Posted on

Happy Birthday, Isabel Paterson

Screen Shot 2015-01-22 at 3.20.25 PM

 

Have you heard of Isabel Paterson?

She was born January 22, 1886, Manitoulin Island, Canada, and she is unquestionably the most underrated of all American political philosophers.

An autodidact and an extraordinarily formidable intellect, Isabel Paterson wrote many essays and books, but her best and most famous work is  The God of the Machine, in which she wrote, among other things:

Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion, and extinction; in the nature of things it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end…. Seen in this light, government is so horrific – and its actual operations in the past have been so horrible at times – that there is some excuse for a failure to realize its necessity (Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943).

 

From Brittney Little’s excellent article:

 

Isabel Paterson is undoubtedly not as widely known as she deserves to be. Of course, we all know Ayn Rand but did you know that Rand admitted she owed an intellectual debt to Paterson? Well, you see, someone had to teach Rand about the wonders of the free market, and that teacher was Isabel Paterson. Paterson led a young group of writers in the late 1930s, and she would stay up all night long answering all of Rand’s and Rose Wilder Lane’s questions.

Paterson, Rand, and Lane, are considered to be the three founding mothers of libertarianism in America. So besides tutor those two ladies all night, what exactly did Paterson do? Paterson is noted for being a journalist, novelist, political philosopher, and a literary critic. According to her biographer, Stephen Cox, Paterson is the “earliest progenitor of libertarianism as we know it today.” She wrote about free trade and opposed the major economic program of her time, known as the New Deal. Paterson was in favor of less government involvement in both economic and social issues.

Something even more amazing about Paterson is how she came to be the woman she was. Her only formal education consisted of two years in a log schoolhouse on Manitoulin Island in Canada. She moved to the United States when she was young and became a US citizen in Michigan in the year 1928. Even though she was only schooled for two years, she took her education into her own hands. She spent many nights reading classical poetry and literature, which seemingly treated her well. Many credit the lack of government schooling for Paterson’s courageous and unregulated thinking.

We can also look to her past to help understand her economic beliefs. She was raised in a very poor family and had to work at a very young age to help chip in. Her family often lived in tents, and Paterson spent most of her days as a waitress, stenographer, and even a bookkeeper.

(Link)

 

 

Posted on

Barack Obama Openly Admits His Antipathy Toward The Free Market

In so doing, Barack Obama also discloses for us again his arrant economic-political illiteracy.

Straight from the horse’s mouth — and it doesn’t get any plainer than this:




One would be wise to note here that there’s never in world history been a system of total unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, but the societies that have come the closest have prospered the most.

In fact, there’s an indisputable correlation between freedom and flourishing, which is why Hong Kong, a barren rock in the middle of the ocean, with virtually no resources at all, grew to such astronomical proportions in so short a time during the 20th century, and it’s also why America became the greatest civilization in all of human history in less than 200 years.



Posted on

Born On The Fourth Of July: America’s 235 Anniversary

On this day in 1776, America’s thirteen colonies broke away from Britain to forge a new nation free to govern itself. The guiding principle behind this new nation is stated very clearly in America’s foundation document — the Declaration of Independence — which says that all human beings by nature possess the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are instituted among humans to protect these rights.

I emphasize the word protect in this context because it was (and in many ways still is) a revolutionary idea: for in most lands, including America today, government is looked upon as a sovereign ruler of the people. But this was not America’s original intent.

The word unalienable means “that which cannot be transferred, revoked, or made alien” — and everything that has made America great is merely an elaboration upon this foundational principle.

The Declaration of Independence is not a treatise on political theory but a statement to the world of what the founders of America believed to be a self-evident truth: namely, that we each own ourselves and our property in full.

The language used in the Declaration of Independence owes much to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which states that the major function of government is to protect the life, liberty, and property of each person.

The framers of the Constitution indeed believed the legitimate functions of government to be merely protective, and not paternal. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The legitimate functions of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.”

In fact, politically speaking, those two things are at root the only possible alternatives: protective government or paternal government. (Even anarchy devolves eventually into a de facto government of one or the other of these two.)

America is for this reason a nation of laws: laws which specifically protect “against the instigation of aggression,” for it is ultimately only through aggression, or its threat, that the right to life and property can be infringed or abrogated.

The right to life, which is the fundamental right, is what makes America politically free.

The right to property, which is the only manifestation of the right to life, is what makes America economically capitalistic.

Capitalism is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness applied to economics.

Capitalism is the freedom to produce and to trade property.

It is of inestimable significance that of the many grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, a number of those grievances are economic.

Money is property, and private property is the crux of freedom.
Property is subsumed under the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: obviously, you cannot possess the right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness if you do not first possess the right to produce, keep, and dispose of those things which maintain your life and make you happy.

In this sense, America is correctly known as a country of negative rights.

What that term refers to is the fact that your freedom imposes no burdens and no responsibilities upon any other person except responsibilities of a negative type: you must refrain from violating the same rights in others.

Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

Rights are in this way compossible – which means: they can’t conflict since everyone possesses the exact same rights: specifically, the right to one’s own life and property – and only one’s own life and property.

Negative rights are the only possible way for each and every individual, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, to live freely.

Negative rights do not guarantee a set income. They do not guarantee healthcare. They do not guarantee a level playing field or a level training field. They do not even guarantee success or happiness.

They guarantee only that you are free to pursue success and happiness, and that if you achieve these things, they are yours unalienably. Which is to say, these things cannot be revoked or transferred.

That is the premise America was founded upon.

In other words, negative rights guarantee you the one thing most important to human life: the freedom to pursue your values. In America as she was originally intended, you are free to make of yourself whatever you can, provided you do not infringe upon the same rights in others.

The long war upon the principle of negative rights, which began before the ink was finished drying on the Declaration of Independence, is waged almost exclusively by those who, in one form or another, seek to replace negative rights with so-called positive rights.

Positive rights do not actually exist.

In fact, they’re a complete negation of rights and a contradiction in terms, since by definition positive rights are not compossible – which is to say that in order to be carried out, positive rights require the infringement of the rights of others. So that if, for example, whether or not you work, you possess (which in reality you do not) the positive right to a certain fixed income, it will necessarily require that someone (i.e. the government) takes money from someone else and gives that money to you, in order to provide you with your fixed income. The most obvious problem with this is that no one has the right to take money from any other person; for if someone did possess such a right, from whom would it derive?

Money and all other property may be lawfully taken only by permission.

Permissions are not rights.

Such is the nature of positive rights, whose fatal flaw is built into the very idea of positive rights.

This 4th of July, then, let us celebrate the principle that birthed the greatest civilization in world history: the principle of negative rights.

Happy 4th.


Posted on

The Sudsbuster

He was one of the mellow, the soft-spoken, the tawny-haired — one who preferred to be alone.

His name was Mark, a dishwasher at age 45.

He was a drifter, a loner. He valued his freedom above all; dishwashing jobs he could always find.

Our paths crossed and re-crossed at the Café Claire, where I was tending bar. The Café Claire stood on the outskirts of an industrial town, near the railroad tracks, beside his temporary home. Sometimes he’d sit at the end of the bar, before his shift or after, and drink black coffee. Sometimes he’d speak to me, and sometimes he would not.

He was a tidy man, and orderly. He organized things in an oddly geometrical way. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not use drugs. He was clean-living and in good shape, neither depressed nor its opposite.

He was single, without children.

And he was free.

He read a lot — novels and non-fiction — to endure, perhaps, the knives of lust that so frequently strike. He had the quietude of one who has gone a long time without sex.

His home was an efficiency apartment — a “hutch,” he called it — with good plumbing. (This mattered to him.) He dealt only in cash and he was good with his money. He saved, he moved on. Sometimes he worked on farms, sometimes he loaded and unloaded freight, sometimes he carried hod. But when I first met him and asked him what he did, he said “I’m a sudsbuster.”

So in the way of things, he would come behind my bar at times, when I was busy, and, without asking me, he’d wash my dishes. I loved him for that. He was fast on his feet and knew how to work around people, so that nobody was in anybody’s way. Buried in bloody marys and martinis, I’d glance over and see him plunged to his elbows in suds, his gold-rim spectacles, which somehow endeared him to me, filled with the burning bar light, his neat goatee damp with perspiration and pied with skeins of gray. Working with somebody in this way creates a deep and ineradicable bond.

Two or three times, I saw him outside work while I was in my car. Each time, he was walking alone along the railroad tracks, at dusk like some solitary figure carved from the coming dark. This was a grizzled landscape, a prairie desert of Euclidian perfection, full of rings and radii, vast yet traversed by a single road: an isolate highway humming day or night with Mack truck tires. The wind ferried tumbleweeds across the lion’s pelt land. Deadwood everywhere stood silvery-gray, like the moon above, and invariably whenever I saw him, a feeling of melancholy came over me, a melancholy for him, I am not sure why.

This, though, is not about pity or pathos, and Mark was not a person to pitied.
This, rather, is about one man out of many millions making his way
in the land of the free,
the USA.

Posted on

The Truckdriver

The trucker who lives next door is seldom home.

He’s a long-haul trucker, he’s over-the-road. He earns good money and does not spend. Something of the ascetical about him. He’s forty. His hair is long. He wears jeans and combat boots. Sallow and haggard, his face is handsome nevertheless. His willowy wife does not ride with him but stays at home. They have no children. The wife is solitary, long-legged and tan. She has a ponytail of sandy-brown. She smokes Marlboro’s. They do not rent but own. The wife spends hours in her garden, or she reads in her backyard. Her eyes are pensive. She waves to us but rarely speaks.

The trucker who lives next door arrives at unexpected hours, on unexpected days. Emerging from his rig, he has the leanness of a desert prophet about him. I imagine him eating very little while he’s out on the road. He transports the goods from north-to-south. He hauls the freight from coast-to-coast. He kisses his wife in the driveway. They hold hands and enter their tidy cottage together. They shut the door behind.

Sometimes, on holidays, his rig will sit for three or four consecutive nights along our residential side street. It sits gleaming in the dark. The trucker loves his rig; it is his home away from home. Once, in the middle of the night, I heard a gentle noise outside and crept up to the window. The trucker who lives next door was polishing his semi with a white cloth in the moonlight. The semi is midnight-blue and chrome.

Here on the ragged edge of this desert town where the ancient railroad tracks lie rusting in the grass, the frontiers begin. This is the frontier the trucker crosses and re-crosses year around. Our town is like many western towns, with its looping river and cauliflower clouds, its one Masonic lodge and the hard clean skies above, and in the distance, fields of clay where woolly mammoth once knelt down in the soft earth to die, and a billion bison bones fossilize in the ground. Beyond the backyards, the interstate curves off into the lonesome horizon, and the distant cars make very little sound.

Posted on

What Causes Such Shocking Poverty?

Did you know there’s never been a real famine in the United States?

One thing alone is responsible for that fact, and that one thing is this:

Private property rights.

It is the absence of fully protected property that creates poverty.

As the brilliant Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto puts it in his book — which I highly recommend — The Mystery of Capital:

Many of the poorest countries in the world possess enormous amounts of capital, but their ownership is insecure because of faulty or nonexistent property law or property rights protection. The value of private savings in the ‘poor’ countries of the world is forty times the amount of foreign aid they have received since 1945. [The citizens of poorer countries] hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles, cannot be used as collateral…

(This, incidentally, is also the fundamental reason that the Native American Indian Reservations exist is such a horrific state of grinding poverty: our good progressive government — right and left — doesn’t allow Native Americans to own property: i.e. they exist by governmental permission.)

Compare that to property laws in the west where, says de Soto, “every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy” (Ibid).

Private property is the crux of prosperity.

Please make no mistake about that.

And property, never forget, is nothing more, or less, than an extension of person.

The cornerstone of all socialist-Marxist theory, on the other hand, is, as Karl Marx himself famously put it, “the abolition of private property.”

When will this monstrous ideology and its legions of proponents and practitioners be at last held accountable for creating the shocking poverty such as we see in the photo above?

When?

[Laissez-faire] stands alone as the only feasible way to rationally organize a modern economy. At this moment in history, no responsible nation has a choice (ibid).

Posted on

Howard Zinn: Freedom Versus Equality

Howard Zinn was born on August 24, 1922. He died January 27, 2010.

Zinn taught Political Science at Boston University from 1964 until 1988; he was an American historian, of sorts, a self-proclaimed Marxist who, by his own admission, did not believe in objective history:

I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching….

Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.

Howard Zinn is probably second only to Noam Chomsky in terms of the neo-Marxist influence he wields, and in light of Howard Zinn’s recent revivification, which began just prior to his death, the History Channel aired a program called The People Speak, which was a documentary written and produced by Matt Damon and based upon Howard Zinn’s propaganda publication A People’s History of the United States.

Quoting from his People’s History:

“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history, because it uses wealth to turn those in the 99 percent against one another” (A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn).

That is Howard Zinn’s philosophy in compendiated form: Ninety-nine out of one hundred of us are not actually free, even if we think we are, because income inequalities exist.

Howard Zinn never seriously asked why income inequalities exist in the first place — at least, not that I’ve ever seen — but the answer to that question is this: not everyone possesses the same degree of talent, skill, and most especially, ambition. (This point, incidentally, was dramatized persuasively in the late Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.”)

Inequality is inherent to freedom.

Humans left free naturally stratify, as several famous experiments have demonstrated. Why? Because of the reason just stated: humans possess varying degrees of talent, brains, and most of all, ambition.

Freedom, of course, does not guarantee wealth; it does not guarantee success. Freedom is one thing and one thing only: the absence of compulsion. It simply means that you are left alone. Freedom means no entitlements, no minimum guarantees, no help (or hindrance) at all, no public education, no free health care, no drinking laws, no illegalization of drugs, and so on.

Howard Zinn did not pretend to be an advocate of liberty. He, like all postmodernists and neo-Marxists, believed that “social equality” and “social justice” are more important than freedom, and, accordingly, individual rights (particularly the inalienable right to your own property — i.e. your money) can be lawfully expropriated by the government and redistributed.

To this day, Zinn’s A People’s History remains a staple among academics and other leftists — despite the fact that it is the only “academic” history book that doesn’t contain a single source citation, and despite the fact that it was refuted long ago, and devastatingly so, by the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin in the pages of the The American Scholar (49). Here’s an excerpt of that refutation:

It simply is not true that ‘what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.’ It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. ‘Tet’ was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders (Dr. Oscar Handlin, The American Scholar, 49, 1980).

Ron Radosh has also very recently written an excellent article on Mr. Howard Zinn and Mr. Good Will Hunting.

Howard Zinn: 1922-2010

Posted on

Noam Chomsky

chomsky3

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky? I ask because, like everyone else in academia, I think he’s about the smartest man in the world.

Best,

D

Dear D: Which Noam Chomsky are you referring to?

The one who openly supports Hezbollah?

Or do you mean the one with proven neo-Nazi ties?

Perhaps you’re referring to Avram Noam Chomsky, so-called sage of MIT, who several times propagandized for Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge?

Perhaps you’re thinking of the hypocritical Noam Chomsky, who’s sanctioned many of the world’s other most murderous regimes?

Or perhaps you mean the Noam Chomsky who repeatedly distorts and falsifies his sources?

Do you by any chance mean the Noam Chomsky who’s simply another Marxist, telling a group, in December of 1967, that in Communist China “one finds many things that are really quite admirable” — stating furthermore:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The Noam Chomsky who then goes on to explicitly endorse Chairman Mao the murderer, calling Mao’s blood-red China a “relatively livable” and “just society,” speaking, not coincidentally, five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst famine in all of human history?

Well, perhaps this particular Noam Chomsky wasn’t aware that the sort of collectivization he supports, inherent to Marxism of any brand, was the principal cause of that horrific famine, which killed over 30 million.

Maybe, maybe.

And yet, quoting Chomsky’s own words:

I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this – and I think we should – we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.

I suppose that in the end, whichever Noam Chomsky you’re referring to, D, it makes little difference. A Marxist by any other name is still a Marxist — and that means this:

Chomsky is a devoted and lifelong advocate of authoritarianism and collectivism. He is for this reason an absolute enemy of individual rights and the freedom of each. And that, sir, is what I think of Noam Chomsky.