Column on The Anatomy of bona fide Compromise
Aug 14th
Anatomy of the bona fide Compromise
Tibor R. Machan
On the current political front there is a lot of talk about whether to compromise on various issues, such as continuing or increasing the Keynesian economic stimulus, abortion, gay marriage, extending the debt ceiling, continuing the two–or is it three–wars America is involved in abroad, getting tough on illegal immigration, how to treat radical Muslims in the courts, etc., etc. The president’s stance, peculiarly, is urging compromise on all fronts and not sticking to any firm position based on principle but entering the discussion with a middle-of-the-road outlook.
Yet there is something basically amiss with Mr. Obama’s position and indeed with that of all those who insist that there is great virtue in compromise. The main problem is that a compromise is the outcome of discussions between those with basically different positions. So, for example, if you hold that injecting more stimulus into the American economy is a good idea and I believe that it is not, we might compromise by agreeing in the end that a bit of stimulus will be injected but not as much as promoters of the idea hope for. Thus, to take a concrete case, if Paul Krugmann of Princeton University and The New York Times believes that the government should inject massive amounts of fiat money into the economy, via public works and subsidies, and various make-work projects–one’s the free market would not fund but government officials believe might generate employment–and another economist, say Don Boudreaux of George Mason University and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review, argues for avoiding any policy of printing and spending any kind of fiat money to stimulate employment, the result of spending a modest amount of such fiat money might be a compromise.
Notice that in such a case the two sides did not enter the discussion with what the result turned out to be. Compromises, in short, are what come out of debates between people discussing what kind of public policy should be adopted. Just as the middle between two points is something that cannot be established without knowing where the beginning and the end lie, so a compromise is dependent on positions that aren’t themselves the results of compromises.
Anyone who argues like President Obama–and his cheerleaders such as CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria–that what is needed on all sides is more willingness to compromise haven’t a clear idea what a compromise is. If they did, they would start by laying out the two sides that they urge to reach a compromise and indicating what would it be given the base positions of the two sides. What is it, for example, that Krugmann and Boudreaux really want and then why should they give up their commitment to that position and go along with something else, namely, the proposed compromise the likes of Zakaria propose?
The bottom line is that in any important debate one rationally demand of the debaters that they compromise prior to the process that must preceded it, namely, the debate. Maybe in the debate one side will manage to demonstrate to the other that it’s position is better that the opposition’s. In principle this has to be a possibility. But if one starts with demanding that people who enter such debates start with compromises, one is asking for the impossible. After all, the reason people tend to have firm positions is that they believe them to be sound, to be the right solutions to problems. But because the problem faces groups of people who must come to some kind of common resolution, it is likely that they will not be able to succeed with having their firm positions accepted by all parties to the debate. So what is sensible to ask for is that everyone involved in the discussions will go slow and only accept changes if they see no other way to proceed. To put it differently, the result of a compromise is never desired by those debating issues. These results are grudgingly accepted at best and imply that neither side was successful in convincing the other of the soundness of its stance.
Bottom line is: Don’t urge people to compromise; urge them to debate seriously and intelligently. The resulting compromise will then be the best and only one that could be achieved among these people who have to make collective decisions.
