Remember the Ladies

Women’s History Month, which is celebrated in March, usually focuses on women who have championed women’s right. Even our most famous female Revolutionary War patriot, Abigail Adams, is perhaps best known for admonishing husband John to “remember the ladies” when he was going about the business of helping to form the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, he failed to take her advice.

In the mid-twentieth century, however, three women were instrumental in furthering the gender-neutral causes of individual rights and limited Constitutional government, two political values that had been badly battered by the club of progressivism. These founding mothers of Libertarianism - Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand - had the courage to speak out against the encroaching State when many of their male counterparts seemed to have misplaced their spines.

Isabel Paterson is probably least known of this group, having begun her crusade in the 1920s. Born in Ontario, Canada in 1886, Paterson grew up poor on a cattle ranch in Alberta. She received little formal schooling but was a voracious reader who acquired a broad knowledge and understanding of history and philosophy. Her self-acquired education and career skills probably greatly influenced the high value she placed on maximizing individual potential.

Paterson wrote an influential literary column for the New York Tribune for 25 years in which she challenged popular opinion and shared her developing political ideas. She opposed most of the “New Deal” programs being instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and advocated for less government involvement in social and fiscal issues. She went on to write “The God of the Machine,” a defense of individualism as the source of social and political progress.

Paterson’s contemporary, Rose Wilder Lane, lived the quintessential American childhood. As the daughter of Almonzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose, who was also born in 1886 but in the Dakota territories, grew up on the American frontier and experienced that hard-scrabble way of life first hand. She later helped her mother write and edit the well-loved “Little House” book series, which provides so many American children with their first glimpse of life on the prairie.

Lane eventually established a career as a writer and editor, first with the San Francisco Bulletin, then free-lance. She occasionally worked as a traveling war correspondent, starting with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau after World War I. It was during this time she traveled to Soviet Russia, saw communism up-close and personal and became an avowed opponent of Marxist philosophy. Her political writing venerated individual freedom and expounded its positive impact on humanity.

Lane’s seminal work, the non-fiction book The Discovery of Freedom, became a handbook for the growing libertarian movement of the 1940s. Leader Albert Jay Nock said that Lane’s Discovery of Freedom and Paterson’s God of the Machine, which were published the same year, were "the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century." He also said the two women had "shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally ... They don't fumble and fiddle around--every shot goes straight to the centre."

This same year another important addition to the growing collection of liberty-themed literature hit bookstores. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is probably better known than Paterson’s or Lane’s books and the same can safely be said of its controversial author. Ayn Rand inspires adoration in some and abhorrence in others but seldom do readers come away from her works complacent and neutral. Rand wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum to a middle-class family in Saint Petersburg, Russia Empire, in 1905, Rand experienced the horrors of the Russian Revolution first-hand. When her father’s pharmacy was confiscated by the Bolsheviks the family fled to the Crimea. They eventually returned to St. Petersburg, where Rand studied history and philosophy at the University of Petrograd. At age 21 she emigrated to the United States and landed in Hollywood, where she worked for a time as a screenwriter and playwright. She eventually moved to New York when one of her plays was produced on Broadway.

Rand published two politically-themed works – the semi-autobiographical We the Living and the novella Anthem – before she caught the attention of the book-buying public in 1943 with her 700-page tribute to individualism, The Fountainhead. Fourteen years later her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, hit bookstores. An ode to the productive members of society and a defense of their right to work, create and prosper unencumbered by excessive government interference, Atlas Shrugged solidified Rand’s status as a novelist of ideas. Her clear and well-reasoned arguments in favor of individualism, laissez-faire economics and constitutionally-limited government helped fuel a conservative backlash against collectivism and also formed the foundation of her philosophical movement, Objectivism.

Rand is a controversial figure not only because of her personal life, which was chaotic, to say the least, but also because of her arrogant and abrasive personality. She was antagonistic toward any philosophy that was not of her own creation and it is ironic that Rand is grouped with Paterson and Lane as a founding mother of Libertarianism since she denounced Libertarians as “plagiarists of my ideas.” Yet many of the ideas that Libertarians and Rand shared had been around for centuries. It was just the right time to bring them back.

People - The Ultimate Resource

While the Olympics were being broadcast during the last two weeks of February I watched more television than I usually watch in a year. I am fascinated by this showcase of human ability, creativity, guts and determination. Watching gifted athletes take the human body to incredible heights, many of them quite literally, fills me with reverence and awe. Whether it is the soaring, twisting jumps of the snowboarders, the breathtaking speeds achieved by downhill skiers, or the grace and strength displayed by the figure skaters the Olympics are an inspiring display of what human beings can achieve through talent, hard work and perseverance.

The magnificence of human accomplishment is front and center during special events like the Olympics but it is actually before us all the time, so much so that we tend to take it for granted. Just the past ten years has generated revolutionary changes in the way we live our daily lives and a look back over the past century reveals an even more wondrous landscape of human innovation and advancement.

That's why one must sometimes wonder if we're talking about the same species when it turns to environmental and political matters. Here the messages seems to be 1) humanity is the scourge of the planet and 2) people can't do anything without the intervention of government. Both these notions are false and counterproductive to real human progress.

The late Julian Simon once accepted the conventional view that an exploding human population threatened both mankind and the earth. A professor of business administration at the University of Maryland, Simon's interest in population economics led to his deep involvement in projects designed to curb population growth.

A funny thing happened on the way to zero-population growth, however - the research and studies Simon was pursuing directly contradicted the accepted theory that a higher population leads to lower standards of living. In fact, Simon learned, the opposite was true and in 1977 he published The Economics of Population Growth, a technical manual that attempted to reconcile what seemed to be a contradiction. This was followed in 1981 with The Ultimate Resource and in 1996 an updated version, The Ultimate Resource 2, both of which further explained how population growth actually has positive economic effects in the long run.

Simon's book is over 600 pages long and filled with charts, facts and figures so his research cannot be fully analyzed here, but summaries of data from just a couple of categories prove he was on to something. Consider agriculture: food production per capita has been increasing steadily for the past 60+ years. Along with a decreasing occurrence of famine, Simon noted average height in developed countries has been increasing for centuries, a sign that people have better access to nutritious food. At the same time food production in developed countries has increased, agricultural land in use has actually decreased as people find more efficient ways to farm. Meanwhile, the amount of land used for forests, recreation and wildlife has been rapidly increasing.

Standard of living is another indicator of the positive direction in which the world is heading. Though in the short run children necessarily require additional expense, most of these costs are borne by their parents. Over the long term society is rejuvenated by additional people and Simon found found per capita income in both developed and non-developed countries to be higher where population was growing rather than stagnating.

Finally, let's examine Simon's findings about energy. In a nutshell, Simon is optimistic that energy supplies are not only more than ample, but also that the long-run impact of additional people is likely to speed the development of cheap and almost infinite energy supplies. In addition, energy use has grown cleaner and more efficient with each new innovation, a trend Simon see continuing as long as people are free to explore, research and create.

Problems such as poverty are not the result of too many people but too little economic and political freedom, according to Simon. A snapshot of the past half-century proves that similar people living under disparate economic and political circumstances -East and West Germany, North and South Korea, China and Taiwan - can achieve very different results. Societies which embrace the political values of economic and personal liberty, respect for property rights and a free market in which fair and sensible rules are observed are simply more likely to prosper than those subject to central economic planning and totalitarian government.

Simon's research may be dismissed by the doomsayers and power mongers who seek to control the world's population and resources but those of us with a more positive outlook on the future can have confidence people are not actually the problem - they are the solution.

Michael Moore's "Capitalism" Film

(Warning: spoilers contained herein)

I just rented Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story”. As usual, Mr. Moore raises some excellent points, throws in some humor and theatrics, and completely misses the mark when it comes to identifying causes and promoting good solutions.

First of all, I don’t think his definition of “capitalism” is anywhere close to the mark. He described it with the absurd phrase “a system of taking and giving” as opposed to a system of building, producing, earning, etc. Another point on semantics later.

Moore makes some effort to correctly attribute blame for the economic and fiscal woes of our country to officials from both political parties, but he still has a soft spot for anyone with a “D” next to their name, and a clear animosity for those evil “R”s. He accuses Ronald Reagan of “presiding over the “wholesale dismantling of [the U.S.] industrial infrastructure”. Hardly a fair accusation when U.S. manufacturing was in decline before, during and after Reagan. Also a bit biased when the film omits the fact that Bill Clinton(with the help of Republicans) signed both the NAFTA and GATT treaties which were not exactly healthy for U.S. manufacturing, but forget partisan bickering.

Michael Moore makes a point of the fact that “capitalism” isn’t described in The U.S. Constitution, although his citation of phrases such as “We The People”, “a more perfect union” and “general welfare” indicate that he didn’t read much beyond the preamble. He then makes a point of talking to several priests who state that capitalism is pure evil, and that Jesus would never stand for it. I know that the bible condemns “usury” but, like the Constitution, I don’t think it specifically mentions “capitalism”.

The film contains scathing criticisms of the banking and financial systems, the cozy relationship between Washington and Wall Street, the TARP bill, and AIG bailout. One photo shows Federal regulators, namely the head of the OTS and deputy director of the FDIC in a pose with bank lobbyists figuratively cutting through “red tape” of regulation. The sweetheart loans that government officials such as Christopher Dodd, Donna Shalala, Pete Conrad and any number of banking and securities regulators received from Countrywide Financial are described. Numerous examples are provided which reveal the relationship of elected officials, economic advisers and high ranking appointed officials with banking and investment firms that they were supposed to be regulating. The issue of the 2004 FBI report describing an “Epidemic” of Mortgage Fraud is also raised. Then, there’s the major issue of the big bailouts in which the U.S. Government funneled hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into AIG and the large Wall Street banks.

These are all valid things to criticize, yet Mr. Moore would have us conclude that this is somehow an indictment of capitalism? All I see is a tale of corruption and failure on the part of big government. We have mountains of regulations, and armies of regulators employed to prevent fraud, corruption and abuse in the marketplace. These highly paid government officials have utterly and completely failed in their appointed tasks. The FBI warns of an epidemic of fraud, yet we see no high profile prosecutions? The SEC fails to note the proliferation and danger of exotic financial instruments? The FDIC, OTS and Federal Reserve don’t sound the alarm about badly under-capitalized and over-leveraged financial institutions? WORST OF ALL, right at the moment when we were about to witness a vindication of free market principles ... just when the people and the companies who committed the frauds, who created the financial derivatives and who made millions with reckless speculation were about to be wiped out by their excesses . . . in comes BIG GOVERNMENT and The Federal Reserve to bail out the failed businesses with trillions of taxpayer dollars. I challenge Michael Moore or anyone else to find me a source which would define one of the elements of capitalism as “Big government confiscates wealth from successful and responsible businesses and individuals to reward failed businesses and individuals.” More than a few other ‘isms’ come to mind when I think of a a system in which economic outcomes are ordained by a central power.

In other parts of the film, there is a story of a bread company that is organized as a co-op, and uses a business model which minimizes the pay differential between the managerial workers and the assembly line workers. There is also a profile of a successful company called “Isthmus Engineering” which has cast off the top-down management system in favor of a decision making process where all employees vote and participate. There is also the story of the employees of Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago who staged a sit-in to demand the severance benefits which they had been promised, and the outpouring of community support for their effort. In holding up these shining examples, Mr. Moore fails to note that Isthmus engineering doesn’t operate on government grants. The bread company in question doesn’t produce under the direction of a government commissar, and it wasn’t Barack Obama, Richard Daley or Nancy Pelosi who organized the protest at Republic Windows and Doors. These folks are free American citizens, and it is by virtue of our Constitutional system of limited government that these people are at liberty to pursue their creative business models, and exercise their right to organize and assemble, free of the constraints and tyranny that have been the hallmark of economies designed around a system of central planning.

I would advise Mr. Moore to choose his terms more carefully, and be thankful for the fact that he lives in a society where he is able to produce films and distribute them to a wide audience free of interference from any Ministry of Truth.

One final side note on “Capitalism”. . . That guy Randy Hacker, who was being foreclosed upon had quite a collection of firearms. In the film, he even says that, after what he and his family have gone through with the banks, he could understand why someone might snap and go on a shooting spree. Sounds like a dangerous right wing extremist to me. Perhaps he and the rest of us peasants should be deprived of our firearms. What say you Mr. Moore?

Oh No . . . Not Another Patriot Act Renewal

By now, I'm sure that everyone is aware that the Congress and President Obama have decided to again renew the expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act.

I had to search quite a while to find a roll call vote on the "Patriot Act Renewal". I finally found an article that explained why. The legislation to renew the expiring provisions of the Patriot Act AS IS were buried in a vote described as:

House Vote #67 (Feb 25, 2010)

On Motion to Concur in Senate Amendments: H R 3961 Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2010-67&sort=party

I'm not sure what's worse; Describing a piece of legislation that erodes the liberty of U.S. citizens with a ridiculously contrived and appropriately Orwellian acronym which spells "USA PATRIOT" or burying the renewal of it in a bill about physician payment reform.

At least Peter Welch voted against it.

The Senate passed the bill by a voice vote with little or no debate.

Some Democrats, like Senator Leahy and President Obama will talk about how they really, really, really wanted to add more safeguards to protect civil liberties, but those Republican meanies threatened to filibuster, so they just HAD to renew the expiring parts of the law in its current form. The argument is completely absurd. I don't doubt that the Republicans were largely in favor of passing the renewal. However, if the Democratic majority was honestly attempting to protect our civil liberties, they had every opportunity to do so. As an aside, I think it's absurd to believe that it's possible to amend a bill that is a fundamental violation of civil liberties with any sort of provision that's going to "safeguard" civil liberties. However, let us assume that the Democrats were being sincere in their claims. With the expiration clause already built in to the legislation, the Democrats could have issued a clear ultimatum to Republicans. Either include these new measures to "safeguard" civil liberties, or proceed with your filibuster, and let the provisions expire as scheduled. If the Democrats had any genuine interest in protecting civil liberties, the idea of renewing the act in its current form would not even have been on the table!

When it comes to legislation that infringes upon civil liberties, otherwise increases the size and scope of Federal government, or enriches well connected special interests at the expense of the average U.S. citizens, Republicans and Democrats always seem to find that noble spirit of bi-partisanship