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).
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.
Eric Arthur Blair — A.K.A. George Orwell — 1903-1950
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, “and when there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
I confess I myself sometimes feel like that cuttlefish spurting out ink, but that’s perhaps beside the point. The quoted line is from a timeless essay George Orwell wrote in 1946 called “Politics and the English Language,” which essay, like George Orwell himself, influenced many writers, at least one of whom later went out of her way to deny any influence.
In his essay, George Orwell rather convincingly makes the surprising argument that there’s a direct and demonstrable link between politics and poor writing, between governments and the degeneration of language.
How so?
Because, says George Orwell, and I agree, all issues are at root political issues, and “politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”
His essay is a fascinating read — I can assure you not boring even to those uninterested in politics — and what one finds perhaps most striking about it is that it touches upon the profound connection that exists between thought and language, between the proper use of words and clarity in thinking.
Pretentious diction, dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, these are the cardinal sins he catalogs and condemns — “an accumulation of stale phrases chokes like tea leaves blocking a sink” — whereas, on the other hand, the scrupulous writer, in every sentence she or he writes, will ask four basic questions:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And then probably two more:
1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Generally I’m wary of the overly proscriptive, and this essay does have a little of that stench about it. Yet it’s so thoughtful and so well-written that it’s faults are overshadowed.
It was not brilliant, but it was good. There were flaws — things I would have done differently and a few scenes that annoyed me — but the movie was sincere, and I thought that on a certain level it succeeded.
The left, meanwhile, is in a cold sweat over the impact this movie might have on the American people and on Barack Obama’s chances at reelection, and so the leftwing media has embarked upon a propaganda campaign: savaging this movie — and Ayn Rand — so severely that I had to see for myself what the movie was actually like. So I drove by myself eighty miles (one way) to watch it, and when it was all over, I didn’t regret it.
The real star of the show is the actress Taylor Schilling, who manages to make the not-entirely-convincing Dagny Taggart into a convincing and, from my perspective, entirely likable character. My leftist readers will be throwing up their hands over this, but that means nothing to me.
Let me also say, just for the record, that I am neither an Objectivist, nor a disciple or devotee of Ayn Rand. But I do have one very vital thing in common with her:
I do not believe that it is legitimate for any government or any person to initiate the use of force or aggression against any other human being.
The left is, as mentioned, in hysterics over this movie, though for no very intelligible reason. It is the left, you see, that traditionally prides itself upon tolerance and peacefulness, and yet it’s the left that finds itself in the horribly awkward position of having to defend now the indefensible notion that the initiation of force is okay: we may expropriate your property and we may take your money by force because, understand, it is for the good of the poor, and the state may enforce the morality that the state deems appropriate, agree or disagree.
But the initiation of force is not okay — ever — and Atlas Shrugged The Movie captures this.
As an addendum, let me say one final thing:
I’ve read now several accounts of this movie, and there isn’t a single one I know of that’s done an accurate or fair job of recapitulating Ayn Rand’s actual views. By far, the most widespread and misbegotten error in every recapitulation I’ve come across is the banal belief that capitalism caused the current financial crisis.
This popular piece of propaganda is so painfully easy to disprove that the only real wonder here is how anyone could actually believe it in the first place. The economist Dr. George Reisman demolished that rubbish in an article he wrote over two years ago, which article he graciously gave me permission to reprint in my book Leave Us Alone. His essay is a brief but unanswerable piece, and I reprint it here in response to all those journalists and bloggers out there who don’t have a clue what capitalism actually is, and who don’t have the wherewithal to find out:
The Myth that Laissez Faire is Responsible for Our Financial Crisis
by George Reisman
The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism.
The attempt to place the blame on laissez faire is readily confirmed by a Google search under the terms “crisis + laissez faire.” On the first page of the results that come up, or in the web entries to which those results refer, statements of the following kind appear:
“The mortgage crisis is laissez-faire gone wrong.”
“Sarkozy [Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France] said ‘laissez-faire’ economics, ‘self-regulation’ and the view that ‘the all-powerful market’ always knows best are finished.”
“America’s laissez-faire ideology, as practiced during the subprime crisis, was as simplistic as it was dangerous,” chipped in Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister.”
“Paulson brings laissez-faire approach on financial crisis.”
“It’s au revoir to the days of laissez faire.”
Recent articles in The New York Times provide further confirmation. Thus one article declares, “The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal….”
Another article tells us, “For 30 years, the nation’s political system has been tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.”
In a third article, a pair of reporters assert, “Since 1997, Mr. Brown [the British Prime Minister] has been a powerful voice behind the Labor Party’s embrace of an American-style economic philosophy that was light on regulation. The laissez-faire approach encouraged the country’s banks to expand internationally and chase returns in areas far afield of their core mission of attracting deposits.”
Thus even Great Britain is described as having a “laissez-faire approach.”
The mentality displayed in these statements is so completely and utterly at odds with the actual meaning of laissez faire that it would be capable of describing the economic policy of the old Soviet Union as one of laissez faire in its last decades. By its logic, that is how it would have to describe the policy of Brezhnev and his successors of allowing workers on collective farms to cultivate plots of land of up to one acre in size on their own account and sell the produce in farmers’ markets in Soviet cities. According to the logic of the media, that too would be “laissez faire” – at least compared to the time of Stalin.
Laissez-faire capitalism has a definite meaning, which is totally ignored, contradicted, and downright defiled by such statements as those quoted above. Laissez-faire capitalism is a politico-economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and in which the powers of the state are limited to the protection of the individual’s rights against the initiation of physical force. This protection applies to the initiation of physical force by other private individuals, by foreign governments, and, most importantly, by the individual’s own government. This last is accomplished by such means as a written constitution, a system of division of powers and checks and balances, an explicit bill of rights, and eternal vigilance on the part of a citizenry with the right to keep and bear arms.
Under laissez-faire capitalism, the state consists essentially just of a police force, law courts, and a national defense establishment, which deter and combat those who initiate the use of physical force. And nothing more.
The utter absurdity of statements claiming that the present political-economic environment of the United States in some sense represents laissez-faire capitalism becomes as glaringly obvious as anything can be when one keeps in mind the extremely limited role of government under laissez-faire and then considers the following facts about the present-day United States.
1) Government spending in the United States currently equals more than forty percent of national income, i.e., the sum of all wages and salaries and profits and interest earned in the country. This is without counting any of the massive off-budget spending such as that on account of the government enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nor does it count any of the recent spending on assorted “bailouts.” What this means is that substantially more than forty dollars of every one hundred dollars of output are appropriated by the government against the will of the individual citizens who produce that output. The money and the goods involved are turned over to the government only because the individual citizens wish to stay out of jail. Their freedom to dispose of their own incomes and output is thus violated on a colossal scale. In contrast, under laissez-faire capitalism, government spending would be on such a modest scale that a mere revenue tariff might be sufficient to support it. The corporate and individual income taxes, inheritance and capital gains taxes, and social security and Medicare taxes would not exist.
2) There are presently fifteen federal cabinet departments, nine of which exist for the very purpose of respectively interfering with housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce, and virtually all of which nowadays routinely ride roughshod over one or more important aspects of the economic freedom of the individual. Under laissez faire capitalism, eleven of the fifteen cabinet departments would cease to exist and only the departments of justice, defense, state, and treasury would remain. Within those departments, moreover, further reductions would be made, such as the abolition of the IRS in the Treasury Department and the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice.
3) The economic interference of today’s cabinet departments is reinforced and amplified by more than one hundred federal agencies and commissions, the most well-known of which include, besides the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the FBI and CIA, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, FEMA, FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, and NASA. Under laissez-faire capitalism, all such agencies and commissions would be done away with, with the exception of the FBI, which would be reduced to the legitimate functions of counterespionage and combating crimes against person or property that take place across state lines.
4) To complete this catalog of government interference and its trampling of any vestige of laissez faire, as of the end of 2007, the last full year for which data are available, the Federal Register contained fully seventy-three thousand pages of detailed government regulations. This is an increase of more than ten thousand pages since 1978, the very years during which our system, according to one of The New York Times articles quoted above, has been “tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.” Under laissez-faire capitalism, there would be no Federal Register. The activities of the remaining government departments and their subdivisions would be controlled exclusively by duly enacted legislation, not the rule-making of unelected government officials.
5) And, of course, to all of this must be added the further massive apparatus of laws, departments, agencies, and regulations at the state and local level. Under laissez-faire capitalism, these too for the most part would be completely abolished and what remained would reflect the same kind of radical reductions in the size and scope of government activity as those carried out on the federal level.
What this brief account has shown is that the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state than to laissez-faire capitalism. The ability of the media to ignore all of the massive government interference that exists today and to characterize our present economic system as one of laissez-faire and economic freedom marks it as, if not profoundly dishonest, then as nothing less than delusional.
Beyond all this is the further fact that the actual responsibility for our financial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created by producing and saving. This is a policy it has pursued since its founding, but with exceptional vigor since 2001, in its efforts to overcome the collapse of the stock market bubble whose creation it had previously inspired….
In 1943, a lady by the name of Rose Wilder Lane published a book called The Discovery of Freedom. It’s an absolutely original work of non-fiction, a salvo to human energy and the creative mind unshackled, and it influenced classic liberals beyond number — and yet it has largely gone unacknowledged.
“Rose Wilder Lane sought to highlight the difference it made in America that the individual was permitted freedom from government authority. The Americans broke from the idea that dominated all over human history that they must depend on some overarching authority in government to grant them well being, and thus when good happens, we owe ever more to the powers that be.”
Quoting a Canadian writer named Jeff Walker:
Dozens of motifs and expressions to be found later in [libertarian and classic liberal writers] are sprinkled all throughout The Discovery of Freedom. Some of her favorite words and phrases, like “sunlit,” “standard of value,” “life on this earth,” “stagnation,” “non-contradiction,” “static universe,” and countless others dot Discovery’s landscape. The same goes for themes that [classic liberals got] from Wilder, completely unacknowledged, such as: the counterproductivity of government planning; the case for limited government; the factual nature of morality; that contradictions cannot exist in reality; that words have an exact meaning; that human rights cannot exist without property rights.
Rose Wilder Lane was also unveiled in the 1990s as the true author of the Little House on the Prairie series, normally attributed to her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder. But it is for her credo Give Me Liberty and especially The Discovery of Freedom that Rose Wilder Lane must not be forgotten. She was a fearless and exceptional woman who took on politicians, journalists, economists (like the great Ludwig von Mises, with whom she profoundly disagreed on the subject of Democracy), heads of state, and more.
