Brick by brick

Reason links to this mildly irritating attempt at painting Rand as a “sinister” conservative. (Read both pieces. Doherty at Reason says in two paras what I say in ten.) After going on about the conservatives’ opposition to healthcare reform on the grounds of its redistributionist and socialistic nature, saying that Rand has had an influence on the movement,

In these disparate comments we can see the outlines of a coherent view of society. It expresses its opposition to redistribution not in practical terms–that taking from the rich harms the economy–but in moral absolutes, that taking from the rich is wrong. It likewise glorifies selfishness as a virtue. It denies any basis, other than raw force, for using government to reduce economic inequality. It holds people completely responsible for their own success or failure, and thus concludes that when government helps the disadvantaged, it consequently punishes virtue and rewards sloth. And it indulges the hopeful prospect that the rich will revolt against their ill treatment by going on strike, simultaneously punishing the inferiors who have exploited them while teaching them the folly of their ways.

There is another way to describe this conservative idea. It is the ideology of Ayn Rand.

trying to psycho-analyze her (psychological projection at work, perhaps),

Anne C. Heller, in her skillful life of Rand, traces the roots of Rand’s philosophy to an even earlier age. (Heller paints a more detailed and engaging portrait of Rand’s interior life, while Burns more thoroughly analyzes her ideas.) Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum’s mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that “this may have been Rand’s first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ ” (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite “sales tax” or “income tax.” The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

describing her philosophy and her strange personal life, Chait comes down to the old now-I-will-tell-you-why-you-rightists-are-horribly-wrong-in-protesting-against-redistribution argument. “Luck.”

He writes-

The economic right may believe religiously in their moral view of wealth, but we do not have to respect it as we might respect religious faith. For it does not transcend–perhaps no religion should transcend–empirical scrutiny. On the contrary, this conservative view, the Randian inversion of the Marxist worldview, rests upon a series of propositions that can be falsified by data.

Let us begin with the premise that wealth represents a sign of personal virtue–thrift, hard work, and the rest–and poverty the lack thereof. Many Republicans consider the link between income and the work ethic so self-evident that they use the terms “rich” and “hard-working” interchangeably, and likewise “poor” and “lazy.” …

A related complaint against redistribution holds that the rich earn their higher pay because of their nonstop devotion to office work…

Now, it is certainly true that working hard can increase one’s chances of growing rich. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the rich work harder than the poor. Indeed, there are many ways in which the poor work harder than the rich…Few titans of finance would care to trade their fifteen-hour day sitting in a mesh chair working out complex problems behind a computer for an eight-hour day on their feet behind a sales counter.

For conservatives, the causal connection between virtue and success is not merely ideological, it is also deeply personal…Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. “No one helped me,” she wrote, “nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me.”

But this was false. Rand spent her first months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago, which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.) She also enjoyed the great fortune of breaking into Hollywood at the moment it was exploding in size, and of bumping into DeMille. Many writers equal to her in their talents never got the chance to develop their abilities. That was not because they were bad or delinquent people. They were merely the victims of the commonplace phenomenon that Bernard Williams described as “moral luck.”

Not surprisingly, the argument that getting rich often entails a great deal of luck tends to drive conservatives to apoplexy. This spring the Cornell economist Robert Frank, writing in The New York Times, made the seemingly banal point that luck, in addition to talent and hard work, usually plays a role in an individual’s success. Frank’s blasphemy earned him an invitation on Fox News, where he would play the role of the loony liberal spitting in the face of middle-class values. The interview offers a remarkable testament to the belligerence with which conservatives cling to the mythology of heroic capitalist individualism. As the Fox host, Stuart Varney, restated Frank’s outrageous claims, a voice in the studio can actually be heard laughing off-camera. Varney treated Frank’s argument with total incredulity, offering up ripostes such as “That’s outrageous! That is outrageous!” and “That’s nonsense! That is nonsense!” Turning the topic to his own inspiring rags-to-riches tale, Varney asked: “Do you know what risk is involved in trying to work for a major American network with a British accent?”

Such arguments have been made before, and I have tackled two of them, here (the Frank one) and here.

I wish Chait would make up his mind on whether he’s attacking Republicans, or Rand, because their arguments exist on different planes altogether. Its like writing about human sexual habits and then suddenly jumping to marsupials just because both happen to be related life forms. If one is speaking about Rand, she never claimed that “wealth represents a sign of personal virtue–thrift, hard work, and the rest–and poverty the lack thereof,” or that “the rich earn their higher pay because of their nonstop devotion to office work.” Her position was much more sophisticated. She wrote in her essay “What is Capitalism?” (an extract is available from this site)

The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand; it represents the total rejection of two vicious doctrines: the tribal premise and altruism. It represents the recognition of the fact that man is not the property nor the servant of the tribe, that a man works in order to support his own life—as, by his nature, he must—that he has to be guided by his own rational self-interest, and if he wants to trade with others, he cannot expect sacrificial victims, i.e., he cannot expect to receive values without trading commensurate values in return. The sole criterion of what is commensurate, in this context, is the free, voluntary, uncoerced judgment of the traders.

The tribal mentalities attack this principle from two seemingly opposite sides: they claim that the free market is “unfair” both to the genius and to the average man. The first objection is usually expressed by a question such as: “Why should Elvis Presley make more money than Einstein?” The answer is: Because men work in order to support and enjoy their own lives—and if many men find value in Elvis Presley, they are entitled to spend their money on their own pleasure. Presley’s fortune is not taken from those who do not care for his work (I am one of them) nor from Einstein — nor does he stand in Einstein’s way—nor does Einstein lack proper recognition and support in a free society, on an appropriate intellectual level.

As to the second objection, the claim that a man of average ability suffers an “unfair” disadvantage on a free market—

…When you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you….

…The man who does no more than physical labor, consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production, and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor —the man who discovers new knowledge —is the permanent benefactor of humanity….It is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one’s sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform….

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, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And 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, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong. (Atlas Shrugged)

Curiously, Chait quotes this last paragraph (“The man at the top…damned the strong”) and argues for a page or so against the “conservative” “belief” that the world is “fair” by proving that it isn’t. And thus Rand has been disproved. There is a name for such an argument. Unfortunately, my memory fails me.

As I have said before, anyone who believes in the “world is unfair” argument in favor of redistributionism must first apply it to America. For three centuries, the country has enjoyed a standard of living higher than most of mankind. That’s patently unfair to the Africans and Asians who were not fortunate enough to discover America, or the assembly line, or computers or a thousand other ideas. The redistributionist must therefore dismantle America, brick by brick, and distribute the resultant wealth among the many poor Asians and Africans. Let them too enjoy the fruits of the “American dream.” Of course, a redistributionist whose redistributionism is tied up to his nationality won’t agree to such a scheme. But then that’s understandable. Skin a socialist and you will find a nationalist; skin a nationalist and you will find a socialist. Two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

Penance

Found a link to this perverse piece by a civil servant on “fair taxation” via a comment on Sauvik’s blog-

Classical liberals argue that governments have no right over people’s incomes and that direct taxes penalize effort, and thereby reduce economic efficiency by distorting incentives. Yet, recent research from labour economics provides ample evidence to the contrary. It has been found that the disincentive effect of higher taxes on those at higher income levels is marginal enough to be irrelevant. Further, the major share of our tax revenues goes into financing capital-intensive infrastructure investments in highways, ports, airports and so on, all of which benefit the richest disproportionately more than the poor.

On a more fundamental note, it’s now acknowledged that initial conditions—family, society and other contextual factors—which are often more luck than skill or hard work, are critical in influencing outcomes. In Outliers, Malcom Gladwell has illustrated how talent is more persistence and tenacity rather than any inherent skill, and that skill and hard work entail dollops of luck. Further, minuscule differences in performance, especially in the knowledge-based professions, translate into enormous differences in incomes. In other words, all variables being equal, it is luck that decides who stands at the foot and who at the peak of the mountain.

Considering that luck holds the trump card, economists such as Hal Varian at Google and Robert H. Frank at Cornell University have favoured a model where those at the top end of the income table pay a larger marginal tax rate to discount for the extra share of luck they have enjoyed. In other words, the luckier ones subsidize those endowed with less luck.

One by one.

* “Yet, recent research from labour economics…”
So he has refuted the “government has no right over people’s incomes” argument? Absolutely not. He is supposedly refuting the economic inefficiency argument. Philosophy, it seems, is not his forte.

* “Further, the major share of our tax revenues goes into…benefit the richest disproportionately more than the poor”
The rich are benefiting “disproportionately.” I pay for all 10 cups of tea and have the temerity to demand 2 cups for myself thereby benefiting “disproportionately.” Evil bourgeois/ capitalist pig!

* “On a more fundamental note, it’s now acknowledged that initial conditions… more luck than skill or hard work, are critical in influencing outcomes.”
I don’t acknowledge it. Some jerk-offs do. So what? If someone is lucky, he should be forced to do penance for being lucky? Be charitable because of the bounty he has received from some god? This argument is not new. It began with Rawls, and now Gladwell has provided fresh ammunition to benevolent thugs. I wrote about this line of argument here.

* “In other words, the luckier ones subsidize those endowed with less luck.”
As I write in the post I linked to, the egalitarians are huffing and puffing to equalize inequalities created by God – they are playing God. They are hell bent on equalizing outcomes, something I commented upon here. I have to take recourse to Rand here because I don’t know of any other philosopher who tackled this subject head on, a telling comment on my knowledge, or the profession of philosophy. She declared that egalitarianism is a way to create metaphysical equality by subverting the law of causality. She writes-

Egalitarianism means the belief in the equality of all men. If the word “equality” is to be taken in any serious or rational sense, the crusade for this belief is dated by about a century or more: the United States of America has made it an anachronism—by establishing a system based on the principle of individual rights. “Equality,” in a human context, is a political term: it means equality before the law, the equality of fundamental, inalienable rights which every man possesses by virtue of his birth as a human being, and which may not be infringed or abrogated by man-made institutions, such as titles of nobility or the division of men into castes established by law, with special privileges granted to some and denied to others. The rise of capitalism swept away all castes, including the institutions of aristocracy and of slavery or serfdom.

But this is not the meaning that the altruists ascribe to the word “equality.”

They turn the word into an anti-concept: they use it to mean, not political, but metaphysical equality—the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character. It is not man-made institutions, but nature, i.e., reality, that they propose to fight—by means of man-made institutions.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues. It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top—the aristocracy of non-value.

and-

The new “theory of justice” [of John Rawls] demands that men counteract the “injustice” of nature by instituting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive “those favored by nature” (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life)—and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with.

and-

Observe that . . . the egalitarians’ view of man is literally the view of a children’s fairy tale—the notion that man, before birth, is some sort of indeterminate thing, an entity without identity, something like a shapeless chunk of human clay, and that fairy godmothers proceed to grant or deny him various attributes (“favors”): intelligence, talent, beauty, rich parents, etc. These attributes are handed out “arbitrarily” (this word is preposterously inapplicable to the processes of nature), it is a “lottery” among pre-embryonic non-entities, and—the supposedly adult mentalities conclude—since a winner could not possibly have “deserved” his “good fortune,” a man does not deserve or earn anything after birth, as a human being, because he acts by means of “undeserved,” “unmerited,” “unearned” attributes. Implication: to earn something means to choose and earn your personal attributes before you exist.

—

All those people who argue on the basis of “luck” should be willing to put their money where their mouth is – Americans and Indians are “luckier” than people in most African and Asian countries. So the first thing to do is to donate, say, 50% of all tax collections to such unlucky nations. If they are not willing to be so generous, they should keep their disingenuous arguments to themselves. I guess if they knew who Bismarck was and what he said and did, they would cling to this line of his to evade such uncomfortable questions – “there is no altruism among nations.”

Nearly forty years before Gladwell wrote his irritating book and this civil servant using it to buttress his demand for “fair taxation” Rand already wrote about the ideas that motivates such people. And it all started with Rawls. The most irritating part is pointed out by Hoppe in his introduction to Rothbard’s “The Ethics of Liberty” (I dozed off after section 6 of the book and haven’t yet found the patience to continue; Rawls’ A Theory of Justice I mean.)-

In fact, Rawls, to whom the philosophy profession has in the meantime accorded the rank of the premier ethicist of our age, was the prime example of someone completely uninterested in what a human ethic must accomplish: that is, to answer the question of what I am permitted to do right now and here, given that I cannot not act as long as I am alive and awake and the means or goods which I must employ in order to do so are always scarce, such that there may be interpersonal conflicts regarding their use. Instead of answering this question, Rawls addressed an altogether different one: what rules would be agreed upon as “just” or “fair” by “parties situated behind a veil of ignorance”? Obviously, the answer to this question depends crucially on the description of the “original position” of “parties behind a veil of ignorance.” How, then, was this situation defined? According to Rawls, behind the veil of ignorance “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. . . . It is taken for granted, however, that they know the general facts about human society. They understand political affairs and the principles of economic theory; they know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology.”

[...]

As Rawls admitted with captivating frankness, he had simply “defined the original position so that we get the desired results.” Rawls’s imaginary parties had no resemblance whatsoever with human beings but were epistemological somnambulists; accordingly, his socialist-egalitarian theory of justice does not qualify as a human ethic, but something else entirely.

This man rigged his philosophical experiment!

On the subject of “equality of outcome” which is what our civil servant is after, taxation is one of the best ways to accomplish it. Grab more money from those who earn more – the bastards don’t deserve it, they are “lucky.” How … “fair.” Its here that Rand made a major mistake. She wasn’t in favor of eliminating taxation as a first step towards a free society. She wrote-

In a fully free society, taxation—or, to be exact, payment for governmental services—would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government—the police, the armed forces, the law courts—are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.

The question of how to implement the principle of voluntary government financing—how to determine the best means of applying it in practice—is a very complex one and belongs to the field of the philosophy of law. The task of political philosophy is only to establish the nature of the principle and to demonstrate that it is practicable. The choice of a specific method of implementation is more than premature today—since the principle will be practicable only in a fully free society, a society whose government has been constitutionally reduced to its proper, basic functions.

Any system of taxation that is not voluntary – if those who refuse to pay are thrown in jail, it is not a voluntary system regardless of what the IRS or the US courts say – is coercive. And eliminating coercive taxation and instituting a voluntary means of taxation is the “first” step on the way to a free society. As long as governments have the power to demand a tax, they have the power to punish people or grab their property. And that power has to be taken away – first. As Hoppe points out-

“Without justice,” Rothbard concluded as St. Augustine had before him, “the state was nothing but a band of robbers.”

No wonder any debate on taxation is always carried out in terms of “fairness” and “justice.” Even the thieves know that they need to justify their behavior to avoid being lynched.

Dystopia

From “Anthem”.

Foreword

“[S]ocial gains,” “social aims,” “social objectives” have become the daily bromides of our language. The necessity of a social justification for all activities and all existence is now taken for granted. There is no proposal outrageous enough but what its author can get a respectful hearing and approbation if he claims that in some undefined way it is for “the common good.”

Some might think—though I don’t—that nine years ago there was some excuse for men not to see the direction in which the world was going. Today, the evidence is so blatant that no excuse can be claimed by anyone any longer. Those who refuse to see it now are neither blind nor innocent.

The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!”

Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condoning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead.

They must face it, then decide whether this is what they want or not.

—

Law

So we called International 4-8818, and together we scraped the earth around the bar. Of a sudden the earth fell in before us, and we saw an old iron grill over a black hole.

International 4-8818 stepped back. But we pulled at the grill and it gave way. And then we saw iron rings as steps leading down a shaft into a darkness without bottom.

“We shall go down,” we said to International 4-8818.

“It is forbidden,” they answered.

We said: “The Council does not know of this hole, so it cannot be forbidden.”

And they answered: “Since the Council does not know of this hole, there can be no law permitting to enter it. And everything which is not permitted by law is forbidden.”

But we said: “We shall go, none the less.”

—

Happiness

Yet as we walked back to the Home of the Street Sweepers, we felt that we wanted to sing, without reason. So we were reprimanded tonight, in the dining hall, for without knowing it we had begun to sing aloud some tune we had never heard. But it is not proper to sing without reason, save at the Social Meetings.

“We are singing because we are happy,” we answered the one of the Home Council who reprimanded us.

“Indeed you are happy,” they answered. “How else can men be when they live for their brothers?”

And now, sitting here in our tunnel, we wonder about these words. It is forbidden, not to be happy. For, as it has been explained to us, men are free and the earth belongs to them; and all things on earth belong to all men; and the will of all men together is good for all; and so all men must be happy.

Yet as we stand at night in the great hall, removing our garments for sleep, we look upon our brothers and we wonder. The heads of our brothers are bowed. The eyes of our brothers are dull, and never do they look one another in the eyes. The shoulders of our brothers are hunched, and their muscles are drawn, as if their bodies were shrinking and wished to shrink out of sight. And a word steals into our mind, as we look upon our brothers, and that word is fear.

—

“Unmentionable Times” and the “Unspeakable Word”

And as we look upon the Uncharted Forest far in the night, we think of the secrets of the Unmentionable Times. And we wonder how it came to pass that these secrets were lost to the world. We have heard the legends of the great fighting, in which many men fought on one side and only a few on the other. These few were the Evil Ones and they were conquered. Then great fires raged over the land. And in these fires the Evil Ones were burned. And the fire which is called the Dawn of the Great Rebirth, was the Script Fire where all the scripts of the Evil Ones were burned, and with them all the words of the Evil Ones. Great mountains of flame stood in the squares of the Cities for three months. Then came the Great Rebirth.

The words of the Evil Ones . . . The words of the Unmentionable Times . . . What are the words which we have lost?

May the Council have mercy upon us! We had no wish to write such a question, and we knew not what we were doing till we had written it. We shall not ask this question and we shall not think it. We shall not call death upon our head.

And yet . . . And yet . . .

There is some word, one single word which is not in the language of men, but which had been. And this is the Unspeakable Word, which no men may speak nor hear. But sometimes, and it is rare, sometimes, somewhere, one among men find that word. They find it upon scraps of old manuscripts or cut into the fragments of ancient stones. But when they speak it they are put to death. There is no crime punished by death in this world, save this one crime of speaking the Unspeakable Word.

—

Consensus

We looked upon them and we laughed and said:

“Fear nothing, our brothers. There is a great power in these wires, but this power is tamed. It is yours. We give it to you.”

Still they would not move.

“We give you the power of the sky!” we cried. “We give you the key to the earth! Take it, and let us be one of you, the humblest among you. Let us all work together, and harness this power, and make it ease the toil of men. Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood our cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men!”

But they looked upon us, and suddenly we were afraid. For their eyes were still, and small, and evil.

“Our brothers!” we cried. “Have you nothing to say to us?”

Then Collective 0-0009 moved forward. They moved to the table and the others followed.

“Yes,” spoke Collective 0-0009, “we have much to say to you.”

The sound of their voice brought silence to the hall and to the beat of our heart.

“Yes,” said Collective 0-0009, “we have much to say to a wretch who have broken all the laws and who boast of their infamy! How dared you think that your mind held greater wisdom than the minds of your brothers? And if the Councils had decreed that you should be a Street Sweeper, how dared you think that you could be of greater use to men than in sweeping the streets?”

“How dared you, gutter cleaner,” spoke Fraternity 9-3452, “to hold yourself as one alone and with the thoughts of the one and not of the many?”

“You shall be burned at the stake,” said Democracy 4-6998.

“No, they shall be lashed,” said Unanimity 7-3304, “till there is nothing left under the lashes.”

“No,” said Collective 0-0009, “we cannot decide upon this, our brothers. No such crime has ever been committed, and it is not for us to judge. Nor for any small Council. We shall deliver this creature to the World Council itself and let their will be done.”

We looked upon them and we pleaded:

“Our brothers! You are right. Let the will of the Council be done upon our body. We do not care. But the light? What will you do with the light?”

Collective 0-0009 looked upon us, and they smiled.

“So you think that you have found a new power,” said Collective 0-0009. “Do all your brothers think that?”

“No,” we answered.

“What is not thought by all men cannot be true,” said Collective 0-0009.

“You have worked on this alone?” asked International 1-5537.

“Yes,” we answered.

“What is not done collectively cannot be good,” said International 1-5537.

“Many men in the Homes of the Scholars have had strange new ideas in the past,” said Solidarity 8-1164, “but when the majority of their brother Scholars voted against them, they abandoned their ideas, as all men must.”

“This box is useless,” said Alliance 6-7349.

“Should it be what they claim of it,” said Harmony 9-2642, “then it would bring ruin to the Department of Candles. The Candle is a great boon to mankind, as approved by all men. Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one.”

“This would wreck the Plans of the World Council,” said Unanimity 2-9913, “and without the Plans of the World Council the sun cannot rise. It took fifty years to secure the approval of all the Councils for the Candle, and to decide upon the number needed, and to re-fit the Plans so as to make candles instead of torches. This touched upon thousands and thousands of men working in scores of States. We cannot alter the Plans again so soon.”

“And if this should lighten the toil of men,” said Similarity 5-0306, “then it is a great evil, for men have no cause to exist save in toiling for other men.”

Then Collective 0-0009 rose and pointed at our box.

“This thing,” they said, “must be destroyed.”

And all the others cried as one:

“It must be destroyed!”

—

Love

Today, the Golden One stopped suddenly and said:

“We love you.”

But then they frowned and shook their head and looked at us helplessly.

“No,” they whispered, “that is not what we wished to say.”

They were silent, then they spoke slowly, and their words were halting, like the words of a child learning to speak for the first time:

“We are one . . . alone . . . and only . . . and we love you who are one . . . alone . . . and only.”

We looked into each other’s eyes and we knew that the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly.

And we felt torn, torn for some word we could not find.

—

“I” and “We”

I am. I think. I will.

My hands . . . My spirit . . . My sky . . . My forest . . . This earth of mine. . . .

What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.

[. . .]

I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. For in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone. Let each man keep his temple untouched and undefiled. Then let him join hands with others if he wishes, but only beyond his holy threshold.

For the word “We” must never be spoken, save by one’s choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within man’s soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all the evils on earth, the root of man’s torture by men, and of an unspeakable lie.

The word “We” is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.

Playing God

There’s nothing wrong in that, but not this way-

THE link between success and luck is stronger than many people think.

Analysis of this connection provides a useful framework for weighing the issues raised around the country at recent “tea parties,” where orators in high dudgeon bemoaned their “crippling” tax burdens…

Contrary to what many parents tell their children, talent and hard work are neither necessary nor sufficient for economic success…

Although people are often quick to ascribe their own success to skill and hard work, even those qualities entail heavy elements of luck. Debate continues about the degree to which personal traits are attributable to environmental and genetic factors. But whatever the true weights of each, these factors in combination explain nearly everything. People born with good genes and raised in nurturing families can claim little moral credit for their talent and industriousness. They were just lucky. And they are vastly more likely to succeed than people born without talent and raised in unsupportive environments…

There has never been a shortage of talented people willing to work hard for success — even in countries with top rates much higher than 50 percent. And the president’s proposal would not cause such a shortage in 2010.

It would, however, promote more efficient provision of public services, in much the same way that contingent fee contracts often promote more efficient provision of services in the private sector. For example, when lawyers are willing to waive fees unless their client wins, wrongfully injured accident victims often gain legal representation they couldn’t otherwise afford. Similarly, when government levies higher tax rates on the wealthy, we can provide public services that the wealthy and others greatly value but that would otherwise be beyond reach. Under such a tax system, the heavier tax bill becomes payable only if we’re lucky enough to end up among life’s biggest winners.

Financially successful tax protesters seem blissfully unaware of how incredibly fortunate they are…

Robert Frank, here, is trying to be “fair,” just like Rawls, and is correcting God’s innumerable “mistakes.” I wonder if he would also suggest that there be fairness in the distribution of eyes and kidneys? Prepare a registry of all the people in the world and pluck an eye and kidney from X and give it to Y because Y was unlucky enough to be born without them, or lose them in an accident? Luck! I do know that people can be “unlucky” – the most deserving people may not always be rewarded, but that’s no justification for practicing moral cannibalism – egalitarianism. Maybe Frank is writing to inflate the egos of those who believe that hard work is irrelevant and “luck” is all that matters. They can then go and stand up to a Gates or Tendulkar and say – you were lucky! Now hand over the booty!

Egalitarianism is a scourge, and Rawls is one of its most influential purveyors. The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick took him on in his Anarchy, State and Utopia. But Ayn Rand didn’t bother. She did this instead-

Ayn Rand believed that philosophical ideas shape a society’s culture and politics. “The battle of philosophers is a battle for man’s mind,” she said. “If you do not understand their theories, you are vulnerable to the worst among them”. Though Rand had little regard for contemporary academic philosophers, she did write several articles about the discipline, commenting on philosophers’ methods as well as on their philosophical ideas.

In 1971, Harvard philosopher John Rawls published his Theory of Justice to great acclaim, and Rand responded in “An Untitled Letter.” Rawls’s book was notable for the baldness with which he stated his egalitarian principle of justice: that people may reap the benefits of their ability and effort only on terms that also benefit the least able. Rand of course denounced the altruist and egalitarian character of the principle, which she saw as a rationalization for envy—”the hatred of the good for being good.”

In her essay, Rand admitted that she had not read and did not intend to read Rawls’s book and declared that she should therefore be understood as commenting only on the positions ascribed to Rawls in Marshall Cohen’s lengthy review in the Sunday New York Times. Critics have attacked Rand for adopting that approach to the work, and it is a dubious technique even when made explicit. At the same time, however, critics of Rand have not acknowledged that she was nonetheless able to describe, precisely and essentially, Rawls’s method of argument. Nor have they acknowledged, though it is now a generation later, how presciently Rand was able to foresee the book’s future—drawing on nothing but a book review and her own profound understanding of the way bad ideas spread:

Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable—all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions. I offer in evidence The Critique of Pure Reason….

Within a few years of the book’s publication, commentators will begin to fill libraries with works analyzing, “clarifying” and interpreting its mysteries. Their notions will spread all over the academic map,….

Within a generation, the number of commentaries will have grown to such proportions that the original book will be accepted as a subject of philosophical specialization, requiring a lifetime of study—and any refutation of the book’s theory will be ignored or rejected, if unaccompanied by a full discussion of the theories of all the commentators, a task which no one will be able to undertake.

Which is exactly what has happened with A Theory of Justice.

Anyone who advocates egalitarianism cannot be “good.” You don’t have to commit murder to become “evil.” Promoting wholesale theft and slavery in the name of “justice” and “fairness” is good enough.

Edit: Since Frank’s article draws on Gladwell’s recent book, its interesting to note the “usual suspect” writing something different on it-

Yet, I can’t help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his emphasis are getting swept away by the coolness of the new discoveries. They’ve lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins.

Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.

It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done. A common story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.

Brooks does recognize Gladwell’s position as a form of determinism and actually calls it “pleasantly egalitarian” but to give him credit, he does stay away from Frank’s stupid position.

Further, a comment on an Amazon review of the book says- “John Rawls, philosopher and a believer in luck and the ‘accidents of birth’, would be thrilled! ” Its a matter of patterns – different people writing different books with the same outcome in mind. That’s where the similarities lie.

Rights and freedom

Those suffering from the Malthusian mentality never seem to give up. Today’s “Subverse” is proof of that-

At the time of our independence, our population was 350 million. Today, it is almost 1.2 billion. Fortunately, food production has more than tripled in the same period thanks mainly to the Green Revolution; hence there have been no mass famines. Though fertility rates have admittedly come down from over six children per woman to around three, there are still about 18 million people added to our population every year. They have to be fed, educated and housed. This is an unsustainable burden on the Indian economy. It has led to massive environmental damage. Our exploding cities and a growing culture of violence can also be largely traced to our increasing numbers. A major priority of whichever government comes to power must be to make greater efforts towards stabilising our population growth and promoting family planning. It would be a great pity if the next government thought otherwise.

There are some people for whom man is not man – a living entity with free will, intellect, productive ability etc – but some kind of animal. Man for them is a sub-human species who has to be controlled, fed, educated, clothed, his ass wiped, neutered… Others exist who know that such a view will not be palatable to many, and so they airbrush it and claim that man is indeed human and free and productive etc, but he’s not “really free”, and to make sure that he’s “really free”, he should be controlled. I am describing control freaks of the “positive liberty” type, but I won’t write about them today. This quote from Adam Smith that I borrowed from one of many Cafe Hayek posts applies to them however-

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

What I will be writing about is Garrett Hardin’s essay – “The Tragedy of the Commons” – because he too is a Malthusian. While his essay is more famous for its economic thought experiment which gave the essay its title, its his thesis which should be attacked. He writes-

[T]he concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called “no technical solution problems,” and, more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these.

It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe. Consider the problem, “How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?” It is well known that I cannot, if I assume (in keeping with the conventions of game theory) that my opponent understands the game perfectly. Put another way, there is no “technical solution” to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word “win.” I can hit my opponent over the head; or I can drug him; or I can falsify the records. Every way in which I “win” involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it. (I can also, of course, openly abandon the game–refuse to play it. This is what most adults do.)

The class of “No technical solution problems” has members. My thesis is that the “population problem,” as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem–technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.

When I mentioned him in brief last time, I called his essay “chilling.” And its not just because of his conclusions, but the way he approaches them-

We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography. In economic affairs, The Wealth of Nations (1776) popularized the “invisible hand,” the idea that an individual who “intends only his own gain,” is, as it were, “led by an invisible hand to promote . . . the public interest” (5). Adam Smith did not assert that this was invariably true, and perhaps neither did any of his followers. But he contributed to a dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely, the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez-faire in reproduction. If it is correct we can assume that men will control their individual fecundity so as to produce the optimum population. If the assumption is not correct, we need to reexamine our individual freedoms to see which ones are defensible.

Here’s how he does it-

1. The “population problem,” as “conventionally conceived,” has no technical solution; the world we live in is finite – forget space – and such a world can only support a finite population.
2. The “tragedy of the commons” applies to population just like it does to property – people breed without paying the full costs of their actions.
3. “The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.” Morality has nothing to do with the nature of man per se – it depends on the “system” – the when and the where.
4. We live in a “welfare state” where the following is not the case-
   

   If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if, thus, overbreeding brought its own “punishment” to the germ line–then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families.

5. We cannot appeal to people’s conscience – tell them to control breeding for the common good. It can have a strange effect on the cycle – “to make such an appeal is to set up a selective system that works toward the elimination of conscience from the race.” Further, in the short term, it has “pathogenic effects.”
6. His solution – “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” If people are not willing to control themselves, their right to breed will have to be controlled. That’s how the “problem” can be solved – by redefining it. By redefining “freedom.”

His chilling conclusion-

Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody’s personal liberty. Infringements made in the distant past are accepted because no contemporary complains of a loss. It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of “rights” and “freedom” fill the air. But what does “freedom” mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, “Freedom is the recognition of necessity.”

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”–and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

There are many ways Hardin’s thesis can be attacked. The first thing to do would be to question the existence of a “problem.” Why is population a problem and to whom? If the “tragedy of the commons” does apply due to “over population”, the problem would not be the population per se but the system of government that lets it happen. And here I think he’s right about the welfare state. I am not talking about letting kids die, like animals do, but most families do consider the costs of bringing a new child into the world; its only in a welfare state where they don’t have to bear the related costs. The collapse of the welfare state and the creation of a rights-based one would fix the “problem”, or at least reduce its size.

Then, there’s his definition of ethics. You cannot divorce morality from the nature of man. And you cannot bring in a deontological theory of ethics and convert it into “administrative law.” The final attack would be on his definition of “rights.” He assumes that rights come and go as time passes on – this view is a consequence of his ethical outlook. Nothing of that sort happens. The concept of rights – its definition – is immutable. Its just that we have been paying more attention to it now than before. The rights of two people do not clash. The statement – “every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody’s personal liberty” – is completely wrong. The fact that you used something for free because the person owning it didn’t mind, or wasn’t allowed to assert his ownership rights, doesn’t mean that when the person does become careful about his rights, he’s infringing on your personal liberty. But this does not apply to population – you or your child are not living at someone else’s expense by the very fact of your being alive. You are not a burden on anyone. Thus the question of applying “mutual coercion” – “abandoning the freedom to breed” – does not arise.

To those who accept the Welfare State as a political axiom, Hardin’s essay might be an unwelcome reality check – actions do have costs. But it would not surprise me if they adopted his thesis without questioning it, if not now then in a few decades. Like Hardin, their theory of justice and that of rights is a warped one. And they would see it as the only way freedom can be saved – “curtail freedom to save it.” That its illogical – contradictory – wouldn’t bother them. This, is a problem.

“Freedom is the recognition of necessity” – it does seem like something Hegel, the irrational worshiper of the State, would say. Freedom is the recognition of the nature of man.