On the Choice of Charities

My father and mother had a favorite charity:  St. Jude's Children's Hospital.  This is a choice some of my siblings have made and the choice is particularly reasonable in that St. Jude's Hospital has worked wonders to save the life of a young great nephew who had bone cancer in a leg.  My own choice of charities is different as I just explained in an e-mail to my siblings.

I wrote:

St. Jude's Hospital is a worthy cause.  However, many will give to medical institutions, while few care enough about the many and broad rights of the individual to support the think tanks that fight so hard to preserve and expand our freedom to exercise our many rights as individuals.  For this reason, I do all I can to support the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Capital Research Center, The Institute for Justice, Cato Institute, The Independent Institute, The Atlas Society, the Foundation for Economic Education, The Right to Work Committee, Judicial Watch, National Federation of Independent Businesses, The Mercatus Center of George Mason University, The Institute of Humane Studies at George Mason University, Americans for Prosperity, some very select activities of the Heritage Foundation, CFACT, and SEPP.  The last two are primarily about environmental and climate change sanity.  Because almost every educational institution and most of the press and media are advocates of ever greater collective power over the individual, these independent, pro-liberty think tanks are critically important.

It is our individual freedoms that make our standard of living possible and which allow us to choose our own values as goals in our own lives.  We must never allow anyone else to take over the management of our own lives.  Unfortunately, most Americans do want to exercise some control over the lives of other Americans, without even the obligation of knowing those they would dictate terms to and very often while knowing they are actually harming some, usually with the excuse that it is for the "greater good."  The "greater good" is always the demon that devours our individual freedoms and self-ownership.  The only greater good any of us actually share in common is our own liberty.  Other than that, we need the freedom to think and act independently and the freedom to associate with others as we choose.  It is those freedoms that then allow us the freedom to cooperate with others.  Individual freedom is not anti-social as many try to portray it.  Individual freedom is the means to make ourselves individually valuable and worthy of the respect and cooperation of others.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in admiring the work of St. Jude's Children's Hospital, aside perhaps from the religious name and the idea that by supporting it, you are doing good work that will win you the approval of the One God and a reward of Everlasting Life.  Freedom of conscience and freedom of association allow one to make this choice to support St. Jude's Hospital for Children.

Without them, one might be forced to instead support the Institute for Xi Thought, as a Red Chinese propagandist recently insisted when I refused to entertain a delegation from Red China at my laboratory.  Yes, the Chinese will impose Xi Thought upon us, he insists.  Given the weakness of our educational system and the collectivist ideology of the schools, many young Americans who embrace socialism, the media, the governments, and many other institutions in America, this is a possibility, though probably under some future Chinese Great Leader.

The Purpose of the National Labor Relations Board is to Deny Cooperation

As I just wrote in my last post, the benefits of society reside in our freedom of association with others of our choosing for purposes of our choosing.  This fundamental right allows us to cooperate with others in exchanges of mutual benefit so that we might all prosper and live more secure and richer lives.  In this process, we are constantly exchanging values, which we must evaluate and rank using our minds.  We succeed in these exchanges best when we think rationally.  Government properly imposes limits on private action to keep individuals from using force to affect these exchanges so that they are voluntary and people are free to only make exchanges they see as beneficial to them.  Unfortunately, governments also commonly use force to force individuals to make exchanges of values they would not make voluntarily.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an especially egregious actor in forcing involuntary associations and involuntary exchanges of values.  Long-established laws have given this board the power to force individuals and associations of individuals owning companies to enter into labor exchanges with labor unions rather than individual employees whenever a majority of the employees vote to join a union.  In many cases, states force those who do not want to be union members to pay union dues nonetheless.  The states that do not force individuals to join the union when the union wins an election, are called Right to Work states.  The Right to Work states preserve a larger measure of the individual employee's right to associate than do the forced union states.  Some argue that the Right to Work laws interfere with a company's right to force its employees to be union members!  That argument is an example of how crazy things get once one allows the use of force to deprive individuals of their rights.  The NLRB has long been charged with depriving companies and individuals of the right to hire union workers or not and to force them to rehire union workers after strikes.  The NLRB also runs the elections in which the employees of a company vote to join or reject a union or accept a bargaining contract.  It places severe restrictions on the freedom of speech of companies during union elections as well.

The NLRB has been stacked by Obama to make it even more biased towards labor unions.  The NLRB's acting general counsel earlier this year threatened to sue South Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and South Dakota because the people of those states amended their constitutions to give their citizens the right to a secret ballot in unionization elections.  It is amazingly presumptuous that a minor federal agency can sue a state because its citizens have decided to protect their rights in their own state constitution.  The people acted because the Obama administration and unions backed a new law that would allow unionization elections to be performed without secret ballots, using what is called card checks.  This would have allowed union bosses to strong-arm employees one by one into signing up for the union without benefit of a secret ballot.  It would be as if Obama had complete lists of everyone who voted for him or against him and could thereafter award all government contracts only to those who voted for him and give entitlement benefits only to those who voted for him.  In addition, he could use the New Black Panther Party people he has refused to prosecute for polling place intimidation to make people vote for him in the first place.  One of the main reasons the labor unions supported Obama so strongly in his election was because they wanted card check and he had agreed to give it to them.  They were gambling heavily on this to turn around their loss of union membership in the private sector, where most employees have caught on to the fact that unions are very good at killing the companies for which the employees work.

Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina has introduced legislation to keep the NLRB from pursuing the threatened lawsuit.  He has 30 co-sponsors of the bill.  The NLRB's purpose is so wrongheaded that 176 members of the House of Representatives voted for an amendment by Tom Price of Georgia to completely defund the NLRB.  The freedom of association will always be impaired by this agency.

The most recent new threat to our freedom to cooperate by the NLRB is its claim that Boeing violated federal labor law by not building a production line for its 787 Dreamliner aircraft in Washington state.  The International Association of Machinists and the NLRB claim that Boeing's decision to build the production line in the Right to Work state of South Carolina was retaliation against the union because of its history of strikes that cost the company many billions of dollars.  The union and Obama's NLRB claim this is an infringement of the worker's right to strike.  That right to strike exists, but so does the right of the company not to hire the striking workers back.  Present law does not let the companies fire the strikers, which infringes the rights of the company owners.  Despite the many absurdities of the present law, the Supreme Court has ruled many times that companies can consider the negative effects of strikes when making their business decisions.  What is more, Boeing's present collective bargaining agreement with the IAM allows Boeing to build new plants outside of Washington without union approval.  This is apparently unusual for such union agreements, which only shows how unions have generally been able to impose themselves into company management.

The corrective action the NLRB is asking for is that Boeing be forced to build a 787 Dreamliner production facility in Washington state at great expense.  Boeing was considering building the facility in Washington, but they wanted a no-strike clause in their labor agreement with the union so they would have production stability in their on-going competition with EADS (Airbus) in Europe, which the union would not give them on any affordable terms.  The request for a ruling against Boeing comes when Boeing has nearly completed a new facility for the 787 in North Charleston, where jobs are much needed.  Boeing has already hired 1,000 workers there.  The announcement of their plan to build this plant was made 17 months ago.  Meanwhile, Boeing has hired 2,000 more workers in Washington state, so the union was not retaliated against in terms of a reduction of employees in Washington.  But the union bosses certainly are disappointed that they cannot collect union dues from the new South Carolina employees, since they voted not to join the union.  The first production of airliners in South Carolina is scheduled for July 2011.

The Obama crew, contrary to some reports, is not calling for the direct shutdown of the new largely built facility in South Carolina.  They are just imposing equal large costs to put a facility into Washington state with an equal number of employees, who will be union members.  They no doubt plan to use this fact to claim they are not killing the jobs in South Carolina or stopping the company from continuing its hiring there.  Despite not calling for the shutdown of the South Carolina facility, Boeing, Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and Sen. Jim Demint are all protesting the interference of the NLRB.  But, the state of Washington is a better bet to give electoral votes to Obama than is the state of South Carolina in his re-election attempt, so Obama does not care.

Whenever government interferes with the individual right of association or the freedom to cooperate, it causes harm to our society.  This is a real social injustice done to many individuals.  The present action of Obama's NLRB is to try to intimidate companies against building new facilities where a union they have an agreement with does not want them to.  It is also an attempt to keep unionized businesses specifically from building new plants and facilities in Right to Work states.  These restrictions only serve to reduce the value a company can offer its customers in exchanges.  This will reduce the growth of the company and may cause it to fail, ending such union jobs as it presently supplies.

In any case, companies come and go and large companies are replaced by more nimble smaller companies all the time.  If the NLRB is allowed to keep unionized companies from expanding in Right to Work states, new companies will find even stronger incentives to plant themselves in Right to Work states and avoid union interference with their plant and facility siting decisions.  Unionized companies will have no choice but to put their new plants overseas, rather than in the United States.  Overseas companies will have reduced reason to establish new facilities in the U.S. and will stay out.  U.S. unemployment will be higher as a result.  Americans will find themselves with a lowered standard of living.

Of course the Obama Democrats have been talking about placing new taxes on companies who expand aboard instead of at home.  The strongest growth in the American economy now is precisely in companies with operations abroad or with high exports, such as many manufacturers.  The Obama taxes will be targeted at those companies and reduce their growth still more than our highest in the world corporate taxes and most onerous regulations have already done.  These wrongheaded Democrat Socialists are just one economic disaster after another.

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.