On the Choice of Charities

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

I wrote:

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

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

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

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

The Many Rights of the Individual

Two hundred and forty two years ago, the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, which states

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The idea that every person has unalienable rights by virtue of the nature of man which are not dependent upon a government granting or recognizing those rights is very frightful to socialists or any other supporters of tyrannical government.  They hate the Declaration of Independence.  They hate the fact that it declares that the only justifiable reason for government is its dedication to the protection and support of every single individual’s rights.  They hate the fact that the Declaration of Independence states clearly that when government acts to deprive men of their equal, individual rights, then it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it.

The Declaration of Independence is not the only essential American governing document that the socialists hate.  Barack Obama declared in a radio interview when he was an Illinois state senator in its state legislature that he did not like the U.S. Constitution because it was a barrier to socialism.  Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan just wrote in the opinion of the four dissenting justices of the Supreme Court in the Janus case that decided that public employees cannot be forced to pay union dues that the majority were “weaponizing the First Amendment.”  The five justices of the majority had used freedom of speech as the reason for not allowing unions to forcibly collect union dues or even to collect them as a default unless a public employee underwent a process to deny the union the right to collect the money from his paycheck.

Justice Kagan and many others of the left have become very incensed that freedom of speech and freedom of religion have been used to thwart them in their dictation of how Americans can think and act.  They are terribly upset that people associating with one another in business were allowed freedom of speech in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010.  They have been incensed that some businesses have been able to escape infringements of their right to freedom of association by virtue of claiming their freedom of religion, whether in their hiring practices or in their wedding cake baking services.  The present session of the Supreme Court also used freedom of speech to deny the socialist California legislature to require organizations giving advice to pregnant women to tell them about their options to have an abortion.  Hence the socialists or Progressive Elitists are more and more horrified by the individual rights recognized in the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, those who favor a government whose functions violate the individual rights of some, often in the name of providing more security or comfort for others, have long been able to keep the courts from recognizing the many individual rights which were supposed to be protected by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.  It was recognized when the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution that individuals had many rights not explicitly dealt with in the earlier amendments of the Bill of Rights.

What are our individual rights, whether recognized by our government are not?

• The right to life, not to be supported, but to be allowed to act to support it ourselves, as we allow others to do so also.  This is a general right to manage our own life and to fully claim self-ownership.
• The right to determine our own actions and to undertake them, provided we do not act to prevent others from determining their own actions and undertaking them with all of us barred from the initiated use of force.
• The right to choose our own values and to pursue those values to try to achieve our own happiness.
• The freedom of conscience, the right to use our own judgment and to act upon it.  Freedom of religion is a subset of this right and is far from all-inclusive.
• The freedom of association, which is also the freedom to choose who we will cooperate with and for what purposes.  This includes our domestic partnerships, our business partnerships, our hiring choices, our freedom of contract, our choice of friends, and those we join in our recreational activities.
• Freedom of speech or communication of our thoughts and ideas in all the forms this may take.  The freedom of assembly is part of this, as it is part of our freedom of association.
• The freedom of privacy, or the freedom not to share those parts of our lives we do not wish to share knowledge of with others.  This includes the right to be secure in our papers, our homes, and such as prescribed in the 4th Amendment.
• The freedom of equal protection of our income and property and the other fruits of our labor and thought.
• The right to own and bear arms so that we might protect our own lives and individual rights.
• The right to fair and just treatment when accused of a crime as prescribed in our 5th , 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments.

I will not claim this to be an all-inclusive list of our natural rights.  I do not claim that life is so simple that it is always easy to understand how one individual’s exercise of his rights will affect others as they try to exercise their own rights.  But, good societies and good governments -- legitimate governments – will always try very hard to make individual liberty their primary goal and will defer as much as is possible to the individual’s right to make his own value choices and manage his own life.  No legitimate government can take the stance that it is justified in violating the rights of some in the interest of other persons.  Legitimate government cannot violate any person’s rights.  It must respect the equal rights of every citizen and legal resident.

A society with such a legitimate government will be one which minimizes the use of force.  The government should act to prevent all individuals from initiating the use of force.  That government also minimizes its restraints on liberty such that its own use of force is also minimized.  Government which violates individual rights does so by the use of force or its threatened use.  Governments are commonly the worst abusers of the use of force in the nations of the world today.  There are no highly legitimate governments operating at this time.  Some are much less worse than others, but all are massive abusers of the rights of the individual.  The United States federal government violates very many of our rights today and American socialists and Progressive Elitists want it to violate many more of our individual rights.

Many Americans, whether socialists or religious traditionalists, want to use government to prescribe a moral code by which everyone is expected to live.  They are often certain that their moral code is right and that a good society can be achieved if only the government will force everyone to live by their moral code.  The fact that there is often more variation in the moral codes held by the political factions pursuing such moral code prescriptions by law than could possibly be encoded into law rarely dawns on them.  These same people, especially the socialists, are very inclined to either use government or extra-governmental force and intimidation to prevent dissenters from their moral ideas from exercising their freedom of speech, press, and assembly.  According to the socialists and sometimes those who speak for God, if you have morally wrong ideas, you forfeit your freedom of speech, press, and assembly.

No freedom is a freedom at all if one will not allow those you think are wrong from exercising their freedom.  There is no freedom of speech if a minority or a single individual is not allowed to state their own ideas.  There is no freedom of association if one is not allowed to discriminate in the choosing of those one wishes to associate with, even if that discrimination may be what many may call bigotry.

The Christian who refuses to associate with gay people is wrong in my opinion, but he is acting fully within his rights.  To make him bake a cake for a gay wedding may very well be an infringement upon his freedom of conscience.

The gay organizations that want to force non-discrimination against gay people outside of the government itself are very wrong in doing so.  They should be as determined to protect their own freedom of association and conscience as anyone else should be.  Imagine a law that requires every gay bar to bring in heterosexual people until they represent their proportion in the population at large among their customers each night when the federal inspectors come around to make a count at the bar.

Many of the religious conservatives were very unhappy about the Supreme Court ruling allowing gay marriages.  In fact, this should have been a very obvious requirement respecting freedom of association.  Unfortunately, our government does not actually recognize the freedom of association.  It also very much limits the freedom of contract in general.  In reality, people should have as much freedom in forming their domestic partnerships under contract as they would have in forming a business partnership.  If three men and three women wanted to form a domestic partnership, that is their right as much as it would be the right of one woman and one man.  The same is true for one woman and two men or for two men and one woman or for three men or for three women.  The government has no business interfering with such an exercise in freedom of association and freedom of contract.  What such domestic partnerships might aim to accomplish and their sexual relationships are not government business, except insofar as the adults entering into the contract choose to make those matters a part of their lawful domestic partnership contract.

A much more harmonious society results when government is not being extensively used as a tool to prevent individuals from exercising their broad and many individual rights.  There are many claims that we live in an very uncivil society today.  Well, what do you expect when we have to fight over the control of a government that is constantly willing and wanting to violate our rights.  When we have a government that loves to take more from the rich and redistribute it to the many more voters who are not as rich, do the rich not have a right to believe they are threatened by that government?  If the rich use their money and connections to manipulate the regulatory state so that it is much harder for small, upstart companies to compete with their larger companies, is it not reasonable that the small businessmen will be very upset?  If the federal government owns half the land in a state and it controls the use of that land so that the environmentalists on the left and right coasts are happy, is it not to be expected that many in the state where that land is not of use to them are going to be unhappy?  If you are a coal miner, a river barge operator, a store owner in a coal town, or a dock worker in Norfolk, VA, is it not reasonable that you will be very unhappy when the federal government decides that a pregnant woman eating only fish from a river downwind from a coal-fired power plant might according to very imaginative argument and highly cherry-picked studies of islanders who only eat seafood develop some problem due to mercury released from coal combustion so that coal-fired power plants are being shutdown?  Or you want to build an office building, but you have to wait 5 years before starting as you work through endless environmental studies which keep requiring you to spend more and more on the building itself, not to mention the lawyers fees.

Then there is the shear weight of the taxes.  You are young and you do not expect Social Security to be around in 40 years when you might retire, but you are paying into it out of every paycheck, instead of putting that money into your own retirement investment fund.  Medicare costs will exceed its revenues in 2026 according to the ever-changing projections, so if that program is still going to be around, you will have to pay higher Medicare taxes soon.  Meanwhile, you may still be struggling to pay off the money you borrowed to go to college.  Thanks to all of that loan money available, the colleges built themselves up like spas for the rich, but the education you received was no better and maybe worse than the education people received 30 years earlier, but you paid much more for it.

Perhaps you are struggling to start a new business and the paperwork required by the governments and by your business customers is overwhelming, thanks to big government.  Meanwhile, you need to buy equipment so you can expand, but the county personal property tax penalizes you for having that equipment, making it harder for you to hire more people.  The more people you hire the more the governments expect you to act as an unpaid tax collector.  If you do business across state lines, you now have to worry about collecting sales taxes for each and every one of many thousands of taxing authorities even though you have no presence in their areas and no vote to determine the taxes or the politicians who decide to levy them.  Imagine the deluge of paperwork now coming your way.

When the governments do too much and forget the principle that their legitimate function is simply to protect everyone’s equal individual rights, then it is pitting the people against one another.  Good people are simply trying to protect themselves from the hurt that the government can do to them.  Immoral people are very happy to try to wrest control of government so they can take advantage of most of the people.  If you think there are not endless numbers of schemes or conspiracies to do just that in Washington, you are very naive indeed.  The evil-doers are some foundations, environmental groups, people who want welfare, labor unions, educators, scientists, professions that want restrictive licenses, and many businesses, not to mention many politicians.

It is absolute pie in the sky nonsense to think government should hurt some and violate the rights of some in order to help some greater number or the most needy.  Government will start with some plausible such proposal that almost everyone will agree with.  After it has established numerous such programs, the people will no longer have the time or will to think about them.  The government arguments for the next set of programs can be much less plausible now.  Soon it is a free-for-all.  Soon one has what we have now, government for special interests.  The people are bewildered and no longer in effective control.  Some simply trust to the authorities, but most Americans are now very jaded.  But, this is exactly what should have been expected when we allowed government to disregard a strict adherence to its legitimate role as the protector of every individual’s many and broad rights.  When we give this up as a critical and essential principle, we give up all hope for a just, fair, and harmonious society.

Rationally Choosing a President

As an American with the right to vote for President, how does one rationally exercise that right?

The first task the rational individual has is to determine what the legitimate purpose of government is and how government acts to achieve that purpose.  It is easier to understand how government acts to achieve its purposes, than it is to understand what its legitimate purposes are.  Government achieves its purposes by using force.  If challenged by any of the people it governs, it is willing to use overwhelming and fatal force.  It is the nature of government that it achieves its ends through the use of force.  Without a clear understanding of that and which of many purposes it may have that are legitimate, it is not possible to make a rational choice of that government's chief executive officer.

Many people believe that government exists to enforce a morality upon a society.  Thus that portion of the left which is long educated in the government-controlled education system commonly believes that some groups deserve to be treated by everyone nicely.  These groups are usually people they see as systematically discriminated against or as rather helpless.  If those of the favored groups are not treated nicely by someone, the government should use force to see that those who are not nice will act nice.  On the other hand, that portion of the right which believes in religious fundamentalism largely believes that everyone should be forced to live in accordance with what they think Christianity requires of moral people.  There is some overlap in these two groups' ideas of morality, but there are also important differences.  What they have in common is a belief that it is right to have government enforce their idea of moral behavior upon those whose ideas of moral behavior differ from theirs or upon people who sin by not living up to the morality they themselves may recognize.

Neither group believes in a broad concept of freedom of conscience.  Because both groups are broadly willing to use force to achieve their goal of moral uniformity in individual's relationships with one another, neither believes in a broad concept of freedom of association either.  The socialist elitist group of the left and the Christian fundamentalist group of the right are the most polarized groups willing to use force to make every individual comply with their moral beliefs, but this is actually a trait of most Americans.

It does not dawn on most Americans that it is from a broad individual right to freedom of conscience and freedom of association that all of the individual rights that most think they should have arise.  Why should an individual have freedom of speech?  Because freedom of speech enables people to develop, with feedback from others, and trade the knowledge they need to survive and flourish on Earth in the midst of powerful natural forces and other people.  Freedom of speech is often opposed by those who wish to suppress the knowledge and understanding that may result.  A crucial portion of that knowledge and understanding is about a moral code suitable to sustaining life as a thinking and living being.  Freedom of speech is critical as a support for developing learning, identifying values to pursue, earning a living by production, and trading values with other individuals.

Today's socialist elitists are often weak on freedom of speech because they argue it can be hurtful to some among those groups they favor or think are incapable of managing their own lives.  Not infrequently, they even believe that scientific pursuit of knowledge should be suppressed if it might cause people to disagree with part of their belief system.  This is most apparent if those who disagree are pursuing profits in trade or disagree with their ideas about evolution or man's relationship with the environment.  The fundamentalist right sometimes forces the teaching of Intelligent Design or forces counseling prior to a woman having an abortion.  Freedom of speech means we have the right to say what we think, but also that we have the right not to be forced to listen to those we disagree with.  Real freedom of speech also rests in freedom of association.  We have the right to speak to those who want to listen to us.  Freedom of the press is just the right to put our thoughts on paper or electronic media and distribute them to those who want to read what we have written.  Consequently, freedom of press also has a foundation in our broad freedoms of conscience and association.

Of course, freedom of religion is just a subset of our broad freedom of conscience.  Indeed, the two were often conflated when the early state constitutions were formulated and in the debates about the federal Constitution.  Freedom of religion is clearly both about a set of beliefs and the freedom to gather with others of similar belief, as is our broader freedom of conscience.  Freedom of conscience, really the freedom to think and to act upon what we think, is inseparable from freedom of association in our interaction with others in a society.  Thus, when a socialist elitist has the government use force to make a Christian fundamentalist baker bake a cake for a gay wedding or to make one pay for a woman's abortion, that socialist elitist is violating the Christian fundamentalist's freedom of conscience and his freedom of association.  It is not of primary moral importance that the socialist leftist may be right that discriminating against gay people and their marriages is wrong or that a woman has a right to have an abortion.  If these are fact as I think they are, this is still not justification for using force to violate the individual rights of the Christian fundamentalist.  Neither would it be right for the Christian fundamentalist to deny the government contract for domestic partnerships to gay people or to force those who do not share their religious beliefs to attend and financially support their church.

Our Declaration of Independence correctly identified the legitimate and very limited function of government.  Its legitimate functions are limited to the protection of the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It accomplishes this purpose by not allowing individuals to initiate the use of force upon others and by not itself using any more force than is needed to prevent individuals or aliens from initiating the use of force against its citizens.  Legitimate government is not in the business of doing harm to some in the name of a greater good claimed for others.  Legitimate government lives under a rule that it must first do no harm to anyone who has not initiated the use of force.  Legitimate government minimizes the use of force in a society, including its own use of force.  This is why the Constitution gave the federal government very limited and enumerated powers.  Those powers have been expanded by present-day interpretations far beyond the context of this very limited role of simply protecting individual rights.

Legitimate government rests on the foundation of a People who are mostly competent to comprehend their lives and environment, choose their own values, and pursue those values in a robust and choice-rich private sector.  It is in the private sector that individuals can best exercise their quest for knowledge and understanding, learn about the many values they might pursue, and exercise their choice of values by acquiring them, often in cooperation with others who wish to enter into trades of values with them.  No such enabling environment is possible in a society following a large government model.  The nature of laws and regulations that go beyond prohibiting the initiated use of force is to reduce choices of values and reduce their free trade.  Such a society suffers a reduction of knowledge, the reduction of the happiness of many, and a subsequent reduction in the production of goods and services.

The socialist elitist thinks it is crass to argue that their web of laws and regulations lead to a reduction in the growth of an economy.  They believe it is fine to impose these limits on human activity in pursuit of their moral ideals because trade and business are immoral, or at least not endeavors suitable to the most enlightened minds.  Never mind the fact that a free society with limited government whose private sector production of goods and services may easily grow at a 4% rate will provide 1.83 times as many goods and services in a generation (about 31 years in America) as one growing at a 2% rate characteristic of their partially enacted agenda under Obama.  They never consider how many of those with lesser abilities or drive will find it much easier to live and to enjoy a much more interesting life in a society with 83% more goods and services in a generation.  They never ask if the medical achievements, the development of new life-enhancing products, the advancement of knowledge generally and its teaching, the increased wealth available for charities, and the shortened work hours in such a more developed private sector might not easily be much preferable to the society with more public housing, free food, long term unemployment benefits, higher taxes, less investment, more corn subsidies, more Import-Export Bank subsidies, more renewable energy subsidies, more college loans, incalculably less pollution, and higher minimum wages now at the expense of this growth.

A moral society starts with a government that does not itself act immorally by using any more force than it must to keep individuals from using force unnecessarily.  A harmonious society starts with this minimization of the use of force.  It allows individuals to choose their own values, manage and own their own lives, and to trade freely with others for each trader's mutual advantage.  Such a society prospers in happiness and security.

Being happy is less about having a good or service than it is about being free to choose what you want and being able to act for the purpose of achieving your values.  The competent individual is capable of doing this.  The individual who is free to do this is more likely to feel competent.  This esteem that follows from the act of using one's own mind to understand reality, to identify and choose one's own values, and to act to achieve those values is essential to happiness.  Self-chosen values are the food of dreams and the freedom to act to achieve them is the basis for hope.  Good government does not kill our individual dreams and does not subvert our hopes.  It does not squash any individual's dreams and hopes in favor of a chosen group.  It provides equal freedoms for all to choose their values and to pursue them.

The man to vote for to become President is the man who best understands this and will try his best to reform government to make it legitimate.

Our Mind-Closing Universities and Conformity

A short post by William Murchison entitled When Higher Ed Shuts the Door on Taxpayer's Right to Know discusses the increasing trend to secrecy on the part of university boards and presidential selection committees.  Murchison says:

The Columbia Journalism Review scores the “increasingly closed-door culture” of university boards, such as Kent State University’s, which not only conducted a secret presidential search recently but “admitted to shredding documents to cover their tracks.”  How about the boards of Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, which not only kept their searches secret but suppressed the names of the finalists until both were hired. Then they told the world!

One can see that given the state of commitment to Progressive Elitism and to political correctness on college campuses that it must be very nearly impossible to conduct the managerial affairs of a public college in the open.  If the board and selection committees maintain political correctness and promote Progressive Elitism as they are expected to by student activists and most faculty members, many taxpayers will be appalled to see what is going on.  If the board and other college controlling committees do not do as expected by student activists and faculty, they are also in very hot water.  Nay, boiling water surrounded by drooling cannibals on most campuses.  Given the culture of the college campus today, such public institutions of Progressive Elitist indoctrination are in a dilemma in all but the most socialistic of states.

Private universities generally only need to satisfy their alumni, students, and faculty, despite raking in huge sums of research grants from the taxpayers.  This is a less tough nut to crack, especially in the Ivy League and equivalent schools, where the alumni have long been very successfully indoctrinated in the Progressive Elitist viewpoint.  These Ivy League schools are very assured that virtually all of their graduates are fully committed to Progressive Elitism, partly because they select for that in their admissions and partly because the on-campus commitment to this indoctrination has long been so thorough.

So how did I escape becoming a Progressive Elitist at Brown University?  By never tiring of pitched debates with up to a dozen Progressive Elitists at a time.  By never being intimated, because I was able to shake the very foundations of their belief, at least for a few hours.  After which they would return as though the discussion never occurred, but with no better ideas than those ideas that had failed so miserably but hours earlier.  Progressive Elitism is definitely a religion for almost all such persons and they refuse to allow that religion to be evaluated and assessed by reason.  But being fully committed to reason, I at least was not susceptible to their religious conformity.

Just as most people in many communities become captured by their desire to belong to a particular dominant religion, whether Christian, Hindi, Islam, or Buddhism, so too do most people in a community dominated by the Progressive Elitist religion just have to be Progressive Elitists so they will belong.  So while people are complex and highly differentiated individuals, most still have a great desire to conform so they will be accepted into a community of people.  If this means denying reality, including their own natures, well then reality will generally be denied.  The human suffering that results knows few bounds, which is why our culture has become more and more cheerless and more and more nihilistic.

Only a community committed to reality, reason, productivity, and individuality can achieve man's greatest needs of security, freely given and valued friendships, real cooperation in mutual endeavors and relationships, the freedom to pursue our highly differentiated values generally according to our individual natures, and hence the freedom to pursue our own happiness.  Such a community is rich in its choices and possibilities.

Unfortunately, those people with already low self-esteem are fearful of that very richness of choices and possibilities.  The less free a society becomes, the larger the number of people with such low self-esteem and the more fearful the society becomes of individuality, choices, and possibilities.  Universities, far from opening young people's eyes to the joy of pursuing life in such a rich, reality-driven society, have long been indoctrinating them to choose a conforming, low-choice, hierarchically managed society that denies them their very individuality.

Freedom of Association and Anti-Gay Discrimination

As I have made it clear many times, I do not believe that homosexuality is in any way immoral.  Morality as it applies to homosexual acts is very similar to the application of morality to heterosexual acts in many important respects, though clearly it is differentiated by the absence of concern for the potential of responsibility for creating a baby.  I have supported gay domestic partnership contracts in their governmental form and noted that government really has no business addressing the spiritual aspects of marriage for anyone.  It should only grant domestic partnership contracts to consenting adults with no more concern for their sex or numbers than is appropriate for a business partnership contract. Adult individuals have the right to form the voluntary associations and contracts of their choice.

I have long been embarrassed by the stand of many Republicans for whom I have often voted on their stance on the issue of homosexual discrimination by government.  Government has absolutely no business discriminating against homosexuals or bisexuals or heterosexuals.  Government must support the rights of every individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of their personal happiness.  This does not allow exceptions for homosexuals, bisexuals, or heterosexuals or many other characteristics individuals have or choices that they make.  Of course, for every Republican who embarrasses me in this regard, there are many more destructive and immoral choices made by almost every Democrat Socialist Party candidate.  Political candidates are never entirely rational and moral.

I argued for an end to the Clinton Defense of Marriage Act and for the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  I contributed to the Log Cabin Republican effort in accomplishing these tasks and praised their work.  I contributed to the Marylanders for Marriage Equality group when it was trying to promote the ballot initiative to equalize same-sex marriages in Maryland.  That campaign was successful, with about half of all Maryland Republicans voting for it.  Unfortunately, these groups are now turning to attempts to make it unlawful for businesses in the private sector to discriminate against gay people.  On this matter, I part ways with these groups, for reasons of general principle and because their effort actually undermines their own right to freedom of association in a very fundamental and harmful way.

I find it an immoral act for a business to refuse service to someone because they are homosexual or because a gay couple may be married. I prefer not to do business with such a business and I applaud others who would not do so also.  In doing so, I am discriminating in accordance with my values.  This personal choice and expression of my own values and moral code is not one that I have the right to impose on others by the initiated use of force.  It changes nothing morally if I join a majority of voters and elect politicians who will use the force wielded by government to accomplish this same goal of imposing my values and my morality on others.  They too have a right to choose their own values and their own moral code.  The fact that I disapprove of the choices some people make does not give me the right to marshal the force of government to suppress their choices of values and actions made in accordance with their moral values.

Good government cannot be achieved or evaluated without a rational reference to principle.  Legitimate government has one and only one purpose.  That purpose is to secure and protect the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and to the pursuit of one's own happiness.  Government cannot do this if it does not allow individuals the implied freedom of conscience and the freedom of association.  The individual in possession of his own mind establishes the principles and values of his conscience and he acts in his life upon those principles and values in forming associations with others.  Good government imposes very little in the way of morality on its citizens.  It only requires that they respect the equal rights of others by not initiating the use of force against others and by not defrauding them.

So if a person forms his moral principles and values in accordance with a Bible verse of the Old Testament such as Leviticus 20:13

Leviticus 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood [shall be] upon them.

without regard for the primitive, brutal nature of the times and the need of a small tribe to procreate madly in the interest of survival, it is not the role of good government to instruct this person on morality or to take actions against his discrimination in putting his moral beliefs into action, so long as his actions do not involve the initiated use of force or fraud.  Government should not require that the believer in Leviticus 20:13 not have an aversion for gay sex, though it must draw the line in not allowing the believer in this brutal dictum to kill or use other violence against those who have voluntary gay sex as adults.  In general, good government will no more prescribe morality than it will prescribe speech or dictate who one will marry or befriend.  Individuals have the freedom to choose their values and the moral principles by which they will live.  They enjoy freedom of conscience and freedom of association by choice.

These are freedoms are as critically essential to gay individuals as they are to heterosexual individuals.  Indeed, when the general principles of individual rights are not respected by government, it is various small minorities who usually suffer the most.  Historically, this has been clearly the case for homosexual and bisexual individuals.

Gay marriage is most often sold as a matter of equality, but that is a weak argument.  The response of some conservatives and other religious people is that everyone has the equal opportunity to marry someone of the opposite sex, so equality is maintained.  Of course, the freedom to enjoy one's own mind and body and to pursue one's own happiness may not be served by the equal opportunity to marry someone of the opposite sex.  In the context of rights, only the even-handed behavior of government is mandated.  Government must not differentiate the availability of equal domestic partnership contracts.  A person of religious belief or otherwise in the private sector, however, need not regard a domestic contract as the equivalent of a requirement of respect for that partnership that he might grant to other partnerships approved by his religion.  The private individual retains all rights to discrimination outside of governmental actions.

But the same-sex marriage advocates seemed rarely to worry about making a fundamental argument based on individual rights.  Too few of them have thought in general principles of the legitimate function of government and its very limited purpose.  Support for same-sex marriage has been based on a popularity contest riding the crest of a recent fad.  The broad and necessary right of a gay individual to choose his own values, who he wants to associate intimately with, who he wants as a domestic partner, and who else he will discriminate against for these purposes, is apparently unknown to him, with few exceptions.  Part of the problem is that most gay people do not think in terms of general good political principles because that would be inconsistent with the fact that most are too closely associated with the Democrat Socialist Party.  It is very difficult to find a valid and strong argument for freedom of conscience and freedom of association from the perspective of a collectivist!  Those arguments derive their strength from individualism and the clear and certain recognition that individuals are complex and highly differentiated.  Every individual has the right to life and the right to pursue his own happiness.  The nature of our lives, of our bodies and minds, and the paths to our happiness are rich in their variety.

I am discussing these fundamental issues of individual freedom pertaining to gay individuals now because of the recent hullabaloo over the Arizona state Senate Bill 1062 which allowed business owners to make association choices based on their religious beliefs.  Now my objection to that bill is that it is defective in limiting the freedom of conscience to that subset of conscience deriving from religious beliefs.  This is a common error in American law.  In reality, the individual has a broad freedom of conscience and it is wrong for government to limit that freedom to only its religious expressions.  I do not believe that when one owns a business, one gives up one's basic freedoms.  If that were so, then every business owner in exercising his right to earn a living and to own property for the purpose of doing so, would be losing other fundamental and necessary rights.  Our rights are broadly owned by each of us and we are rightly and properly deprived of them only when we initiate the use of force against others.

If a businessman is deprived of the right to discriminate against others for some choices or actions they take, can he long expect that he will be allowed to fire an employee who does not perform his job well.  Will he soon be forced to buy goods and services for his business from inept suppliers because a supplier might be a brother-in-law of the governor or represent an industry that makes large campaign contributions?  Must he sell items or services to some people preferred by the government at lower cost than to others?  Will he be allowed to fire an employee or not do business with a supplier who lies to him?  Businessmen have every bit as much need to discriminate among people based on their values as those who are not businessmen. An employee of a business has the right to judge his employer and if he finds him wanting, he is free to leave employment.  The consumer is free to discriminate against a businessman and not buy the goods and services he offers for sale, unless the service falls under ObamaCare, if you go along with one important aberrant claim on how limited our rights are.  In reality, our individual rights are not narrow, as American law tends to mistakenly take them to be, but they are broad, generous, and rich.

Legitimate and good government recognizes this fact.  The presumption of good government is that the freedom of the individual is sovereign and inalienable.  Only extremely rational reasons, agreed upon by most everyone, can be used to limit individual rights.  It does not impose the moral preferences bare majorities or a favored faction on others.  It must allow the individual the freedom to use his own mind and to act upon his own view of reality with only the most necessary limitation that we all have the equal right to do that.  None of us has the right to initiate the use of force to limit the choices and actions of others and we do not gain that right by manipulating a government to do this for us.  The presumption of individual freedom must be very strong in the healthy, individualist society.

Does the gay person refused service by a business suffer a measure of harm?  Yes he does.  He is done an injustice.  But, if the government forces a business owner whose moral beliefs dictate that he should not serve the gay person to serve him, then the business owner has also suffered a harm.  There is no way violating the rights of one person to prevent a harm or an injustice to another can be worked to prevent harm and injustice.  That course of action simply guarantees more harm and more injustice.  We have to expect in life that some people are going to make moral choices others of us will not like.  We cannot treat someone as a slave to be ordered about just because we believe they have done an injustice and that their morality is not as good as ours is.  No, in a free society one simply seeks out other adults who are willing to associate with us.  This is so for much the same fundamental reason that we do not force someone to associate with us for the purposes of sex.  Voluntary consent is critical in a free society.

While the modern Progressive Elitist does not believe freedom of speech and of the press is a broad right anymore and often wishes to limit them based on harm or hurt feelings, these rights are very broad.  It has served us well to enjoy a broad right to speak and write our minds.  It has served our society well to allow people to choose their own values, formulate or adopt their own moral ideas, and to manage their own lives.  While freedom of conscience and freedom of association are not always given the broad protections they should be given, for the most part in the non-business private sector they are tolerated by our government.  They should be equally tolerated in the business sector.  Indeed, they should be given a very committed and strong protection in all of the private sector in America.  If they are, gay individuals will prosper and flourish more certainly than if they are not.

Responding to a Progressive Elitist University Request for Donations

A Brown University student of the Class of 2015 sent me an e-mail request for a donation to the university from which I earned my Sc.B. in Physics degree in 1969.  Because of the magnitude of the tragedy that Brown has so failed to provide young and bright students with an adequate education, I took the time to write the following response:

It is precisely because far too many faculty, staff, and students at Brown University view themselves as "partners and agents for collective social change" that I am deprived of the pleasure of supporting a real education at Brown.  They share the image of themselves as Progressive Elitists justified fully in the use of governmental force to impose values on a largely immoral or amoral people.  They wish to micromanage the lives of millions of people they do not know, yet consider incompetent to manage their own lives.  They ignore the essential fact that people are complex and highly differentiated in character, life circumstance, and values.  They seek an easily acquired sense of intellectual and moral superiority, while abrogating to themselves power and money taken by force.

A real education would encourage students to see how honoring the equal, sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of personal happiness is the real path to achieving the general welfare.  This education would illustrate the need for a legitimate government whose only purpose was the support of these individual rights and which would never seek to harm some while claiming it was helping the majority or some favored minority.  A real education would make it clear that a government that forces some or many to serve the interests of others is tyranny and disruptive of the real benefits of life in a society.  It would show how those benefits flow from the incredible richness of choices and freedom of action when all of our relationships are freely chosen for our mutual benefit.  It would honor freedom of conscience and of association, rather than crippling these freedoms as the big government approved by most at Brown University does.  These freedoms are critical to man who must live by the use of his mind.  An education is supposed to aid man in developing the rationality and analytical capability of that mind.

Unfortunately, any money I give to Brown is used mostly to deprive me and those I love of our individual rights.  It is used to increase the level of already exorbitant tyranny in the Land of the Free.  It is used to diminish the many wonderful advantages of living among others willing to engage in a free trade of ideas, goods, and services.  It creates a government so complex that the vast majority of citizens cannot understand what it is doing and how to control it.  They become pawns due to their limited time, money, and intellect to those few Progressive Elitists who actually do control government to some degree.  But just as the slave master was enslaved by his slaves, so are the Elitists enslaved by the ignorant or insufficiently informed people they think they control.

Soon, as is the case now, control of government is really in the hands of haphazard and conflicting special interest groups (factions in the terms of the founders), who step in and take what they want at the expense of everyone else.  A few of these special interests or factions:

• Crony mercantilists such as green energy companies,
• GE, GM, Chrysler, Boeing with its Export Bank subsidies,
• farmers with crop supports,
• students taking government student loans,
• faculty taking government funded research grants,
• labor unions forcing workers to pay them dues and buying politicians' votes, while systematically underfunding worker pension plans,
• radical environmentalists claiming that economic development is the enemy even as developed countries do most to clean their environments,
• global warming alarmists falsely accusing user's of fossil fuels of overheating the planet,
• people faking disabilities by the millions,
• millions on unemployment benefits for years,
• big bankers and stock investors happy to see the Federal Reserve flood the economy with devaluing printed money,
• home buyers buying homes they cannot afford with government encouragement,
• insurers happy to see people forced to buy health insurance they cannot afford for coverage they do not need as the government asserts its ownership of our very bodies,
• millions happy to use food stamps and other welfare rather than take a job,
• those who use government licensing to keep others out of their profession, 
• a huge government-run education establishment dominated by pro-big government propaganda, teachers unions, and mediocrity,
• large companies that seek to cripple smaller companies with a myriad unintelligible regulations, and of course
• the many power-hungry and corrupt politicians who populate both major parties, though especially the one most favoring the accelerating growth of government.

I had the independence of mind and the knowledge of history, economics, civics, business, and science to withstand the many pressures at Brown to conform to the Progressive Elitist viewpoint that the brutal use of force to accomplish their goals was justified by the claimed purity of those goals.  Of course, kings and aristocrats of old, slave owners, fascists, and communists all made very similar claims.  The end result for any society that deprives its individual citizens of their rights is all too well-known and can be ignored only by the ignorant or the malevolent.

Being a small business owner who has repeatedly converted his limited retirement funds into capital to keep his independent laboratory going through this government caused and government maintained recession of five years duration, my charity activity has to be carefully directed to those fighting the critical battle of our time, indeed of all time.  I am supporting the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Atlas Society, the Institute for Justice, the Club for Growth, the Tea Party movement, the NFIB, and the Right to Work Committee.

Brown University is not very competitive given its concerted deception and propaganda exercised on young minds, too many of which are weak.  It gives me no pleasure to say this, since it is a huge tragedy that Brown is not performing the great service it should be and could be doing.

The Falsely Framed Moral Evaluation of Capitalism

The Washington Post ran a long article on page 1 of its Outlook section on Sunday, 17 March 2013 entitled Is Capitalism Moral?  It was written by Steven Pearlstein, a Post columnist.  He claims that much of the reason for the stalemate in Washington is because the Republicans and Democrats have not really faced up to the question of whether Capitalism is moral or not.  He says that

The grand experiment with communism has been thoroughly discredited, a billion people have been lifted from poverty through free-market competition, and even European socialists have given up on state ownership and the nanny state.  Here at home, large swaths of the economy have been deregulated, and tax rates have been cut.  A good portion of what is left of government has been outsourced, while even education is moving toward school choice.  In embracing welfare reform, Americans have acknowledged that numerous programs meant to lift up the poor instead trapped them in permanent dependency and poverty.

This introduction to the Pearlstein article seems to bow to the power of Capitalism to do good, though it is always jarring to read that deregulation characterizes our government's efforts when about 80,000 pages of new regulations are added each year and the EPA is carrying out the Obama threat to kill the coal industry and coal-fired electric plants and to give us skyrocketing European gasoline prices.  The outsourced government continues to grow its many tentacles and keeps developing new tentacles such as those that sprout from the recent and still developing ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank "Too Big to Fail" acts.

Pearlstein notes that books by Arthur Brooks, of the American Enterprise Institute, and John Allison, of the Cato Institute, make a moral case for "even-freer-market capitalism than we have now."  The books he is referring obliquely to are:

Arthur C. Brooks, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise, Basic Books, 2012.

John A. Allison, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope, McGraw Hill, 2012.

Pearlstein characterizes their argument for capitalism as

As they see it, regulation is an infringement of individual liberty, while income redistribution, in the form of a progressive tax-and-transfer system, is nothing more than thievery committed against the most talented and productive by those who are not.  Regulation and redistribution, they contend, also undermine the vital incentives that drive capitalism, which throughout history has been the best system for freeing large masses of human beings from lives of misery and poverty.  What could be more moral, they ask, than that?

 Pearlstein even credits John Locke, Adam Smith, and Ludwig von Mises for their moral defenses of capitalism, before noting that the novels and writings of Ayn Rand really caused the idea of the morality of Capitalism to catch hold among "right-leaning intellectuals and politicians."

The remainder of this article mostly examines whether Capitalism is moral from Pearlstein's and frankly that of most people's perspective.  That perspective is implicit in the question he asks at the end of the article in his very last sentence:

If our moral obligation is to provide everyone with a reasonable shot at economic success, within a market system that, by its nature, thrives on unequal outcomes, then we ought to ask not just whether government is doing too much or too little, but whether it is doing the right things.

Basically, Pearlstein and most people believe that Capitalism is moral only if it is fair.  The bulk of the article is devoted to his belief that it is not really fair and loaded with implications that it must be controlled by government to see to it that it is as fair as possible.

One problem with judging the morality of Capitalism on the basis of whether it is fair or not is that even a toddler soon has a concept of fairness which need not have firm roots at all in a deep moral understanding.  It is extraordinarily common for the child to complain that it is not fair that her older brother always wins when they play Monopoly.  It is common that the younger sibling claims it is unfair that the older sibling can stay out to midnight on a Friday night with his friends or maybe even until 3 AM.  For many people, that concept of fairness evolves very little as they become adults.

The Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution understood that what government should do was not governed by fairness.  They understood that the legitimate role of government was, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, the protection of our equal, inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The role of government was simply to see that we were not forced by government or by others to give up making our own choices of values and prevented from taking action to try to acquire and keep our values, so long as we did not initiate the use of force against others.  Government had no role in deciding what values we should seek and no role in the distribution of those values among the people.

Those, who like Pearlstein, claim that the central government role is to ensure fairness in the distribution of values among the people must push government to decide what values really matter and how they will be distributed.  Commonly, they then think almost entirely in terms of income and worldly goods as the values of importance and those to be redistributed.  To concede that government has such a fairness role, is to concede that the Nanny State is proper.  It is to concede that the less developed person is right to constantly challenge the more developed person, or at least that those who have fewer worldly goods are right to challenge the government to redistribute those goods more in their favor or even totally unto equality in the distribution.

Of course a more developed concept of fairness might recognize that someone who chooses to watch NBC and CBS every evening for hours rather than working 12 or 14 hours in a day does not have a moral claim on the earnings or wealth of a person who did make the choice to work the longer hours.  After all, the TV watcher does not trade his relaxation and laughter in front of the TV in any meaningful way for the proceeds of the many additional hours worked by someone making a very different value choice.  Yet, most Americans exercise their limited sense of fairness to think that the TV watcher deserves to have a significant part, maybe even more than half, of what the hard worker made in his additional hours of work.

To a large degree, most people think fairness is about equality.  Yet, people are too complex and too highly differentiated for them to be equal.  They may have equal rights, but that is about the only way in which people are equal.  The Founding Fathers understood this, but they feared democracy largely because they understood that most people are governed too much by a desire for a simple-minded fairness, which drove them to desire equality and the redistribution of money and goods.  Yet, it cannot be fair to deprive the person who has acquired income and goods without the use of force of what he has acquired.  No system based on a forced redistribution can be fair.  Why set out in the name of fairness to redistribute income and goods when this necessarily means that one is unfairly doing harm to many and that fairness cannot be achieved?  Even Pearlstein allows that it is hard to know when to stop the process of redistribution.

The morality of Capitalism has the same basis as the morality of the entire private sector, only some of whose activities are devoted to the values of income and worldly goods.  There is no role for government in choosing who my friends will be and how many hours I am to spend with each of them for our mutual enjoyment.  The government that tried to redistribute my friendship time and effort would clearly be recognized as a tyranny.  There is no role for government in determining how fair it is that a woman of good character may or may not be loved by the man she wants to love her.  There is no role for government in deciding who we may choose for our domestic partner or partners, though that issue is still hotly debated with respect to same-sex marriage.  Many of the greatest values in each of our lives are properly seen by most of us as beyond the sphere of government rules for distribution.

Yet, for some childish and foolish reason, most adults do think that government has a role in re-distributing income and wealth.  I believe this is in large part because they ignore the fact that this is really a theft of the time an individual put into acquiring that income and wealth, including the time he may have spent preparing himself for earning it, as in his studies, his thinking about markets over many years, and his careful attention to details in his work.  Many seem to think that they have not subjected someone to slavery just because they are taking by force only half of every added dollar he earns rather than all of it.  In fact, a paper by Peter Diamond (MIT) and Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley) is making its rounds among the Progressive Elitists now that claims that the correct marginal tax on high income people is 73%.  I frankly cannot understand how they so deceive themselves that taking half or 73% of every additional hour worked from someone is not the moral equivalent of slavery.

Most slave owners in the Antebellum South allowed their slaves to spend a few hours working in their own gardens to grow some of their own food.  Did this mean that they were really not slaves because the slaveholder did not have them in his cotton or rice fields 100% of the time?  The Progressive Elitist might argue that they only make slaves of those who choose to be very productive in the marketplace, so if you participate in the market you are choosing to be a slave.  Of course they fear to be that honest, but they do say that if you make a lot of money you are choosing to pay the progressive taxes.

Yet, the person who spends time on other values, such as watching TV, going fishing, running, or spending time with friends or family is not taxed in any way.  That is not fair.  If it is right to progressively tax the person who chooses to spend time making money, then it is unfair to give the person who could have made money, but did not, a tax deduction for the money he failed to make.  Fairness demands that he be taxed for the value of his time that he spent in a different choice of values.  Yet, government knows that people will not stand for it to discourage other values such as time with family with a tax, so it acts in a manifestly unfair way on those who spend productive time making money through voluntary trades with others.  It does this even though it is generally recognized, even by Pearlstein, that such economic activity has done wonders in improving the standard of living for almost everyone, even the inveterate TV watcher.

Pearlstein's characterization of the market as much more free than it is provides him with some of his arguments that free markets do not work so well.  He also treats the arguments of people like Allison  unfairly.  For instance, he says

The conservative case against regulation, for example, is premised on the proposition that everything that has gone wrong with the markets is the government's fault.

 Well no, free market advocates realize that many businesses will fail in a perfectly free market and that there will be a business cycle in a free market with recessions from time to time.  They just object to the fact that government action in the market has the consequence of causing more business failures, more frequent and deeper recessions, and in the present case a recession that seems to have no foreseeable end.

Pearlstein claims that free market advocates say that

Because pursuit of self-interest is the essential ingredient in a market system, it somehow follows that individuals and firms are free to act as greedily and selfishly as they can within the law, absolved from any moral obligations.

I do not think there are many who believe they are "absolved from any moral obligations" in their actions.  Pearlstein in particular seems to imply that Allison holds this view.  I have not read his book, but the way Pearlstein describes Allison's viewpoint leaves quite a large leap to the conclusion that Pearlstein seems to impose on Allison's viewpoint.  I surely do not believe that a businessman is only morally obliged to obey the law and that he is morally allowed to otherwise act immorally.  Indeed, that is a clearly immoral viewpoint, which an advocate of Capitalism on moral grounds is most unlikely to make.  But Allison correctly notes that when government uses a heavy hand in making moral decisions in the marketplace, the many laws that claim to define moral actions and value choices in the marketplace will naturally become a substitute morality for many people.  If Pearlstein wants everyone in the market to act morally, then he should remove the government from the market as much as possible so that people will understand that they must act morally in the market, rather than just obeying the laws.  Government morality acts as bad money does to drive good money out of the market.

Pearlstein repeats the liberal argument that economic success often is due to dumb luck.  Some have the good fortune to be born with the right genes and the right parents, to grow up in a good community, to be better educated, to be better mentored, and to be at the right place at the right time.   They argue that the market should reward virtue, not dumb luck.

Well OK, we like to see virtue rewarded.  But, in a system in which market success means that everyone involved in a voluntary transaction has entered into it because he believes he is better off for having participated in it, how is anyone hurt if someone in the transaction was lucky?  Everyone still benefited.  We all want the freedom to be lucky, do we not?  We may be lucky in a business transaction one day also.  Or, maybe we were lucky enough to meet the love of our lives 40 years ago.  Apparently liberals believe that luck should be re-distributed also.  So, why is it only luck in financial terms to be redistributed?  Did I not realize a greater value in having the luck to meet Anna than someone else has had who is unhappily married for the third time?  As in the marketplace, virtues and luck both play roles in our love lives.  Luck is not something to be redistributed and rationed among us.  Our luck and misfortunes are generally properly beyond the reach of government.  Yes, we may well choose to recognize that some people have suffered more misfortune in life than others in our private charity work or contributions, but this is not a proper function of government.  Rightly, there is no grant of power for the purpose in the Constitution.

Pearlstein continues to argue against the perceived fairness of the marketplace.  He says that 20 years ago wage and salary earners reliably captured about 75% of the national income, with the rest going to capital providers.  More recently, labor has only received about 67%.  I expect there are reasons for such a shift that make sense.  One is that there is a decrease in union labor in the private sector.  Another is that there is an increase in the importance of knowledge and professionalism and both are more and more often tied to capital and the founders of businesses.  Still another is that complex law and regulation has insulated very large companies from upcoming competition.  Another is the huge influxes of taxpayer money to companies such as Goldman Sachs, CitiBank, Bank of America, GE, GM, Lockheed Martin, Solyndra, and A123 Systems in recent years.  Corporate welfare seems to be a staple of Progressive Elitist government even as it pretends it is not.

Pearlstein claims that 50 years ago, the typical corporate executive earned less than 50 times the pay of the average front-line worker.  He says the ratio is now 350 to 1.  He implicitly believes this is a statement that morality is defied here.  I expect he is comparing the few large corporations of 50 years ago in a much smaller US economy with today's corporations acting in a much larger US economy and in a much larger world economy.  If he chose to compare the mid-sized companies and large small businesses today with similar sized businesses by income of 50 years ago, the ratios would be much more similar.  That is, compare the ratio in a $100 million income company today with a $100 million income company of 50 years ago and the ratio will be much less dissimilar.  Neither 200 years ago, 100, 50, or last year did most companies even have a 50 to 1 ratio.  That ratio is a phenomena of size.

Pearlstein laments the fact that inequality of income in the market threatens to overwhelm the ability of a progressive tax-and-transfer system to keep up with it.  So yes, Pearlstein simply assumes that income equality is a requirement of a moral economic system, despite the fact that almost no one advocates equality in other aspects of our private lives.  His, and that of most Progressive Elitists, is a very childish moral code.  It is manifestly biased in the application of equality and it absolutely refuses to recognize that individuals are highly complex and differentiated.  It refuses to recognize that as a result, we make very different value choices and bring very different abilities to bear on acquiring the values we choose.  It just assumes that using force to redistribute income and wealth is good.  It just assumes that largely enslaving those who make good money in the voluntary and mutually beneficial marketplace is justified as for the greater good.  It also assumes that it is right and proper to redistribute luck, but only luck operating in the market.  What an absolutely weird, yet common, idea of morality this is!

A society with a very limited government whose only function is to protect our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and the pursuit of personal happiness is the only society in which people are free to be moral.  They are then free to be moral in the entire private sector of their activities, including that subset of economic activities in the market.  Capitalism is moral for the same reason that other human action dedicated to the free choice of values and the freedom to pursue them is moral.  Capitalism is moral because it allows these choices of value by each individual in the marketplace.  It is moral as an exercise in our individual right to freedom of association to cooperate with others as we choose for financial reward, just as in other aspects of our lives we are free to associate with others as friends and lovers and family.  Our labor belongs to each of us by right and we trade it with others in some cases for monetary gain and in other cases as part of a family to instruct a child or to do the dishes and laundry.  Government has no moral obligation to equalize any of the rewards that we get from exercising our freedom of association or the use of our time.  Indeed, if it tries to do so, it has violated our individual rights and done an evil deed.

USDA Makes Heterosexism Ugly

Most of us did not know that heterosexism does not describe those who practice or advocate the desirability of heterosexuality.  No, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Sec.Tom Vilsack, it means the belief that marriage can only be between one man and one woman.

I am trying to figure out where this idea comes from.  Does liberalism mean that only one man and one woman can enjoy the benefits of a liberal society?  Perhaps it does now, when liberalism seems to mean that one great socialist leader and his First Lady will rule the country and choose everyone's values and impose them on everyone using the force of government.  This was not the origin of the term liberalism, however.  Libertarianism still means that one favors liberty for all and conservatism still means one favors many traditional values, so most isms do not have a parallel to this new word heterosexism.

Why is it that sexism does not mean that one believes in the desirability of sex or that one enjoys sex?  No, in our strange new world, sexism means one is biased against those of one sex or another.  In this vane, one would think that heterosexism would mean that one was biased against heterosexual activities.  But no, heterosexists are according to the USDA advocates of heterosexuality.  This would be in keeping with the traditional use of words such as liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and libertarianism, rather than the screwy use of the word sexism.  But, the USDA says that heterosexism is not just in favor of heterosexuality, but that its essence is the denial of marriage to those who are not heterosexual.  I do not know why attitudes toward the marriage rights of others must be wrapped up in this term at all.  This is very strange.

But applying this rule to other words that ought to be of the same family, leads us to the conclusion that homosexism is the denial of marriage rights to those who are not of the same sex.  Bisexism is the denial of marriage rights to those who are heterosexual and to those who are homosexual.

The USDA is re-educating its employees against biases directed at those who are not heterosexual.  Of course, any government agency has no business being biased on the basis of sexuality in its hiring and promotions.  The USDA is going beyond this to attack certain ideas about marriage though.  Given that the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet ruled that states cannot discriminate in favor of heterosexuality in marriage, it seems a bit premature for the USDA to be framing those who oppose marriage rights for those who are not heterosexual as bigots.  Mind you, I think such people are bigots, but the government's courts and Congressional law have made no such determination.  The Obama administration is all in favor of discriminating against those who believe marriage should be reserved to one man and one woman, however.

Furthermore, the USDA does not make marriage laws, so it is pretty much irrelevant whether some of its employees believe marriage should be limited to one man and one woman.  Any effort to dictate that they cannot think this is an attack on the religious beliefs that many people hold and is as clearly wrong as would be USDA discrimination against the hiring of homosexuals or its attempt to re-educate them to become heterosexual once hired.

This USDA effort is in the context of a diversity and inclusion program.  It is being pushed forward by the Office of Personnel Management as a model for all of the other agencies of the federal government.  It will then be pushed upon the states and upon all government contractors.  In practice, such diversity training and incentives result in managers preferentially hiring and promoting two-fers.  They will be rewarded for hiring or
promoting lesbian women and homosexual Black men, while discriminating against heterosexual white males and even those who are only one-fers, such as heterosexual Black males or white females.  This leads to what ought to be seen as clearly unlawful and immoral discrimination.

To overcome the fact that this is such transparent wrongful behavior, it is useful to actually denigrate the word heterosexual.  It has to be converted into a put-down.  This has been done with white male as in "The Founders were just a bunch of white males, so their work was full of evil and discrimination.  Therefore we can dismiss the Constitution in its entirety, not to mention the Declaration of Independence."  The strangely defined word heterosexism helps to give the word heterosexuality a very negative connotation.  Defining heterosexism as evil and as a denial specifically of marriage rights helps to accomplish this important goal of the Progressive Elitists.

It will be interesting to observe in time if one sense of the meaning of Progressive Elitism becomes the belief that only Progressive Elitists are allowed to marry.  When that starts to happen, will most Americans see that as a new form of bigotry?  Or will they just accept the idea as a return to the aristocracy's natural rights such as they enjoyed in the Dark Ages and Medieval times?  After all, the Progressive Elitist believes most Americans are too stupid to choose their own values and to manage their own lives.  It is clear that they already think of themselves as the educated aristocracy who by right take care of the dumb and uneducated peasants, who should be treated just a little bit better than the pigs.  Maybe.  Many environmentalists and animal rights advocates among the Progressive Elitists believe most of the peasants should not be treated as well as the pigs or the snail darter.

As I have discussed many times, the government ought not to be in the marriage business.  If marriage is a spiritual union of two or more people, then it belongs in the private sector.  Government should only offer domestic partnership contracts and these should no more limit the partners than a small business contract does.  These domestic partnerships should be completely non-discriminatory, so long as the partners are only consenting adults.  See my prior discussions on the right to form domestic partnerships without government discrimination here, here, here, and here.  Marriage or domestic partnerships are surely relationships in which one should be completely free to exercise one's right to the freedom of association.

Capitalism: Freedom to Compete or Freedom to Cooperate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Right to Association with Others - The Right to Work and Hire

The equal, sovereign rights of individuals to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their own minds and bodies, and to pursue their own happiness are very broad.  Limitations put upon individuals by legitimate governments are few and strictly limited to the prevention of violence and fraud.  Among the most basic of an individual's rights are the right to work for a living.  Another is the right to associate with others for voluntary purposes, which includes such rights as the right to trade goods and services, the right to hire employees, the right to be an employee of another, the right to be a service provider, the right to be a customer, the right to use property to provide goods and services, the right to practice a profession or trade, the right to enter into a business partnership, the right to enter into a domestic partnership, the right to exchange ideas, and the right to enjoy friendships and romantic and/or sexual relationships.  The freedom to work and the freedom to associate voluntarily with others are very broad freedoms, which legitimate governments seek to protect.  On the other hand, illegitimate governments, which are much more common, seek to interfere with these basic freedoms.

Illegitimate government was defined in our Declaration of Independence.  Government which is destructive to the unalienable rights of the individual to, among other rights, the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is declared illegitimate and tyrannical.  The United States of America today is full of such illegitimate and tyrannical governments.  These governments feel especially free to interfere with our voluntary associations in trade, work, and cooperation in the following ways

• controls and regulations on the production of goods,
• mandates and limits on the employer - employee relationships, 
• the licensing of professionals and tradesmen, 
• the imposition of slavery upon employers to keep financial records and to keep tax records and file tax forms, 
• limitations on the exchange of services, 
• the dictation of who can be hired and who cannot be hired, 
• the unequal treatment of various domestic partnership combinations, 
• the denial of access to the market of very large companies, 
• the excessive burdening of small companies with laws, mandates, regulations, and paperwork,
• micromanaging safety issues not understood by governments in complex workplaces,
• micromanaging performance standards not understood by governments in complex professions,
• exaggerating safety issues to gain control and to reward special interests,
• exaggerating issues of potential fraud in the interest of control and to award special interests,
• discriminating against many professions with property taxes on their tools and equipment, which does not hurt government pets such as lawyers and accountants and actually increases their business,
• discriminating against many professions because some people believe they are immoral, such as prostitution or marijuana suppliers,
• discrimination against some people in education and the exchange of ideas,
• preventing those with little wealth or income from entering many professions or trades,
• using minimum wage laws to discriminate against the undereducated and the disabled,
• using minimum wage laws to discriminate against young people lacking previous job experience or those living in low-cost-of-living areas (popular with unions),
• limiting the number of companies providing services to bolster the income of those previously in business,
• as a change-up, forcing companies and associations to grant special privileges to unions, people of favored races, people with handicaps, and to governments,
• requiring people to purchase goods and services, such as the services of accountants and lawyers by businesses, health insurance under ObamaCare, seatbelts in cars, child safety seats, high mileage vehicle mandates, unnecessary radiation inspection services for fully contained radiation sources, 
• the regulation and taxation of fossil fuels due to unproven and scientifically wrong fantasies of man-made global warming disasters,
• subsidies for favored people, companies, institutions, and industries, such as the cake-taking ethanol, wind generation, and solar power industries,
• manipulations of the value of the dollar to favor financial institutions or exporters or importers,
• restrictions on foreign competition such as the Jones Act provisos against foreign-owned shipping,
• interference with railroad and trucking rate structures,
• bailing out companies with strong union ties, such as GM and Chrysler, at the expense of other companies and taxpaying consumers,
• the massive transfer of wealth from the private sector to governments,
• requiring the payment of labor union labor rates on government projects or by government contractors,
• crippling American businesses with much higher taxes and regulatory burdens than foreign competitors have,
• and interfering with or failing to ease restrictions on foreign trade, since every individual has the right to trade with others, even when they are in foreign nations.

Of course, many of these restrictions on the freedom of association and work are justified with claims that public safety or the prevention of fraud make them necessary.  These claims are commonly exaggerated in the interest of some special interest, often that of the politician to award his friends and contributors being the foremost special interest.  Fraud should be combated with vigorous legal action against actual instances of fraud, not by overly active imaginations conjuring up ways in which someone in a profession might defraud a customer.  These anti-fraud prevention schemes will always cause more trouble than they address.  They gain traction, however, because many Progressive elitists believe the People are too stupid to choose their own associations well.  The People are imagined to be defenseless against fraud.  Somehow, the government will anticipate every possible fraud and prevent it.  Or so it wants us to believe.  In fact, it is mostly just successful in keeping entrepreneurs from competing for the business of a nation of sovereign individuals.

One of the best organizations in fighting such abuses of governmental power is the Merry Band of Freedom Litigators at the Institute for Justice. They have a long and successful track record of attacking irrational licensing laws and other approaches to preventing people from working and earning a living.  Here is a recent example of their work:

As demonstrated by a series of eight new reports issued in October 2010 by the Virginia-based Institute for Justice, one of the principal obstacles to creating new jobs and entrepreneurial activity in cities across the country is the complex maze of regulations cities and states impose on small businesses.  IJ’s “city study” reports are filled with real-world examples of specific restrictions that often make it impossible for entrepreneurs to create jobs for themselves, let alone for others.

The Institute for Justice has documented how police in Pine Hills, near Orlando, used barber licensing laws there, to fine barbers hundreds of dollars who had years of experience as barbers, but no license.  These raids on unlicensed barbers were used as a cover to search for drugs without a search warrant, showing how a disregard for some individual rights commonly leads to a disregard for other rights.  They also found that in eight major metropolitan areas, nearly one in three professions requires a license.  In the 1950s only about one in twenty professions needed a license.  One of the best ways to reduce unemployment is simply to let people work.  No subsidies are needed, no tax breaks are needed, and no government-sponsored training need be provided.  The governments simply need to get out of the damn way and allow people to work!

My bullet list above provides reason after reason for why Americans are unable to find jobs or to create their own jobs now.