Insert ideas into head; observe at safe distance.

Taboos Change

Tue, 9 Oct 2012 10:41:19 -0700

I ceased believing in the doctrines of the church in which I was raised nearly 35 years ago. Because it was an unaffiliated (and at that time a non-political) Protestant church, I never had the feeling that “my” opinions — Christian or, later, atheist — were culturally dominant. I felt just as much cultural constraint against talking about my deepest beliefs outside my group of co-believers when I was a Christian as I did, later, when I became a secular humanist. Few people way back then wanted to hear the Gospel, and certainly not of one’s emotional commitment to it, any more than they wanted to hear about one’s sexual practices. All people wanted to know is “where you fit.” You were a Christian? Good. Say no more.
After I became a secular humanist, a few people demonstrated uneasiness when I made skeptical arguments, or confessed to my atheism. But I tended to hang around with urban secularists, mostly, so I didn’t feel that cultural opposition often. I was usually buttressed within a “church,” if a church of the unchurched and uncrutched. Still, I recognized that most folks possess little interest in philosophy: the eternal debate running in my head, between existentialism and Epicureanism, is a yawner to the people I meet, and would alarm many.
Further, I have never had any illusions about how comforting the word “atheist” is. It freaks some people out.
Nevertheless, in becoming a secular humanist I had become, in fact, generally more comfortable talking about my basic notions, my metaphysics, ethics, etc. — and certainly my theology. This was largely because, while a Christian, I had always picked at my doubts about supernaturalism, and those doubts were actively suppressed by the religion I held (doubt was a sin!). By being honest about those doubts, I was freed, emotionally. (Though I still harbored one Christian idea — the idea of the “weaker brethren” — that I used to censor my thoughts around most believers in supernaturalism. Based on my reading of The Wild Duck, I figured that most people couldn’t “handle the truth.”)
Well, times have changed. The cultural taboo against secularism is falling away. A recent Pew Report on the religiously unaffiliated shows a marked increase in the unchurched. But is this illusory? Alan Jacobs at The American Conservative wonders if some of this isn’t about numbers increasing but, instead, merely about more honesty in self-reporting:
Has there been an actual increase in religiously unaffiliated people, or do people who are in fact unaffiliated simply feel more free than they once did to acknowledge that fact? My suspicion is that until quite recently a person born and baptized into the Catholic church who hadn’t attended Mass in fifteen years would still identify as a Catholic; but recently is more likely to accept his or her unaffiliated status. There is less social (and perhaps also psychological) cost in saying “I have no particular religion that I’m connected to” than there once was.
It may be that, soon, secular humanists could run for office, and the number of atheists in Congress, too, would spike up. Right now, only a few politicians — and no presidential candidates — dare contemplate “coming out” as a non-believer in Christianity. Hence we get folks like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, pretending to be Christian. (Some think that Obama pretends to be Christian because he’s secretly a Muslim, but that seems unlikely to me. His name change, from “Barry Soetero” to “Barack Obama” looks more like searching for paternal roots and striking a “cool” pose — there is nothing cool about the name “Barry,” unless followed by “Lyndon” — than expressing deep commitment to the Prophet. But I could be wrong. And that would be funny, to have a Secret Muslim running the Great Shaitan.) We also get witless half-believers like Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush, and even more witless full-believers like George W. — all gaining points just for talking about being “born again.” (Just so do the fools confound the wise.)
Quoting C.S. Lewis, Jacobs wonders whether the rise in the religiously unaffiliated might constitute
not a change in behavior but a change in how people think of their behavior — a change that brings their self-descriptions more closely into line with reality. And that wouldn’t at all be a bad thing: there’s always something to be said for the removal of illusions, for “reveal[ing] the situation which had long existed.”
This strikes me as a good point, and an interesting one. But it is not a simple insight, for “as a man thinketh so is he,” and the removal of the taboo against self-definition surely encourages more self-definition . . . unless off-set by some other factor.
And self-definition is heresy incarnate.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (1973), the word “heresy”
is derived from the Greek hairesis which originally meant an act of choosing, and so came to signify a set of philosophical opinions or the school professing to them. As so used the term was neutral, but once appropriated by Christianity it began to convey a note of disapproval. This was because the church from the start regarded itself as the custodian of a divinely imparted revelation, which it alone was authorized to expound. . . . Thus any interpretation which differed from the official one was necessarily ‘heretical’ in the new, pejorative sense.
People choose their ideas with greater felt freedom than they did, in the old days. And so they define their ideas for themselves — a very Protestant act, but now individualized, contra any institution, or at least contra traditional religious institutions — and in so doing they define their very own religious status. We are reaching an existentialist moment . . . though of course other institutions and social factors (team, club, clique, clade, and — even — political party) buffer our philosophic freedom, allowing for some comfort from the awful freedom of staring at the world with eyes unshaded.
We are all heretics now.

Two-Party Ideological Illusions

Thu, 4 Oct 2012 10:43:47 -0700

The confusing jumble and perverse mess of America’s political alignment solidified when the abolitionist movement aligned with the Whig big governmentalists to form the Republican Party, thus uniting the central idea of personal freedom with the dangerous corruption of unlimited government . . . by opposing the Democrats, the ostensible party of “limited government.” In America, ever since, freedom has received only divided, inconsistent support from either major party, always combined with trade-off tyrannies.
Of course, the association of “limited government” with slavery goes back to the Virginian founding fathers, and there were northern Federalists who opposed slavery. But a number of Democrats opposed slavery at least to some extent (Martin Van Buren running as a Free Soiler, for instance), and the LocoFoco faction leaned solidly abolitionist. Thus the unnatural, counter-ideological split was “set in stone” by the Republicans, and only exacerbated as the two parties transformed themselves over the years, trading off freedom and tyranny in a rather helter skelter fashion.
Since those times, of course, there has been at least one long-term paradigm shift, where the parties flip-flopped on each other, ideologically. Adding to the confusion.
But perhaps this was inevitable. In first-past-the-post democracy, dominance by two opposing parties is almost inevitable. The only way to change this is to move to proportional representation or Condorcet voting, or some mix of the two.
With two parties, then, what happens? They each stake off ground. They engage in coup-stick fights to determine policy. Now, while it appears to be the case that policies can favor all, most favor some and disfavor others. Those that “favor all” are, generally, liberty-defending policies, policies that protect individual freedom, personal responsibility, and the rule of law. Those that favor some over others are all special projects and programs. So, inevitably, the two parties contending for policy bite off the policy spectrum, divvying it up so that Party I defends freedoms A, B and C but not D, E, and F, while promoting favoritisms p, q, r, s, t, u, and v while opposing favoritisms x, y and z. Party II finds itself selecting the opposite policies.
But since the logic of favoritism is such that benefits are concentrated while costs are dispersed, there is a constant temptation to go for all favoritisms at once. So the parties tend to accept the favoritisms of each other as faits accompli, and rarely really unbuild favorite programs. Freedoms they tend (though not universally) to ignore and let lapse, except the ones that buttress up the system itself, the system that allows for trading off and sparring over the favoritisms which get them money and power.
It’s complicated, since partisans almost never contemplate what is really going on. Many accept the excuses to govern as the realities of governance. And even skeptics find it difficult to oppose the accretions of policy wholesale, because, after all, “it works” now. Sorta.
Politics is a mess. Understanding it requires going behind excuses to reasons, probing behind surface activity to back-room dealing and even into far stranger territory: the uncovering of options not chosen, the true costs of opportunities foregone. And, more difficult yet, the deciphering of both familiar and alien moral codes.
Those of us who have developed a distaste for both Republicans and Democrats have it a bit easier in getting at the truth than do partisans. But since the system encourages its own continuation, those with divergent tastes and opinions tend not t0 be promoted, allowing for illusion to spread amongst partisans of both sides based on the subtle influence of self-interest and conformity.
Thankfully, it remains an oppositional culture — despite the latent one-party fascism that most politicians find tempting — so the processes of conformity are never certain or total. There is still room for doubt and dissent.

Obama Will Win, Americans Will Lose

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 17:01:07 -0700

A lot can happen in the final month of a presidential race, but at present it looks like Obama will win his re-election bid. Romney’s numbers are down. A Reason-Rupe Poll shows why, in part: More people dislike Romney than dislike Obama. This is astounding, in its way, since Obama’s given us so many reasons for disappointment. But in the context of many years of Republican failure (2000-2008), and with major media on the Democratic side, skimming over Obama’s sins, letting Obama always blame someone else for his administration’s major foul-ups, the normal forces that favor incumbent re-election seem to have the most traction.
Though I agree with Republicans that Obama has been a disaster, and that Democrat politicians and partisan supporters are, in general, crazy persons barely intersecting with reality, they have once again failed to offer up a decent challenger. Their excuse is largely the same excuse that Democrats rarely offer up good candidates: The pool of folks fool enough, or megalomaniac enough, to run for the presidency, limits selection. But it’s worse than that, really. Both parties have trouble seeing beyond their partisan itches, and so they cannot offer reasonable people who might pull marginal voters with any avidity, and without resorting to cheap tactics, like fear, bigotry, or reverse bigotry. Vacuous slogans work too well: talk of “hope,” for instance, or vague pitches for “change.”
Now Obama has gone with that old Progressive/socialist standby: “forward.” Yeah, thanks. Forward to the concentration camps, we go marching.
That Americans are fool enough to vote for the turkeys offered them shows just how uneducated and unwise they are. That’s what you get from public education, folks. People “socialized” to voting for idiots and knaves.
The idea of putting Romney up to challenge Obama wa insane on the face of it. He may be a decent man in his private life, but as a businessman he’s associated with the insiders who bailed themselves out to the tune of many trillions. His policies are relentlessly middle of the road, while right now we should be running from the Bush/Obama rush towards Centralized Everything and Progressive Debt. Romney even promoted the Massachusetts template for Obamacare, the Democrats’ dirigistic mess of “reform” for medical institutions, which will increase costs and further scuttle any real competition that could improve services and reduce prices in the health care industry. Further, Romney’s a worse warmonger than Obama, despite the fact that Obama has broken his promise as a Peace candidate by starting wars, continuing wars, and murdering innocents with drone strikes in multiple countries. To be worse than Obama on this is to offer no alternative at all.
So, what’s the takeaway from this mess? Rational people must press Republicans to repent of their herdish folly. They have to stop “going along” with their witless leadership, the insiders in the party who push as “electable” numbskulls like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Bush only got in by running against an arrogant a-hole (Al Gore) and having the conservatives on the Supreme Court “decide” in Bush’s favor in the infamous Florida recount, in what is probably one of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history.
Republicans: You can’t expect the Supreme Court to rig your elections every time. You have to expect that lamebrain dimwits and mainstream ninnies will normally lose (as Bush did by vote totals if not by judicial legerdemain, and McCain did any way you look at it). Mitt Romney was “electable” only if, somehow, Providence intervened (we’re a little over a month away, so we’ll see).
Democrats should simply be ashamed of their policies. But they aren’t. And they won’t repent until they’ve destroyed the country. So no lesson I could relate here will mean anything to any of them. They have demonstrated that peace means nothing in their lights — the anti-war stance of the left during the Bush years has proved to be mere partisan posturing. If you were excited about Obama because of his anti-war positions, but still support the man after his continued warmongering, you should be wearing sackcloth and ashes, not sporting an Obama/Biden bumper sticker on your Prius.
But the constituency that will likely have the most to be ashamed of will probably remain the libertarians. Not Ron Paul — he proved that freedom and peace seriously argued for can sell. He also proved that Republicans are too cravenly timid and conservative to actually support freedom and peace. And not Gary Johnson — who gave it a good college try. But, unless my crystal ball has cracked, the Johnson-Gray ticket won’t get the 6 percent it’s now polling at.
Why?
Well, Gary Johnson’s running as a Libertarian, that’s why.
The Libertarian Party has anti-name recognition. It is poison itself. It’s an albatross hanging on the neck of the freedom movement.
Libertarian ideas are stronger than ever. According to some measures, were people to vote their political opinions, and not their strategic second-guessings, they’d vastly prefer Johnson over mainstream tool, Mitt Romney:
The fact that you may have not heard of Johnson does not make you uninformed. According to a recent report by the Pew Center for People & the Press, only a quarter of voters have -- and only 5% have heard a lot about him. However, that doesn't mean you wouldn't agree with him. The website Isidewith.com, which features a political quiz that well over 3 million people have filled it out, suggests that if the Presidential race was based on people’s beliefs, it would be between Obama and Johnson.
But how do you get the word out, when the political system is thoroughly rigged by the two major parties, and those parties remain under the thumb of a small group of insiders?
Well, you have to offer something new. The party has to be fresh.
And the Libertarian Party is not fresh. It has the stink of the perennial loser about it. Only one of its presidential candidates achieved a mere 1 percent return. Since then, .5 percent is about as good as the party can muster in terms of votes.
And this includes a famous run by Ron Paul.
I bring up Paul because in 1987, when I was helping start Liberty magazine, Murray N. Rothbard argued that the Paul candidacy was the party’s only hope. (He argued the case in Liberty’s first issue.) Only Paul could pull enough votes in to take the LP out of its loserdom rut, he wrote. And he argued this very vociferously, with all the confidence and certainty of a self-anointed prophet.
I didn’t believe him. As prophets go, I am fairly humble, but I will profess to one advantage over other libertarian prognosticators: I don’t lie to myself. I don’t pretend that the world is “heading my direction” just because I want it to.
Rothbard was proved spectacularly wrong in 1988. Upon which he over-reacted and jumped rails to start the “paleo-libertarian movement,” a culture-war misfire if ever there was one.
A few elections later, Harry Browne threw his hat into the LP three-ringed circus, and the old mantra was heard again, but with a name change: Only Browne has the skills and the reputation, we were told, to bring votes to the party in national elections.
I wrote a piece for Liberty, in those heady days, that the editor conveniently forgot to run. I argued that this ever-repeating mantra of “breakout candidate” was tired, and kept libertarians from facing the obvious truth: The party couldn’t push anyone to the front ranks. There could be no breakout, for the party itself inoculated its candidate from success.
Sure, the Libertarian Party heroically maintained ballot status in state after state, in grand Sisyphean fashion. But the rock that Libertarians push up the hill must come down. And does, every four years.
I admire Libertarians. That is, I admire their hard work, their dedication, their altruistic nature. But as habits of prudence and savvy go, the LP cause doesn’t pass muster.
The problem? A first-past-the-post election system naturally forms two antagonistic parties. It’s rigged that way by math and logic; just as free markets provide better and more goods to more an more people than can regulated, protected markets, the protected “market” of America’s “democracy” ensures sub-par campaigning and duopoly partisan rule. And these two insider parties inevitably shore up their natural advantage with further contrivances to keep competition low.
So the only hope for a “third party” in this environment is to grow, grow quickly, and displace one of the parties.
Americans instinctually know this. They allow only a certain “start-up time” for an upstart party. Had the Ed Clark campaign polled better in 1980, and had the 1984 LP candidate out-performed Clark, there might have been hope for the LP. But Americans like illusion, and Ronald Reagan provided just the right amount of libertarianism for America at that time: lip service to freedom, but little else — and on key issues (drugs, empire), less freedom and more tyranny.
The Libertarian Party’s name was tarnished by 1985. Its hope was killed. It had proved itself of no great use for political change, doomed, forevermore, to “also ran” status.
So, in that piece never run in Liberty, I argued that Libertarians should take Harry Browne’s candidacy as a test. If he actually outdid the Clark run, I was wrong. There was hope. But if he polled below that, it was time to face the music, the dirge, and bury the Libertarian Party.
Well, the piece was not run. The editor was a Browne supporter, and I don’t think he wanted to “jinx” the campaign. And yet my prophecy proved correct: Browne did poorly. (It should be noted that, for the record, I liked Browne, on a personal level, and even admired him.)
Libertarian hope trumping reason, Browne even ran again.
And still failed to get many votes.
My challenge to Libertarians, today, is this: If Johnson — who is, after all, the only LP standard-bearer to actually succeed in cutting government while in political office, thus carrying with him more cachet than any previous LP nominee — fails to muster many votes, bite the bullet and dissolve the party.
If Gary Johnson does get 5 percent of the vote, I’ll concede. I’m wrong.
And I’d be happy to ’fess up to error, since I’ll be voting for Johnson.
But despite the immense weight of my single vote, I don’t expect Johnson to gain even 3 percent.
So, if my run of sage prophecies continues, and the LP underperforms again, I’ll push for it loudly, this time: Liquidate the LP!
The reason to do this is not just because it wastes libertarians’ money and efforts. Do it because the party stands in the way of the alternates that would arise.
Remember, in the 19th century, a political party was replaced.
The Democratic Party fought the Federalists, then the Whigs. But abolitionists — the most libertarian movement of that day — challenged the status quo, the two party system: First, with the Liberty Party, which was dissolved after it failed to catch on; then with the Free Soil Party, which (late in the day) got a boost from a former president, Martin Van Buren, as its presidential nominee, but still failed to catch on; finally with the Republican Party, which succeeded. The Whig Party died, its central cause — “internal improvements” and pro-business dirigisme — taken up by the Republican abolitionists. (Alas.)
Other parties have tried to do this, since. None have succeeded. And Libertarians gave it an astounding amount of dedication. But they failed. New things must be tried. And the continued presence of the LP, sucking up libertarian support and attention, prevents libertarian goals from any possible political success.
So, my friends: liquidate the party. After the election. If I’m proved right — that is, if Gary Johnson garners fewer votes than, say, 3 percent of the popular.
One thing that could scuttle my challenge would be a defection of Republican electors, voting for Gary Johnson instead of the hopeless Romney in the Electoral College. If that happens, all bets and plans might need a rethink.
But I’m not betting on anything.
I’m just offering a challenge: Could we try pushing liberty a bit more rationally? Can we stop pretending that the system isn’t rigged against us?
If we unbuild the LP, alternate parties could form, perhaps gain local and then national attention, and possibly even displace the Republicans.
It think it is obvious that the Democratic Party will continue on as the party of Big Government. If we are stuck with a two-party system, then there must be an anti-Big Government party that would seriously pitch limited government ideas, offering workable government-reducing legislation and Constitutional revisions.
Personally, I’d love to float a LocoFoco Party. But that’s almost certainly a non-starter, so something really radical, but still “almost” mainstream, might work. I suggest a Receivership Party. The point of that would be to put the federal government — yes, the whole union — under a receivership of the states, which would reconstitute a union (or, better yet, several unions) and, under the period of receivership liquidate the assets gathered and prioritize the obligations entailed by the United States of America.
It’s high time to talk about thoroughgoing measures to curb the power of the churning state. A Receivership Party, bent on radical control of the mess that the federal union has become, could gain widespread interest amongst fiscally conservative people. It could capture the imaginations of even social conservatives, perhaps enough for them to stop worrying about other people’s sex lives, and get down to truly public-interest issues.
Or maybe it, too, would prove to be a non-starter. (It may be, even, that the United States must undergo a massive financial implosion and bankruptcy before anything can be done.) All I suggest is allowing for a new playing field. Competition.
At present, with the LP in the way; libertarian reforms of anything more than a milquetoast variety are simply not possible.
So, Libertarians, it’s up to you. The Democrats are crazed utopians, believing seventy impossible thing between breakfast and brunch. The Republicans are cowards and nincompoops, not daring to think anything new, really. There’s no real hope from that quarter — any group of people who regards Ronald Reagan as America’s latter-day Mohammad, cannot be convinced of much of anything good. They are hopeless.
Don’t mess it up worse. Stop playing Sisyphus. Give up on the impossible. Experiment. Reach out without your ideological crutch of that word “libertarian” in your party’s name. Apply to politics at least some of the rigor you have applied to political ideology. Think different; do differently.
And hey: Just because Obama’s won (or is about to win) a major election, don’t think he’s won the future. The future doesn’t belong to cranks and scam artists, does it? (I hope not.)

Hyper About Inflation?

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:10:07 -0700

The Federal Reserve’s renewed commitment to “quantitative easing,” announced on September 13, shouldn’t ease anyone’s mind. It is a frank favoring of some folks over others — “crony capitalism,” as free-market economists like to put it, a major contributor to the trend of increasing economic inequality. It’s “welfare for the rich.”
It is also crank policy, borne of pure desperation.
But is this bailout mania the sign of end times?
Peter Schiff believes the unleashed QE3++ to be “the final nail in the coffin of the U.S. dollar, and with it, the entire U.S. economy.” With all this newly created money pumping into the economy, he sees an out-of-control inflationary spiral.
Hyperinflation.
But that’s his prophecy, not the immediate reality. And besides, other hard money men — back in the 1970s, during the days of stagflation (and just when I started noticing this stuff) — made similar prophecies before, and hyperinflation didn’t happen then. Is Schiff really just a Chicken Little?
Ben Bernanke and our leaders think so. Or, at least, hope so.
They worry about the deflationary present. That’s why they “print” so much money, throwing it at banks and mortgage-backed securities. To offset the money that just evaporated with the collapse.
It’s trickier than that, though. Inflation has several definitions. By one, quantitative easing is inflation, since it increases the supply of money.
But some of the best economists urge us to look at inflation as the movement in relative prices when the supply of money increases relative to the demand for holding it. It’s a ratio of two factors, not just one. For example, even when the money supply is stable, but demand for it lets up, you can see inflationary effects, which tend to include higher consumer prices and (eventually) a lowering of producer prices, as people go on a consuming binge. (Spending money, you see, constitutes a lessening of demand for money. It is the demand for goods and services.)
Deflation is the contrary process, when the supply of money decreases relative to the demand to hold it. And, in turn, if people’s demand to increase their reserves of money rises, that increased demand may offset even wild monetary growth.
That’s what’s happening now. The supply of money, currently, is inflationary; the demand, deflationary. Bernanke, the president and Congress are more than willing to throw vast hoards of magically invented money at all sorts of banks and businesses, all in the vain hope that, at some point, investors are going to start investing in something productive, hiring more people, etc etc. The Federal Reserve, for its part, has been throwing money at banks for four years now, to the tune of many trillions of dollars, but because of general desire to hold cash reserves, people (and banks) just soak it right up.
Banks, along with the general run of investors, are doing precisely what John Maynard Keynes feared: not loaning money at interest. (Some, aware of this, think that the only response is to throw more money down the same rat hole. And they warn that not doing so would cause a “lost decade” like Japan’s 1990s — forgetting that the Great Depression was a “lost decade,” too, and that it wasn’t monetary expansion that finally got America out of that particular rut. Indeed, the fear of not repeating history seems to be the chief cause of repeating history.)
I figure that Keynes didn’t quite understand the real nature of capitalism’s business cycle. He believed people were too irrational, and that smart men like him could invest better than could investors. There is no evidence for this. He also glossed over the importance of relative prices, and the idea that economies under the throes of a business cycle can get skewed with sectoral malinvestments (over-investments here, under-investments there), tricked by interest rates. (Indeed, this is one of the great insights of Mises and Hayek, that the consequences of inflation are not necessarily uniform. Inflation doesn’t just change “the price level,” as mainstream monetary theorists have hammered for over a century; inflation warps relative prices. That’s why, after a bust, we see sectoral unemployment, not general unemployment.)
As our leaders try to prevent another Great Depression, they seem hell-bent on making sure it re-occurs. Marx’s great line about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as comedy, applies, I think, to the weird revival of Keynesianism today. There’s little intellectual case for it.; the doctrine imploded in the 1970s. But hope springs eternal in the mind of progressives and politicians, who pretend that they are important in a sort of messianic way.
Indeed, this may all come down to pseudo-intellectualism, scientism.
When Keynes revolutionized economics with his talk of “animal spirits,” he seemed so above it all, so “scientific.” That was a long time ago. Today, amidst a huge slump, our leaders (and leading Keynesians) don’t seem at all rational.
The ancients threw virgins at idols; our leaders throw money at rich people.
And they are praying that Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, and company, are wrong.
But they don’t seem to be listening for an answer to their prayers. They have incense to burn at other altars. They have their hands full.
Whether the Federal Reserve can avoid hyperinflation after the sponge sops its last droplet, the way Paul Volcker did by halting monetary growth in the very late 1970s, remains to be seen. The situation seems much more dire this time, as I’m sure Mr. Schiff would argue. The U.S. debt is much larger. The bloated, overcommitted federal welfare state and America’s expensive imperial presence are both tottering on the brink of insolvency. Even many of the states are running in the red. And what Volcker did was risk a major recession to give the economy time to recalculate relative prices, and start up again on a better footing. I remember the early 1980s. Not exactly fun times. There was a lot of unemployment as Volcker’s daring strategy played out.
But Ben Bernanke, today, is doing just the opposite precisely because he does not want to “cause” more unemployment. He fears doing the necessary thing. He fears the medicine that a recession provides, the recalculation of wages and prices and interest. And all his new money is going somewhere. Prices will rise in some new boom (the Fed wants another housing boom, because, apparently, it worked so well the last time, as Schiff quipped). And either it busts again, leading to the cycle repeating, or all that money pushes prices into a hyperinflationary spiral, as Mr. Schiff prophesies.
Let’s hope that the end of all this isn’t the running of red blood in the streets. Let’s hope our leaders wise up.

Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:38:03 -0700

Father James Sadowsky died recently, the usual honors at his passing perhaps lessened by the overshadowing death of the great Thomas S. Szasz. His reconstruction of Rothbardian rights theory in a famous essay on private and collective ownership is brilliant, a classic — well worth reading. He was not a giant, like Nozick or the aforementioned Szasz, but he did fine work, and he exhibited a calm reason, something worth emulating.
Martin Masse interviewed him for Le Québécois Libre, and in it Masse queries the philosopher about his relationship (none, it turns out) with that towering figure in the libertarian movement, Ayn Rand:
MM: What about her very rationalist approach of defending egoism and narrowly defined individualism?
JS: Her egoism business, that's a case where I think her philosophical training failed her. Because she's always defending what she calls selfishness, but it turns out not to be what most people call selfishness. She meant self-regarding. Her egoism was very attenuated as a matter of fact. As far as I can see, she wasn't against helping old ladies cross the street.
Sadowsky sees the obvious problem with her egoism, but doesn’t really grasp the full enormity of her misconstruction of ethics. It is foundational. She was wrong in the very definitions of her terms, upon which she rested much of her substantive ethics and politics. I have written about this before, but it is worth repeating, since everyone seems to miss it, unaccountably. So, here is the bare bones of the Error of Randian Egoism.
Rand defined a foundational pair of opposite concepts

egoism=selfishness
versus
altruism=selflessness

but then defined

egoism as rational self-interest and
altruism as the obligation to sacrifice self to others.

Do you see the problem here? If you define egoism as devotion to self-interest, then altruism must be defined in terms of interest as well, presumably other-interest. If you define altruism as the duty to sacrifice oneself to others, then egoism must be defined in terms of sacrifice as well, presumably in the manner that NEARLY EVERYONE MEANS BY SELFISHNESS, the sacrifice of others to self. But this she deliberately resisted. And in so doing she balled everything up in a hodgepodge of moralistic claptrap.
Now, it turns out that “interest” is by no means a simple or clear concept, “sacrifice” changes meaning when moving from value theory to social practice, and nearly every single concept in her “new concept of egoism” gains its rhetorical strength from the antinomies she sets up at the get-go.
I regard Ayn Rand as the single worst philosopher I've encountered in the libertarian movement. No other philosopher, save Andrew Galambos, if he counts, made as big a boner as her philosophy of selfishness. She is, at the very least, vastly over-rated.
The good Father James Sadowsky, S.J., had the sense to see it. Would that more libertarians looked beyond her attractive fictions to deeply analyze her philosophy as such, with an eye to testing her ideas, not religiously apologizing for them.
And about her metaphysics? Don’t get me started.