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Wall Street Protesters And Their List Of Grievances: Theatre Of The Absurd

The so-called Wall Street Protesters have posted a list of grievances, ostensibly to codify all the things they’re against, and if, heaven help you, you take the time to actually read that list — grammatical errors and all — I predict you’ll no longer be in any doubt that these people are truly Anarchists For Big Government.

Here’s an example, taken from their website:

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending “Freetrade” by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Why not just make the minimum wage $50.00 an hour? Or $100.00? Money, after all, doesn’t actually need to be produced. Businesses just have it. Therefore, businesses can pay any amount demanded. Also, as Ryan Young of OpenMarket.org articulately explains:

Take as true that importing goods across international borders kills jobs. Well, as a matter of logic, importing goods across state borders is no different. Oregonians should be forbidden from importing goods from Californians. Inter-city free trade has the same harmful effects. Consistency demands banning that, too. Even inter-household trade kills jobs under this line of thought.

And of course, one of the main things these protesters are against is “corporations” — this despite the fact that they don’t have any good idea of what a corporation really is.

As I wrote in Leave Us Alone:

Any business, no matter its size, can become incorporated.
Incorporated simply means that businesses draw up contracts, known as the Articles of Incorporation, which contain information about intended activities of the upstart business and also the intended financing. The state then issues a certificate of incorporation, at which point the certificate becomes an enforceable contract….

The present-day model of the American corporation began right after the Civil War, with the development of the trust movement. The trust movement was against the existing laws, imposed by the state, which made the formation of corporations extremely costly and difficult. It took a special act of legislation to deregulate, so that following the Civil War, this new legislative act made it possible for private corporations to combine with one another, via stockholders, turning their shares to “trustees.” This is all private, contractual, and voluntary.

Under the trust arrangement, stockholders of separate corporations can and will turn their shares over to trustees, who then have the power to vote the shares and run the incorporated business. By assembling the shares into the hands of the same trust, it’s possible and perfectly legitimate to run the corporation as a single unit.

The protesters have said (and I quote): “We’re tired of Big Money dictating what [government] programs get funded.”

Really? Is Big Money, then, funding over two-thirds of the federal budget that’s spent on social security, medicare/medicaid, unemployment checks, welfare, food stamps, public schools, and so much more (all of which, incidentally, dwarf national defense spending)?

The answer is no. We the taxpayers are funding these profligate and endless programs, which the Wall Street protesters are calling for more of.

Here’s another question I have: if corporations are so powerful and Machiavellian, why hasn’t corporate money stopped the above-mentioned federal spending — which spending, for the record, is what’s driving the crushing national deficit we’re all laboring under?

As Mark Levin sensibly asks:

• Who’s the biggest health insurer in the country?
• Who’s the biggest bank in the country?
• Who’s the biggest land-owner in the country?
• Who runs the biggest retirement plans in the country?
• And who alone has the force of law to force you to comply with their decisions?

Answer: the federal government.

Reader, make no mistake: the philosophical underpinnings of these protesters are socialistic to the gills.



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Atlas Shrugged The Movie

Actress Taylor Schilling
It was good.

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….

*Please read the rest of this article here.

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Earth Day

This year rather than celebrating Earth Day by advocating still more government bureaus, which will then determine for the rest of us what we can do with our property, let us instead celebrate the only real way to clean up and beautify the planet: private property rights and private stewardship.

From Chapter 2 of Leave Us Alone:

The right to property is, as James Madison said, “the guardian” of every other right. Freedom and private property are inseparable. Property is freedom: you cannot be free if you are not free to produce, use, and dispose of those things necessary to your life.

“Control the property, control the person,” said Lenin, correctly.

Property, like every other right, is first and foremost the right to act: specifically, it is the right to produce, exchange, and use.

“Property is not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth…. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner” (Electric Law Library).

Money is property.

The only alternative to private property is government or communal ownership of property, both of which amount to the same thing in the end: a bureau of centralized planners controlling the property.

If you desire to know precisely what someone’s political viewpoint is, all you need do is find out his or her stance on property; for it is through the stance on property that the entire political philosophy is disclosed. You needn’t listen to anything anyone says about “freedom” or “liberty” or any of these other easy platitudes: no one in her or his right mind will go against those things. Instead, simply check the stance on property. If someone doesn’t believe in full private property rights, that person is, to the exact extent he or she denies private property rights, a statist.

Property is the sine-qua-non of human freedom.

To defend freedom, therefore, you must start by defending the unalienable right to property.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government (James Madison, Federal Papers 10).

Government is instituted no less for protection of the PROPERTY, than of the persons (James Madison, Federalist Paper #54, emphasis in the original).

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management (Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval).

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings (Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours).

The political institutions of America, its various soils and climates, opened a certain resource to the unfortunate and to the enterprising of every country and insured to them the acquisition and free possession of property (Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms).

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence (John Adams).

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Vasily Grossman

The Russian writer Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in what is now the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. At that time, Berdichev was still part of the Russian Empire. Vasily Grossman attended high school in Kiev and then the University of Moscow. He graduated from University in 1929 with a degree in chemical engineering. He worked as an engineer for five years, after which time he devoted himself entirely to writing.

He published his first news article in 1928, his first fictional story in 1934.

During the middle and latter 1930’s Vasily Grossman was exceptionally prolific, and even more so after the start of World War II. At that point he became a correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda). He spent the entire war on the treacherous front, covering, in minute detail, the blood-soaked siege of Stalingrad. In popularity his war reportage was second to none (well, maybe one: the famous Ehrenburg), and Grossman is loosely portrayed by actor Joseph Fiennes in the inaccurate movie Enemy at the Gates.

In his youth and well into his thirties, Vasily Grossman was devoted to the communist philosophy. But during and immediately after the war, he became increasingly disillusioned with that socialist system, so that, starting in 1943, he began explicitly challenging the whole Soviet ideal — both for its repression of freedom and for its anti-Semitism.

His war fiction at this time also began to generate criticism from high Soviet officials. In a matter of months, thus, his writings were suppressed. Over the course of his latter years, Vasily Grossman became an outright opponent of socialism. His writings are, at times, not consistently, among the most eloquent expression of freedom of any person in any era.

Stomach cancer killed him in 1964.

What follows is a short passage from his last novel Forever Flowing. It is one side of a brief dialogue spoken, in part, by the novel’s protagonist Ivan Grigoryevich, who after thirty years of imprisonment has just been released from the Russian Gulag. I quote it as a tribute to freedom, to be sure, but also as a tribute to the man who came to understand the philosophical roots of freedom — and that in a country where freedom was not allowed; in a country where philosophies and freedom were replaced by blind obedience and dogma. It’s important that people like Vasily Grossman are not forgotten.

I’d like you to please think of the following passage the next time you hear, for example, an environmentalist talk about more centralized government and more government ownership of land for the sake of “our endangered environment.”

Please think of it next time you see someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt (or necklace) in glorification of Che Guevara’s communistic ideals, or romanticizing communist Cuba and Castro for their healthcare system, or Chairman Mao with the blood of billions on his hands:

I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.

Forever Flowing

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964)

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Reader Mail

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey! You are a true friend to the workingman, such as me. Your book Leave Us Alone should be required reading in our schools.

Don’t you get sick and tired of capitalism being everyone’s escape goat, like I do? The halls of congress are crowded with representatives of the “X” industry, saying The “X” industry is sick and dying. The “X” industry must be saved!! Only tariffs and subsidies can save the X industry, and if the X industry dies, workers will be thrown out onto the streets. But if congress acts promply (LOL!!) the X industry can be saved, and then it will buy equiptment from other industries, and more men will be employed. But congress once tried to “save silver” in just such a way to “help the East” when one of its results was to force China into deflation and force China off that basis? The United States Treasury was forced to acquire hoards of unnecessary silver to store in its vaults, at ridiculous prices, the essential aims of the “silver senators” achievable at a fraction of the harm by the payment of the frank subsidy to the mine owners or to there workers. But congress would never have approved a naked steal of this sort unaccompanied by ideological flimflam regarding “silver’s essential role in the currency” as with the Guffey Act under which the coal mines (in which I work) were not permitted but compelled to conspire together to NOT sell below fixed minimum prices fixed by the government. Though congress had started out to fix “the” price of coal, the government soon found itself (because of different sizes, 1000s of mines, and 1000s of different destinations by rail, truck, and barge) fixing 350,000 separate prices for coal! One affect this had of trying to keep coal prices above the competitive market prices was to accelerate the tendency by consumers toward the substitution of other energy sources such as natural gas and oil. If people didn’t expect to be feed off the government “teet” all the time this wouldn’t happen, I feel. Don’t you?

Keep up the great work, Ray Harvey!

John

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Depression Before the Great Depression

Martin van Buren
The following is Chapter 21 of Leave Us Alone:

Before the Great Depression of the 1930’s and 1940’s, there were a number of depressions and recessions in this country, two of the most notable being the Panic of 1819 and the depression of 1837. In every instance prior to the Great Depression, the government policy was essentially a policy of hands-off.

Which was exactly as it should have been, since depressions are not caused by the private sector but by government interference in the marketplace, and only that.

What were the results of these hands-off policies prior to the Great Depression?

Answer: a drastic reduction in the amount of time the depression lasted.

Let us reiterate and emphasize that the only way to create wealth and jobs is through production.

That is why capitalism, true laissez-faire capitalism, is the only possible way to end an economic depression or recession.

Government spending will always compound problems. Why? Because government can only obtain money by taxing or borrowing or printing.

Always remember: government by definition is not an agency of production: it is a mechanism of force. That is its defining characteristic.

Thus the money that government takes away from the private sector depletes money that would otherwise have by choice (as opposed to by coercion) been saved or spent upon other things.

Private money, in other words, is diverted from the capital sector into the hands of bureaucrats. Which is exactly the thing that exacerbates and prolongs the preexisting economic problem.

It is so very easy to spend money that is not yours, money that you’re not fully accountable for, money that you obtain through force or the threat of force. Whereas, on the other hand, cutting governmental borrowing and spending and taxation and printing, it frees private money and private resources, which in the end is the one and only thing that can produce genuine wealth.

Printing more and more money to cover the cost of government spending will only ever bring inflation. It can happen in no other way.

Economic law cannot be abolished, just as mathematical law cannot be abolished, and for the exact same reasons. It doesn’t even matter how many politicians wish to abolish these economic laws, or how charismatic the masses find these bureaucrats: economic laws will not be subverted. One might just as well try turning back the tide with one’s own two hands.

Here, then, is how to end a recession or depression as swiftly as possible:

Slash government spending.

Slash taxes.

Stop the inflationary process that fiat money (i.e. money printing) inevitably brings.

Deregulate private enterprises so that the private sector can function – which is to say, free the market so that businesspeople can start up businesses, produce products, and create more and more jobs.

That’s all there is to it. And yet it’s a pill that bureaucrats simply cannot swallow.

The depression of 1837 was the biggest depression this country had seen prior to the Great Depression. The good President Martin Van Buren and his administration did exactly the right thing: they stepped back and let the market correct itself, which indeed it did, so that the depression lasted less than a year.

Martin Van Buren stated in his inaugural address that he advocated a policy of laissez faire.

Two months later, the United States experienced a banking crisis. President Van Buren stuck to his guns.

“All but six of the nation’s eight hundred or so banks had ceased redeeming their bank notes in gold or silver, but in his first message to Congress the President proclaimed that his policy would be one of governmental retrenchment” (Dr. Thomas Dilorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America, p. 158).

In President Van Buren’s own words:

“All communities are apt to look to government for too much, especially at periods of sudden embarrassment and distress…. All former attempts on the part of Government to assume management of domestic or foreign exchange have proved injurious.”

President Van Buren added that the solution is “a system founded on private interest, enterprise and competition, without the aid of legislative grants or regulations by law” (James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1922).

It should be noted that Van Buren had to fight every step of the way against governmental intervention by such notable statists as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and the young Abraham Lincoln, all of whom remained statists until the day they died.

President Van Buren waged a tireless war for deregulation of finance, and he thereby created the Independent Treasury System in which all bank notes were redeemable in gold and silver.
In so doing, he brought this country the strongest and most stable monetary system it’s perhaps ever had.

President Van Buren also, in the words of historian Jeffrey Hummel, “thwarted all attempts to use economic depression as an excuse for expanding governments role.”

Conversely, interventionists like Henry Clay and his young protégé Abe Lincoln saw this economic downturn as a political opportunity to create pork-barrels for so-called internal improvements. Sound familiar?

These same statists also attempted to get the federal government to bail out the states, but President Van Buren fought them tooth-and-nail and eventually won; so that government spending actually fell during his term, and the debt remained steady, the free-market price system allowed to operate without intervention.

That is why the depression of 1837 lasted only one year.

That is why it never spun out of control, as today’s crisis has.

By refusing to pile up debt, President Van Buren thereby refused to drag out the economic downturn, which by necessity steals money from the private sector.

Compare that to, in the next chapter, the brief but by-no-means exhaustive list of extraordinarily destructive policies followed first by Herbert Hoover, who was an admirer of Soviet Russia and “believed that human manipulation could triumph over any alleged ‘laws’ of economics,” and then the even more brutal Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a discussion of whom will come in the chapter after the next.