Connecticut and Other States with Unhappy Residents and Population Loss

Russell Blair wrote an article for the Hartford Courant about the residents' views about living in Connecticut that makes it clear that the high tax and Democrat-controlled state is poorly governed. 

The Connecticut Economic Resource Center surveyed state residents and found that 47% of them said they plan to leave the state within the next five years!  It also revealed that only 44% agreed that Connecticut was a good place to live and raise a family.

A Gallup poll in 2016 had found that 46% of Connecticut residents said they would like to leave the state given the opportunity.  At that time, the state was tied with the high-tax state of New Jersey in that statistic as the state with the most residents desirous of exodus.

The U.S. Census Bureau believes the state lost 1,215 residents in the year following 1 July 2017.  It was one of 9 states with a population loss in that one-year period.  The other population losers were New York, Illinois, West Virginia, Louisiana, Hawaii, Mississippi, Alaska, and Wyoming.  Puerto Rico was another loser.  Note that this period was one of general excellent economic growth in the United States.

A state report from May 2017 says that Connecticut residents have been leaving the state in accelerating numbers since the Great Recession.  A poll in October 2017 noted that the percentage of people with incomes above $150,000 a year considering a move to another state was much higher than the that from the population as a whole.

Connecticut has recovered only 80.8% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession, making it one of a very few states which has not recovered all of the jobs lost.

West Virginia and Wyoming lost many jobs thanks to the anti-coal policies of the Obama administration.  The refusal to allow oil and gas developments on federally owned lands made it impossible for many new jobs in that industry to be developed in Wyoming and Alaska.  The Obama policies suppressing the construction of pipelines hurt both West Virginia and Wyoming as potential oil and gas producers.  Wyoming and Alaska are hurt by excessive federal land ownership.  Anti-mining rulings by the federal government have prevented much mining activity in Alaska.

The status of freedom in the states is another big factor in economic growth of a state and in the general happiness of state residents.  The Cato Institute Ranking of Freedom in the States ranks Connecticut #33, New York #50, Illinois #35, New Jersey #47, West Virginia #34, Louisiana #30, Mississippi #40, Wyoming #38, Alaska #15, and Hawaii #49.  Only the Alaska rating suggests that a lack of freedom in the state and local governments in that state is not a factor in its loss of population.

Another factor that hurts a state in population retention and growth is the quality of K-12 education adjusted for student hetergeneity and expenditures adjusted for the cost of living, which people have not been able to look-up until recently, but they do sense it.  A Cato Institute Policy Analysis of 13 November 2018 by Liebowitz and Kelly has provided such an analysis recently, though it is little known.  In their ranking of the 50 states and DC, Connecticut ranks 38.

Consider the other recent population losers and their rankings in the Cato Institute K-12 education analysis:  New York ranks 46, Illinois ranks 40, West Virginia is 51, Louisiana is 47, Hawaii is 11, Mississippi is 25, Alaska is 48, and Wyoming is 37.  An expensive and poor job of educating children in a state will have a strong job suppression effect and make a state a poor place for a family to raise children.  Of the states losing population, only Hawaii is doing a good job of educating children. Mississippi is very average, but it has a bad reputation as a result of irrational ratings with widespread use such as the U.S. News & World Report rating.  When a state does a poor and inefficient job of educating children, it is likely to do a poor and inefficient job of all other aspects of governance.

The lesson for Connecticut and the other population losers is that poor governance has a very significant effect on people in pursuit of their happiness.  High taxes, poor education for children, excessive and abusive business regulation, the general state of freedom, and high rates of violence and theft are very effective in creating an unhappy populace.

The Parable of the Coat-Giving Father

The Democratic Party answered the State of the Union speech with a view from another world.  In Stacey Abrams' world, Americans were in good shape financially under Obama, but are now living in a deep depression.  On behalf of the Democratic Party, she made a plea that we all work together to take care of one another as we once did when we brought an end to Jim Crow laws.  In this vein, she demanded that we terminate the use of fossil fuels to prevent the end of the world by global warming and that we use the force of government to end all discrimination against LGBTQ persons.

Oops, the main opposition to Jim Crow was always the Republican Party!  Oh well, hardly anyone knows anything at all about history anymore.  The Democratic Party controlled education system has seen to that.

Oops, there is mounting evidence that the Earth is cooling, particularly in the thermosphere, and will continue cooling for the next few decades due to a great reduction in solar activity.  Additions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere does virtually nothing to change the temperature of the Earth's surface or troposphere.  Ending the use of fossil fuels will only make energy more expensive and less dependable, hurting those with lower incomes the most.  The Democratic Party is all in for hurting people with higher energy costs.

Oops, the Democrat Obama administration fought hard to maintain Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the courts against veterans backed by the Log Cabin Republicans.  The Obama administration lost the court case at the Appeals Court level and their next defense of DADT would have been before the Supreme Court.  They gave up the case because it looked like they would lose again in the Supreme Court and at about that time polls showed that Americans did not support DADT and were supporting gay marriages.  The Democrats are hardly winter soldiers on matters of principle, despite their pretensions.

In emotional support for her take care of one another thesis, she offered the parable of her Father Giving Away His Coat to a man on the highway on a cold and rainy night.  He was walking home from work and came upon a man cold and shivering who had no coat.  He gave the man his coat because he knew that he was not alone -- his family would come to get him.

Is this freedom to choose your own values and to act on those values what the Democratic Party stands for?  What that party stands for is actually this story:

A man on the highway is alone, cold, and shivering.  A government strongman in body armor and armed with a semi-automatic weapon is patrolling the highway and notes the condition of the cold, shivering man without a coat.  He waits for another man to come along who has a coat.  He confronts that man and points his weapon at the man and demands that he give his coat to the cold, shivering man.  He then demands the now coatless man's wallet and takes 40% of the money in the wallet.  He takes a quarter of that and puts it in his own wallet.  He turns over a half of what he originally took to his department claiming, without any need for evidence, that it was taken because the man who had it was engaged in crime (the Father did often hitchhike).  What happens to the other quarter?  The Democrats in control of the government give it to Solyndra or some other scheme by rich and connected people to take advantage to the American people.  This is the actual pattern of Democratic Party controlled governments.  See New York state, California, Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago and many, many other examples.

This is the party of Jim Crow laws, so it is capable of doing terrible harm to many Americans, always justified by the claim that you have to harm some people to help the greater number or the most needy.  There is no surer path to power than that paved by the claim that you will use the power of government to help most of the people, while ignoring the fact that most people are far better at choosing their own values and managing their own lives than are government legislators and bureaucrats who do not know us as individuals and do not even care to do so.  After all, they see most of us as Deplorables, which is natural given that they really do believe that most of us have no business choosing our own values and managing our own lives in accordance with our own values.

Stacey Abrams would not allow her own Father to choose his own values and manage his life in accordance with his values,  She is blind to how important that very likely was to him.  I am not endorsing self-sacrifice, but men need to be free to choose their own values.  There is no freedom if we are not free to do so and, if having done so, to be free we must be free to act in pursuit of our own values.

It was refreshing to hear Trump endorse freedom and clearly condemn socialism.  Unfortunately, his advocacy of a law to require paternity leave is inconsistent with freedom.

Leaving High Taxes and Big Government Behind

This post is based on some very useful references provided in a comment to my prior post on the Cato Institute evaluation of the freedom in the 50 States 2016.

Between 1992 and 2014, the IRS tracked the migration of people and their AGI on their tax forms. The net results of these migrations are indicated in this map where red is a loss of income due to net migration and green is an income gain.

It is interesting to note that of the 8 least free states by the 2016 report of Cato Institute on Freedom in the 50 States of my last post, the following 7 states are either red or light red in this income migration map, indicating a loss of income:

New York
California
New Jersey
Maryland
Connecticut
Illinois
Rhode Island

Out migration from California tends to be strong to Arizona, Nevada, Washington, and Oregon.  All of these states are more free than California and the least free is Oregon, which perhaps explains why its income increased the least of these four states.

New Hampshire, the freest state, had a small increase in income due to migration. Oklahoma and Alaska were #3 and #2, respectively, and both have risen in recent years in freedom, so their newly deserved reputations were not yet established in many of the years 1992 - 2014.  Indiana at #4 has been more stable in its freedom and clearly has performed much better in minimizing losses than its neighboring states of Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio in this time period.  Indiana's weakest ranking of #26 was in fiscal policy which includes taxes and that is a particularly strong factor on the out-migration of income.  Tennessee, Idaho, Florida, and Arizona of the 10 most free states are also all green in this income migration map above.  #5 South Dakota is white, or income neutral, and #9 Iowa is pink.

Overall, the freer states were the Rocky Mountain states, the Great Plain states from Oklahoma north, and the Southeast with the exception of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.  There are no red states in these areas.  Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas are pink, but three of these states are in the #16 - #25 grouping for freedom.  Missouri is further hurt by not being a Right to Work state.

Here is another interesting map from Peter J. Nelson of the Center of the American Experiment entitled Minnesotans on the Move to Lower Tax States 2016:

In the map, the bluer the color the greater the loss of taxpayers earning more than $200K a year.  We also find that most of the low freedom states have higher losses than do high freedom states.  All of the 9 states with gains equal or greater than 1.00% are in the top twenty most free states by the Cato Institute ranking.  Tax policy is under the Fiscal Policy ranking and in this area South Carolina is ranked #23, Nevada is #25, and Wyoming is #21, so there is a stronger correlation with the overall freedom ranking than there is with the Fiscal Policy ranking subset of freedoms for these high income in-migration states.  Some of these high in-flux states do have very high Fiscal Policy rankings, however, with New Hampshire, Tennessee, Florida, Montana, and Idaho having Fiscal Policy rankings from #1 to #8.  So general freedom may be more important for a subset of the wealthier migrators and tax policy alone may be the most important factor for another subset of these wealthier migrators.

Overall, I would judge it likely that income migration is affected strongly by tax policy, but it is also affected strongly by a desire for freedom in general.  Different people have different weightings on these aspects of freedom in their personal set of values.  Good government seeks to provide everyone with the freedoms their individual rights entitle them to.  When a state government offers a better service to freedom, rational and productive people will come to that state. Good things happen to states and the local communities when more rational and productive people choose to live there.

Freedom in the 50 States Evaluated by Cato Institute

The 2016 report on Freedom in the 50 States by the Cato Institute evaluating the state of freedom through 2014 is now available.  The results of their evaluation of freedom based on fiscal policy, personal freedom, and regulatory policy are summarized in this map:

Cato provides the weightings they used for the evaluation of freedom and one can change those weightings to one's personal preferences to see how the rankings change.  But by Cato's weightings, the top ten freest states are ranked and graded as, with the party of the governor, the senate, and the house of the state added in order either as a D or an R in the year 2014:

1) New Hampshire, 0.3319, D, R, D
2) Alaska, 0.3265, R, R, R
3) Oklahoma, 0.2791, R, R, R
4) Indiana, 0.2778, R, R, R
5) South Dakota, 0.2754, R, R, R
6) Tennessee, 0.2646, R, R, R
7) Idaho, 0.2608, R, R, R
8) Florida, 0.2133, R, R, R
9) Iowa, 0.2048, R, D, R
10) Arizona, 0.1834, R, R, R

The 10 most authoritarian states with their negative scores are:

50) New York, -0.9763, D, D, D
49) California, -0.5026, D, D, D
48) Hawaii, -0.4904, D, D, D
47) New Jersey, -0.4285, R, D, D
46) Maryland, -0.4039, D, D, D
45) Connecticut, -0.2612, D, D, D
44) Illinois, -0.2554, D, D, D
43) Rhode Island, -0.1735, I (really D), D, D
42) Maine, -0.1500, R, D, D
41) Kentucky, -0.1489, D, R, D

It is interesting that the five most authoritarian states, New York, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Maryland are all more greatly deviant from the norm of freedom than is the freest of the states, New Hampshire.  If you value your freedom, it is particularly important to avoid these most negatively rated states.  New York is about three times more negative than New Hampshire is positive.  In fact, New York is almost twice as bad as either of the next two worst states, California and Hawaii.

If one were to move from New York to New Hampshire, the freedom score would increase by 1.3082.  Or if I were to move from authoritarian Maryland to where much of my family lives in Oklahoma, my score would improve by 0.6830, which is a substantial increase in freedom.  Or if you live in the Washington, DC area, living in Virginia offers a big improvement over living in Maryland by 0.5080.  If you have to live near New York City, Connecticut is substantially more free than is either New York or New Jersey.

Of the 10 most free states, all are controlled by Republicans, except two which had divided government in 2014.  Of the 10 most authoritarian governments, all were entirely controlled by Democrats in the governorship and the legislature, except the two least repressive of that set of the 10 worst, who had one of the three legs of the state government in the hands of Republicans.  It is not uncommon for libertarians to claim that the Republicans are every bit as anti-freedom as the Democrats, but these rankings make it clear that the Republicans are significantly better than the Democrats in most cases.  Indeed, one of the main reasons that the mean state freedom rankings are so much better than those of the most repressive states is because far more states are controlled by Republicans than are controlled by the more adamant deniers of individual rights found in the Democrat Party.

Independence Day Thoughts on Freedom

When Americans declared their independence from Great Britain 240 years ago, they were a people who were largely self-employed and proud to manage their own lives.  They believed they had no need for a government to choose their values for them and to micromanage their lives.  Their principal need for a government was to prevent individuals from initiating the use of force against one another and to protect them from outlaw gangs, warring Indians, and attacks by other nations. Most of those needs they were quite willing to fulfill in large part at the very local level, including a local militia. They certainly did not need a government dominated by special interests and aristocrats a long distance away from them dictating numerous laws and taxing them.

But what is the American condition today?  Relatively few people are self-employed.  The result is that relatively few people believe that they are capable of controlling their own lives.  For the ease of being an employee, most people have given up the ability to earn their own living under their own management.  Most people have consequently lost a key ingredient to their independence and their self-confidence.  This is a loss partly brought on by political decisions in which a people more and more frequently employed by others came to be in greater and greater numbers in the electorate. Frustrated with their lack of control and holding a great political power in their numbers, but lacking self-direction, these Americans became susceptible to special interests who wanted to gain power and wealth at the expense of the less numerous employers who had made their wealth in a largely free market.  More and more legislation came to regulate employers and to transfer their wealth to groups politically favored by government.  This further weakened the spirit of self-sufficiency, independent mindedness, and encouraged the creation of huge barriers to starting and operating businesses. Americans became more and more dependent upon their government and the whims of the special interests that came to control that ever more powerful government.

Today, government and the education system it dominates insist that we are not really individuals at all.  No, we are simply members in some identity group.  White males are only capable of thinking like a stereotypical white male does.  Black males are only capable of thinking as a stereotypical black male does.  Those exceptions, such as Justice Clarence Thomas, Dr. Thomas Sowell, and Professor Walter E. Williams are simply abominations abhorrent to nature and traitors to their group identity.  In an interesting twist, it is fine however for a white male to think outside his abhorred group, provided he thinks like one of the approved identity groups.  Well, that is true to a fair degree, though there are increasing numbers who now resent such a person's theft of their identity.  Overall, our special interest serving government found it very convenient to lump Americans into a few groups so that we might be divided and controlled more readily.  This also serves the critically important function of obscuring the fact that the government cannot know us as individuals and cannot do anything but suppress our individuality with its ever-increasing legislation and regulations. People will be less aware of the suppression of their individuality if they have been taught that they only have a group identity.  This is a fundamentally collectivist idea.

Americans are a self-contradictory group these days.  They want less government, but they rarely want to give up any program that currently exists, except for ObamaCare, maybe.  They want the government to spend less, except on a few new programs that they want.  They are not infrequently willing to break a law they think the government will not notice, but they are eager to create new laws to prevent others from doing anything that might aggravate them.  Indeed, Congress is held in super-low regard because it is so often in gridlock, though the last time it was not in gridlock it passed the hated ObamaCare act.  Generally, the people believe that a legislature is not doing its job unless it is passing loads of new laws.

Now, because I view the only legitimate function of government, as did the Declaration of Independence, as being the protection of the rights of each and every individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of personal happiness, I see little need for new laws doing what most new laws have done in recent decades.  Most new laws further restrict the freedom of action of at least some Americans, though most laws are aimed at a minority subset of Americans if great harm is to be done to them.  Those laws restricting most Americans are usually designed to cause them only a small and largely unnoticed loss, but which in the aggregate allows a substantial transfer of wealth or power to a small, politically favored special interest group.  After many decades of following such a "practical" and unprincipled political course, we now have a government that does most Americans far more harm than it does us good.

We do presently have a need for much new legislation.  We need to repeal decades of laws that have interfered with our natural individual rights.  We have far too many laws providing for the theft of the value of the hours many put into productive work.  We have far too many restrictions on our freedom of association.  We have far too many prohibitions against our exercise of freedom of conscience, which includes, but is not limited to, our freedom of religion.  We have ever more constraints on freedom of speech and of the press.  Our property rights are in frequent jeopardy, whether it be to use our property for production or to keep it from being confiscated because some law enforcement arm of government imagines that it might have been used in a crime or even only that some action involving it fits a pattern of some organized crime or terrorist action, however implausibly that may apply to this particular property owner.

It is an interesting phenomena, though only one among many contradictions, that those who favor ever-larger government are constantly making claims that human activities cannot be sustained by the environment, yet ever-increasing spending based on the confiscation of the fruits of productive work can be sustained without limit.  So let us review a few charts on government growth provided by the Cato Institute:

Since 1900, Federal spending went from 2.8% of GDP to 21.4% of GDP in 2016, which is a 7.6-fold increase.  Total state and local government spending increased by only 2.2 times in comparison.  The more local government is, it would appear, the more solid the constraints on its spending.  Now that government spending is such a large part of the economy, it is critical that we stop using GDP as the measure since that government spending is actually counted as GDP.  Yet that money has to be produced outside government, while only a fraction of government spending is returned to the government for spending from taxes on money earned by doing the governments' bidding.  Total government spending here is 32.4% of GDP.  The Non-Government GDP (NG GDP) is then 67.6%. If government taxed the functions it spends money on at the same rate it taxes the general private sector economic activities then one could estimate that 32.4% of the money spent by governments is returned to government in taxes of the money spent by governments.  So, 0.324 times 32.4% is 10.5%.  The reality is that government actually taxes these activities at much lower rates.  It is probably generous to assume that taxes return 5% of the government money spent.  So let us subtract 5% from total government spending to find the drag that government spending itself puts on the private sector economy.  Net total government spending of (32.4 - 5.0)% /  67.6% = 40.5%, which is substantially more than the 32.4% the presentation of the data against the GDP provides us.  Let us bear this in mind as we look at some more charts of our unsustainable government growth.

The national defense is certainly a legitimate function of the government and it has a constitutional validation in the enumerated powers of the government.  This represents 15% of federal spending and it certainly includes some waste and abuse and suffers from the greatly diverted attention of our hired managers in Congress.  Interest payments are justified by the Constitution, but there is no legitimate reason for those payments to have grown to be 6% of the budget.  That is a percentage which would rise rapidly if we did not have an economy suppressed by government requirements that have greatly reduced the velocity of money in the economy.  The All Other Activities covers a few constitutionally valid functions, such as some of the foreign affairs activities, the post offices and post roads, the minting of money, immigration controls, the maintenance of weight and measure standards, the operation of the Patent Office, and the operation of the federal courts at a level appropriate for a nation of many fewer laws and regulations.  Had a proper philosophy of government prevailed, as stated in the Declaration of Independence and mandated by the Constitution, the spending of our present federal government would be closer to 20% of its present spending than to 25% of present spending.

Since 1970, it sure is a good thing that defense spending as a percentage of the GDP has trended down substantially and that non-defense discretionary spending has come down a bit, because entitlement spending has climbed prodigiously.  Entitlement spending has no constitutional basis and no basis in the legitimate function of government as defined in the Declaration of Independence.  It is generally funded by the theft of the fruits of the productive work of Americans so that it can be rerouted to those favored politically by those who lust for the power to distribute the money.  This huge expansion of entitlement spending makes the so-called beneficiaries dependent upon the government, which suits the government just fine.

An appreciation of the degree to which our government has become one dominated by special interests would not be realistic if we did not acknowledge the huge increase in federal subsidy programs shown above.

This final graph is the number of pages in the Federal Register from Wayne Crews' Ten Thousand Commandments 2016 report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In the 1940s and the 1950s the total number of pages of final regulations in the Federal Register for the decade were running at about 110,00 pages a decade.  In the decade from 2001 -2010 the number of pages had grown to 730,176.  Presumably, the government considers it our duty to have read all of these regulations so that we might abide by them.  Did you do your government mandated duty?  Remember, ignorance is no defense for violating the law or any regulation.  More and more of the binding regulations or the interpretation of the regulations can only be found in court proceedings or in website announcements of the thousands of government regulatory agencies, which the government itself cannot enumerate. Good luck you lost, ignorant soul if the government decides to come after you.  Do you trust the likes of Obama, Hillary, or The Donald not to do so?

Oh that we might be free!  It would be incredibly wonderful to celebrate the 4th of July as a free man.
It would be a joy to be among free men who had maintained the principles of freedom set forth in the Declaration of Independence and then largely implemented in the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1791.  To live in a society based on the free trade of values in a rich and robust private sector rather than one dominated by the forceful taking of wealth and service by governments would be to live in a genuinely life-sustaining society.  It is not possible to imagine how much our standard of living would be improved with the flowering of productivity, creativity, justice, and benevolence one would find in such a society.

The Severe Limits of Social Justice

The idea that the government should force every individual of our society to provide Social Justice is a central belief of Progressive Elitists.  The implementation of their Social Justice agenda is a massive injustice.  Let us examine the reasons that make this the case.

Justice has meaning in the relationships of individuals and meaning as an aim of government.  In the relationships of individuals, justice exists when an individual correctly identifies the value of another individual based on his character and actions.  This evaluation is clearly dependent upon one's ethical code.  Consequently, an individual will not correctly identify the value of another individual when his moral code is not correct or when he holds himself to no moral principles.

Suppose an individual has a correct moral code and is highly capable in applying that code to the complex problem of evaluating the worth of another individual on the objective assessment of observations of his character as witnessed by his actions in life.  This highly competent judge of value in other individuals will nonetheless not be able to form a valid opinion of the worth of all the other people he encounters in his life simply because he will not know enough about many of them to form an objective opinion.  He will only be able to do justice to those he knows sufficiently well.

This objective moral evaluator will understand that when dealing with people who he does not know well enough, he should be careful not to do an injustice to them.  This is at least the case in the context of a society in which the initiated use of force by individuals is prohibited, as it is by legitimate governments.  A further requirement is that the government itself uses no more force than that needed to prevent the initiated use of force among individuals.  Once the use of force is minimized in a society, then an individual can afford to live by the principle that he should hold a benevolent assumption that others are not a threat to his life and he may assume that others are of significant value until they actually prove otherwise in actions he has had the opportunity to observe. Thus the rational individual in a free society acts on the principle that he should not do others the injustice of assuming them a threat to his life.  In voluntary associations with them, he can assume that they will trade values to their mutual benefit or they will be free not to have any association at all.

This benevolent assumption of value in others is conditional on a society in which our interactions with others are of a voluntary nature.  It assumes that when we trade values in our interactions, we are not being forced to do so.  A government which harms some individuals in order to provide favors to other individuals or groups, as our present government does on a major scale, is actively making some groups a threat to the lives of many individuals.  It undermines or even denies the basis under which one may make the benevolent assumption of value in others.  It can actually force individuals to do the injustice to others of having to assume that they are a threat to his life until and unless they prove that they are not a threat and actually are a value.  This is what has happened in many fascist and communistic societies.  Big Government or statist government is a basic threat to justice in this way.

Government can clearly be the means by which massive injustice comes to characterize a society. How can government be prevented from being the cause of injustice?  It is by forcing government to observe the rights of the individual.  The rights of the individual are determined by the nature of man and by a basic core morality.  As Ayn Rand said in her essay Man's Rights:

"Rights" are a moral concept -- the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others -- the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context -- the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics.  Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

A "right" is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context.  There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life.  Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action -- which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a "right" pertains only to action -- specifically, to freedom of action.  It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive -- of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice.  As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligation except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The freedom to act on your own judgment implies the need for freedom of conscience and the exercise of voluntary choices within a society requires the freedom of association.  Freedom of speech does not exist unless one is allowed to advocate wrong ideas from the perspective of others or even with respect to reality.  Similarly, freedom of conscience does not exist if one is not allowed to have ideas, including moral ideas, that are wrong.  Freedom of association does not exist unless one is allowed to unjustly err in assessing the value of others.

While rights are a means of securing morality in the actions of government, those moral principles that government must recognize are the most basic and most core moral beliefs.  The government must not dictate more than the most basic of moral requirements on the individuals of the society it serves.  Government protection of the exercise of individual rights requires it to allow individuals to choose their own values and to manage their own lives in accordance with their own values.  The bare minimum of morality that forms the foundation of rights is the recognition that the individual must take actions to secure his life and to maintain it in a healthy state.  He has the right to pursue his own happiness. To take such actions effective in their purpose, he must be free to think and to pursue the information and develop the knowledge necessary to that effective action. Both freedom of thought and action for such purposes are critical values and he must have property rights to values he produces by his thought and actions.  But, he does not have the right to initiate the use of force against others, as they do not have that right against him.  No one has the right to use the force of government to do harm to others either, unless those others have first initiated the use of force.

Rights reside in the individual.  The individual is the sovereign rights-holder.  Rights are not a grant or a privilege from government.  Rights arise from the nature of man, not from the nature of the state. The state either protects the rights of the individual or it does not.  It either performs its legitimate function or it does not.

Man, whether singly or in numbers, is not omniscient.  The development of knowledge and the understanding of nature are difficult.  In attempting to understand our reality we all make mistakes and no one achieves a complete knowledge.  This is a critical part of our understanding of man's nature and of the complexity of the reality in which man lives.  This being the case, it is not reasonable to expect that all men will agree on most moral issues and most value judgments.  So how can we live in a society together even when we are not in complete agreement, or maybe even in considerable agreement, about moral decisions?  The practical answer to this is to have a government that only enforces a minimum of moral requirements.  The answer is a government that simply prohibits the initiated use of force and protects our individual rights.  We are then left the freedom to make our own value choices and to associate with others of our choice voluntarily in the private sector to pursue our common values and to trade with one another to our mutual advantage.  In this private sector we can all aim to achieve every one of our values and to gain values we want in every association and cooperative endeavor we have with others.  This is not the case in the government sector, once government expands beyond its legitimate purpose as the protector of individual rights.

The Progressive Elitists say no to this concept of individual rights.  They claim that rights are really only privileges granted those favored by government.  Those privileges may be changed at the whim of government, at least if that government is controlled by a democratic vote, whether fraudulent or not.  They say the purpose of government is not to secure and protect the rights of the individual, but to ensure Social Justice.

An individual cannot form a just assessment of the character of everyone he encounters, so he cannot offer everyone justice.  But, he can adopt the principle that he will do no one an actual injustice and he will most certainly not initiate the use of force against others.  How can a government do more than this?  A government does not have a moral assessment of every one of the individuals within the country.  The government is still composed of a number of individuals and that number of individuals will never come close to having adequate objective knowledge of the character of most individuals in the country to form a valid assessment of their individual worth.  The government can no more provide justice to everyone than can an individual.

How does a government embarked on the endeavor of Social Justice respond to this inadequacy?  It must simplify the problem.  Its response to insufficient knowledge is a classification scheme that simplifies individual differences by assigning individuals to categories.  Individuals are complex, so a given individual will be thrown into many categories, with his particular combination of characteristics largely lost to the process.  The individual may be characterized by many pixels of information, but the whole of the individual is eradicated.  For instance, one individual may be a count in each of the following categories:

• Skin color or the area of the origin of his ancestors
• Male or female or transgender
• Age
• Married or unmarried
• Dependent children or not
• Child care users or not
• Home-owner or not
• Income level
• Wealth level
• Veteran or not
• Heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other flavors of sexuality
• Employer or employee
• Employed, seeking employment, or not seeking employment
• Labor union member or not
• Supporter of bigger government or not a supporter
• Contributor to favored charities and non-profits or not
• Healthy or unhealthy
• Paid health insurance or not
• Citizen, legal resident, or illegal alien
• Supporter of green energy and catastrophic man-made global warming or not
• Borrower or lender
• Farmer or not
• Exporter or not
• Bank accounts abroad or not

On and on the classification counting goes, but Abigail Adams and Patrick Henry cannot be reconstructed from the many bits they have been parsed into.  The individual himself is totally eradicated.  But with this simplification, the government can now pretend to pursue Social Justice.

Now having partitioned the population into numerous categories, the government can indulge in legislation aimed at helping certain categories and hurting other categories.  When helping a category, the usual justification is a claim that Social Justice is being served.  If preferences in hiring to certain ancestral groups or to one gender are legislated, Social Justice is served.  If income or property is transferred from someone who has worked hard to become educated and worked hard in business to subsidize someone else who has spent endless hours watching TV sitcoms and horror movies and who partied and played instead of studying, then Social Justice is served.  If a person unhealthy due to tobacco smoking and overeating of junk food has difficulty affording health insurance, then force healthy and young people to pay much more for their insurance in order to subsidize unhealthy behaviors in the name of Social Justice.  If it is impolitic to make employees file their own payroll tax forms and send their own tax payments to the government, then in the name of Social Justice make the employer spend his time providing this unpaid service.  If the taxpayer wants to contribute to a non-profit organization supporting individual rights, do not allow that organization to become a tax-exempt organization or if it already is and he contributes $250 a year to it, take down his name as an enemy of Social Justice.  If an individual or organization notes that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is a proven failure, prosecute him as a racketeer under RICO in the name of Social Justice.

Social Justice can be used to justify every act of special interest favoritism.  It is used to justify every instance in which the government hurts some individuals or groupings of individuals to supposedly help another grouping.  Endless numbers of groups are pitted against one another for the favors of government or to at least avoid being the victim of government.  The result is a general breakdown of the voluntary interactions that make it possible for one individual to assume that another has value to his life prior to his actually having such an evaluation of the character of that other individual.  It becomes easy to determine if that individual is a threat to one's life in many cases.  If you are an employer, then employees are a threat, especially if they are members of a government-favored labor union.  If you are a so-called white male, than anyone who is not a white male is a threat due to government favoritism.  If you have a high income or are wealthy, then those with significantly lower incomes or wealth are a threat by virtue of their ability to provide larger numbers of votes for a politician.

Because of government favors rendered in the name of Social Justice and the battle to be designated a special interest, society is broken into numerous, nearly innumerable, groups at war with one another to control the use of government force for their advantage.  The separation of interests of each individual into many categories is a great aid to minimizing the opposition of individuals to the government taking control of many aspects of their lives.  Each enabling act of legislation or each bureaucratic regulation commonly helps a group under one category at the expense of a group in another category.  The group hurt is hurt in one aspect of their lives, but that group still has many reasons to be busy attending to the many other aspects of their lives.  They cannot afford to spend a great deal of time opposing the new act that is imposing upon their individual rights and depriving them of their values and freedom.  The government pursuing Social Justice counts on this to perpetrate its accumulation of more and more power over the life of every individual. 

The Social Justice pursuing government cannot allow anyone to disagree with its moral proclamations.  Disagreement implies a violation of justice within this framework.  It becomes policy for the government to become intolerant of different views of ethics and of different value judgments. If you disagree with affirmative action for the hiring of Black Americans, you are a racist and because you are wrong, you do not have the right to say that affirmative action is wrong.  But, note that if you do not have the right to be wrong, then you have no right to freedom of speech.  If you believe you have religious reasons for thinking gay marriage is wrong and will not produce a wedding cake for a gay marriage, you must be fined heavily enough to destroy your small bakery. You cannot be wrong about this moral issue, so you are not allowed freedom of conscience, freedom of association, or the freedom of free trade.  If government claims that some scientific theory implies that harm is being done to someone and you claim the science of that theory is wrong, you are proclaimed guilty of Social Injustice to those the theory claims will be harmed.  You do not then have the right of free inquiry, free speech, freedom of the press, and you do not have the right to develop scientific understanding because you are not serving Social Justice as determined by the government.

Governmental pursuit of Social Justice imposes much more highly elaborated moral theory on the people of a nation than does the legitimate government whose only purpose is to protect individual rights.  That theory will neither be consistent nor highly rational since the government is chosen by those who vote and they are notably not experts in ethical theory.  What is worse, because there is an enforced intolerance of differing moral beliefs, the People are denied the benefit of a free discussion of morality.  Moral ideas are never tested and improved in the free market for the development of knowledge.  

Even if the People were thoughtful about ethics, they might be wrong and the politicians they vote for might trade ethics for geld or power in their dealings with the myriad special interests vying for the great powers exerted by Social Justice-pursing government.  Such government must violate individual rights.  It must act largely in ignorance of the interests of many of the People.  It must act to hurt many people in the name of helping others.  It must use force much more often than will the individual rights protecting government.  It must minimize the voluntary and co-operative relationships found in the private sector and replace them with involuntary mandates and transfers of income and wealth, jobs, medical care, education, housing, and innumerable other values.  The harmony of the private sector must be replaced with the strife of the Big Government sector.  All of this is a necessary consequence of a government pursuing Social Justice as envisioned by the Progressive Elitists.  In reality, this is the ultimate Social Injustice.

The closest a society can come to maximizing Social Justice is to be a society that honors individuality and protects the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  The best a society can do is to protect these individual rights equally and to provide an environment in which the use of force is minimized by not allowing either individuals or the government to initiate the use of force.  The rational individual will understand his own life and his freedom to manage and secure his own life is his greatest value.  He understands that to do that he must be free to think and to act upon his thoughts, with only such limits as set by the requirement that he not deprive others of an equal right to think and to act upon their thoughts in the interest of their lives as well.

It is the private sector, not the force-wielding government sector, that provides us the opportunities of a good and healthy society for beneficial relationships with others to achieve our individual values in a manner consistent with a respect for individual lives and the individual minds that direct those lives. The role of a legitimate government is only to protect our individual rights. When government takes on the additional role of delivering goods and services to some at the expense of others, it is hurting some under the threat of force in a brutal manner that has no analog in the private sector.  It forces individuals into an unnecessary conflict of interest, whereas the private sector provides a wealth of individual choices for relationships, cooperation, trade of values, or the freedom to not pursue a relationship, cooperative endeavor, or a trade.  In comparison, the Big Government model, proclaiming itself to be pursuing Social Justice, is a shotgun wedding offering no possibility of divorce and a staid existence with ever-reduced choices.  Nothing more offends my sense of justice than this evermore totalitarian state.

Why is American Independence Day Exceptionally Worthy of Celebration?

We are often told that we celebrate the 4th of July because American troops have fought to keep us free.  Or, it is simply claimed that the USA is the greatest country on Earth.  Some even say America is exceptional, but too often stumble over an explanation as to why that is so or was so.  Some say it is because America is a democracy.  None of these explanations is worthy of those Americans who have understood or who do now understand the real basis for American Exceptionalism.

American Exceptionalism is founded on the fact that the United States of America was to have a government that recognized that:

• All individuals are equal before the law.
• Each individual has the right to life, liberty, property, self-ownership, and the pursuit of happiness and these rights are broad.
• Government is not the source of these individual rights.
• Legitimate government exists to protect these individual rights.
• Legitimate government has a very limited scope and no powers but such as are enumerated in the people's mandate for government, the Constitution. 

Together, these requirements and aims of government constitute the American Principle.

Today, only a minority of Americans believe in the American Principle.  Because of this, the United States of America has definitely lost much of its Exceptionalism.  The Index of Economic Freedom of the Heritage Foundation says the USA is the 12th freest nation, rather high in the group of mostly free nations, but falling once again compared to earlier rankings. The Simon Fraser Institute and Cato Institute do an evaluation of economic freedom around the world also.  Their 2013 report on the degree of freedom in 2011 places the USA in the number 17 position and falling from its earlier rankings.  So, yes the USA is the world's most powerful country.  It is a comparatively free country.  But it is not the world's freest country.

Frankly, the USA is not living up to the American Principle.  It is the American Principle that would make us the freest country in the world.  It is this principle that provides the basis for the great opportunities for personal happiness that we have often provided better than other countries in the past.  On Independence Day we should all be renewing our commitment to the American Principle and we should be paying respect to those Americans who were committed to it in the past and to those who are committed to it today.  We should all be eager to see America once again the premier country in the world with respect to our most important political value, our Liberty as individuals.

My Response to a Democrat Politician's Wife Request on Father's Day

Karmen Walker Brown is the wife of Anthony Brown, the present Lt. Governor of the state of Maryland, who is now running for Governor.  Anthony Brown has served under the present governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley.

O'Malley is a strong Obama supporter and has aspirations to run for the office of the President.  He has also strongly pushed applying the high state sales tax to gasoline sales, on top of the fixed cost gasoline tax now in place.  He has forced Maryland electric utilities to buy expensive alternative fuels and pass the costs on to the consumer.  He increased the sales tax by 20%, the top personal income tax rate by 16%, and the top corporate tax rate by 18%.  He pushed for and signed a gun control law that drastically infringes the right to bear arms in Maryland.  He even promoted and signed a rain tax on Marylanders that taxes them for any impervious surfaces on their property.  Before he became governor, he was mayor of Baltimore and presided over that city's horrendous public school system as it became even worse.  He headed the Democratic Governors Association from 2011 - 2013.

The Democrat Socialist Party has tight control of the Maryland state government.  It has large majorities in both houses of the legislature and it has controlled the governor's office for a long time.  The Democrats manage this dominance with a very touchy, feely approach.  Karmen Brown is playing this game now by requesting huge numbers of Marylanders to sign a Father's Day card for her husband Anthony.  Here is how this works:

If you asked Anthony what the most important thing is to him, I know what his answer would be: Family. Our kids mean the world to him.

Father’s Day is one of Anthony’s favorite days. It’s a time for our family – and families across Maryland – to come together and celebrate what’s really important.

With Father’s Day coming up this weekend, the kids and I are hoping you can help us out. We’re putting together a big card and we want you to sign it! I know he’d love hearing from his friends and supporters on such a special day.

Click here now to wish Anthony a Happy Father’s Day.

For Anthony, there’s no doubt that being a father is his most important job. You can see it in the way he helps the kids with their homework or asks about their day.

He’s as dedicated to them as he is to making life better for kids across Maryland. It’s why he works – every day – to improve schools, create jobs, and ensure that all families have access to the health care they need to thrive. He knows that this great state is only as strong as the families who call Maryland home.

That’s why the kids and I want to give Anthony a big Father’s Day surprise.

Can you take a minute to sign our card for Anthony? Click here to add your name.

Thanks and Happy Father’s Day,

Here is my response to Karmen Brown:

Karmen,

I vote on my conviction that there is no political value as great as that of the individual for his individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of his own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of his personal happiness.  The individual has a very wide right to freedom of conscience and association, which is not to be infringed by the state.  Gov. O'Malley has been committed to almost constant infringement of individual rights, as indeed any big government advocate and user of brutal force for any purpose but the protection of individual rights must be.  Lt. Gov. Brown has been his ally in these tyrannical infringements of individual rights.  It is very unlikely that he will be able to convince me that he is the less wrongheaded and evil of the two thugs who will be running for Governor under the nomination of the two major parties.

I believe I was put on your list of favorably inclined people because I believe in marriage equality.  Yes, such a belief is implied by individual rights, but so is the belief that I own my own body and that as such I have the right to control my health care and health insurance.  ObamaCare claims that my body belongs to the government.  I reject that claim and I have no intention of selling my body to the government even at the cost of being sent to prison.  I defend all of the rights of the individual, including the right of some to say things that may hurt the feelings of others. Our right to bear arms shall not be infringed.  Bloggers and all writers have the same freedoms as are protected for newspapermen and for the same reason that we all have the right to use our minds and freely express our beliefs in speech, in writing, and in assembly.  We have the right to choose who we will hire, to choose our clients, to choose our friends, and choose our sex and domestic partners.

The rights of the individual are broad and the legitimate functions of government are narrow.  This was established in our earliest founding document, the Declaration of Independence.  The proclamation there established the basis for a People of sovereign individuals mandating the very limited powers of the Constitution and setting up a government which is not sovereign, but was only a legitimate means for sovereign individuals to protect their individual rights.  Note that the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Bill of Rights further inform us that the individual retains his sovereignty.

These issues are of such critical importance that they must be addressed by rational minds, not by feelings that seek to associate your big government thug with fatherhood and child-raising on Father's Day.  I too am a father and my greatest wish is that my three daughters will some day have federal and state governments that will protect, rather than violate, individual rights.  There is nothing else so important.  This is why many a man has fought for these rights and many have given up their lives to protect them.

In a society which protects individual rights, we are enabled to choose our own values and manage our own lives with all of the advantages of free trades in all aspects of our associations with other individuals.  Then and only then can we all pursue our dreams in a harmonious way.  Then and only then are we free to hope that the future will be good and better for us all.  Free minds are the most essential means for improving our standard of life, our security, and for achieving our happiness.

Charles

Charles R. Anderson, Ph.D.
Lab: (410) 740-8562
Mobile: (301) 830-1886
http://www.AndersonMaterials.com
http://AndersonMaterials.blogspot.com
http://ObjectivistIndividualist.blogspot.com/

The new TSA full, full, full body search in the context of our individual rights

I just read about the horror of a woman who had undergone the new TSA full body search procedure in which her breasts, buttocks, vagina area and labia were all felt.  This does represent a new way in which we have lost the ownership of our own bodies, but it is not unrelated to many other ways in which the ownership of our bodies and minds has been challenged successfully by government.  I also understand that some will say this trade off of our ownership of our bodies is justified because otherwise the government cannot offer us complete assurance that we will survive a flight.  The decision is not trivial, yet there are reasons why we must draw the line on what the government can do with our bodies, if we are to maintain the ownership of our own bodies.  While I personally would not feel the horror the woman searched in the story did about being so searched, each of us as individuals should have the right to feel or not feel that horror.  Her body is hers.  We must respect that.  And though I do not feel the horror, I do very much resent being searched.  I resented it even more when my 12 year old daughter was searched on 3 legs of 4 legs of a round-trip flight between Baltimore and Tulsa years ago.  Apparently, those searches today would be much more invasive.

The full body search with sexual intimacy is logically consistent with the idea that we as individuals do not own our own bodies and minds.  We are to be forced to buy health insurance approved by elitist bureaucrats, because we are incapable of rationally providing for the care of our own bodies and the state has an interest in the ownership of our bodies.  We are told that we cannot decide when to use a seatbelt, a bike helmet, or whether to use tobacco or marijuana, because the state shares the ownership of our bodies.  We are told in some locales that we cannot eat some foods because some politicians think those foods are not healthy and they own our bodies.  In an earlier day, males were told that they did not own their minds and bodies and that it was appropriate to conscript them and force them to fight in undeclared wars.  We are told that only government-owned or government-approved schools can educate us, because we do not own our own minds, which need to be indoctrinated with ideas beneficial to government control of the People.  For a very long time, government has discouraged people from developing their individual sexuality, once again an infringement upon the individual's right to own their own bodies and minds.

Ideas matter and the direction that many ideas take are often linked.  It is the old story that first they came for the Jews and I was not a Jew so I did not care much.  Then they came for the Gypsies and I was not a Gypsy.  Then they came for the mentally retarded and I was not mentally retarded.  Then they came for the old and the infirm and I was not old and infirm.  Then they came for me and no one else was me, so they did not care.

Our individual rights are many.  They may be summarized as:  every individual has an equal, sovereign right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their own mind and body, and the pursuit of happiness.  Do not allow any attack on any of our broad rights to succeed because it threatens every other of our rights.  The forceful taking of each of our rights is a preparation for the next assault on the next right.  There can be no compromise on this, because the assaults are never-ending.  Long ago, we allowed the assaults on our property, right to work, right to hire, and income to reduce those rights to sometimes honored privileges.  We lost the right to our minds, when we allowed government to take over education.  We lost our rights to our bodies with the FDA, Medicare, Medicaid, and now ObamaCare.  We can no longer talk about such subjects as racism and affirmative action or the morality of judging people as individuals based upon their individual character on many college campuses run by our governments.  We have never allowed equal expression and equal treatment of people whose sexuality was not both heterosexual and monogamous.

Right after right has been compromised, because few people will defend all of our rights.  The employee does not care about the rights of the employer and thinks it is perfectly fine that the employer must act as an accountant, a tax record keeper, and a tax collector, all unpaid mandates forced upon him by government agents very willing to use force.  The man who earns a living using equipment such as laboratory equipment or that to manufacture goods, is hit hard with property taxes on that equipment, while the lawyer or the accountant is unequally hit with no such devastating tax.  Then the People complain that manufacturing jobs are going overseas and we are only a service economy!  Of course, few of us pay corporation taxes, so why shouldn't the U.S. have the highest corporation taxes in the OECD in 2011?  Of course, we will lament the fact that many U.S. multinationals are expanding operations abroad faster than in the U.S., but does it ever dawn on us that the unequal taxation of corporations is the reason, as well as a violation of the equal rights of the shareholders of that corporation? 

There is a very good reason for a holistic understanding of our rights as individuals and the implied necessity of a government of very limited powers, which our Constitution decreed as the demand of the People.  But the constitutional demand is not very strong when the People have forgotten that they must be the backbone of the Constitution, which by itself can only serve to bridge a momentary lapse of attention by the People.  It is very clear that it is unable to protect the rights of the individual when we pay little attention to them ourselves for a hundred years of determined Progressive attack and not infrequently of Conservative attack!

A British Plea that America Honor Its Constitution and Not Take the European Path

Daniel Hannan, a British politician and author of A New Road to Serfdom, made this perceptive plea that America treasure the wisdom and the freedoms offered us by our Constitution and reject the European way so favored by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their comrades in socialism.  It would be great if every American listened to this short talk.

My 9/12 Protest Sign

My 9/12 Protest sign for the march from the Washington Monument to the Congress has two columns.  The first reads:

Read Ayn Rand!

Legitimate
Government:
•    Has Few Powers
•    Protects the Equal, Sovereign Rights of the Individual to Life, Liberty, Property, & the Pursuit of Happiness
•    Implied Individual Rights are Many
Individual Rights:
•    Constitutional Rights
•    Ownership of Body
•    Right to Earn a Living & Use Income
•    Freedom of Conscience
•    Freedom to be Left Alone & of Privacy
•    Freedom of Association
•    Individual Sexuality
•    Freedom to Trade
•    Freedom to Educate
•    Freedom to Hire


The second column reads:

Read Atlas Shrugged!

Illegitimate, Tyrannical Government:
•    Present Government
•    70% of Spending is Unconstitutional
•    Violates Individual Rights
•    Doesn’t Protect Rights Equally
•    ObamaCare Steals Your Body
•    Many Stimulus Plans Steal Your Income
•    Financial Controls Violate Freedoms of Trade, Contract, Hire
•    Coming CO2 Emissions Penalties are Pointless
•    Redistribution of Income is Immoral
•    Hates Enterprise & Self-Responsibility

Because there is a 60% chance of rain and it is raining now at 0430 hours, the sign is wrapped in thin clear plastic sheet.  It should hold up.  I hope many freedom-loving Americans will show up in a few hours, despite the rain!

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.

Jim Powell -- Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand: Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement

I recently read an excellent and remarkably inexpensive book about the Great Depression called FDR's Folly by Jim Powell.  This book is well-organized and really focuses on the essentials of how FDR deepened and lengthened the Great Depression.  There are other books on the Great Depression, but none of those I have read manage to give the scope of the problems as concisely and clearly as this book does.  I intend to obtain more of his books and read them.  Jim Powell is a Senior Fellow at the CATO Institute, whose website just directed me to this interesting article by Jim Powell on the critical roles of three women in greatly slowing the American slide into the morass of socialism.  The article was published by The Freeman and called Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand: Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement and was written in 1996.  He starts out:

Liberty was in full retreat in the early 1940s. Tyrants oppressed or threatened people on every continent. Western intellectuals whitewashed mass murderers like Joseph Stalin, and Western governments expanded their power with Soviet-style central planning. Fifty million people were killed in the war that raged in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The United States, seemingly the last hope for liberty, was drawn into it.

Established American authors who defended liberty were a dying breed. H.L. Mencken had turned away from bitter politics to write his memoirs, while others like Albert Jay Nock and Garet Garrett were mired in pessimism.

Amidst the worst of times, three bold women banished fear. They dared to declare that collectivism was evil. They stood up for natural rights, the only philosophy which provided a moral basis for opposing tyranny everywhere. They celebrated old-fashioned rugged individualism. They envisioned a future when people could again be free. They expressed a buoyant optimism which was to inspire millions.

All were outsiders who transcended difficult beginnings. Two were immigrants. One was born in frontier territory not yet part of the United States. They struggled to earn money as writers in commercial markets dominated by ideological adversaries. All were broke at one time or another. They endured heartaches with men—one stayed in a marriage which became sterile, and two became divorced and never remarried.

These women who had such humble beginnings—Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand—published major books during the same year, 1943: The Discovery of Freedom, The God of the Machine, and The Fountainhead, respectively. The women, recalled journalist John Chamberlain, “with scornful side glances at the male business community, had decided to rekindle a faith in an older American philosophy. There wasn’t an economist among them. And none of them was a Ph.D.” Albert Jay Nock declared that, “They make all of us male writers look like Confederate money. They don’t fumble and fiddle around—every shot goes straight to the centre.”

If you have read this introduction, I am sure you are now hooked.  Read the rest of  Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand: Three Women Who Inspired the Modern Libertarian Movement and enjoy yourself.

I am less a fan of Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, Man's Struggle Against Authority (13 customer reviews on Amazon), than I am of Isabel Paterson's God of the Machine (6 customer reviews on Amazon) and, of course, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (with 1,012 reader reviews on Amazon) and Atlas Shrugged (2,028 reviews on Amazon!).  The latter three books are great reads and fascinating books.  I find Lane's The Discovery of Freedom interesting for its historical role, useful for some information on a period of time in Europe and the U.S., but strained in the recurring analogy of freedom with energy.  The analogy is useful and true, but its overuse throughout the book bore a weight on me that was just a bit too much about half way through the book.  She is also less clear-minded about many issues than Paterson or Rand and she is too religious in her thinking to be as satisfying.

Contrasting State Cross Border Business Health Compared to a Freedom Index

A recent discussion I was in with other alumni of Case Western Reserve University about the sorry state of Cleveland, which was just recently chosen by Forbes Magazine as the most miserable city in America, caused me to consider some of the effects on Cleveland of being in a state with a bad business climate.  Of course, the city of Cleveland does much to cause its own problems and can be said very reasonably to have a bad influence on the politics of the whole state of Ohio.  This case also caused me to think about the strange underdevelopment of southern New Jersey.  Then today, I read an article on the strong business performance of Northern Virginia compared to Washington, D.C. and the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.  What explains these differences?

There are major differences in the ability to do business based on regional factors such as location, geography, population density, transportation, and other factors besides political factors.  This makes it hard to fully compare doing business in South Dakota with doing it in New Jersey or Maryland.  But, if one is a business owner or prospective owner, there is often a fair equivalency in many of these other factors if you are deciding whether to establish your business in Northern Virginia or in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.  Similarly, it is very reasonable to consider putting your business in southeast Pennsylvania, Delaware, or Southern New Jersey.  Once again, one can choose Ohio, or one of Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, or Pennsylvania for many types of businesses.  Specifically, if one is considering the Cleveland, Ohio area, it is easy also to consider Pennsylvania.

I want to explore how far political freedom can be correlated with these remarkable differences in economic and business performance.  William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens have published Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom through the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, dated February 2009, which I previously discussed in a post here.  They rated and ranked the states for economic freedom and then again for personal freedom and provide an overall freedom ranking.  They correlate the degree of freedom with rates of internal net migration.  People, at least those willing to move, find freedom attractive.  Economic growth rates may also be suspected to be dependent upon economic freedom, and at least secondarily upon personal freedom as well.  Start-up companies commonly need to be able to attract bright, hardworking professionals.  It is reasonable to expect that many of them value personal freedom.

Consider the issue of the growth of Northern Virginia versus the Washington suburbs of Maryland.  In 1970, Northern Virginia accounted for 27.0% of the Gross Regional Product, with Suburban Maryland having a 34.5% share, and D.C. a 37.5% share.  In 2009, D.C.'s share had shrunk drastically to 22%, while Suburban Maryland had shrunk slightly to 32%.  Northern Virginia rose startlingly to 46% of the Gross Regional Product.  In absolute terms, all three sub-regions grew their gross product, but clearly the rate of growth in Northern Virginia greatly outstripped that of the Suburban Maryland and D.C. areas.

How did Virginia compare to Maryland in the freedom indices?  Virginia was ranked 13th on the Economic Freedom Index, while Maryland was ranked 34.  Virginia was ranked number 9 on the personal freedom index, while Maryland was ranked 50th.  For overall freedom, Virginia was ranked number 9 and Maryland was ranked number 46.  While other factors can be critical in starting a new business, many businesses will have a fairly balanced choice between Virginia and Maryland for other reasons and will then choose more economic and personal freedom.  D.C. is not ranked, but it is almost certainly worse than Maryland for freedom, so its more greatly fallen share of the Gross Regional Product is surely to be expected.  These freedoms are not just luxuries being chosen.  In many cases, they are the difference between business success and failure.

I have a friend who lives in Southern New Jersey and he has told me many stories of the poverty there, the miserable schools, and the very high local unemployment rates.  This was true prior to the recession.  Of course such a situation can make an area already look unattractive to a business.  But, there is plenty of relatively undeveloped land in Southern New Jersey and locations close to Philadelphia and densely populated Delaware areas.  It is also in the middle of the mid-Atlantic area.  Why is this area so highly undeveloped when Northern New Jersey has a high degree of development?

Well, if we look at Northern New Jersey and compare freedom there to that in New York, we find that New Jersey does relatively well, because New York is miserable.  On the Economic Freedom Index, New Jersey is 46, while New York is 50.  Both are awful, but New Jersey is at least competitive and even better.  On the Personal Freedom Index, New Jersey rates a 45 ranking, while New York is 48.  On the Overall Freedom Index New Jersey is 49 and New York is 50.  So Northern New Jersey can compete for businesses with New York.

But, Southern New Jersey has to compete with Pennsylvania and Delaware for businesses.  One has to expect that the fact that health insurance, as mandated by the respective states, being twice as expensive in New Jersey compared to Pennsylvania, for instance, might have some impact on how businesses will fare in the respective areas.  The Economic Freedom Index takes into account many other factors as well.  Comparing New Jersey to Pennsylvania and Delaware, we find that PA is 19, DE is 24, and NJ is a lowly 46.  On the Personal Freedom Index, PA is 29, DE is 36, and NJ is 45.  The Overall Freedom Index says PA is 20, DE is 26, and again we have our lowly NJ at 49.  The inducement here is clearly to choose Pennsylvania for your new business, or maybe Delaware.  But, Southern New Jersey looks like a hard choice to justify.

Cleveland is not quite so strongly affected by conditions in a state which is really close to it.  But still, many businesses might reasonably say that they have reason to be in the Eastern Mid-West and then choose a state to be in.  This will affect Cleveland.  Of these states, the nearest is Pennsylvania.  But, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia also border Ohio.  Let me list the states, their Economic Freedom Index ranking, their Personal Freedom Index ranking, and their Overall Freedom Index ranking:

PA, 19, 29, 20
WV, 40, 17, 33
KY, 33, 26, 32
IN, 16, 19, 13
MI, 15, 20, 14
OH, 32, 46, 38

On Overall Freedom, Ohio is dead last in its local region.  It is particularly poor with respect to Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  It is hardly a wonder that Ohio is having a hard time economically.  This, in turn, hurts Cleveland.  To be sure, the fact that it is very hard to start a business in Cleveland is an outstanding reason for it to be a basket case.  John Stossel recently pointed out that a Cleveland official recently boasted that they helped a company set up a business in Cleveland in a mere 18 months.  In comparison, a company was started in Houston in one day.  Cleveland has 22 zoning categories, while Houston has none.  Cleveland has a penchant for electing kooks as mayor.  Dennis Kucinich was one of the worst.  Dennis the Menace is blatantly opposed to the profit motive.  He is now in the House of Representatives and for a long while opposed ObamaCare because it was not a single-payer program.  He caved after a ride with Obama in Air Force One.  [Did Obama threaten to throw him out the door at altitude?  Dennis should have held true to his convictions.]

The Progressives view freedom as the archaic and quaint coin to be paid for the aid of the needy.  Or so they say.  They do have an uncanny penchant for making the politically-connected wealthy much more wealthy and even those who are only politically connected wealthy.  But, history tells us that man's condition was little improved for eons until capitalism and the free market system began its rapid development in the 1800s.  Comparative studies today of the countries around the world show huge advantages in overall prosperity and the prosperity of the poor in nations for those nations with higher degrees of freedom.  The little study above also shows that there is some considerable reason to believe that even the differences between adjacent states in the United States are very important for the economic development of states and regions in those states.

Trading freedom for redistributionist schemes is a fool's errand.  The average wealth and income will fall, as will the median wealth and income, as will the wealth and income of the poor.  No one wins, except those who are consumed by envy and must level everyone to poverty to slake the thirst of that lowly envy.  Frankly, every state should be in a keen competition with the states near it to provide its citizens with more freedom than those neighboring states do.  Of course, the politicians would hate to see such a competition be widely recognized as important by the People.  They do everything they can to avoid letting us know about this, including insisting that the government-run schools not teach students about this source of American Exceptionalism.  We are prosperous because we are free.  As we lose our freedom, we will lose our prosperity.

Freedom Ranked in the 50 States

William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens have published Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom through the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, dated February 2009. This is an interesting document. William Ruger is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Texas State University, who is currently on military leave and serving with the Navy in Afghanistan. Jason Sorens is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

From the Executive Summary:

This paper presents the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. We develop and justify our ratings and aggregation procedure on explicitly normative criteria, defining individual freedom as the ability to dispose of one’s own life, liberty, and justly acquired property however one sees fit, so long as one does not coercively infringe on another individual’s ability to do the same.

This study improves on prior attempts to score economic freedom for American states in three primary ways: (1) it includes measures of social and personal freedoms such as peaceable citizens’ rights to educate their own children, own and carry firearms, and be free from unreasonable search and seizure; (2) it includes far more variables, even on economic policies alone, than prior studies, and there are no missing data on any variable; and (3) it uses new, more accurate measurements of key variables, particularly state fiscal policies.

They compare their study to the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of North America 2006 Annual Report which omits "such interventions as gun control, homeschooling regulations, and marijuana laws." They also compare it to the Pacific Research Institute's U.S. Economic Freedom Index: 2004, which puts gun control and seatbelt laws under Regulatory Sector with occupational licensing, recycling programs, and labor regulations, while ignoring other personal freedom issues. They make a good case that their methodology for weighing the variables makes more sense and that they consider more significant issues pertaining to our individual freedom. The report is based upon the laws of the states and local governments as of the end of 2006 and on arrest data through 2006. They say that the other freedom measurement studies have similar lags from policy to evaluation.

The database covers fiscal policy, gun control, alcohol regulation, marijuana policies, tobacco and smoking laws, automobile regulations, law enforcement data, education policies, land-use and environmental laws, labor market regulations, health insurance policies, utilities deregulation, occupational licensing, asset forfeiture rules, eminent domain reform, court systems, marriage and domestic partnership regulations, campaign finance laws, and sundry mala prohibita.

Table I gives the state ranking for Fiscal Policy, Table II that for Regulatory Policy, and Table III gives the ranking for Economic Freedom based upon the sum of the quantifiers for Fiscal Policy and Regulatory Policy. One of the important improvements in the study is that the fiscal policy measurements are made with respect to the size of the state economy. This corrects for too much credit being given to low cost of living states. The results of the Economic Freedom Ranking are:

Table III: Economic Freedom Ranking
State Economic Freedom index

1. South Dakota 0.385
2. New Hampshire 0.345
3. Colorado 0.337
4. North Dakota 0.315
5. Idaho 0.257
6. Georgia 0.253
7. Texas 0.225
8. Tennessee 0.225
9. Missouri 0.210
10. Alabama 0.200
11. Arizona 0.190
12. Iowa 0.177
13. Virginia 0.175
14. Utah 0.164
15. Michigan 0.161
16. Indiana 0.159
17. Oklahoma 0.144
18. Kansas 0.126
19. Pennsylvania 0.120
20. Wyoming 0.098
21. Montana 0.096
22. South Carolina 0.062
23. Nevada 0.058
24. Delaware 0.052
25. Florida 0.047
26. North Carolina 0.041
27. Nebraska 0.036
28. Louisiana -0.012
29. Illinois -0.025
30. Mississippi -0.032
31. Minnesota -0.075
32. Ohio -0.081
33. Kentucky -0.086
34. Maryland -0.110
35. Wisconsin -0.111
36. Oregon -0.113
37. Massachusetts -0.133
38. Connecticut -0.142
39. Arkansas -0.148
40. West Virginia -0.177
41. Washington -0.219
42. Rhode Island -0.267
43. New Mexico -0.288
44. Hawaii -0.295
45. Vermont -0.310
46. New Jersey -0.337
47. Alaska -0.343
48. California -0.351
49. Maine -0.406
50. New York -0.596

South Dakota holds the honor of being the economically freest state, though New Hampshire, Colorado, and North Dakota are not far behind. Then there is a gap in index and Idaho and Georgia follow. The next group is led by Texas and Tennessee with Missouri, Alabama, and Arizona on their heels. Iowa and Virginia lead the next group which includes Utah, Michigan, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the second highest ranked Northeastern State at position 19. Delaware follows in position 24, then Maryland at 34, Massachusetts at 37 and Connecticut at 38. Maine and New York are 49 and 50, respectively, and they are far outliers. These are two states no economic freedom-lover could choose to live in. They scream out for domestic out-migration. The average ranking of the Northeastern States is 35 including number 2 New Hampshire. Without New Hampshire, the others average a ranking of 38.4. Outside of the awful Northeast, California (48), Alaska (47), Hawaii (44), New Mexico (43), Washington (41), West Virginia (40), Arkansas (39), Oregon (36), and Wisconsin (35) all deserve very dishonorable mention. Thus, the Pacific States including Hawaii and Alaska, average a particularly dishonorable ranking of 43.2, which is even worse than that of the Northeastern States.

The Personal Freedom ranking and index is given in Table IV:

Table IV: Personal Freedom Ranking
State Personal Freedom index

1. Alaska 0.272
2. Maine 0.193
3. New Mexico 0.138
4. Arkansas 0.125
5. Texas 0.121
6. Missouri 0.110
7. Oregon 0.104
8. Idaho 0.100
9. Virginia 0.100
10. Wyoming 0.095
11. Vermont 0.093
12. Arizona 0.089
13. New Hampshire 0.087
14. Utah 0.086
15. Kansas 0.085
16. Colorado 0.084
17. West Virginia 0.080
18. Tennessee 0.059
19. Indiana 0.049
20. Michigan 0.045
21. Montana 0.029
22. Mississippi 0.027
23. Florida 0.022
24. South Dakota 0.007
25. Iowa 0.006
26. Kentucky 0.003
27. Oklahoma -0.002
28. Hawaii -0.009
29. Pennsylvania -0.018
30. North Carolina -0.022
31. Minnesota -0.036
32. Nevada -0.045
33. North Dakota -0.047
34. Nebraska -0.055
35. Washington -0.055
36. Delaware -0.060
37. California -0.063
38. Connecticut -0.082
39. Wisconsin -0.089
40. Louisiana -0.098
41. South Carolina -0.102
42. Georgia -0.106
43. Alabama -0.107
44. Massachusetts -0.109
45. New Jersey -0.120
46. Ohio -0.124
47. Rhode Island -0.163
48. New York -0.188
49. Illinois -0.213
50. Maryland -0.294

Alaska is far ahead of the pack in personal freedom or freedom from state paternalism. Maine, while far behind, is also separated well ahead of the pack. New Mexico, Arkansas, and Texas are the next grouping. All of these leaders except Texas were bad performers in the Economic Freedom index. Texas was ranked 7th in that index, while it is 5th in the Personal Freedom index. Missouri, Oregon, Idaho, and Virginia are next in Personal Freedom. Of these, all but Oregon did well in Economic Freedom. The so-called Free State of Maryland distinguishes itself as the very worst Personal Freedom state. It is really separated from the pack too. The next worst is Illinois, which also is separated from the pack, though no where near to the extent of Maryland. New York and Rhode Island are also uniquely bad.

The report also provides an overal freedom ranking and index produced by adding the Economic Freedom index and the Personal Freedom index for each state. The result is:

Table V: Overall Freedom Ranking
State Overall Freedom index

1. New Hampshire 0.432
2. Colorado 0.421
3. South Dakota 0.392
4. Idaho 0.356
5. Texas 0.346
6. Missouri 0.320
7. Tennessee 0.284
8. Arizona 0.279
9. Virginia 0.275
10. North Dakota 0.268
11. Utah 0.250
12. Kansas 0.210
13. Indiana 0.208
14. Michigan 0.206
15. Wyoming 0.193
16. Iowa 0.183
17. Georgia 0.146
18. Oklahoma 0.143
19. Montana 0.125
20. Pennsylvania 0.102
21. Alabama 0.092
22. Florida 0.068
23. North Carolina 0.019
24. Nevada 0.013
25. Mississippi -0.004
26. Delaware -0.008
27. Oregon -0.009
28. Nebraska -0.018
29. Arkansas -0.023
30. South Carolina -0.040
31. Alaska -0.071
32. Kentucky -0.082
33. West Virginia -0.097
34. Louisiana -0.110
35. Minnesota -0.111
36. New Mexico -0.150
37. Wisconsin -0.199
38. Ohio -0.205
39. Maine -0.214
40. Vermont -0.217
41. Connecticut -0.225
42. Illinois -0.238
43. Massachusetts -0.242
44. Washington -0.275
45. Hawaii -0.304
46. Maryland -0.405
47. California -0.413
48. Rhode Island -0.430
49. New Jersey -0.457
50. New York -0.784

New Hampshire and Colorado are the winners. The next grouping of good states includes South Dakota, Idaho, Texas, and Missouri. The third grouping is Tennessee, Arizona, Virginia, North Dakota, and Utah. The next is Kansas, Indiana, Michigan, Wyoming, and Iowa. And which states are the bad actors? New York is the very most awful state with an overall freedom index which is abysmally negative and lies far below that of the runner up awful states of New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland. The next bad group is Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine, Ohio, and Wisconsin. The states ranked 35 through 50 have tended to be controlled by the Democrat Party in recent years. Ohio at a 38 ranking is the closest to a swing state.

As noted, my state of Maryland is an awful state for a freedom-lover at a ranking of 46. One of my sisters lives in the relatively good state of Kansas with a ranking of 12, though she is often upset by the pressure for the teaching of Intelligent Design in Kansas schools and attitudes towards a woman's right to abortion. A larger portion of my family lives in Oklahoma with a fairly respectable ranking of 18. Then there is an Anderson Clan contingent also in North Carolina with a ranking of 23. So, only the Maryland branch of the Anderson Clan lives in a state fully committed to the infringement of our freedom. Shame, shame on Maryland and on its voters.