February 5th, 2010 by Ron Pisaturo
Ayn Rand’s 105th birthday was on February 2. On that day, I was immersed in unimportant details of my life. But this morning I celebrated Ayn Rand’s birthday in my favorite way. I opened up one of her novels (The Fountainhead this time) at random places and began reading.
Perhaps I should perform this celebration every day. After all, I look at beautiful paintings every day. The novels of Ayn Rand (especially The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) are the most beautiful and inspiring works of art that I have ever encountered. Why not enjoy them every day?
January 26th, 2010 by Ron Pisaturo
Here is some elaboration on this statement from my previous post, in which I wrote that Obama’s statement at his “Job’s Forum” could be boiled down to this: Tell me what to tell you to tell people to do.
Obama was asking for advice on what to do on the economy. But the only proper role of government in the economy is the protection of property rights as part of protection of life and liberty. Any government action beyond this role amounts to using coercion to tell people what they must do with their lives. And so Obama is asking people to tell him what to tell people to do.
Furthermore, Obama was asking specifically for help from businessmen in creating jobs. In creating a job for someone, a businessman gives someone instructions on what to do in order to be productive; in short, the businessman tells someone what to do. And so Obama is asking people to tell him what to tell them to tell people to do.
(Note that a prospective employee too can create a job, when the prospective employee explains to a prospective employer how the employee can make money for the employer.)
But, one may, ask, why is Obama’s plea so wrong?
For one thing, it is not the job of businessmen to create jobs for others, as it is not the job of American citizens to create profits for businessmen. Republicans are as wrong as Democrats on this issue. As I wrote last February,
To the Republicans, like the Democrats, the job of productive geniuses is to provide jobs for everyone else. The idea of the welfare state has reached a deeper level. According to this idea, the “people” must be provided not only with products and services such as food, shelter, and health care, but they must also be provided with a job so that they can hold the illusion that they are earning their living.
A businessman rightfully tries to produce at the lowest cost possible, which generally means with the lowest number of jobs possible. A good businessman tries constantly to reduce the number of jobs needed to produce a given supply of goods, just as any person tries constantly to reduce the number of hours needed to complete his household chores. Often, of course, a prosperous business needs to create more jobs in order to produce and sell more goods that its customers are demanding. But even in these cases, “job creation” is not the business’s goal but rather an unavoidable cost; the business’s goal is profit. And a business may also prosper not by increasing production at all but instead by cutting costs by cutting jobs. These facts are such simple common sense that it is unconscionable for any politician or commentator to speak of “job creation” as a proper goal of business. Yet politicians and commentators speak this way almost unanimously.
Another, worse thing wrong with Obama’s plea can be seen by observing the difference between mutual consent and coercion, analogous to the difference between consensual sex and rape. A businessman is free to create a job or not, and offers some of his own wealth as payment for the job. When the government “creates” a job, the government offers wealth that was robbed (through taxation) or stolen (through deficit spending and ‘monetizing’ its debt) as payment for the job.
The ongoing public debate, between Democrats and Republicans, over whether the government really has saved or created the jobs that it claims to have saved or created, is a false alternative. Any job “saved” or “created” by government—apart from the job of protecting the life, liberty, and property of its citizens—should not exist.
Some might protest that the government’s creation of jobs is not at all like rape; after all, no one is forced to accept a government job. But citizens are forced to turn over their wealth. And suppose the government said this to you: “We are taking your husband away from you. But don’t worry, the government will provide another man for you. Now, we are not forcing you to take this man; but if you want a man, this is the man you can have. But no one is raping you.”
The wealth robbed or stolen from private citizens and then spent on a government job is wealth that cannot be spent or invested by the rightful owners of that wealth.
What if you cannot find a job in a free society? Well, what if you cannot find a man (or a woman)? You keep trying, or you do your best on your own. You don’t resort to rape or to kidnapping another woman’s man for a chance at that woman.
The average rental price for cropland in New York State in 2009 was $41 per acre, per year. That means that for $400 per year, or roughly a couple of months of saved-up food stamps, a man could rent more than enough land to subsist on and possibly even support a small family—even without expensive modern equipment—through his own hard work. (Families in China today subsist on less than an acre per person.)
One failing of modern education is that most people today have no inkling of how to survive on their own. They have no idea of how to grow food or hunt or raise livestock, how to build or maintain a shelter, how to make or even mend clothing. More importantly, they somehow feel unable to learn how to do these things, things that even primitive savages somehow learned how to do. Most importantly, they have no appreciation for those who do know how to do these things, and who offer their goods and services to them. Today’s ignoramuses condemn landlords, but demand the shelters that these landlords build and maintain; they condemn energy companies, but demand the fuel and electricity these companies provide to heat their homes, fuel their cars, and run their appliances; they condemn drug companies and insurance companies, but demand the drugs and insurance that these companies create. More generally, they condemn businessmen, but demand that businessmen provide them with a job, as if to say, “We don’t know how to survive on our own. Somehow you do know how to survive; you must be privileged or something. Tell us what we must do in order to be useful. And then drop dead.”
The model product of modern education is Barack Obama.
When the financial crisis hit in late 2008, individuals realized that their savings—especially their stocks and their homes—were not as valuable as these individuals had thought. These individuals then acted rationally: they cut back on their spending. They refrained from buying things that they did not need: things such as vacation trips, dinners in restaurants, home entertainment centers, and new automobiles. They cut back on these luxuries in order to rebuild their savings for things that were more important to them: things such as education for their children; or a nest egg for a rainy day; or a nest egg for their retirement, when they would need savings in order to pay for food, shelter, clothing, and health care.
Businesses that offered the unneeded goods and services suffered. The government’s “stimulus plan” was designed (at least ostensibly) to spend government money—acquired through borrowing on behalf of taxpayers—on these suffering businesses so that the employees of these businesses could keep their jobs. And the employees’ jobs consisted of continuing to produce things that rational individuals had decided they did not need.
And so, while rational individuals thought that they were replenishing their savings by cutting back on luxuries, the government has been surreptitiously spending these replenished savings in order to keep producing what the savers do not need. The savers believe that their saved dollars can be redeemed in the future to buy the food and health care they will need. But instead, these savings will have to be spent on paying back the debt that the government incurred when the government kept people working at making unneeded things. Just as in late 2008, only more so, the savers’ savings today are not worth as much as the savers think.
One might ask: “But what if the government defaults on its debt?” (Such a scenario is very likely, since ‘monetizing’ the debt—creating more dollars and paying the debt with them—is one, devious way of defaulting.) Then, won’t the savers be off the hook and not have to pay off the debt? Well, but there are many savers who have put some of their savings into government bonds. Many savers have done so without even realizing it, since the companies in which they own stock have done so. If the government defaults on its debt, then the savers who own bonds have less savings than they think they have. However you slice it, many, many Americans today have much less wealth than they think they have.
One day, there will not be enough real savings—that is, real capital equipment and fuel and supplies—remaining, and factories and mechanized farms will no longer be able to run, and prosperity will end.
As people, even ‘wealthy’ people, die for lack of drugs or medical equipment or trained doctors, the last factories to go dark will be the government-subsidized ones making fancy new automobiles and home theatre centers.
Why is our government taking us down this suicidal path? One of the government’s arguments is economic. Here is Obama on April 14, 2009:
To begin with, economists on both the left and the right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending. [This false statement would have been true if, for “on both the left and the right,” Obama had substituted “among both hard-core Marxists and semi-socialist Keynesians.”] You see, when this recession began, many families sat around the kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back. And so have many businesses. And this is a completely reasonable and understandable reaction. But if everybody—if everybody—if every family in America, if every business in America cuts back all at once, then no one is spending any money, which means there are no customers, which means there are more layoffs, which means the economy gets even worse. That’s why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand. That’s exactly what we’re doing right now.
But people don’t stop spending altogether. They stop spending on things they don’t need. Yes, there are layoffs; there are layoffs of people who are making things that customers don’t need. People stop buying today what they don’t need so that in the future they will be able to buy what they do need. Likewise, in a free society, people stop making what customers don’t need so that they can begin to make what customers do need.
The process of transitioning from the production of unneeded things to the production of needed things takes time, but the process must be allowed to start. The time that managers and laborers continue to spend on making home theatre centers is time that they cannot spend on learning to be doctors’ assistants or to make medical supplies. The money that an investor gives to government to buy a ‘safe’ Treasury bond (used to keep an auto company going) is money that he won’t invest in building a new facility to train nurses.
A favorite argument for stimulus spending is an argument from Keynes, alluded to by Obama in his passage above. In an economic recession, according to Keynes, there are idle resources. Factories are operating at under full capacity, and people are unemployed. According to Keynes, if the government can somehow coax the economy to put those idle people and machines to work, then extra wealth will be created at no cost. According to this argument, such government spending does not ‘crowd out’ private investment; the resources paid for by government spending are not being taken away from some private use, because these resources had been idle anyway.
The basic error of this argument is the basic error of Marxism: the denial of thought. Marx was a (‘dialectical’) materialist. To Marx, the means of production are machines, arms, and legs, but not minds. Working entails sitting or standing at a machine and pulling levers, or swinging hammers. To materialists such as Marx and Keynes, thinking—about what to make and how to build new machines to make those things—does not count as work. ‘Worker’ is synonymous with ‘manual laborer’.
In a free society, free individuals may choose to let their obsolete machines idle, but their minds do not idle. A laid-off laborer lives off of his savings (which he did not squander on HDTVs and a new SUV and trips to Vegas) while he teaches himself a new skill. A manager who made cars starts planning to make ambulances. And so on. But again, individuals cannot do this new teaching and planning while they are still doing the old ‘working’.
The irony of Keynesianism is that, in the act of trying to achieve ‘full employment’ and ‘full capacity utilization’ of existing machines, it achieves the complete idling of the one truly precious resource: the human mind.
What if the government had not bailed out auto companies and banks, and had not ‘saved’ other jobs through the stimulus plan? Many people would have lost jobs. Those with inadequate savings would have had to cut back on expenses drastically. And that would have been a good thing. The stimulus saved these people from even having to think of ways that they should have cut back. For instance, not only would they have had to cut out SUVs and cell phones and plasma TVs and cable TV and beer and football, but they might have had to move in with their parents or their neighbors, and live two or three families in a one-family house. The former factory worker might have had to become a handyman hustling jobs from the whole neighborhood, working 80 hours a week instead of his usual 40, while studying another 10 hours a week to be a paramedic, and thinking another 10 hours a week about a new idea for low-cost mobile offices for doctors. The children might have had to do all the household chores while their mother worked 80 hours a week helping out in the emergency room and learning to become a nurse. And all of these things would have been good.
But by ‘saving’ the jobs of these ‘workers’, the government ‘saved’ these individuals from the responsibility—and the rewards—of thinking.
It is difficult to say who are the most harmed by the government’s ‘jobs stimulus’: those of us who have to pay for these obsolete jobs, or those who remain in them.
The above is a partial elaboration of my One-Sentence Memo on ‘Stimulus’ Spending, which I wrote last February:
Government spending enables some people to acquire what they have not earned, deceives other people into thinking they can afford to buy what they don’t really need, and stimulates people to work at making things that people have not earned or don’t need.
So there we have the economic argument for the government’s job stimulus, and my rebuttal. The economic argument does have to be rebutted, but remember this: The only reason that Keynesianism, an absurd doctrine, has influence is that it is a rationalization for statism. And the politics of statism rests on the moral code of altruism, which has been expressed by Obama, for instance, in two of his ready slogans: “We are our brother’s keeper” and “shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.”
Fortunately for mankind, the ethics of altruism has been refuted by Ayn Rand, the champion of rational selfishness. If only more of mankind would discover that fact.
I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.
[Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, 1943.]
December 4th, 2009 by Ron Pisaturo
At his “Jobs Forum” yesterday, Obama said this:
It is only when the private sector starts to reinvest again, only when our businesses start hiring again and people start spending again and families start seeing improvement in their own lives again that we’re going to have the kind of economy that we want. That’s the measure of a real economic recovery.
So that’s why I’ve invited all of you here today. Many of you run businesses yourselves. Each of you is an expert on some aspect of job creation. Collectively, your views span the spectrum. That was deliberate. We’ve looking for fresh perspectives and new ideas.
…
I am open to every demonstrably good idea, and I want to take every responsible step to accelerate job creation.
In other words: Tell me what to tell you to tell people to do.
Such a mentality does not grasp the nature of man and the meaning of freedom.
Need I elaborate? Time permitting, I may do so this weekend.
November 30th, 2009 by Ron Pisaturo
This statement, about the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, made last week by President Obama, has been replayed repeatedly on television news:
After eight years—some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done—it is my intention to finish the job.
It seems that Mr. Obama cannot discuss any policy without blaming the prior administration. But of those eight years in Afghanistan, nearly one year has been under the Obama regime. More significantly, of the 856 Americans killed in those eight years in Operation Enduring Freedom, 283—that is, 33%—have been killed since February 2009, while Obama has been President. (Source: http://icasualties.org/OEF.)
Number of Americans killed in 2007: 117
Number of Americans killed in 2008: 155
Number of Americans killed since February 2009: 283
As in other policy areas, and as I have explained often and at length (here, for instance), the change made by Obama in foreign policy has been in the wrong direction from the disastrous Bush Administration. Bush was an American-sacrificing, sovereignty-surrendering, evil-appeasing weakling. Obama is weaker.
What would be a rational U.S. policy in the Middle East? In a nutshell, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan should have been Operation Scorched Earth; Operation Iraqi Freedom should have been Operation Recapture of Oil Assets; and our mission in Iran and Saudi Arabia should be Operation New Texas.
November 11th, 2009 by Ron Pisaturo
The day before this year’s Independence Day, in my post, Revolution, I wrote this:
It is becoming increasingly likely that nothing short of civil disobedience—and perhaps even more than that—will be necessary to save the America created by our Founding Fathers. In my judgment, the next TEA Party should be more than a verbal protest and more like the original Boston Tea Party.
Do enough Americans have the courage to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defy a government that is changing America into a socialist/fascist/statist society? If Iranians can defy the Iranian dictators, if Estonians can stand up to the Soviets, surely many Americans can stand up to the Obama regime.
Do enough Americans have the understanding of freedom—of capitalism—necessary to know what to stand for as well as against? Probably not. But even a chance for freedom is worth fighting for.
Now, on Veteran’s Day, I am willing to walk the walk. If Rosa Parks could refuse to give up her public bus seat to a white person (and endure prison for this ‘crime’), and if American soldiers can risk (and sometimes lose) their lives in defense of freedom, then I can risk being singled out by the Obama regime for extra persecution.
I will no longer submit to the government’s dictates that I pay for the health care and welfare of others, most of whom I would surely despise if I knew them.
Beginning on January 15, 2010, I will stop paying estimated income tax. On April 15, I will file an extension, so that it will not be until September 15 that the government will have a way of knowing whether I have ‘underpaid’ income tax. Perhaps by then, enough other Americans will have withheld tax payments and made the Obama regime relent or fall.
I hope that other Americans will take similar actions. My understanding of the tax process is as follows. If one is on salary, one can update one’s W-4 form so that little tax is withheld. If one is self-employed, one can refrain from paying estimated tax. If one takes these actions beginning in January 2010, and then files an extension on April 15, 2011, the government will not know until September 2011 whether one ‘owes’ tax. By then, we will know how strong the tax revolt is, and what our chances are of winning. Perhaps by then the Obama regime will have relented or fallen. If not, and if there are not enough of us in revolt, then one can still decide to pay tax plus the penalty.
Then there are some, such as me, who are willing to risk imprisonment. Perhaps this post itself violates numerous laws.
For me, the chance for freedom is worth the risk of ‘penalty’ or imprisonment.
We cannot rely on democracy, which is what America—once a constitutional republic based on the principle of individual rights—is degenerating into. Democracy is nothing more or less than the will of the majority, whether civilized or savage.
If we wait and do nothing. by next year our freedom of speech, and our best chances for organized resistance, may be gone.
“Give me liberty, or give me death.”
October 26th, 2009 by Ron Pisaturo
On Friday, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “we will have a public option in our legislation to keep the insurance companies honest and to provide real competition.”
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs used similar language when he said on Thursday, “the President believes we have to have choice and competition, thinks the best way to do that is through a public option.”
The Obama Administration has been speaking this slogan “choice and competition” for months now. On July 22, Obama himself said this:
If you don’t have health insurance, or are a small business looking to cover your employees, you’ll be able to choose a quality, affordable health plan through a health insurance exchange – a marketplace that promotes choice and competition.
I have explained, here, President Obama’s tyrannical notion of ‘choice’. In other posts (such as The Tyrant’s Lies Against Capitalism and Fascism: Controlling Capitalists, for Socialist Goals, I have explained other ways in which Obama exhibits the mentality of a tyrant. Now Obama and his Administration exhibit a tyrant’s notion of ‘competition’, an out-of-context notion of forced competition, as if competition is the one productive feature of capitalism and thus the one feature of capitalism worth having.
By this reasoning, the U.S. should never have freed the slaves. Instead, we just should have forced the slaves to compete with each other; imagine how much more productive they would have been if only the best slaves had been fed. And we should have kept the slaves ‘honest’ by forcing them to compete with a master too (a kind of ‘public option’), supported by another team of unseen slaves (like today’s taxpayers).
Ayn Rand defines capitalism as “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.” (“What is Capitalism?”, The Objectivist Newsletter, November and December, 1965. Reprinted in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, New York: Signet, p.19.) Under capitalism, individuals are free to use their own rational judgment in production, in choosing what to produce and how to produce it. They are free to keep what they have produced. They are free to trade their products with other individuals by mutual consent. These are the reasons that capitalism leads to prosperity—not for everyone—but for those who follow the proper morality of rational self-interest.
A certain kind of competition is implicit in the activity of trade. Whenever a man offers his goods or services for trade, he is implicitly competing against the other choices that his potential trading partner can make. Competition is healthy and good when it arises in the context of free trade. But when a tyrant comes along and deprives individuals of their freedom and says, “This is the product that you must provide (specified health insurance policies and specified healthcare treatments), this is how you must provide it, this is to whom you must provide it (everyone), this is the payment we will allow you, and only the ones who ‘play’ best by these rules will survive,” that leads to a different kind of competition. It is the competition of slaves fighting each other in the Coliseum.
Under this kind of ‘competition’, which has been going on for generations—via the FDA, oppressive income taxes, Medicare and Medicaid, and regulation of the insurance industry—it is little wonder that various groups of ‘competitors’—drug companies, insurance companies, doctors, and patients—have grown to loathe each other. If only these ‘competitors’ would recognize the real enemy: the tyrants in government.
September 15th, 2009 by Ron Pisaturo
On Saturday, I attended a TEA Party, 912West, in Los Angeles along with thousands of other Americans. Notice all the American flags and other symbols of America in these photos of the event. These people love America.
912West organizer Tony Katz at the podium
Thanks to my friend Scott McConnell for photos of me
The speakers were mixed. For instance, one speaker exhorted the government not to cut Medicare benefits. When he said this, there was little support from the audience. Nor was there support when one speaker seemed to criticize all banks. But when speakers, such as Bill Whittle, spoke of individual rights, the audience was emphatic in support.
Too bad there are few if any elected officials, Republican or Democrat, who understand individual rights as well as many of these Americans do.
