I probably picked this up at the same library book sale where I acquired
Atlas Shrugged. It is a collection of essays, most by Rand but not all, that Rand herself describes not as a treatise on economics but as a collection of essays on the moral aspects of capitalism.
That, like the collection’s subtitle, The Unknown Ideal, strikes me as important in any consideration of the essays’s contents. First up, the moral aspect. It is clear throughout that Rand believes capitalism not just to be an economic system, but also a moral philosophy. There are pieces to that puzzle that I’d argue with, but it is clear from the beginning that Rand is arguing not just for what she believes is good, but also for what she believes is right. Unfortunately, this is most manifest in her frequent contempt for those who would hold another perspective. They, by dint of her moral conviction, are not just opposing an economic system, they are opposing her moral position. And that, above almost everything else, makes her text somewhat difficult to approach.
But in her defense, she does call capitalism the unknown ideal, and that is clearly what she believes capitalism to be -- an ideal that is unlikely (or impossible) to achieve in the real world. She even structures the series of essays first into a grouping that deals with the “Theory and History” of her ideas, and then into a second grouping that seeks to apply those ideas to the “Current State.” Although I can’t help but notice that her opening essay in that second grouping, the deceptively titled “The Anatomy of Compromise,” seeks no such compromise between her moral position and the unfortunate realities of the world around her. Indeed, much like her alter ego John Galt, Rand metaphorically concludes that “in any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.” So much for compromise.
Having said all that, I did find myself dog-earing and scribbling in the margins of this work a lot -- the hallmarks of both a frustrating and a mentally-engaging read. On balance, I found myself disputing more than agreeing, somewhat surprised to find Rand and the other authors falling back on the same lazy tropes again and again.
False Dichotomies
Is man a sovereign individual who owns his person, his mind, his life, his work and its products -- or is he the property of the tribe (the state, the society, the collective) that may dispose of him in any way it pleases, that may dictate his convictions, prescribe the course of his life, control his work and expropriate his products? Does man have the right to exist for his own sake -- or is he born in bondage, as an indentured servant who must keep buying his life by serving the tribe but can never acquire it free and clear?
Rand’s writing is littered with false dichotomies like this -- setting up two absurdities in opposition to each other, and assuming that the reader will accept the idea that you can only have all of one and none of the other.
Well, this reader isn’t buying it. The above example is, to my way of thinking, an especially egregious case of this technique. Even if reduced down to its barest essence (i.e., is man a sovereign individual or the property of the tribe?), it is easy to see that neither and both of these propositions are true. But when you add in all of Rand’s qualifiers (i.e., a sovereign individual is someone who owns his person AND owns his mind AND owns his life AND owns his work and its products; and being the property of the tribe means it can dictate your convictions AND prescribe the course of your life AND control your work AND expropriate your products) you actually get a dizzying array of possible combinations that may or may not be true at the same time. For the sake of the exercise, drop the labels, and contemplate a situation in which man both “owns his mind” and in which his society can “expropriate his products.” That could be true, couldn’t it?
But maybe an even clearer example of a false dichotomy comes when one of the essays quotes Ludwig von Mises:
“Nothing is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal encyclicals blame capitalism for the spread of irreligion and the sins of our contemporaries, and the Protestant churches and sects are no less vigorous in the indictment of capitalist greed. Friends of peace consider our wars as an offshoot of capitalist imperialism. But the adamant nationalist warmongers of Germany and Italy indicted capitalism for its “bourgeois” pacifism, contrary to human nature and to the inescapable laws of history. Sermonizers accuse capitalism of disrupting the family and fostering licentiousness. But the “progressives” blame capitalism for the preservation of allegedly out-dated rules of sexual restraint. Almost all men agree that poverty is an outcome of capitalism. On the other hand many deplore the fact that capitalism, in catering lavishly to the wishes of people intent upon getting more amenities and a better living, promotes a crass materialism. These contradictory accusations of capitalism cancel one another. But the fact remains that there are few people left who would not condemn capitalism altogether.”
Observations like these only seem contradictory when you force them into an either/or paradigm. But there’s another paradigm called “both/and” and it actually does a better job explaining what’s going on here. In this view, capitalism is capable of causing both poverty and prosperity. There is, after all, only one lottery winner.
Simple Strawmen
Another common conceit is the use of strawmen to support arguments that would otherwise have a difficult time surmounting the actual complexities that the strawmen have been constructed purposely to obscure. And sometimes the author doesn’t even try to cover his or her tracks -- transparently reducing the item to be railed against in front of the reader’s very eyes. Here’s one the collection’s other authors, Nathaniel Brandon, in his essay about the common fallacies about capitalism:
Should education be compulsory and tax-supported, as it is today? The answer to this question becomes evident if one makes the question more concrete and specific, as follows: Should the government be permitted to remove children forcibly from their homes, with or without the parents’ consent, and subject the children to educational training and procedures of which the parents may or may not approve? Should citizens have their wealth expropriated to support an educational system which they may or may not sanction, and to pay for the education of children who are not their own? To anyone who understands and is consistently committed to the principle of individual rights, the answer is clearly: No.
Makes the question more concrete and specific, huh? Yeah, I guess that’s one way to describe what you just did. But I’d rather you call it what it is -- creating a strawman that is much easier to tear down than the actual reality that gives you such heartburn. Go ahead. Show me the children who are forcibly being removed from their homes.
I would caution any reader to look for these tropes before dissecting any of the serious arguments offered by Rand and her collected authors. So armed, we can more confidently stride into the philosophical battleground.
Gold
I’m not sure I will ever understand the Randian obsession with a gold-backed currency. The essay addressing this topic in this collection was written by no less an expert than Alan Greenspan, and it is filled with several shocking (to me) revelations.
A free banking system based on gold is able to extend credit and thus create bank notes (currency) and deposits, according to the production requirements of the economy. Individual owners of gold are induced, by payments of interest, to deposit their gold in a bank (against which they can draw checks). But since it is rarely the case that all depositors want to withdraw all their gold at the same time, the banker need keep only a fraction of his total deposits in gold as reserves. This enables the banker to loan out more than the amount of his gold deposits (which means that he holds claims to gold rather than gold as security for his deposits).
I just about fell out of my chair when I read this. I thought THE WHOLE POINT of a gold-backed currency was tying it to a hard, actual asset that exists in a finite amount. This supposedly prevents the creation of money “out of thin air,” but, according to Greenspan, you evidently can create new money (that isn’t backed by gold) as long as you’re a banker and you have some gold in your vault. And who is to say how much of this “claim-to-gold-backed currency” can be created? You guessed it. The market.
But the amount of loans which he can afford to make is not arbitrary: he has to gauge it in relation to his reserves and to the status of his investments.
When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for future expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy’s stability and balanced growth.
I’m no banker, and have certainly never served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, but doesn’t this line of argument only make sense if there truly is some kind of inviolate gold standard? You know, like you can’t lend more money than the amount of gold you have in your vaults. The minute you allow the lending of “claim-to-gold-backed currency,” aren’t you basically throwing that standard out the window? Unless there is an inviolate fraction (i.e., you cannot lend more money than ten times the amount of gold you have in your vaults), there is nothing (except the minds of men) to stop profligate lending. In this situation, I really don’t understand what magic the gold in the banker’s vault is able to exert that a fiat currency can’t.
And there’s more. In this essay, Greenspan waxes eloquent about the opposition to the gold standard, painting a grim and despotic picture of this enemy.
But opposition to the gold standard in any form -- from a growing number of welfare-state advocates -- was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale.
Sorry. Both things cannot be true. It is true, with apologies for adopting the same unfortunate rhetoric, that under a gold standard, taxation “confiscates the wealth of the productive members of society.” They are the ones with the gold-backed money, after all, and gold-backed money is in limited supply. If you’re a “welfare statist” and you want money for your “welfare schemes,” there is only one place to get it.
But without the gold standard and with the subsequent onset of deficit spending, exactly how are governments confiscating the wealth of the productive members of society? Greenspan admits they’re not being taxed. Whether it’s the now-somewhat-archaic practice of selling government bonds, or the now-seemingly-ubitquitous practice of just spending more money than it has, governments aren’t really taking money from anyone are they?
But Greenspan is trying to thread an even narrower needle than this.
Under a gold standard, the amount of credit that an economy can support is determined by the economy’s tangible assets, since every credit instrument is ultimately a claim on some tangible asset. But government bonds are not backed by tangible wealth, only by the government’s promise to pay out of future tax revenues, and cannot easily be absorbed by the financial markets. A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited.
Here’s the key, and the thing I will never understand about the gold standard. Greenspan hooks his whole argument on this idea of “tangible wealth,” without ever acknowledging that the gold in his gold standard only acts like the guarantor of tangible wealth because we all agree that it can -- just like we’ve all now agree that the government itself (the Leviathan, if you choose) can serve as the guarantor of that tangible wealth. There is nothing magical about gold. Once you realize that you begin to understand that any other commodity could be substituted (silver, toothpicks, paper currency) and, as long as we all agree that that is the thing that has value, then the system will work generally the same way.
WTF?
As the above example shows, the importance of correctly parsing the right words is an extremely important tactic in understanding (and sometimes refuting) the Randian arguments in this book. It’s a tool I had to employ frequently, but sometimes it felt like a tool unequal to the task I had assigned to it. Literally, I sometimes had no idea what the authors were even talking about.
“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 the 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 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 received the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the “competition” between the strong and the weak of intellect. Such is the pattern of “exploitation” for which you have damned the strong.”
Rand is quoting Atlas Shrugged here (as she does a lot in these essays), so some pardon can be given, I suppose, for the rhetorical flourishes, but in substance, really, what the f*** is Rand talking about here?
Mental energy -- Definition, please? What exactly is “mental energy,” and how do you know who has it and who doesn’t? The janitor reference is a curious one, since I can suppose that Rand never saw Good Will Hunting.
No matter what millions he earns -- Millions? Meaning more than one and likely many multiples? Compared to the salary of a janitor? Which is what, in 1957 dollars? $4,000 a year? This is a “small percentage of his value” compared to that of the “mental effort” required of the janitor?
Receiving no intellectual bonus -- Again, definition, please? What kind of “intellectual bonus” is the janitor receiving from the “man at the top of the intellectual pyramid”? And, in Rand’s opinion, what kind of “intellectual bonus” (apart from the multiple millions) should that man be receiving from the janitor? What, scrubbing his toilets isn’t enough?
Starve in his hopeless ineptitude -- I suppose there are people so mentally deficient that, without some helping hand, they would be unable to feed themselves. But is this trait typical of the janitorial class? Rand evidently thinks so, which should tip the reader off as to the kind of class-based patterns of thought that permeate her writing. In her estimation, there are Men (those who use their brains and deserve intellectual bonuses) and there are Animals (those who would starve in their hopeless ineptitude).
Primordial Savages
Let’s dwell on this theme a little longer. I covered it in my reaction to Atlas Shrugged, but it is even more apparent here.
It is obvious that the ideological root of statism (or collectivism) is the tribal premise of primordial savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights, believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and may sacrifice them whenever it pleases to whatever it deems to be its own “good.” Unable to conceive of any social principles, save the rule of brute force, they believed that the tribe’s wishes are limited only by its physical power and that other tribes are its natural prey, to be conquered, looted, enslaved, or annihilated. The history of all primitive people is a succession of tribal wars and intertribal slaughter. That this savage ideology now rules nations armed with nuclear weapons should give pause to anyone concerned with mankind’s survival.
Rand tips dangerously close to outright racism here, perhaps only salvaging an intellectual position by the closing observation that modern nations conduct themselves in similar ways. But it is still agonizing to listen as she drones on about the inferiority and savagery of “primitive people.” It’s obvious, she says, but the only thing that is obvious to me is how blinkered she is being. Hmmm. Let me think. Is there any other reason to believe in the supremacy of the tribe other than an INABILITY to “conceive of individual rights” or “social principles”? It’s those Animals again -- those “people,” so far below the top of the intellectual pyramid that it’s best not to even think of them as Men. They’re primordial savages. Seriously, when she says things like this, I can’t help but dismiss them as the rantings of a Nietzschean superman.
Here’s another example I just can’t resist including. Rand, famously, is opposed to altruism, believing it to be either a cynically conscious tool to rob people of their wealth or an insidious systemic evil that corrupts the very foundations of our society (it’s sometimes hard to tell who the real devil is in Rand’s arguments).
When one grasps this, one knows that it is no use arguing over political trivia, or wondering about the nature of altruism and why the reign of the altruists is leading the world to an ever widening spread of horror. This is the nature of altruism, this -- not any sort of benevolence, good will, or concern for human misfortune. Hatred of man, not the desire to help him -- hatred of life, not the desire to further it -- hatred of the successful state of life -- and that ultimate, apocalyptic evil: hatred of the good for being the good.
Wow. Okay, first, notice what Rand did there, equating “life” with the “successful state of life.” What is the “successful state of life”? Well, of course, that’s life as Rand wants to define it. Man, the sovereign individual, unfettered from any obligations to or dictates from his tribe. That, in Rand’s argument, is “life,” and those opposed to it (or perhaps just disagreeing with its simplistic formulation) “hate” it. They hate Man. What else can possibly explain their opposition to him?
What every successful man (successful at any human value, spiritual or material) has encountered, has sensed, has been bewildered by, but has seldom identified, can now be seen in the open, with nations, instead of individual men, re-enacting the same unspeakable evil on a world scale where it cannot be hidden any longer. It is not for her flaws that the United States of America is hated, but for her virtues -- not for her weaknesses, but for her achievements -- not for her failures, but for her success -- her magnificent, shining, life-giving success.
“It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind which means: against life and man. It is a conspiracy without leader or direction, and the random little thugs of the moment who cash in on the agony of one land or another are chance scum riding the torrent from the broken dam of the sewer of centuries, from the reservoir of hatred for reason, for logic, for ability, for achievement, for joy, stored by every whining anti-human who ever perched the superiority of the “heart” over the mind.”
Now, remind me. Who hates who? Rand is quoting Atlas Shrugged again, but, of course, quoting Atlas Shrugged is essentially quoting herself. But whether it’s a character in Atlas Shrugged or her direct voice, the vitriol, the contempt, the hatred for those who are part of this “conspiracy without leader or direction” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) borders on the unhinged.
And this, I think, is what makes it the most difficult for me to approach Rand seriously. In another essay on the property status of the airwaves, she says this:
If you want to gauge a collectivist theory’s distance from reality, ask yourself; by what inconceivable standard can it be claimed that the broadcasting airways are the property of some illiterate sharecropper who will never be able to grasp the concept of electronics, or of some hillbilly whose engineering capacity is not quite sufficient to cope with a core-liquor still -- and that broadcasting, the product of an incalculable amount of scientific genius, is to be ruled by the will of such owners?
Seriously. It’s the condescension that turns me off the most. I’m not talking about whether the airwaves should or should not be owned by the government. I’m talking about the intellectual laziness in thinking that calling people names constitutes a reasoned argument. It makes me wonder if Rand can even make her arguments without insulting anyone.
And then, in the same essay, back to the idea of savages.
I say “atavistic,” because it took many centuries before primitive, nomadic tribes of savages reached the concept of private property -- specifically, land property, which marked the beginning of civilization. It is a tragic irony that in the presence of a new realm opened by a gigantic achievement of science, our political and intellectual leaders reverted to the mentality of primitive nomads and, unable to conceive of property rights, declared the new realm to be a tribal hunting ground.
It’s almost as if the thing that makes them “savages” is that they never read Atlas Shrugged. I mean, by what other standard could we possibly measure “civilization”?
The Market Is Perfect, Except When the Government Meddles In It
A lot of the essays in this book can be classified as supporting this essential premise: the free market is the best and most efficient economic (or moral) system we have, and whenever anything appears to go wrong with it, it is not the fault of the free market, it is the fault of the government meddling with it and not allowing it to function.
The problem with this argument is that there is no way to prove it -- as there has never been a free market whose outcomes we can observe, as Rand herself admits.
A system of pure, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism has never yet existed anywhere. What did exist were only so-called mixed economies, which means: a mixture, in varying degrees of freedom and controls, of voluntary choice and government coercion, of capitalism and statism. America was the freest country on earth, but elements of statism were present in her economy from the start. These elements kept growing, under the influence of her intellectuals who were predominantly committed to the philosophy of statism. The intellectuals -- the ideologists, the interpreters, the assessors of public events -- were tempted by the opportunity to seize political power, relinquished by all other social groups, and to establish their own versions of a “good” society at the point of a gun, i.e., by means of legalized physical coercion. They denounced the free businessmen as exponents of “selfish greed” and glorified the bureaucrats as “public servants.” In evaluating social problems, they kept damning “economic power” and expropriating political power, thus switching the burden of guilt from the politicians to the businessmen.
All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy.
This is a pure self-fulfilling prophecy. With this card in hand, the objectivist can claim that anything good that happens is because of the free market, and anything bad that happens is because of government intervention into it.
And the authors of these essays do this a lot -- sometimes to the point of contradicting each other. Rand will describe the giants of American industry -- men such as “James Jerome Hill or Commodore Vanderbilt or Andrew Carnegie or J. P. Morgan” -- as “self-made men who earned their fortunes by personal ability, by free trade on a free market.”
Huh. I thought there was no such thing as the free market. Oh well.
These are all railroad men, and Rand clearly has a special place in her heart for railroad men. Alan Greenspan, a few essays later, adds some more color to this story.
The railroads developed in the East, prior to the Civil War, in stiff competition with one another as well as with the older forms of transportation -- barges, riverboats, and wagons. By the 1860’s there arose a political clamor demanding that the railroads move west and tie California to the nation: national prestige was held to be at stake. But the traffic volume outside of the populous East was insufficient to draw commercial transportation westward. The potential profit did not warrant the heavy cost of investment in transportation facilities. In the name of “public policy” it was, therefore, decided to subsidize the railroads in their move to the West.
Between 1863 and 1867, close to one hundred million acres of public lands were granted to the railroads. Since these grants were made to individual roads, no competing railroads could vie for traffic in the same area of the West. Meanwhile, the alternative forms of competition (wagons, riverboats, etc.) could not afford to challenge the railroads in the West. Thus, with the aid of the federal government, a segment of the railroad industry was able to “break free” from the competitive bounds which had prevailed in the East.
This, of course, is a bad thing.
As might be expected, the subsidies attracted the kind of promoters who always exist on the fringe of the business community and who are constantly seeking an “easy deal.” Many of the new western railroads were shabbily built: they were not constructed to carry traffic, but to acquire land grants.
The western railroads were true monopolies in the textbook sense of the word. They could, and did, behave with an aura of arbitrary power. But that power was not derived from a free market. It stemmed from governmental subsidies and governmental restrictions.
When, ultimately, western traffic increased to levels which could support other profit-making transportation carriers, the railroads’ monopolistic power was soon undercut. In spite of their initial privileges, they were unable to withstand the pressure of free competition.
And Rand, of course, agrees, diagnosing the problem like this:
But there existed another kind of businessmen, the products of a mixed economy, the men with political pull, who made fortunes by means of special privileges granted to them by the government, such as the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. It was the political power behind their activities -- the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges -- that caused dislocations in the country’s economy, hardships, depressions, and mounting public protests. But it was the free market and the free businessmen that took the blame. Every calamitous consequence of government controls was used as a justification for the extension of the controls and of the government’s power over the economy.
You see. Free market = good. Mixed economy = bad.
And this really becomes an essential point. On the surface one may think that Rand advocates for the free market because she believes it is the best way to provide prosperity to all -- but that’s not really it. Her advocacy for the free market isn’t grounded in Reaganesque views of shining cities and lifting all boats. Her free market views are based entirely on rewarding those who deserve rewards.
Here’s the hook. It all depends on what you think is “good” and what you think is “bad.” One way to look at the railroad story is as Rand and Greenspan tell it. The government created all this dysfunction and hardship by meddling in the free market. But another way to look at it is that the free market, as Greenspan admits, wasn’t going to build railroads to the West coast because, initially, there wasn’t any profit in it. And that, when profit was possible, the government got out of the way and the free market took over. Deciding that it was bad for the government to help build the railroads means that you are deciding that not allowing the profit-seeking forces of the market decide what gets built and what doesn’t is “bad.”
And what, praytell, is “good” from that point of view?
Loading the Vernacular Dice
As I've said, so much of Rand’s argument absolutely depends on the definition of the terms she uses -- definitions that are never quite explicitly stated. In another example, while she rails against the evil that is government control she is sometimes forced to admit that some “businessmen” do profit under such systems. But…
It is not a matter of accidental personalities, of “dishonest businessmen” or “dishonest legislators.” The dishonesty is inherent in and created by the system. So long as a government holds the power of economic control, it will necessarily create a special “elite,” an “aristocracy of pull,” it will attract the corrupt type of politician into the legislature, it will work to the advantage of the dishonest businessman, and will penalize and, eventually, destroy the honest and able.
This utterly confuses me. Other than the assertion that one system (government control) is evil and another system (free market) is good, what evidence is there that either proposition is true? Don’t people suffer and succeed under both systems? And why is the businessman who plays by the rules of the free market “honest and able,” while the one who plays by the rules of government control “dishonest” and “corrupt”? Isn’t the businessman who succeeds under government control using his mind to out-compete his rivals? It’s almost as if Rand wants to write her own rules so that she always wins the argument.
To further extend this point, let’s look at another essay written by Nathaniel Brandon, where he cites more history that he thinks makes the same essential point about government meddling. Now, the subject isn’t railroads, but banking.
Throughout most of the 1920’s, the government compelled banks to keep interest rates artificially and uneconomically low. As a consequence, money was poured into every sort of speculative venture. By 1928, the warning signals of danger were clearly apparent: unjustified investment was rampant and stocks were increasingly overvalued. The government chose to ignore these danger signals.
Beware the passive voice in that paragraph! “Money was poured into every sort of speculative venture.” How do you put that sentence into the active voice? Who poured the money into the speculative ventures? The government? The market? Or the minds of men?
A free banking system would have been compelled, by economic necessity, to put the brakes on this process of runaway speculation. Credit and investment, in such a case, would be drastically curtailed; the banks which made unprofitable investments, the enterprises which proved unproductive, and those who dealt with them, would suffer -- but that would be all; the country as a whole would not be dragged down. However, the “anarchy” of a free banking system had been abandoned -- in favor of “enlightened” government planning.
A Quick Aside
Okay. Quick aside. The authors of these essays LOVE putting things in quotation marks. They do it, I assume, as I have done, in order to show the irony of these words, which, from their point of view, are publicly used in a manner exactly opposite to the actual situations. A free banking system is called “anarchy” but is actually enlightened; government planning is called “enlightened” but is actually anarchy. Get it?
But this technique is so overused that it more often comes across as either unintelligible, or just vindictive. Here’s a particularly egregious example from Rand’s essay on how big business is actually America’s persecuted minority.
Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen. For instance, consider the evil of condemning some men and absolving others, without a hearing, regardless of the facts. Today’s “liberals” consider a businessman guilty in any conflict with a labor union, regardless of the facts or issues involved, and boast that they will not cross a picket line “right or wrong.” Consider the evil of judging people by a double standard and of denying to some the rights granted to others. Today’s “liberals” recognize the workers’ (the majority’s) right to their livelihood (their wages), but deny the businessmen’s (the minority’s) right to their livelihood (their profits). If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as “social gains”; if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as “selfish greed.” if the workers’ standard of living is low, the “liberals” blame it on the businessmen; but if the businessmen attempt to improve their economic efficacy, to expand their markets, and to enlarge the financial returns of their enterprises, thus making higher wages and lower prices possible, the same “liberals” denounce it as “commercialism.” If a non-commercial foundation -- i.e., a group which did not have to earn its funds -- sponsors a television show, advocating its particular views, the “liberals” hail it as “enlightenment,” “education,” “art,” and “public service”; if a businessman sponsors a television show and wants it to reflect his views, the “liberals” scream, calling it “censorship,” “pressure,” and “dictatorial rule.” When three locals of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters deprived New York City of its milk supply for fifteen days -- no moral indignation or condemnation was heard from the “liberal” quarters; but just imagine what would happen if businessmen stopped that milk supply for one hour -- and how swiftly they would be struck down by that legalized lynching or pogrom known as “trust-busting.”
Okay. There’s a whole lot I can criticize in that paragraph, but let’s just focus on her use of the quotation marks. I understand their use for words like “social gains” and “selfish greed.” As described above, Rand puts those in quotation marks to show that she would prefer a different usage of these terms from that of her philosophical rivals. But why is “liberals” placed in those irony-inducing quotation marks? She wants to re-appropriate that word, too? Yes, I know about classical liberalism, and maybe that’s her angle, but frankly, putting it in quotes EVERY TIME she mentions it comes across as more vindictive than intellectual.
Back To The Main Point
But let’s get back to my larger point. Even in a mixed economy, even in situations controlled by government action, men are still men and can still make up their own minds about what they will and will not do. Right? Rand, et. al., wants to preach that government regulation turns Men into Animals, but not, evidently, the free market. There, Men are always Men, free to exercise their minds in any way they see fit.
Sorry. I’m not sure you can have it both ways. And this, I think, is where the essential flaw of Rand’s entire philosophy comes most into stark relief. She wants you to choose between Man being either a “sovereign individual” or the “property of the tribe,” which, in fact, puts Man on the wrong linear axis. Man does not lose his freedom when he is a member of his tribe, and is still free to act under whatever dictates the tribe places upon him. I know. I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and I’ve seen how John Galt reacts when literally tortured by the statists. The real question lies along the perpendicular axis. Choose not if Man is sovereign or property, choose if the forces acting upon his sovereignty are market-based or state-based.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
