A Milestone in the Objectivist Movement

At last! The philosophy of reality, reasoning independent minds, individual self-interest, and a free market society always had to recognize that its movement had to embrace all of these within itself. Yet the Ayn Rand Institute long refused to do this.  To an apparently significant degree, ARI is now ready to do a better job of doing so and allow a popular movement to blossom without excessive schisms and attempts to control all Objectivist thinkers.

We have always needed more recognition that independent-minded individuals with their many varied interests and experiences would reasonably hold somewhat different principles and apply them to the complexities of life differently. Objectivism as a philosophy by which one can live your own life, has to contain within it the flexibility to handle the salient fact of our individuality. Yes, at a high level we all agree on some central principles, but in our individual lives one has to work out a host of sub-principles that apply to yourself as an individual. One cannot apply to Ayn Rand or to ARI for approval of how you make these judgments, because "No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." 

To be a successful movement, the Objectivist movement needs to believe that there is a free market in Objectivist ideas. That market of rational, independent-minded individuals will sort out the good and the bad ideas. Unfortunately, some Objectivists had too little confidence that there were enough rational, independent-minded individuals for this to work out successfully. Yet only if there are, will Objectivism ever succeed as a major popular movement.

See The Atlas Society comments on the ARI release for the main ways in which the ARI policy will now open up Objectivism to more independent-minded thinkers.  Robert Tracinski has also made interesting observations on this.

Retaking College Hill - The Adults Are Back by Walter Donway

This is the 5-Star Review I have just posted on amazon.com: 

A wonderful story of ideas, courage, reason, love, action, and commitment to reform an irrational university

Ideas have consequences.  They have life and death consequences for billions of individuals living their daily lives and pursuing their individual values.  Good ideas are not easy to identify. Very bad ideas are all too often passionately adopted by intelligent people.  Discovering good ideas and rejecting bad ideas demands a commitment to reason, knowledge of mankind’s history, and the willingness to debate those ideas with others.  We rely heavily on the education of young people to provide them with the knowledge that they may engage ideas to improve their lives, the lives of their family members, and the lives of their neighbors.  Education in America has lost its way and betrayed its mission.  This is especially true of our colleges and universities.  

Walter Donway’s new novel Retaking College Hill - The Adults Are Back takes on this most crucial issue in our civilization.  He tells a thrilling story of how a thoroughly postmodern, neo-Marxist, group-identity-centric university might be set back onto its proper education mission.  The story is one of ideas, melded with romance, and acts of courage in the face of intimidation and actual violence.  Men of reason have to confront the howling, brutal mobs that too many students and faculty have joined.

The university is an elite, historic university modeled upon Brown University, from which I graduated in 1969 and from which the author graduated in 1966.  It was in the late 1960s when many elite and many not so elite universities started to seriously take a path away from teaching the intellectual values of the Enlightenment and the history of Western Civilization, or any comprehensive and contextual history at all.  This was certainly true of Brown.  Brown has continued down this path, taking an evermore collectivist, group identity, and anti-individualist direction.

Damian, a graduate of the university returns from service in the Navy to see his father, a dean of the university. His father is alone in the university administration still committed to trying to admit the brightest and best prepared students without regard for group identities.  He is also committed to teaching the values of the Enlightenment and the history and values of Western Civilization.  He has a few, a very few, allies on the faculty.  There is a philosophy professor and a physicist on the faculty who are allies.  The physicist shares my evaluation that catastrophic man-made global warming is a failed hypothesis, so his life is threatened.  Asian and Jewish students must have several hundred points higher scores on their SATs compared to other identity groups to even have a chance of admission.  Courses have to be simplified and made subjective, rather than objective, so that intellectually less capable identity group students can pass the courses.  There is a huge administrative bureaucracy dedicated to diversity.  But worst of all, there are faculty and student groups determined that the only ideas that can be held or discussed on the campus are those of postmodernism, neo-Marxism, collectivism, group identity with oppressor/oppressed tags, anti-carbon fuel, and anti-free market ideas.

A speaker brought to the campus by the philosophy professor to give a talk opposed to these ideas is met with extreme violence.  The dean is also threatened with violence.  Fortunately, Damian has invited a SEAL friend to spend his leave with him.  His SEAL friend is able to help Damian deal with some of the violence on campus and near it.  This is a novel of action as well as one of ideas and their consequences.  It is directed primarily at thinking people, but it is not at all necessary to be an intellectual to enjoy this novel.  The characters are well-developed and just interesting people.  The main characters are people with whom you should enjoy spending some time!

Damian is an admirer of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, as am I.  There are very brief discussions of her philosophy with Damian’s philosophy professor mentor and with his lively and beautiful girlfriend. She is a very intelligent student thoroughly committed to socialism who grew up in Israel.  Atlas Shrugged has a transformative effect upon her as she reads it to better understand Damian.  It has such an effect upon many young people who want a rational and integrated philosophy of life.  Of course, Objectivism, like all ideas, should be subject to vigorous discussion and evaluation on our college campuses.  It is Damian’s dream to become a college philosophy faculty member to assure this happens.  I wish him the best of good fortune!

“Ayn Rand Said” is Not an Argument by Craig Biddle

I have just read Craig Biddle's article "Ayn Rand Said" is Not an Argument in The Objective Standard.  It is posted here.

As Biddle says, his argument is one that should not have to be made.  I have made this argument myself many times and have tried to operate on it while arguing points on this blog.  I left the following comment, which might be moderated out of existence:

While I greatly admire Ayn Rand's work and believe that I learned useful thinking skills from her, it is always a challenging task to quote her appropriately in the many discussions of politics, economy and business, energy and the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, and human associations that I write about on my blog. It simply takes as much work in many cases to be sure I am quoting her in an appropriate context as it would simply to make my own argument from reality. Should I establish that the context is appropriate for quoting her, I will have to establish the very arguments that need to be made to tie her conclusion correctly to reality in most cases, assuming that she was right in the first place.

There have been a few topics on which I do believe she was wrong. Three of Biddle's bullets as possible examples, I would consider among her errors. I would add her call for regulators to require more time on broadcast media for the opposition to socialism, her occasional tendency to underestimate the resilience of the U.S. economy to federal government harms, and her statement that a man with a beard was hiding character faults. These errors do very little to moderate my admiration for her generally, but they are lessons on why one must think for oneself.

Being a thinking man, but not a scholar, I rarely have time to invest this additional work into appropriately quoting Ayn Rand on a topic. It is safer and more efficient to admire her, but to make my own arguments. Of course any errors I might make then weigh only on me, as they should. And more importantly, I more firmly establish the structure of my own knowledge by always making it my job to fully develop that body of knowledge with direct and constant reference to reality. This is what Ayn Rand's hero John Galt did and this is what Ayn Rand tried to do. One cannot do otherwise as a rational individualist.

For those wondering, the bullet of the four viewpoints that Biddle suggests that Ayn Rand may have been wrong about that I would not necessarily agree with was the one in which she asserts that a child has a duty to his parents.  This is not a simple matter.  There are contexts in which a child has a duty to a parent and a parent has a duty to his child.  The parent-child relationship is very different than the relationships between adults.  It is common for Objectivists to say that children do not have rights.  This is another matter on which I take exception.  A child has a right to be allowed to take actions that develop his potential to become a rational individualist.  This is not to say that a child has the right to demand that someone educate him.  What he has a right to is that no one be allowed to prevent him from trying to educate himself.  A child's rights are very different than those of an adult, but they do have rights.  Generally, these rights are a subset of adult rights.  It is the legitimate duty of a parent, as it is of a government with respect to adult rights, to see that the rights of his children are protected from force by others.  So, if a government forces a child to attend a government-run school where the child cannot appropriately pursue his development as a rational individualist, it is the duty of the parent to oppose that government requirement.

The Patient Subjugation and Unaffordable Care Act and Progressive Elitism

As the time nears when Americans are once again being forced to sign-up for government approved health insurance plans, a string of pithy quotes by Jonathan Gruber, a chief contributor to the creation of the near-secret PPACA bill, baldly state that stupid Americans were easily manipulated into subjugating themselves to this law.  In fact most Americans have always opposed this law and very many were always angry that the Congress did not construct a bill of such a critical nature with due deliberation and discussion.  It did not even read the bill, as famously noted by Nancy Pelosi with her statement that the bill had to be passed so that it might be read!  It is true that Americans had been duped into providing the Democrat Socialist Party the presidency, a super majority in the Senate, and a majority in the House of Representatives.

All one had to know about the bill to oppose it was that individuals were no longer to be free to choose what medical care would be covered in their health insurance plans.  With some thought, some even realized that the basis for a government claim for the authority to dictate how an individual would maintain his mind and body, was a highly collectivist claim that government had a right of ownership in every individual's mind and body.  This is an appalling claim to anyone who understands and values the equal, sovereign right of every individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and to the pursuit of one's own happiness.  The government's denial of individual self-ownership is chilling and brutal.  This denial was a chief aim of the many Progressive Elitists in leadership positions in the Democrat Party, in academia, and in much of the media.

In the cause of achieving this universal claim of collective ownership of every individual's mind and body, the Progressive Elitists are highly united.  They often agree that lying, misdirection, bribery, and fraudulent voting are all very acceptable means to achieve the end of collectivism which they value above all else.

Progressive Elitists often state that everyone is morally obliged to sacrifice their own interest for, as they like to say, "the least among us."  This is not only a moral claim in their minds, but it is a license for the use of government force to make everyone give up their own interest in favor of someone the Progressive Elitist believes to be in need, either materially or mentally.  This claim of subjugation to the needs of "the least among us" has become more and more common on the part of Progressive Elitists.

There is a tradition and still a strong following among Progressive Elitists for the notion that government is the moral enforcer of the so-called pragmatist claim that the greatest good for the greatest number defines morality.  When real moral principles are deemed too hard to formulate, to defend, and to live by, such a weak nostrum is about all a society can fall back on, excepting religion and the commonly related divine right of Kings and their aristocratic and ecclesiastic enablers.  To be sure, the American Progressive Elitist does view the President as a King-like figure and themselves as the aristocratic and ecclesiastic enablers.

They also claim to be proponents of democracy, though that claim is modulated by their constant belief that most Americans are stupid, as was so clearly revealed in the Jonathan Gruber and Nancy Pelosi comments.  This was earlier revealed in Obama's claim that most Americans cling foolishly to their guns and religion.  That he also sees himself as a king is very apparent in his saying as President he can do anything he wants and in his continuing violations of the Rule of Law.

Progressive Elitists are in a bind given that they purport to support democracy, yet they think the People are mostly incapable of choosing their own values, managing their own lives, and of voting correctly as envisioned by the Progressive Elitists.  They must find a way to manipulate the unwashed masses to vote in a manner that will allow the Progressive Elitists to actually dominate and control the government.  Because the Progressive Elitist is sure that she knows what is best for the masses, deception through any combination of lies and misdirections is justified.  We have seen this in spades with the PSUCA (see title) or the Patient SuckA.

How do the Progressive Elitists enlist support from the People in democratic elections?  Usually it is by claiming that they are for all the People except the Rich or that they are the champions of the Middle Class.  In this way they are hoping to gain the support of the majority and they will commonly promise this majority enough special favors to try to win them to their cause.

Among their many deceptions is the idea that it is possible to achieve the greater good of the greater number through laws that affect many of our moral choices.  Perhaps it is the in-supportability of this idea that has actually pushed more and more Progressive Elitists toward the claim that government is obliged to primarily pursue the interests of "the least among us," though this claim is usually made to fellow highly educated people they expect to be fellow elitists.  The practical problem of achieving political power is complicated if the Progressive Elitists actually ask the Middle Class to give up its own interests.  This is not an easy sell.

Why is this notion of the greatest good for the greatest number unachievable?  If force is to be used to transfer some value from some to others and yet a majority has to be enlisted to support that use of force by the government, then it is not easy to have a big enough pool of victims from whom enough can be extracted to provide a noticeable benefit to the majority except when the majority is not much greater than the victimized minority.  So, on one issue the beneficiaries might be 60%, on another 55%, and on another they may be 80%.  If the beneficiaries are randomly chosen, the chance any one individual was benefited on all three issues is only 0.264.

If these same issues were left to the private sector, most people might very easily arrange their affairs to benefit on each of the three issues or at least not to be hurt on any of them.  Surely on all of the issues before our Big Government now, a transfer to the private sector would commonly allow individuals to achieve 70 to 90% of their values.  In the private sector one has the added critical advantage that force cannot be used to make you enter into a trade that you do not think is in your own best interest.  In the government sector a victim is required and force must be threatened to make the victim yield his time, his income, or his wealth up to the Progressive Elitist re-distributor.

Now to be sure, the Progressive Elitist program does not aim to distribute the benefits randomly.  Some people are supposed to be the ones who are commonly to bear the hurt, in theory.  In practice, Big Government is little more controlled by the Progressive Elitists avowed agenda than it is a true expression of the democratic will of the majority of the People.  As I have noted over and over, Big Government is so vast and complex that the People do not understand what is going on and they commonly feel powerless to control it.  Even few, if any, Progressive Elitists can understand and follow the full scope of government actions.  This was richly illustrated in their contingent of full-time politicians voting for the PSUCA without reading it and later having to admit that they knew little about it.

Progressive Elitists who are not actually corrupt are also overcome by those who are corrupt and a multitude of special interests who fill the power vacuum to manipulate some government policies of particular interest to themselves.  Big Government becomes mostly a government not of and for the People, but one of and for the Special Interests.  Contrary to the claims of the Progressive Elitists, this is not correctable by electing or appointing better Progressive Elitist managers.  Indeed, the Progressive Elitists who see themselves as managing government actually have to turn to Special Interests for help in writing the laws which control actions in the private sector they do not themselves understand.  This happens all the time.  Some Special Interests are happy to do this for them so that they can design a law that gives them special favors or at least costs smaller companies, their future competitors, more to abide by than it costs them.  Complex laws and regulations tend to suppress smaller, hungrier competitors very well.

ObamaCare certainly has rewarded many special interests while depriving many individuals of the health insurance plan they wanted, the doctor they wanted, the convenience of using a hospital near them, and the weight of often much more expensive plans especially if a young male, but also for anyone who was healthy.  The AARP was among the heavily rewarded special interests, as were some other insurers.  So were many hospitals since many doctors had to give up their private practices and join hospital and clinic groups due to the computer records and financial pressures of ObamaCare.

Government can be designed so that it only acts in all of our interests.  There is only one way this can be achieved.  Government must be allowed only the power to protect the one value we all share.  That value is our individual rights.  This was recognized in our great Declaration of Independence.  A government so limited in power and scope was mandated by the People in our Constitution.  Unfortunately, the Progressive Elitist program has long required the effective destruction of the protections of our Constitution, for as Obama famously stated it is a roadblock to the redistribution of wealth and favors.  The Constitution stood in the way of his Progressive Elitist transformation of America.  Now the Obama Regime simply ignores it and any law they do not like.

Because the Progressive Elitist government model cannot improve the lives of the majority of Americans compared to their own self-management in the private sector, the Progressive Elitist has to have constant recourse to lies and misdirections.  The Middle Class must be deceived.  It is simply impossible to actually benefit "the least among us,", the Middle Class, and the necessary number of Special Interests.  It is an absolute certainty that most Americans will suffer from the Progressive Elitist Big Government model.

The only way we can ever bring back a commitment to constitutional and limited government consistent with our individual freedom is to live by an individualist philosophy designed to promote rational values consistent with the practical needs of life on Earth.  Objectivism is that philosophy.  A commitment to its principles would enable the People of the USA to elect officials capable of and dedicated to reforming our horribly errant governments.  We must transform these tyrannical governments too much under the control of the Progressive Elitists and their allied Special Interests.

Those special interests are not just rich people, corporations, and religious people as the Progressive Elitists claim.  Some special interests are rich people or corporations, but there are many more.  These include:

• Christians who would use government to impose their values, commonly by requiring women to carry a fetus to full term, by denying same-sex marriages, or by claiming that Christian charity requires governmental redistribution.  Yes, some Christians are Elitists, some Progressive, some Traditional
• Islamists who want to impose Sharia Law.
• Environmentalists who believe man is evil, but all other animals are supreme.
• Those opposed to carbon-based fuels for environmental and CAGW reasons.
• Those who believe that profit is evil.
• Labor unions who deny individuals freedom of labor contract.
• Government workers
• Green energy companies with subsidies and favoring mandates
• Farmers with subsidies
• Those who benefit from the ethanol mandate.
• Users of the Export-Import Bank
• Those companies protected by high tariffs
• Banks with cheap money from the Federal Reserve
• Too-Big-To-Fail financial institutions
• Too-Big-To-Fail auto companies
• Extended unemployment beneficiaries
• Disability insurance recipients who used to work with the same disability
• Food Stamp recipients
• Employees whose employers are forced to do all the tax paperwork with its risks
• Professions and jobs with limited competition due to licensing requirements
• Accountants and tax attorneys due to the overly complex tax law
• Trial lawyers
• Insurers due to excessive liability awards allowing them to collect high premiums
• AARP with its health insurance supplements and anti-youth political program
• Home builders and mortgage lenders due to mortgage interest deductions
• Beneficiaries of rent controls
• Older home owners in areas with severe home-building restrictions
• Existing commercial real estate owners where new commercial construction is denied
• TV and radio stations favored by the FCC
• Those near shale oil and gas formations with super cheap energy because governments are delaying pipeline construction
• Russia and the Saudis because governments are slowing energy production here
• Many, many more

The Progressive Elitist does not think we are capable of arranging and choosing our own health insurance, just as they do not think we can generally choose our values and manage our own lives.  As Tocqueville said:

A man’s admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.

It is interesting to note that that contempt seems to easily transform into a disregard for the welfare of your fellow man and makes it easier to take advantage of him as a Special Interest manipulating the powers of excessive government.  The transformation of America implemented by the Obama Regime has richly illustrated this.

[On 26 November 2014, Prof. Walter E. Williams wrote a column called Elite Contempt for Ordinary Americans, which emphasizes the role of academics as a center of such contempt and their efforts to indoctrinate the young in college.]

Capitalism: Freedom to Compete or Freedom to Cooperate?

The enemies of Capitalism and free markets like to describe them as being characterized by dog-eat-dog competition and the survival of the fittest.  Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism provides moral support for Capitalism and hence is subjected to the same criticism.  Before examining the derogatory portions of those claims, let us ask if the free market should be viewed as that part of society in which man has the freedom to cooperate or to associate with others.

Of course, all real freedoms adhere to individuals and each and every individual has the same sovereign rights.  If I have the freedom to cooperate or associate with another person, then I have the right to use my mind to evaluate whether I will enter into a particular cooperation or association with another person and  he has the corresponding right.  If we arrive at a mutual agreement to cooperate or associate, we do so.  If we cannot do so, we go our separate ways and perhaps seek out others with whom we can reach a mutual agreement.  In practice, this means that we seek people out who we can trade values with such that each party believes they are better off because of the trade.  There are innumerable such trades being made in a society and it is perfectly rational for the parties to make such trades in many cases.  The value of living in a society is found in the wealth of such advantageous exchanges.

Such free market trading requires that men be free to use their minds to choose their own values and then to manage their own lives in accordance with their values.  Much of the prejudice against free markets is based on the opinion of elitists that others are not capable of choosing their own values and of managing their own lives.  But let us be frank that if men are not allowed the freedom to choose their own values and manage their own lives, then they are fundamentally enslaved.  There will then be no free market or a very restricted domain will be all that is allowed to the free market.

If there is no free market, what have we lost?  We have lost the ability to manage our own lives according to our own values.  We have also lost the ability to cooperate freely with others in our society or even between societies to trade values for mutual benefit.  We lose the freedom of association which is a freedom to choose with whom we will cooperate or associate and for what reason we will do so.  We lose the freedom to exchange money, goods, services, ideas, friendship, and love.  Of course a restricted society which has begun the process of eliminating the freedom of association tends to do so in the realm of money, goods, and services exchanges if freedom of speech was once well-established.  In many societies freedom of speech has never been well-established and in those societies the exchange of ideas may be among the first exchanges lost.

When it is well-established that the government has control of those exchanges, it can further expand its controls to ideas, friendships, and even love.  In America today, we have some cases in which government already controls ideas.  This is common in government-run schools and colleges, as well as in the workplace.  We have restrictions on friendships in the form of outlawed sexual exchanges, especially if friendship is mixed with the exchange of money.  We have restrictions on love in the form of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act.  It is perfectly appropriate to view these restrictions as restrictions on the free market, which is a concept really much broader than the strictly economic concept usually given to it.  The reason is that all of our human relationships are based on an exchange of values and these values need not be economic values.  The values may be friendship, love, and ideas.  In this realm of the free market, it is not competition, as people usually think of it, that most characterizes it.  It is cooperation and willing association.

Returning to the economic marketplace, where goods, services, and ideas are exchanged, the more fundamental action an individual makes a choice about is also one of with whom and for what reason will he cooperate and associate.  His primary motive is not to bury some opponent.  It is to find a way to exchange values with others in such a way that each is made happier by the result.  Of course, he may only be thinking of his own happiness, but then so are those with whom he is trying to arrange the trade.  So, the result is that everyone, to the extent they are rationally using their minds, is better off.

Of course, some people may wish to make trades that others will not choose to make with them and they may be disappointed.  This cannot be helped because everyone has an equal, sovereign right to cooperate or associate with others.  Force cannot then be used to make others enter into exchanges to which they have not agreed.  Those who do not like Capitalism or the free market then proclaim that the disappointed person or persons have been "eaten."  This is a clear exaggeration.  The proposed solution to this disappointment is to have the government use force to make people, who calculated that the disappointed person's proposed trade was bad for them, enter into the exchange nonetheless.  A better alternative to using force would be for the disappointed competitor to establish more reasonable evaluations of his proposed trades with others.  If he is simply not good at arranging certain types of exchanges on a voluntary basis, then he needs to find other types of exchanges which he is better at arranging.  A wealthy free market society is rich in possibilities for many other alternative exchanges.

Government restrictions on free markets take the form of mandates disallowing cooperation between people or forcing unwanted exchanges of values.  Either way, the government is destroying the freedom of association, or we might say the freedom to cooperate, that every sovereign individual has.  I just learned about an example of just such a nefarious government interference upon one of my nieces today.  She is a very good soccer player and a deep-thinking strategist of the game.  She teaches soccer to children in classes operated by a sports store.  The other soccer coaches are paid.  She cannot be paid because of the Child Labor Laws.  She teaches soccer because she loves the game and she likes teaching children.  But, there is clearly no justice in the perhaps well-intentioned law, that keeps her from being paid.  Her freedom to associate with children who want to learn to play soccer well because she might both love teaching it and be remunerated is interfered with by government.  She teaches anyway, but her freedom to choose payment and maximize the values gained is lost.  Of course, she is a child, though a very intelligent and hard-working child.  We have governments which are only too happy to restrict the freedom of adults in very many exchanges as well.  Why not, since our governments think adults are no more able to choose their own values and manage their own lives than they think children can.

Government interferences with the free market always take the form of restrictions on the freedom of association.  It is voluntary cooperation that the government limits to prevent competition or to achieve other goals contrary to the choices made by individuals in the free marketplace.  The reason is that the economic marketplace exists so that people can form partnerships and companies together voluntarily, hire voluntary labor, use capital from voluntary investors, buy equipment, facilities, and supply goods from voluntary venders, acquire knowledge and ideas from cooperating consultants and inventors, buy a technical library, and provide goods, services, and ideas to voluntary clients.  Each of these relationships is characterized by a voluntary exchange of goods, services, or ideas.  Each is an example of the freedom of association.  Each is an example of cooperation.

Of course competition usually occurs in the process.  But, competition in the sense that people usually think of it is not as fundamental as the freedom to cooperate is.  While some people have a surfeit of competitive juices, many are simply seeking out one value after another and care only about the value they gain in any given transaction.  They hope to string together many successful transactions and do very well for themselves.  In many cases, they have no idea with whom or what they are in competition.  For instance, when I quote a material analysis job for a possible client, am I in competition with another materials analysis laboratory, or am I in competition with other alternative uses of the company money?  The company could buy a piece of equipment, pay off a loan costing them interest, or send an employee off for training.  My experience is that most often my real competition is not another materials analysis laboratory.  It is a host of other alternative uses that my possible client has for his money.

It is very hard to conjure up visions of dog-eat-dog competition in this context!  What does become clear in this context is that competition is fundamental to an economic exchange only in the broader context that everyone rationally is placing a value on his values that can be realized in a trade.  It is very hard to see this as evil.  Indeed, this is exactly what the moral man does and it is why he develops a moral code.  He needs a moral code to place relative values on the many possible values he might pursue and might gain in exchanges with others.  Of course the exchanges in question are all exchanges of values, of which economic exchanges are a subset.

Competition exists in the free market because people act to realize value gains in their exchanges with others.  But, the exchange itself is an act of cooperation or association.  There is no way to interfere with the natural competition without losing acts of cooperation and denying the freedom of association.  The act of competition is the act of the evaluation of values.  It is not stabbing someone in the chest.  It is not throwing them in a dungeon and starving them.  These are the things governments do when they interfere with our voluntary exchanges of values whether in the economic free market or in the broader free market.

You may say I am extreme in this assessment, but no, I am seeing the complete context very well.  If a government interferes with my sovereign right to associate with others, it may place a less severe penalty on me for trying to go ahead with a denied exchange.  If I then assert my sovereign right and refuse to take or accept the penalty, the government will ratchet up the use of force on its part and may well have a SWAT team shoot me or imprison me for life.  The real penalty for asserting my sovereign right may well be death or permanent enslavement.  This is clearly evil.

Rational men do not want their societies to go into these sorts of death spirals.  They understand the need to keep their society as free as possible from the use of force, including government-wielded force.  Capitalism is the form society takes when men are free to associate with one another.  Mixed economies deny the freedom to cooperate with others and trample the right of association.  These principles are readily illustrated in Ayn Rand's ingenious novel Atlas Shrugged and in the excellent movie Atlas Shrugged Part I.

The 2010 Atlas Society / Free Minds Summer Seminar

I have been posting relatively little this last week, since I have been attending the 2010 Atlas Society / Free Minds Summer Seminar being held in Alexandria, VA since 30 June.  The seminar continues through 7 July.  Today, there are no activities, however, so I intend to make a couple of posts.

I have been a member of the Atlas Society for 11 years.  The Atlas Society, founded by my friend David Kelley, "promotes the philosophy of Objectivism and its core values: reason, achievement, individualism, and freedom."  The Atlas Society has great appreciation for the work of Ayn Rand and believes we can acquire invaluable understanding from her work.   At the same time, it is not dogmatic and believes every individual should think independently to further develop a philosophical understanding of human life and principles by which to guide their own life.  It is impossible to imagine John Galt thinking that it would be impossible for him to take any action with philosophical implications without first consulting Ayn Rand or asking what she would do in his situation.  No, in the complete context of his life, he would figure out how what his personal values were and he would act on them in his own way.

The Atlas Society has just launched a new website with much new content on the philosophy of Objectivism.  It has recently started the Business Rights Center with my friend Roger Donway as Director.  "The Business Rights Center is dedicated to defending businessmen who are wrongly defamed by the media and unjustly prosecuted by the government. The BRC also strives to expose and challenge the false premises of today’s post-Enlightenment, anti-business intelligentsia."  The Atlas Society also puts out the very interesting quarterly magazine, The New Individualist, edited by Sherrie Gossett.  This really is a very fine magazine.  It is worth reading from cover to cover and its layout is always high art.  It is such a work of beautiful art, that you will actually feel the need to wash your hands before you pick it up.