to be or not to be? the problem of abortion part 1

One can learn an enormous amount about oneself through the issue of abortion.  If one happens to be an American, through the issue of abortion one can theoretically identify one’s moral, political, and jurisprudential leanings.  Perhaps that’s why I find the issue so fascinating.  But it can also be frustrating.

Why frustrating?  Because I’m rarely exposed to someone who seems to grasp exactly what is at stake in the debate.  For example, some believe that abortion is about “choice” versus “life.”  What do these alternatives mean?  Absolute choice, like an hour before a woman’s due date just because she’s changed her mind about the whole affair?  Absolute life, like forbidding a woman the “morning after pill” the morning after she is the victim of rape?  Both views seem to me to be patently unreasonable.  But some people hold them.

Although I do not believe either extreme is reasonable, I’m only going to dismiss outright those who hold the latter view (the “life absolutists” who claim that abortion ought never be permissible) because I don’t take that view seriously, and anybody that does is invited to dismiss this piece immediately anyway.  Nothing I will have to say here will alter such a person’s view, for that person has reached his or her view by mere conviction alone – not any form of reason.  As one my philosophical heroes has put it: “In philosophy, as in any other purely theoretical discipline, it is better to be wrong as the result of inquiry and argument than be right as the result of mere conviction.”  Panayot Butchvarov, The Concept of Knowledge at 5 (Northwestern 1970).  Such folks disagree, which they are of course at liberty to do.  But I am equally at liberty to dismiss such people as hopeless knaves.

Remarkably, the former view actually has a rather hearty band of adherents who believe that nothing of moral significance or relevance occurs between the freely chosen decision to have sexual intercourse and childbirth.  (If you think I just erected a straw-man here, explain why.)  Who are these adherents, and what could they possibly add to the debate surrounding the morality of abortion?

The answer to the first question is “radical feminists.”  And I use the qualifier “radical” to distinguish these feminists from those who believe, quite rightly, that women should be considered as legal equals to men.  Those I simply call “feminists” proper, to which I consider myself an ardent subscriber.  The answer to the second question is, in my view, little or nothing of any degree of intelligibility.  And I’m not just being facetious here.  I literally mean that radical feminists, in the exact same sense as our hopeless knaves above, have little or nothing to add to the debate surrounding the morality of abortion.  My reasoning for my view follows.  But first a bit of background.

During the winter of 2007/08 I spent a great deal of time procrastinating when I should have been studying for the Iowa Bar Exam.  One of the things I did to procrastinate was surf the internet.  And, in looking for a law school classmate friend of mine who described herself as a radical feminist, I wound up viewing a website known as www.feministing.com (your guess is as good as mine where the idea for the name of the site comes from).  To put it as politely albeit as accurately as I possibly can, I was instantly fascinated by how militant and belligerent the contributors to this site are.  I grew so fascinated that I actually attempted to engage some of them in conversation and argument.  Ultimately, my attempts failed, although I was successful in interacting civilly with them.  But it was plain as day that they didn’t want someone like me around, despite their claim to wish to engage people on the merits of their views.  Simply put, I “didn’t get it” because I “don’t have a uterus.”  (I’ve never understood this sentiment.  Since when has one’s genitalia fixed one’s ability to reason?  One would think that feminists, of all people, would reject that one’s genitalia determines one’s ability to reason.)

Disappointed with the contributors’ unwillingness to engage in any serious discussion of their views, I purchased and read the executive editor’s, that is Jessica Valenti, book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters (Seal 2007).  Fascinated by Valenti’s mindset does not even begin to describe my astonishment as I worked through this strange book, which is specifically styled to “educate” younger women (the back cover of which speaks to all young women: “YOU’RE A FEMINIST.  I SWEAR.”).

No less so was I fascinated by Valenti’s instruction to young women about the issue of abortion.  Valenti writes: “[W]omen’s reproductive rights are under attack… [R]epro[duction] rights are about more than abortion and birth control.  They’re about being able to have sex when we want to.”  (81)

In other words, abortion is not only about contraception, abortion is contraception.  And both are subsumed under the name “reproductive rights,” as if anyone objects to the notion that a woman has the right to choose when she wishes to reproduce.  (Have you ever heard anyone advance the argument that the state should deprive a woman of when she must reproduce?  How would the state decide to force a woman to reproduce?  I don’t even know where to begin with this.)  The second strange feature of Valenti’s opening remarks about abortion is her use of the term “contraception.”  To me, that term denotes a concept that embodies preventing conception – that seems to be the point of the “contra” in “contraception.”  But Valenti’s use of the term includes “aborting that which is already conceived” in her definition.  To me, this is a wholesale mangling of basic language.

In any event, Valenti continues: “At the heart of it all, it’s truly about hating sex, or at least hating that women have sex.  There’s a lot of talk about life and morals, but it’s nonsense.  To the people who want to limit your choices, it’s about slut-punishing.”  I find these claims baffling.

For example, I happen to believe that preserving a life form – any life form, including weeds and spiders – is, at least prima facie, is better than extinguishing it.  And I say prima faciebecause this rule is obviously not absolute, for there are plenty of living things that it is good and proper to extinguish (e.g., cancer).  All things being equal, on my view, one ought not terminate another life form for no good reason, or arbitrarily, if you will.  Call it whatever you wish, but be it a blade of grass, or even a spider (I really don’t like spiders), one ought not destroy it unless one has a reason for doing so, for letting it live is morally better than not.  See, e.g., Panayot Butchvarov, Skepticism in Ethics 88 (Indiana 1989) (“The intrinsic goodness of existence as such is evident in the attractiveness of the claims of certain conservationist and environmentalist movements, as long as we understand their goal of the preservation of the environment, including other species of life, as motivated by the belief that this is an intrinsic good, rather than something [merely] conducive to human interests.”).  It is therefore no surprise that I consider myself a conservationist, an environmentalist, and why I don’t hunt animals anymore (and feel guilty about not being a vegetarian).

As a result, let’s get clear about the following proposal.  I believe the general moral proposition “One ought to do what one can to preserve life where one reasonably can in the circumstances” is prima facie true.  And the reason I believe this to be a prima facie true general moral proposition is because I take it for granted that, all things being equal, in any given universe, preserving any given being’s existence is in some sense “better than” or “superior to” extinguishing it – unless there is a good reason for doing so (which is why we say the proposition is merely prima facie true, not absolutely true).

I take this proposal as the fundamental starting place when examining the problem of abortion.  I also take this proposal as the fundamental basis of the conservationist and environmentalist movements, as Butchvarov notes above, to which – like “feminism” – I consider myself an ardent subscriber.

Do you agree with my proposal as the place to start?  Why or why not?

my path to libertarianism

I was born in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1977 and was raised in what I would describe as a moderately republican nuclear family.  I say “moderate” because, while registered republicans, neither of my parents were particularly religious, and in my opinion many (if not most) self-described “conservative” republicans are fairly religious.  (See, e.g., the Mike Huckabee/Sarah Palin wing of the party.)  My paternal grandparents were recovering Catholics-turned-Unitarian Universalists, and my material grandparents were what I’d describe as moderate Lutherans.  If I was raised anything insofar as religion is concerned, it was Unitarian Universalist – or, as I often call it, the “it’s all good religion.”

From pre-school through the sixth grade, I had the rather interesting experience of being the minority among my two best friends, both of whom were Korean and whose parents had immigrated to the United States either before or shortly after my friends were born.  Of course, in my actual schooling I was within the majority, but in my everyday dealings, school related or not, it spent a lot of my time in what was a very different cultural setting.  I mention this because I think this experience had an enormous impact on what I would later come to learn is something called “race consciousness,” that is, in the sense that I never realized any such consciousness at all (until I entered law school and was exposed, for the first time, to “critical race theory”).

To be candid, I never really considered myself a political person until I began studying at the University of Iowa as an undergraduate.  My first “political” exposure of any serious kind came in a freshman class called “accelerated rhetoric,” where I was inundated by a certain fellow student’s views that can only be described as radically feminist.  In a more general sense I also came to be aware of the general sentiment that republicanism is a very backward and ignorant political stance to hold, although for reasons that were never articulated to me, so I (naturally) changed my voter registration to Democrat – if nothing else to fit in.

It was also during my freshman year that I realized two critical things about myself.  The first was that I had absolutely no serious idea about what “I wanted to do” with my adult life, whenever that dreaded time began.  The second was that I had absolutely no serious grasp of any political or moral positions in any depth or sophistication.  This latter realization (if not the former) struck me at the time as something that ought to be remedied.  Needless to say, I believe these two realizations occurred to me while sitting in a class called “Principles of Reasoning” (to avoid math) taught by then-graduate student John Rudisill (now an Assistant Professor at the College of Wooster),  which is the name for the most basic logic course one can take at the University of Iowa, taught within the philosophy department.  Needless to say, I was absolutely hooked at this point – if not by philosophy, then by the notion of clear thinking and reasoning.  Whatever I wanted to do, I thought, I wanted to do it in a clear and thoughtful way.

Sometime after I switched my official major (for the fifth and final time) to philosophy, inspired by the Socratic claim to fundamental ignorance and the Cartesian program of casting away all components of knowledge that contained any shred of doubt, I scrapped any political allegiance or affiliation, deciding that I would (eventually) construct my own views from scratch based on the lives and works of the wisest of humanity (western philosophers, of course).  And so it began.

Much like my former (albeit brief) affiliation with the Democrat Party, which was for a time complimented with a moderate flirtation with Marxist thought, I also began my intellectual journey as a thoroughgoing atheist, a view that has, over time, softened to some degree of agnostic mysticism, and culminated in my being confirmed in the Episcopalian Church of the United States at the age of 30.  (More about this later, as I have little doubt that some will insist that one cannot be simultaneously an agnostic mystic and a Christian.)

By the time I received my B.A. from the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts, majoring in philosophy, I was decidedly libertarian in outlook (although a registered Independent), where “libertarian” refers to particular political philosophy that holds individual humans as the ontological and normative starting point to any just society. As briefly as possible, libertarians insist that the line of demarcation between a just and an unjust society is the point at which individual rights to property, life, liberty, and one’s pursuit of happiness is unduly subordinated to the will of “the state” or “the people.” Though libertarians differ in degree regarding where to draw the line, all libertarians agree that it must be drawn.

In my view, reasonable libertarians generally focus on the right of individuals to act in accordance with their own subjective values, and insist that the coercive actions of the state are often (or even always) an impediment to the efficient realization of those values. As a result, if libertarians had a slogan, “Live and let live” might be a prime candidate. I consider “classical liberals” and “reasonable libertarians” synonyms, and therefore believe the label includes folks like John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and later,Friedrich Hayek, Milton Freidman. In varying degrees, all of America’s “Founding Fathers” were classical liberals (i.e., libertarians).

My first real application of pragmatic libertarianism came in 1999, after moving to Scottsdale, Arizona, during the run-up to the 2000 presidential election.  And the reason I say “pragmatic” is because (in my view) every serious libertarian most realize that he must also support a genuinely viable candidate, lest one be relegated to “losertarian” status of voting for candidates that have no serious chance of actually winning.  Hence, I supported John McCain, and then collapsed my support of McCain to George W. Bush, viewing my libertarian allegiance as much closer to either of these candidates than Vice President Al Gore.

Upon entering law school, however, my rather loose interest in politics solidified for three reasons.  The first, and most important, was through my exposure to that mysterious body of law known as constitutional law (although it was also due to exposure to law of other categories).  Being someone who considered himself rather extensively trained in the areas of logic, and being someone who believed he had a fairly serious and genuine grasp of the notion of reasonable inference, I quickly realized that I had some rather severe “formalistic tendencies” when it comes to law and legal argument.  (More about this later.)  The second and third reasons were my exposure to two schools of thought, one of which was somewhat familiar, the other less so: radical feminist jurisprudence and critical race theory.  Both schools of thought, because they specifically embrace the notion that “the law” is not an intrinsically valuable institution of reason and wisdom, but rather simply a tool, or a means, to some other end, and which both theories insist have been, and still is, inherently oppressive to women, nonwhites, or both.  (Similarly, concepts such as “logic” and “truth” are also nothing but “purely subjective tools of oppression” (or some such))  It didn’t take long for me to realize that there is an enormous amount of rot in the legal academy, and that many naïve souls find it persuasive.  Nor did it take me long to realize how many genuinely intelligent people become utterly enchanted by such schools of thought, and how powerful the enchantment’s grip is – very much, if not identical, to how some embrace certain religious doctrines.  In any case, these experiences pushed me rightward, and I changed by political affiliation from Independent to Republican.

This began a very politically active phase for me – volunteering for political campaigns, donating money I didn’t have to politicians, and even working for a politician one summer inWashington, D.C. (on defending George W. Bush’s judicial appointments, as luck would have it).  My political philosophy developed enormously, and what I considered to be my jurisprudence solidified.  In the spring of 2003, I was extremely fortunate to work (for law school credit) for a United States District Court Judge in Des Moines, Iowa.  This experience was truly superb, for I learned a great deal from my extremely talented, wise, and extremely humble judge – not only about law, but life.

By the time I received my J.D. in 2003 and then my M.A. in Philosophy in 2004, I’d describe myself as very politically active in the GOP, and rarely missed an issue of the neoconservative Weekly Standard or the conservative National Review for the next four years.

My first job was, perhaps unsurprisingly, as a judicial law clerk for a Minnesota District Court Judge.  He was appointed just a couple months before I was invited to work for him by republican governor Tim Pawlenty, and considered himself a moderate republican as well.  The work – which consisted in the both of us working and reasoning closely together an in a way that considered any hint of “judicial activism” absolutely unthinkable – was exhilarating.  Never were we as a team reversed, and – I like to think, anyway – my judge and I quickly gained a solid and respected reputation for accuracy, fidelity to law, and fairness to litigants.  It was awesome.  In fact, leaving my clerkship for private practice when I did was one of the decisions I regret making most.

After three years in private practice in downtown Minneapolis, during which time I maintained by interest in politics due mostly to my continued interest in constitutional law issues, my wife Dana and I reached the breaking point regarding (what we consider to be) “big city life.”  So we moved back to my hometown, Iowa City, Iowa, at the close of 2007.

By 2008, my interest in politics had waned enormously.  By this point I had grown sufficiently frustrated with what I believed to be many republicans “who don’t get it” and virtually all democrats “who really don’t get it.”  This frustration culminated in my voting, for the first time, for the democrat candidate for POTUS (I voted for Dole in ‘96, and Bush II in ‘00 and ‘04).  (My reasons for voting for Barak Obama will appear in a subsequent post.)  By 2009, I decided to abandon the GOP for the last time, in part because I am simply dejected by politics in general, and the current state of politics in particular.  But while I remain quite libertarian in outlook, my libertarianism is most aptly described, in my view, as neoconservative.

Like Sabio Lantz noted in his “confession” over at Liberty and Skepticism, the Libertarian Party itself consists of a very large variety of people who genuinely believe themselves accurately described by the label, some of whom I would be horrified to be classified as related to in thought.  So I remain leery of libertarianism with an “L.”  Also like Sabio, I am most certainly a proponent of the Austrian School of Economics, although I probably am more socially conservative than Sabio is (and am certainly more socially conservative than Kevin is).

In a future post currently in the drafting stages, I will opine on the problem of abortion in the United States.  I mention this now because I believe one can essentially find exactly where one stands in terms of moral, political, and legal philosophy – all at once – when forming a sophisticated position on this issue.  I look forward to the discussion.

sonya sotomayor

Just a few thoughts I wanted to get out there:

1. Sonia Sotomayor is extremely well qualified to be a member of SCOTUS.

2. POTUS is entitled to nominate, and expect confirmation of, all but unqualified individuals to any federal court.

3. Any Republican opposed to Sotomayor’s nomination is a fool.

4. Any Democrat who complains about Republicans opposing Sotomayor, who remained silent during the sabotage Miguel Estrada, is a disgrace.

5. The current problem took root in 1987, although the argument can be made that pre-1987 practices of both parties showed signs of what was to come.

6. In the politicization of the judicial nomination and confirmation process lay the seeds of what will lead to the disintegration of what was once a great form of government.

7. Anyone who believes that Sonia Sotomayor is more qualified to be a member of POTUS than Robert Bork is a fool.

8. Within (6) and (7) are the reasons why I can’t stand politics anymore, and why I recently abandoned, once again, the GOP in favor of the Libertarian Party.

what does “neoconservative libertarian” mean?

What does “conservative” mean?

An intrinsically relative term, a “conservative,” in the very general and twenty-first century sense in which I use it, denotes a general mood or approach to social and political thought; a “habit of mind,” a “mode of feeling,” and a “way of living,” as R. J. White put it. At the highest level of abstraction, a “conservative” is one who grants traditional solutions to social and political problems an initial presumption of validity or wisdom, and who therefore views deviations away from such solutions skeptically. As it appears in each individual, the degree to which one will deploy the initial presumption will vary between one who is militantly or dogmatically conservative, by which I mean one who is closed-minded to the possibility that any given tradition or particular traditionalist belief is the relevant sense erroneous, and one who is quite open-minded to the possibility that any given tradition or belief is erroneous and therefore quite open to reflecting upon and debating it. In my view an individual of the former temper is a “right-wing” conservative, and the rest are “moderate” in necessarily varying degrees.

What does “neoconservative” mean?

“Neoconservatism” is a sub-set of conservatism. Some use the term to describe former neoliberals (contrasted with classic liberals, who are today’s libertarians) who, have been “mugged by reality” at some point, as Irving Kristol put it, and who have accordingly renounced neoliberal ideology in favor of a harder, more “realistic” approach to social and political problems. But still other “neoconservatives” are aptly so-described even if they were never neoliberals from the outset, such as Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The key ingredient all neoconservatives share, however, is a rejection of paleoconservative foreign policy tenants, held by paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchannan, such as protectionism and noninterventionism, in favor of a strong international military capability and presence, and a willingness to engage regimes sufficiently hostile to classical liberal values if perceived necessary to achieve a particular end (e.g., to prevent a regime like Iran who openly proclaims its desire to exterminate Israel, from possessing and/or dealing weapons of mass destruction). While most neoconservatives a members of the Republican Party, notable Democrats include Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Joseph Liebermann.

What does “libertarian” mean?

“Libertarianism” (or “classical liberalism”) refers to particular political philosophy that holds individual humans as the ontological and normative starting point to any just society. Libertarians accordingly insist that the line of demarcation between a just and an unjust society is the point at which individual rights to property, life, liberty, and one’s pursuit of happiness is unduly subordinated to the will of “the state” or “the people.” Libertarians differ in degree regarding where to draw the line, but all agree that it must be drawn. Reasonable libertarians generally focus on the right of individuals to act in accordance with their own subjective values, and argue that the coercive actions of the state are often (or even always) an impediment to the efficient realization of those values. As a result, if libertarians had a slogan, “Live and let live” might be a prime candidate. I consider “classical liberals” and “reasonable libertarians” synonyms, although some would consider this an abuse of the identity relation, and therefore believe the labels to initially include John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and later, Freidrich Hayek, Milton Freidman. In varying degrees, all of America’s “Founding Fathers” were classical liberals (i.e., libertarians).

So what does “neoconservative libertarian” mean?

Obviously, the term refers to a synthesis of neoconservatism and libertarianism (or classical liberalism). One who is a neoconservative grants “the presumption of wisdom” to tradition, but who is acutely aware that the presumption can be overcome by the changing times and of modernity in general. It is one who is fundamentally open-minded, and while this individual views change without fear or loathing, he nevertheless views self-styled “progressives” with skepticism to the extent that progress is seen as good in-itself and not as a means. At the same time, such an individual disdains overbroad and unnecessary state controls, and has little faith in large-scale government to effectuate social engineering of any kind. Nevertheless, however, this individual views the problem of a shrinking world without being hindered by the delusion that while some elements of our global community wish to exterminate our way of life, this worry is in some sense irrational. As a result, this individual believes that the first duty a government owes to its people is that of protection, even if protection entails subscribing to the following proposition: “We must deter and defend against [a] threat before it is unleashed … even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of [an] enemy’s attack…. The United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.” This proposition is commonly known as “The Bush Doctrine,” which some believe was first offered as a definitive foreign policy by neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz during his service to George H. W. Bush, and later to George W. Bush. If neoconservative libertarians had a slogan, therefore, and apt candidate might be “Live and let live; but if you don’t intend to let me live, I’m going not going to let you live first.”

bush lied, kyoto died?

According to the European Union, at the United Nations climate change conference in Bali the world community to outlined a road-map according to which an agenda for further measures to curb perceived human-caused climate change would be implemented in the years to come. For example, the conference set a deadline for the end of 2009 to complete negotiations regarding when governments must ratify and implement measures by 2012, as well as addressed other issues such as deforestation and providing assistance to developing countries without the resources or technology to effectively curb carbon-dioxide emissions on its own. “We have worked hard to achieve this result. It is a very important step forward,” remarked commission president Jose Manuel Barroso in a released statement. Seems like good news for environmentalists and the Bush Administration conference delegation, no?

According to

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Thomas L. Friedman, in an op/ed piece published today in the New York Times, no: “For 90 minutes, Andy Karsner, who runs the Department of Energy’s renewable energy programs, James Connaughton, who heads White House climate policy, and their colleagues put on a PowerPoint performance that was riveting in its understanding of the climate problem and the technologies needed to solve it. Their mastery of the subject was … impressive [and] ‘present[ed] … a thoughtful analysis that made sense’” (according to Indian activist group Centre for Social Markets CEO Malini Mehra). But Friedman found this fact puzzling, because ever since “President Bush trashed the Kyoto treaty in 2001, without presenting any alternative for six years,” America “has not been able to lead on [the issue of climate change].” Our “credibility” is therefore, according to Friedman, “shot” on the issue of climate change forevermore. This is our just damnation for, according to Friedman, sending the following “message to the world [in 2001]: ‘Get lost. We only care about ourselves.’”

Thus, on Friedman’s account, one must accept as axiomatic that President Bush immediately lost all credibility on the issue of climate change when he pulled out of Kyoto in 2001, and nothing can be done to repair Bush’s credibility, period. And once the mind is closed in such a regard, one understands why Friedman, Al Gore, and the rest of the “room full of global activists” from “around the world” “came [to Bali] loaded to carve up the Americans who had to be stupid because they represented the Bush administration.” In other words, when the Bush Administration demonstrated a thorough mastery of the issues and offered reasonable solutions addressing them, Friedman and Co. were “emotionally confused” by the Bush Administration’s good sense and evident goodwill. But since the Bush Administration can’t possibly be making good sense about anything, an explanation is in order. Friedman is happy to offer one: “On the one hand, it was obvious that these U.S. officials really knew their stuff, yet on the other, I’d bet not a single person there believed they reflected the true Bush policy.” This is Friedman’s Pulitzer Prize caliber “eureka moment” of the day: Since the Bush team is making so much sense, which is fundamentally impossible, they must be lying to everyone.

You see, when one’s capacity for rational thought is as blinded by hatred as Friedman’s,

“gender” and “diversity” expert Malini Mehra, and prison escapee Irwandi Yusuf (“We don’t believe the Americans in this Administration.”) no explanation of the United State’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol will mollify. Withdrawal, for whatever reasons, and no matter how reasonable, was a heresy so antithetical to militant environmentalism that is must be met with the ultimate punishment: doubting anything the Bush Administration says on the matter of climate change forevermore. And because the ultimate punishment absolute and irrevocable, no amount of evidence to the contrary will justify lifting it. So neither doing things such as pointing out that the U.S. Senate rejected Kyoto by a narrow 95-0 margin in 1997, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification, or even that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman agreed during their run for President and Vice President that the protocol sould not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations, for example, will do.

But don’t take my word for it. Do your own research. For example, take a look at what the left-leaning

Brookings Institution‘ had to say about Kyoto in 2002:

The fundamental principle on which the Kyoto Protocol is based—setting “targets and timetables” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions—is both economically flawed and politically unrealistic. To ratify the protocol, a developed country must be willing to agree to reduce its emissions to a specified level—typically about 5 percent below the country’s emissions in 1990-by 2008 to 2012 regardless of cost. Because costs could be huge, most developed countries will never ratify the treaty or will insist, as a precondition, that their targets be diluted through an accounting adjustment that allows credit for activities that absorb carbon (called sinks). Countries that do ratify are unlikely to comply if the constraints become seriously binding. Developing nations, which will become the world’s largest emitters in coming decades, have even less incentive to sign on.

The issue of costs is crucial. The array of uncertainties associated with climate change makes it impossible to tell whether the benefits of the treaty are worth its costs. Nor is there any evidence that the targets set by the protocol are the optimal levels of greenhouse gas emissions, either for an individual country or for the world as a whole. If anything, cost-benefit calculations based on studies to date tend to suggest that the costs exceed the benefits, at least in developed countries.

Kyoto’s greatest weakness, however, is not the lack of clear cost-benefit justification. After all, governments often face uncertainty when evaluating potential policies. Because the damages caused by climate change could be very large, a prudent legislature might want to adopt a climate policy to hedge its bets as long as it could keep the policy’s costs within bounds. But Kyoto’s “targets and timetables” design makes that impossible. Governments that adopt the protocol risk taking on a disastrously expensive commitment—and surrender part of their sovereignty in the process.

The Kyoto agreement also fails to give governments any incentive to police it and lacks credible compliance measures. Monitoring polluters is expensive, and punishing violators would impose costs on domestic residents in exchange for benefits that would go largely to foreigners. Governments would be strongly tempted to look the other way when firms exceed their emissions permits. Negotiators have tried to devise a strong international mechanism to monitor compliance and penalize violations, but so far have produced only a paper tiger: the protocol’s compliance mechanism is not a credible deterrent for anything beyond very minor violations.

Nor has Kyoto found a way to include significant participation by developing countries. Because these countries are responsible for a relatively small share of historical greenhouse gas emissions, they are especially reluctant to incur large costs and give up their sovereignty in a climate change agreement. The protocol does provide a complicated mechanism that would allow developed countries to earn credits for reducing the rate of emissions growth in developing countries. However, it would have little effect overall because developing countries are expressly exempted from Kyoto’s emissions targets. They would not be required to limit their emissions unless they volunteered—at some point in the future—to accept binding emissions targets. But the protocol provides little incentive for them to do so.

(See also this 2004 Brookings piece, noting that “supporters and skeptics alike agree” that the Kyoto treaty “will not solve the climate problem,” does “not apply to developing nations,” as well as this 2000 piece, which notes that Kyoto “is never going to work” and “is the wrong approach” to tacking the climate change issue.”)

Or how about the libertarian CATO Institute’s 2001 take on Kyoto:

Kudos to President Bush, the first world leader whose administration has pronounced the Kyoto Protocol stone, cold dead.

It’s about time —- and it’s about mathematics. Kyoto was probably the dumbest international instrument signed by an American chief executive.

Strong words, but easy to back up with a little primer on climate change. If we continue on our way, doing nothing and with no specific attempt to spread technologies that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the earth will continue to warm. Averaging the so called “general circulation climate models” used in the upcoming U.N. compendium on climate gives a 2.2ºC (4 degrees Fahrenheit) warming for the next 100 years.

When run backwards, most (but not all) of those models “hind cast” too much warming in recent decades. When their mean prediction is adjusted for this fact, and for the scientific truth that a small fraction of recent warming is from changes in the sun, the expected warming in the next 100 years drops to around 1.4ºC (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Several scientists, ranging from those in the service of the British government (whose radical position on global warming resulted in riots last summer), to those in libertarian think tanks, have replicated this calculation and come up with the same answer.

That’s not a large number, and it is disproportionately distributed into a warming of the coldest winter temperatures. But, even so, what would Kyoto do about it?

The answer is, nothing.

At least nothing that could have any discernible impact on how climate influences our lives. Clinton administration scientists answered this one for us: If all of the nations did what they said they would do under Kyoto, the net amount of warming reduced by the year 2100 would be 0.14ºC. That’s 6.4 percent of the average warming of those U.N. models.

How much does it cost? Estimates range from 1 percent to 3.5 percent of GDP per year. The larger figure assumes very little “emissions trading” between nations, where we could take credit for emissions prevented in, say, Africa, by giving them less emissive technology. Incidentally, our European friends don’t want us to make up the majority of our emissions by doing this humane thing. The cost figure also looms large if we can’t “sequester” our emissions in trees and soils, and are instead forced to raise energy prices. Again, our European allies won’t let that happen, either. So the 3 percent-GDP range is the more likely figure.

If anyone wants to see a microcosm of what Kyoto would bring, look no further than California, except that the lack of energy must also be exacerbated by excessive energy taxes.

These numbers are well known to the Bush Administration—which needs to get them out in public—and to the environmental press, which never mentions them.

Think of them in terms of “insurance,” and substitute “your house” for GDP. According to Kyoto, you would pay 3 percent of the value of your property, each and every year. And should your house burn down, Kyoto will reward you with 6.3 percent of its total value. Is that all you get for your money?

It’s worse than this. Kyoto would probably wreak great harm on the environment. It is well known that the more affluent a society is, the more it protects the environment. Among other things, people have more capital to invest in the development of efficient technology. Taking this capital away in the form of the onerous energy taxes required to promulgate Kyoto has the additional pernicious effect of giving our government a virtually limitless fund to squander, when the investing should be left up to individuals. I have personally lost thousands of dollars on Ballard Power Systems, a fuel-cell company, and I drive a gas-electric Honda Insight (a great car that really does get 70 mpg). But it is not your responsibility to buy stock or cars for me or anyone else.

Finally, Kyoto is irrelevant. History teaches us that we cannot anticipate the technological changes of the next 100 years, but we can be sure that what gives us power, and how we move things, will be very different than what runs us today. Compare horse-drawn 1900 to Internet-driven 2000 for an example. I don’t know what will charge the world of 2100, but I doubt that it will produce a lot of greenhouse emissions, whether or not they are harmful.

Do the math. Kyoto was a bad deal, whether or not you care about global warming. And it’s a good deal that finally there is a world leader with the courage to tell the truth.

With an open and inquiring mind, one quickly notices that for those as faithful to their emotional and dogmatic hatred of Bush as Friedman (who veteran New York City constitutional law litigator Glenn Greenwald has described, after analyzing over four years of Freidman’s rantings on Iraq, as “one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening” the United States today), facts, argument, and logic are simply irrelevant. And this is because Friedman’s emotion has overcome his rationality – his perception has become his reality, and he sees only what he wants to see. And since Friedman and Co. do not want to believe that the Bush Administration is taking the issue of climate change seriously, they won’t, and don’t, no matter what the evidence shows.

But don’t take my word for it. Friedman is the one, after all, with the Pulitzer.

f. a. hayek’s road to serfdom (selections)

Preface

“I use throughout [this book] the term ‘liberal’ in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that ‘liberal’ has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.” (xxxv)

“[T]rue liberalism is [] distinct from conservatism…. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some [that] are not available on equal terms to others.” (xxxvi)

“[T]he most important chance [that] extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of people. This is necessarily a slow affair, a process [that] extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations.” (xxxix)

“[T]he unforeseen but inevitable consequence[] of socialist planning [is] a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand.” (xlii)

Chapter 1: The Abandoned Road

“Few [intellectuals] are ready to recognize that the rise of fascism and nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period but a necessary outcome of those tendencies. This is a truth [that] most [intellectuals] were unwilling to see even when the similarities of many of the repellant features of the internal regimes in communist Russia and National Socialist Germany were widely recognized. As a result, many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of naziism, and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.” (6)

“We have progressively abandoned [economic] freedom [] without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past. Although we [have] been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by De Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.” (16)

“Individualism has a bad name today [because] the term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness…. But the essential features of [] individualism [that], from elements provided by Christianity and the philosophy of classic antiquity, was first fully developed through the Renaissance and had since grown and spread into what we know as Western civilization – are the respect for individual man qua man, that is, the recognition of his own views and tastes as supreme in his own sphere, however narrowly that may be circumscribed, and the belief that it is desirable that men should develop their own individual gifts and bents.” (17)

“The attitude of the [true] liberal toward society is like that of a gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.” (22)

Chapter 2: The Great Utopia

“Where freedom was concerned, the founders of socialism made no bones about their intentions. Freedom of thought they regarded as the root-evil of nineteenth-century society, and the first of its planners, Saint-Simon, even predicted [accurately] that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be ‘treated like cattle.’” (28)

“Nobody saw more clearly than De Tocqueville that democracy as an essentially individualist institution stood in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism: ‘Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom … socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each [person], socialism makes each [person] a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.’” (29)

“There can be no doubt that the promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda and that the belief that socialism would bring freedom is genuine and sincere. But this would only heighten the tragedy if it should prove that what was promised to us as the Road to Freedom was in fact the High Road to Servitude. Unquestionably, the promise of more freedom was responsible for luring more and more liberals along the socialist road, for blinding them to the [contradictions] between the basic principles of socialism and liberalism, and for often enabling socialists to usurp the very name of the old party of freedom. Socialism was embraced by the greater part of the intelligentsia as the apparent heir to the liberal tradition: therefore it is not surprising that to them the idea of socialism’s leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable.” (31)

“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Stalinist Russia as is pre-Hitler Germany.” (33)

“While many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, in the democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined…. [But] democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, [] to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who now wish it would be [are] prepared to accept the consequences ….” (35-36)

Chapter 3: Individualism and Collectivism

“[S]ocialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of ‘planned economy’ in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body…. What [the] planners demand is a central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan, laying down how how the resources of society should be ‘consciously directed’ to serve particular ends in a definite way.” (37, 40)

“The liberal argument in favor of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of co-ordinating human efforts [and it] is based on the conviction that, where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other…. [W]here it is impossible to create conditions necessary [for] competition [to be] effective, we must resort to other methods of guiding economic activity. Economic liberalism is opposed, however, to competition’s being supplanted by inferior methods of coordinating individual efforts[, a]nd it regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority.” (41)

Chapter 4: The “Inevitability” of Planning

“It is revealing that [Marxists] are content to say that central planning is desirable. Most of them affirm that we can no longer choose but are compelled by circumstances beyond our control to substitute planning for competition. The myth is deliberately cultivated that we are embarking on the new course not out of free will but because competition is spontaneously eliminated by technological changes [that] we can neither reverse nor wish to prevent. This argument is rarely developed at any length[, rather,] it is one of the assertions taken over by one writer from another until, by mere iteration, it has come to be accepted as an established fact…. [L]ike so many Marxist ideas, it is now found in many circles [that] have received it at third or fourth hand and do not know [from] whence it derives.” (49-50)

“From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.” (62)

Chapter 5: Planning and Democracy

“The common features of all collectivist systems may be described … as the deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal. That our present society lacks such a ‘conscious’ direction toward a single aim, that its activities are guided by the whims and fancies of irresponsible individuals, has always been one of the main complaints of its socialist critics.

In many ways this puts the basic issue very clearly[, a]nd it directs us at once to the point where the conflict arises between individual freedom and collectivism. The various kinds of collectivism, communism, fascism, etc., differ among themselves in the nature of the goal toward which they want to direct the efforts of society. But they all differ from liberalism and individualism in wanting to organize the whole of society and all its resources for this unitary end and in refusing to recognize autonomous spheres in which the ends of [the] individuals [themselves] are supreme. In short, they are totalitarian in the true sense of this new word [that] we have adopted to describe the unexpected but nevertheless inseparable manifestations of what in theory we call collectivism.

The ’social goal,’ or ‘common purpose,’ for which society is to be organized is usually vaguely described as the ‘common good,’ the ‘general welfare,’ or the ‘general interest.’ It does not need much reflection to see that these terms have no sufficiently definite meaning to determine a particular course of action…. The welfare of a people, like the happiness of man, depends on a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations. It cannot be adequately expressed as a single end, but only as a hierarchy of ends, a comprehensive scale of values in which every need of every person is given its place. To direct all our activities according to a single plan presupposes that every one of our needs is given its rank in an order of values [that] must be complete enough to make it possible to decide among all the different courses [from] which the planner has to choose. It presupposes, in short, the existence of a complete ethical code in which all the different human values are allocated their due place.” (64)

“[M]orals have [ever]more tended to become merely limits circumscribing the sphere within wich the individual [may] behave as he like[s]. [But t]he [existence] of a [complete] ethical code comprehensive enough to determine a unitary economic plan [entails] a complete reversal of this tendency.

The essential point [therefore] is that no such complete ethical code exists. The attempt to direct all economic activity according to a single plan would raise innumerable questions to which the answer could be provided only by a moral rule, but to which existing morals have no answer and where there exists no agreed view on what ought to be done. People will have either no definite views or conflicting views on such questions, because in the free society in which we have lived there has been no occasion to think about them and still less to form common opinions about them.

This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to be. It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individual minds, nothing put partial scales of values exist – scales [that] are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. From this the individualist concludes that the individuals should be allowed, within defined limits, to follow their own values and preferences rather than somebody else’s’ that within these spheres the individual’s system of ends should be supreme and not subject to any dictation by others. It is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions, that forms the essence of the individualist position.

The view does not, of course, exclude the recognition of [legitimate] social ends, or rather of a coincidence of individual ends [that] makes it advisable for men to combine for their pursuit. But it limits such common action to the instances where individual views coincide; what are called ’social ends’ are for it merely identical ends of many individuals – or ends to the achievement of which individuals are willing to contribute in return for assistance they receive in the satisfaction of their own desires. Common action is thus limited to the [areas] where people agree on common ends” (65-67)

“The limits of [an individual's] sphere [of liberty] are determined by the extent to which the individuals agree on particular ends; [but] the probability that they will agree on a particular course of action necessarily decreases as the scope of such action extends. There are certain functions of the state on the exercise of which there will be practical unanimity among its citizens; there will be others on which there will be agreement of a substantial majority; and so on, until we come to [areas] where, although each individual might wish the state to act in some way, there will be almost as many views about what the government should do as there are different people…. We can [therefore] rely on voluntary agreement to guide the action of the state only so long as it is confined to spheres [of liberty] where [such] agreement exists.” (67-68)

“It is the price of democracy that the possibilities of conscious control are restricted to the [areas] where true agreement exists and that in [other areas] things must be left to chance…. Democratic government has worked successfully where, and so long as, the functions of government were, by widely accepted creed, restricted to [areas] where agreement among a majority could be achieved by free discussion; and it is the great merit of the liberal creed that it reduced the range of subjects on which agreement was necessary to one on which it was likely to exist in a society of free men. It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate ‘capitalism.’ If ‘capitalism’ means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is fare more important to realize that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.” (77-78)

“Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. [But] it is by no means infallible or certain [for] it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.” (78)

Chapter 6: Planning and the Rule of Law

“[T]he Rule of Law[, s]tripped of all technicalities, [entails] that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand – rules [that] make it possible to foresee with [reasonable] certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of [such] knowledge.” (80)

“While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means [that] people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action. Within the known rules of the game the individual is free to pursue his personal ends and desires, certain that the powers of government will not be used deliberately to frustrate his efforts.” (81)

“The distinction … between formal law or justice and substantive rules … is simple enough. The difference between the two kinds of rules is the same as that between laying down a Rule of the Road, as in the Highway Code, and ordering people where to go; or, better still, between providing signposts and commanding people which road to take.” (82)

“Formal rules are thus merely instrumental in the sense that they are expected to be useful to yet unknown people, for purposes for which these people will decide to use them, and in circumstances [that] cannot be foreseen in detail. In fact, what we do not know their concrete effect, that we do not know what particular ends these rules will further, or which particular people they will assist, that they are merely given the form most likely on the whole to benefit all the people affected by them, is the most important criterion of formal rules in the sense in which we here use this term. They do not involve a choice between particular ends or particular people, because we just cannot know beforehand by whom and in what way they will be used.” (83)

“In out age, with its passion for conscious control of everything, it may appear paradoxical to claim as a virtue that under one system we shall know less about the particular effect of the measures the state takes than would be true under most other systems and that a method of social control should be deemed superior because of our ignorance of its precise results. Yet this consideration is in fact the rationale of the great liberal principle of the Rule of Law[, a]nd the apparent paradox dissolves rapidly when we follow the argument a little further.” (83)

“Where the precise effects of government policy on particular people are known, where the government aims directly at such particular effects, it cannot help knowing these effects, and therefore it cannot be impartial. It must, of necessity, take sides, impose its valuations upon people and, instead of assisting them in the advancement of their own ends, choose their ends for them. As soon as the particular effects are foreseen at the time a law is made, it ceases to be a mere instrument used by the lawgiver upon the people and for his ends. The state ceases to be a piece of utilitarian machinery intended to help individuals in the fullest development of their individual personality and becomes a ‘moral’ institution – where ‘moral’ is not used in contrast to immoral but describes an institution [that] imposes on its members its views on all moral questions, whether these views be moral or highly immoral.” (85)

“[A]s planning becomes more and more extensive, it becomes regularly necessary to qualify legal provisions increasingly by reference to what is ‘fair’ or ‘reasonable’; this means that it becomes necessary to leave the decision of the concrete case more and more to the discretion of the judge or authority in question. One could [indeed] write a history of the decline of the Rule of Law … in terms of the progressive introduction of these vague formulas into legislation and jurisdiction, and of the increasing arbitrariness and uncertainty of, and the consequent disrespect for, the law and the judicature, which in these circumstances could not but become an instrument of policy. It is important to point out once more in this connection that this process of the decline of the Rule of Law has been going on steadily in Germany for some time before Hitler came into power and that a policy well advanced toward totalitarian planning had already done a great deal of the work [that] Hitler completed.” (87)

“It is the rule of Law, in the sense of the rule of formal law, [namely,] the absence of legal privileges of particular people designated by authority, [that] safeguards that equality before the law which is the opposite of arbitrary government…. A necessary … result of this is that formal equality before the law is in conflict … with any activity of the government deliberately aiming at material or substantive equality of different people, and that any policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law[for the simple reason that t]o produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. To give different people the same objective opportunities is not the give them the same subjective chance.” (87-88)

“[It is of course true] that the Rule of Law produces economic equality – all that can be claimed for it is that [such] inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way. It [ought therefore come to no surprise] that socialists (and Nazis) have always protested against ‘merely’ formal justice, that they have always objected to a law [that] had no views on how well off particular people ought to be, and that they have always demanded a ’socialization of the law,’ attached the independence of judges … [all of] which undermined the Rule of Law.” (88)

“The conflict between formal justice and formal equality before the law, on the one hand, and the [fundamentally misguided] attempts to realize various ideals of substantive justice and equality, on the other, also accounts for the widespread confusion about the concept of ‘privilege’ and its consequent abuse. To mention only the most important instance of this abuse – the application of the term to ‘property’ to property as such. It would indeed be privilege if, for example, as has sometimes been the case in the past, landed property were reserved to members of the nobility. And it is privilege if, as is true in our time, the right to produce or sell particular things is reserved to a particular people designated by authority. But to call private property as such, which all can acquire under the same rules, a privilege, because only some succeed in acquiring it, is depriving the world ‘privilege’ of its meaning.” (89)

“The Rule of law was consciously evolved only during the liberal age and is one of its greatest achievements, not only as a safeguard but as the legal embodiment of freedom. As Immanuel Kant put it (and Voltaire expressed it before [Kant] in very much the same terms), ‘Man is free if he needs to obey no person but solely the laws.’ As a vague ideal it has, however, existed since Roman times, and during the last few centuries it has never been so seriously threatened as it is today.” (90)

“The Rule of law [] implies limits to the scope of legislation: it restricts it to the kind of general rules known as formal law and excludes legislation either directly aimed at particular people or at enabling anybody to use the coercive power of the state for the purpose of such discrimination. It means, not that everything is regulated by law, but, on the contrary, that the coercive power of the state can be [legitimately] used only in cases defined in advance by the law and in such a way that it can be foreseen how it will be used.” (92)

Chapter 7: Economic Control and Totalitarianism

Chapter 8: Who, Whom?

“[T]o the ancients blindness was an attribute of their deity of justice.” (112)

“The fact that the opportunities open to the poor in a competitive society are much more restricted than those open to the rich does not make it less true that in such a society the poor are much more free than a person commanding much greater material comfort in a different type of society.” (113)

“[T]he system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.” (115)

“There will always exist inequalities [that] will appear unjust to those who suffer from them, disappointments [that] will appear unmerited, and strokes of misfortune [that] those hit have not deserved.” (117)

“As soon as the sate takes upon itself the task of planning the whole economic life, the problem of the due station of the different individuals and groups must indeed inevitably become the central political problem. As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. There will be no economic or social questions that w[ill] not be be political questions in the sense that their solution will depend exclusively on who wields the coercive power, on whose are the views that will prevail on all occasions.” (119)

“Socialists, the cultivated parents of the barbarous offspring they have produced [in Germany], traditionally hope to solve th[e problem of the individual's spiritual freedom to for one's essential values] by [the mechanism of] education. But what does education mean in this respect? Surely we have learned [by now] that knowledge cannot create new ethical values, that no amount of learning will lead people to hold the same views on the moral issues [that] a conscious ordering of all social relations raises. It is not rational conviction but the acceptance of a creed [that] is required to justify a particular plan. And, indeed, socialists everywhere were the first to recognize that the task they had set themselves required the general acceptance of a common[], definite set of values. It was in these efforts to produce a mass movement supported by such a single world view that the socialists first created most of the instruments of indoctrination of which Nazis and Fascists have made such effective use.” (125)

Chapter 9: Society and Freedom

“Independence of the mind or strength of character is rarely found among those who cannot be confident that they will make their way by their own effort.” (132)
“The planning for security [that] has such an insidious effect on liberty is that for security of a different kind. It is planning designed to protect individuals or groups against diminutions of their income, which although in no way deserved yet in competitive society occur daily, against losses imposing severe hardships having no moral justification yet inseparable from the competitive system. This demand for security is thus another form of the demand for a just remuneration – a remuneration commensurate with the subjective merits and not with the objective results of a man’s efforts. This kind of security or justice seems irreconcilable with freedom to choose one’s employment.” (135)

“The problem of inadequate incentives [that] arises here is commonly discussed as if it were a problem mainly of the willingness of people to do their best. But this, although important, is not the whole, nor even the most important, aspect of the problem. It is not merely that if we want people to give their best we must make it worth while for them. What is more important is that if we want to leave them the choice, if they are to be able to judge what they ought to do, they must be given some readily intelligible yardstick by which to measure the social importance of the different occupations. Even with the best will in the world it would be impossible for anyone intelligently to chose between various alternatives if the advantages they offered him stood in no relation to their usefulness to society. To know whether as the result of change a man ought to leave a trade and an environment [that] he has come to like, and exchange it for another, it is necessary that the changed relative value of these occupations to society should find expression in the remunerations they offer.” (138)

“Within the market system, security can be granted to particular groups only by the kind of planning known as restrictionism …. ‘Control,’ i.e., limitation of output so that prices will secure an ‘adequate’ return, is the only way in which in a market economy producers can be guaranteed a certain income. But this necessarily involves a reduction of opportunities open to others. If the producer, be he entrepreneur or worker, is to be protected against underbidding by outsiders, it means that other who are worse off are precluded from sharing in the relatively greater prosperity of the controlled industries. Every restriction on the freedom of [contract] reduces the security of all those outside it. And, as the number of those whose income is secured in this manner increases, the field of alternative opportunities [that] are open to anyone who suffers a loss of income is restricted; and for those unfavorably affected by any change the chance o f avoiding a fatal diminution of their income is correspondingly diminished. And if, as has become increasingly true, in each trade in which conditions improve, the members are allowed to exclude others in order to secure to themselves the f[ruits] in the form of higher wages or profits, those in the trades where demand has fallen have nowhere to go, and every change becomes the cause of large unemployment.” (142)

“[F]reedom can be had only at a price and … us as individuals … must be prepared to make severe material sacrifices to preserve our liberty.” (147)

Chapter 10: Why the Worst Get on Top

“Just as the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans, so the totalitarian dictator would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism. [He w]ho does not see this has not yet grasped the full width of the gulf [that] separates totalitarianism from a liberal regime, the utter difference between the whole moral atmosphere under collectivism and the essentially individualist Western civilization.” (149)

“[I]n general, the higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values. It is a corollary of this that if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral in intellectual standards where the more primitive and ‘common’ instincts and tastes prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards. It is, as it where, the lowest common denominator [that] unites the largest number of people. If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life on all the rest, it will never be those with highly differentiated and developed tastes — it will be those who form the ‘mass’ in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put the weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals.” (152)

“[A] political dictator … will be able to obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently. It will be those whose vague and imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed and whose passions and emotions are readily aroused who will thus swell the ranks of … totalitarian[ism." (152-53)

"To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral constraints [that] control their behavior as individuals within the group.” (157)

“Like formal law, the rules of individualist ethics, however imprecise they may be in many respects, are general and absolute; they prescribe or prohibit a general type of action irrespective of whether in the particular instance the ultimate purpose is good or bad. To cheat or steal, to torture or betray a confidence, is held to be bad, irrespective of whether or not in the particular instance any harm follows from it. Neither the fact that in a given instance nobody may be the worse for it, nor any high purpose for which such an act may have been committed, can alter the fact that it is bad. Though we may sometimes be forced to chose between different evils, they remain evils.” (161)

“The principle that the end justifies the means in individualist ethics is regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule; there is literally nothing [that] the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because the ‘good of the whole’ is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done…. There can be no limit to what [the collectivist] must be prepared to do, no act [that] his conscience must prevent him from committing, if it is necessary for an end [that] the community has set itself or [that] his superiors order him to achieve.” (162)

“Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes [that] horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise, and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the ’selfish’ interests of the individual are allowed to obstruct the full realization of the ends the community pursues.” (163)

“Where there is one common all-overriding end, there is no room for any general morals or values.” (164)

“To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if [it is] necessary to achieve the end set for him.” (165-66)

Chapter 11: The End of Truth

“The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should become to regard them as their own end. [T]he beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them [in a way that allows them to] act spontaneously in the way the planner wants.” (168)

“This is, of course, brought about by propaganda…. The skillful propagandist then has the power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated form all other sources of information.” (168-69)

“While in the totalitarian states this status of propaganda gives it a unique power over the minds of the people, the peculiar moral effects arise [out of] the object and scope of totalitarian propaganda[,] … the moral code of a totalitarian society[, which reorganizes] the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order [in which the] most … humanitarian elements of our morals, the respect for human life, for the weak, and for the individual generally, will disappear.” (169)

“The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda … are destructive of all morals because they undermine one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and the respect for truth.” (170)

“The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those [that] they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but [that] were not properly understood or recognized before. The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning.” (172)

“The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word ‘liberty[,]‘ [for] wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people.” (173)

“great [un]american god-out day”

Read my thoughts on the embarrassing “Great American God-Out Day” movement here. In a nutshell, I find the lengths some will go to engage in open bigotry against non-atheists disheartening; but hey, that is the nature of the game at present.