October 27th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
The worst thing regarding “Occupy Wall Street” and related anti-capitalist protests is that most popular defenders of capitalism—aside from Ayn Rand—do not understand capitalism well enough to defend it against the absurd arguments offered by public figures who support the chanting, mindless–and now violent–protesters.
Consider the arguments by union leader Arthur Cheliotes, music producer Russell Simmons, and leftist activist Sally Kohn in this confrontation with capitalist Charles Payne in Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street.
Cheliotes: Success occurs in a society because of the infrastructure of the society. Some people will excel. But we have to remember that there’s a whole matrix of things that happens. For example, government serves as a foundation on which commerce in a civil society is built. … Charles [Payne]’s individual success had a lot to do with the fact that that infrastructure was in place that gave him the opportunity to excel. …
My message is one of community. It says that if we all do well, then each individual can do well. But unless we all do well— [Interruption.]
As Charles Payne mentions in his response, this communal argument has been making the rounds among leftists such as Elizabeth Warren, (Democratic candidate for U.S. Sentate from Massachusetts), who said last month,
I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.” No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own—nobody.
You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory—and hire someone to protect against this—because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Then Russell Simmons spoke:
This argument, it is a fundamental, it’s whether or not we are part of a collective and if we should be responsible even— it goes all the way (?) to the health care, or to decent education, or people are suffering in poverty, should we be responsible for them? People out here believe we should be. And they believe that our government in some cases, should fund decent health care, a decent education, a decent opportunity. And there are others who believe—I did myself—but we know that that isolation he’s [Payne?] referring to is a sickness. And we as a society have to represent the people and the individuals, and not the corporations.
Then Sally Kohn spoke:
… The larger issue is, in this country, you can’t just work hard and get ahead and do well anymore. That used to be the American Dream. Now listen. … There are legal structures in this country that are enforced: your patents, your policy, they’re all enforced by our courts which we paid for. You drove, if you drove a product to roads, there are roads to be paid for. … All I’m saying is we should have an oppportunity for other hard-working people to do well. [Interruptions.]
…
Right now, the wealthy are paying a lower tax rate—
In defense of Charles Payne and all capitalists, here is my reply to all the nonsense that was thrown at him. (The style of my reply is deliberately colloquial and confrontational, as it is a response in kind.)
Unlike the Occupy Wall Street protesters, who revile the police and military and defecate on police cars, capitalists support the police and the military and the courts in the protection of individual rights to life, liberty, and property. Unlike the anti-capitalists, we capitalists support patent law and copyright law and contract law and all law that protects property rights. But I reject your package deal, your false assumption that because some government is good, all government is good. The part of government that I condemn is the anti-capitalist part: the welfare state, which is what four fifths of government spending—and all government controls—go to: public health care, public housing, public schools, public food programs, and so on.
Whenever government provides a service, you anti-capitalists take credit for it. You claim that society paid for these services, and you invoke the collective ‘we’. But who in society paid for the services? Most of the government’s money comes from robbing the rich. Most of that money is spent on the poor. And then you claim to have helped the rich. You rob my dollars and then brag that you give me dimes.
You argue about taxes as a percentage of income. That’s a smokescreen. A man who makes 50 million dollars a year pays more than a thousand times as much in taxes as does a man who pays 50 thousand dollars a year. Does the millionaire have a thousand times as many of his children in public schools? Does he receive a thousand times as much in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security benefits, food stamps, and public housing?
When you pay for groceries at the supermarket, would it be right and just for the cashier to say, “That will be 5% of your weekly income, please”? You don’t want justice. You just want. You want what we earned. You attack greed in the name of envy.
Yes, a factory owner benefits from having employees who are educated. But he pays for that benefit by paying a higher salary to educated workers than to non-educated ones. And if a capitalist chooses to invest in the education of his employees or prospective employees, he does not need the government to do it for him, and a lousy job of it at that.
A capitalist benefits from many individuals, not by robbing some and being robbed by others, but by trading with individuals by mutual agreement, by offering fruits of his labor in return for fruits of theirs. Yes, a small percentage of what the government robs from me and from other producers is spent allegedly to benefit me, but I would benefit infinitely more if that robbed wealth instead remained in the hands of us producers so that we could trade with each other for private roads, private fire-fighting, and—above all—private education. Don’t assume that robbing on my behalf gives you the right to rob. Don’t assume you may rob my dollars because you return me dimes.
When Charles Payne was poor, he benefited from the wealthy by trading with them, not by receiving government handouts paid for by robbing them.
You claim to help me, but you spend most of my money helping those whom I do not trade with, those who say they want to work but who want from me more than their work can produce. You hide the fact that these individuals do not want to trade but to take; you hide this fact by lumping these individuals together with the honest, productive individuals I do trade with, and then you give the whole lump the name of ‘society’. You try to give equal moral credit to all for the virtue of the most productive few. You try to ride our backs spiritually as well as materially.
You speak as if socialism held a monopoly on the idea of social interaction, as if capitalism meant isolation of each individual from every other. If capitalism meant isolation, then there would be no advertising, no Web sites, no bookstores, no movie theatres, no cell phones, no factories, no skyscrapers, no clothing stores, no supermarkets, no stock markets, no farmers’ markets, no markets, no agreements, no contracts, no trade.
Both capitalism and socialism are social systems; both entail society and social interaction. Under capitalism, social interaction among individuals is chosen solely by the interacting individuals by mutual agreement for mutual benefit. Under socialism, there is only forced obedience to the directives of the largest gang: the ‘majority’, a.k.a. ‘society’.
Under socialism, there is no looking for a job or taking a low-paying job as a stepping stone to something better, or any similar endeavor decried by so many of the Wall Street “Occupiers” who claim to deserve a high-paying job because they went to college (and learned less than nothing from their anti-capitalist professors). Under socialism, there is having a lifelong job assigned to you in childhood based on your genes. If you have good feet, you are made a dancer. If you show an aptitude for arithmetic, you are made an engineer—and no dancing for you, because ‘society’ needs roads. And if you seem ordinary, you are assigned an ordinary life.
Under socialism, there is no helping your own friends or loved ones or particular individuals you respect—there is no helping even your own children—because there is no money set aside for such personal preferences or personal judgments. There is no individual judging of individual virtue. There is only the collective ruling on who are the most in need.
The difference between capitalism and socialism is the difference between consensual intercourse and gang rape.
September 14th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
In the Republican Presidential debate on Monday, September 12, this dialogue occurred:
WOLF BLITZER, DEBATE MODERATOR AND CNN LEAD POLITICAL ANCHOR: … Ron Paul, so you’re a doctor. You know something about this subject. Let me ask you this hypothetical question.
A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, you know what? I’m not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I’m healthy, I don’t need it. But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it.
Who’s going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?
REP. RON PAUL, (R-TX.), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, in a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him.
BLITZER: Well, what do you want?
PAUL: But what he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not be forced —
BLITZER: But he doesn’t have that. He doesn’t have it, and he needs intensive care for six months. Who pays?
PAUL: That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks. This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody —
(APPLAUSE)
BLITZER: But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?
You can read Ron Paul’s unprincipled answer in the transcript. Here is my answer.
No, society should let you let him die.
That is, such a decision by right is for each individual in society to make. Your question reveals your socialist premise that decisions regarding whom to help live and to let die should be made collectively by society, overruling the rights of individuals. Your question also reveals how socialist schemes such as Obamacare require death panels, denials notwithstanding. Everyone dies eventually from current limits to health care. Resources are limited. If all the medical resources are controlled and dispatched by government, then government decides who gets medicine and who does not. Maybe the 30-year-old who needs a half million dollars of care will get care initially, until socialized medicine collapses entirely, but there will be some cut-off of age and expense for which the government will just say no. Consequently, no matter how much wealth an individual produces and wants to spend to save his 75-year-old mother, or very sick brother or best friend or wife or even himself, the government will just say “No, society cannot afford it, the lives of younger or less sick strangers, or strangers with more political pull, are more important.”
As for my own individual decision on this 30-year-old in a free society, would I pay for his emergency and let him off the hook? No. But I would consider investing in a private fund that made loans to such individuals, if the return on investment were attractive. The 30-year-old would in effect have to take out a mortgage without getting a house; and he would have to pay high interest for his uncollateralized loan, or he might even have to pay a high percentage of his income—say, 30%—for the rest of his life. Such a burden would be great; indeed, it would be more than half the current tax burden under the welfare state. But the man would have his life, his investors would have their profit, and everyone would retain that precious asset possessed by Americans: freedom.
For a far deeper and more original answer than mine above, see Ayn Rand’s essay, “Collectivized Ethics.”(The Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963, pp. 1, 3–4. Reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness, New York: Signet, 1964, pp. 80–85.)
August 8th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
The Republicans held out a little longer than I thought they would, but they capitulated in the end as I predicted (in a virtually riskless prediction). In return for a miniscule actual reduction in U.S. federal spending—estimated to be roughly $25 billion (from previously projected increases) in the current year, the only year that counts in Washington—they allowed the debt ceiling to be raised by more than $2 trillion.
Republicans claim to be against high government spending, but they are not against the cause of high government spending: altruism.
The only thing that the Republicans held out for is no increase in taxes on the wealthy. But that is the wrong thing to hold out for. Regardless of the amount of tax revenue, the amount of government spending is the amount of capital that the government exhausts. That capital is capital that the original owners of that capital cannot use. Who are the original owners of that capital—the poor? Who are the owners of Treasury securities that the government will not be able to pay off—the poor? Of course not. Deficit spending and inflation are another tax on the wealthy.
The current short-term capital gains tax rate is 25%. Consider this simple example. Suppose the annual rise in prices—caused by the government’s deficit spending and inflation of the money supply—is 4%. Suppose an investor realizes a paper profit of 6% on his capital for the year, which is 2% in real terms. But he must pay a capital gains tax of 1.5% of his capital (25% of 6%). In other words, he must pay a real tax of 75% of his real gain.
If an investor has a “bad” year and makes a paper profit of only 5%, then his real tax rate is 125%.
The Bush tax cuts did not help the wealthy, but merely changed the form of the tax.
Observe that in virtually every way—increases in government spending, increases in regulation of private industry, bailouts of private companies, stimulus plans, extension of entitlement programs, proliferation of czars, self-sacrificial police actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, betrayal of Israel, capitulation to Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—Obama is merely a more extreme version of George W. Bush. The only difference between the Obama Democrats and the Bush Republicans is on the issue of tax cuts for the wealthy. And that difference is really no difference. Either way, the wealthy are sacrificed.
The Republicans capitulated to the Democrats because they are just like the Democrats: they are sacrificers—sacrificing the producers to the nonproducers.
See also these recent posts:
Shared Sacrifice
“The Despoiling of Ability”
On the Backs of the Productive
What the Republicans Should Do
July 29th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
Declare that raising the U.S. debt ceiling is off the table. Present to the public a specific plan as to how the U.S. should prioritize spending of available cash: payments first for the military and veterans, then for Social Security and Medicare (but not Medicaid), then for creditors (except for hostile governments such as China and Russia). Tell the President that he must stop wasting his time thinking about a higher debt ceiling and that he must instead decide on his own plan for prioritizing spending. Acknowledge that the government has defaulted on its obligations many times in the past. Acknowledge that the government is bankrupt and cannot pay most of its obligations. Stop borrowing. Decide on an order of payment to creditors, and propose it to a bankruptcy court. Renounce and dismantle the welfare state, including Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, housing and housing loans, funding for education, funding for art and journalism, funding for science (other than for military purposes), minimum-wage and other labor laws, anti-trust laws, regulation of insurance, regulation of energy, regulation of transportation, FDA, SEC, NLRB, OSHA, EPA, etc.
Some critics of the Republicans claim that the Republicans must compromise, that they control only one half of one branch of government, and that therefore they cannot expect to have things all their way. But the whole purpose of America’s system of checks and balances is to make it possible for one part of one branch of government to say “No” and make it stick, and thereby put a halt to tyranny.
One of the better policies I have heard is this one from Rep. Steven King (R-IA), speaking about what would happen if the U.S. debt ceiling is not raised:
If Congress doesn’t put a prioritization bill on the President’s desk for him to sign, that—I will say in this order—pays the military first, services our debt second, Social Security third, and Medicare fourth, … then the President has two scenarios. One is he can do nothing and let all of his agencies do catch as catch can … which would be chaotic. The other thing he can do is set the priorities himself. And a responsible commander-in-chief sitting in the Oval Office would have by now assured the world financial markets and the domestic investors in American securities that he will service our debt and pay our troops. He’s not done that.
I would pay Social Security and Medicare before debt service, as I will explain later. More importantly, I would take Rep. King’s approach much further.
The Republican House of Representatives should declare that the debt ceiling will not be raised. It does no good to postpone the inevitable. The U.S. government is bankrupt. The official debt is more than $14 trillion dollars. But that debt is only a small part of the true debt. Unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Social Security, prescription drugs, etc. make the full debt more than $100 trillion. (See the U.S. Debt Clock.) That amount is roughly twice the total net worth of everyone in the country. Default is inevitable.
Some claim that the U.S. is solvent because of its ability to tax its citizens. The ability to tax citizens is not an asset; it is an M.O. (modus operandi). It is immoral to tax citizens in the present for the tyranny of the past.
Keep in mind that raising the retirement age for Social Security and/or Medicare is a default. Raising the retirement age from 65 to 70 is cutting the number of years of benefit payments from roughly 15 to roughly 10 (if people even manage to survive from age 65 to 70 without their Social Security and Medicare “benefits”); that’s a default of more than one third. Raising the retirement age is also increasing, by roughly 10%, the number of years that individuals must pay into the system. Finally, raising the retirement age is also delaying by five years the start of benefit payments. All of these defaults amount to a default on roughly half of the full promised payments; that is, these defaults are a “settlement” to pay out only 50 cents on the dollar.
Moreover, it is simply false that the U.S. government has never before defaulted on its credit obligations. (See A Short History of US Credit Defaults and All the Talk About Debt Default is Just Talk.) One egregious default, during the Administration of President Franklin Roosevelt, was the government’s default on allowing U.S. citizens to redeem their Liberty Bonds for gold at the rate of $20.67 per troy ounce.
In the past century, the government has debased the currency to the extent that one ounce of gold, which used to be equivalent to $20, now costs more than $1600. In effect, the government is paying out less than two cents on the original dollar.
Debasing the currency is a kind of default that is worse than a default on repaying a loan. At least a lender knows that he is incurring a risk, and a lender can choose not to make the loan in the first place. Debasing the currency is outright fraud and theft; it is defaulting on the promise merely to be a storage facility for citizens’ money, that is, for citizens’ gold.
Since default is inevitable, the government must decide three things:
1. What real assets does the government have that can be used to make partial payment to creditors?
2. What is the most ethical order of payment to creditors?
3. What should the government do to continue the government after default?
1. The main real, saleable asset in the possession of the federal government, as far as I know, is land. The federal government “owns” roughly one third of the land in the United States. This situation is a disgrace for a country based on the idea of property rights. The government should immediately begin selling all of this land, except for the land needed for national defense. The cash realized from the sale of this land should go into a fund for paying creditors, in the order described below.
2. The most ethical order of payment of past obligation is as follows. First is payment to veterans. Once this obligation is covered fully, the next in line are Social Security and Medicare. At the same time, all withholdings for Social Security and Medicare should halt immediately. Needless to say, no new obligations for Social Security or Medicare should be incurred. Once the fund for paying creditors is exhausted, Social Security and Medicare benefits should come to an end. I do not know how long the money from land sales can keep such benefits going, whether for one year or ten years. But whatever the duration, that should be that.
What debt should come next, if any money from land sales is left over? Next in line should be holders of formal debt instruments (such as Treasury bonds), except for hostile governments such as China, Russia, and Islamist governments (and government officials) such as Saudi Arabia. But the question is probably moot, because I doubt that there would be money left over for repaying any formal debt instruments.
Why should Social Security and Medicare recipients come before holders of debt instruments? Social Security and Medicare recipients were forced to pay into the system. They had no choice. Holders of debt instruments chose to lend money to the government.
3. If the government defaulted on its debt instruments, how would it be able to borrow again, and wouldn’t the interest rates charged to the government be sky-high? The answer is that the government would not be able to borrow again (for a long time), and would not have to borrow again; both of these things would be good.
What would the elderly do without Social Security and Medicare? I have good news for the elderly. Their children and grandchildren would no longer have to pay roughly 15% of their income into these fraudulent, tyrannical systems, and would therefore have more money with which to help their parents and grandparents if necessary. Social Security and Medicare do not change the mix of young and old; they merely force the young to pay for old strangers. What about the elderly who have no children? They probably had more opportunity to save (since they had no children to raise), but they also can rely on the charity of millions of Obama supporters, many of whom are very wealthy.
What about recipients of Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment payments, and other welfare programs? These people should continue to receive benefits—in the form of loans, not outright payments—for a few weeks or so, and then they should be permanently cut off, cold turkey. And they should not be allowed to vote again until they pay back the loans, with interest. These recipients paid nothing into the system (except for some small payments for unemployment insurance), and deserve nothing out of it. But I have good news for these people. With the repeal of minimum-wage laws, these people would no longer be prevented from earning an honest living merely because of having low earning power; they would be free to start at the bottom and work their way up. And with the repeal of regulations against business, these people would have much more opportunity for honest work. Freedom is worth far more than government handouts.
What about holders of worthless Treasury bonds? I have good news for them. There would be no more income tax, either on individuals or corporations. With the end to the welfare state, the government would need only one quarter of the revenue it takes from citizens today. And there would be no more fascist regulation of business. Freedom is worth far more than Treasury bonds.
What about China and Russia? I have good news for them. They can turn over their nuclear arsenals and weapons programs to the U.S., and think of all the money they would save.
What about Islamist states holding U.S. debt instruments? I have good news for them. They can drop dead and be with Allah.
7/30/2011: For the moral issue underlying the debt-ceiling conflict, see these recent posts:
Shared Sacrifice
“The Despoiling of Ability”
On the Backs of the Productive
July 28th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, speaking on “Fox News Sunday” this week, cited these statistics, which are remarkable though not in the way that Geithner meant:
And remember this country, this great nation with our great resources today, one in eight Americans are eligible for food stamps today. Forty percent of Americans born today are born to families eligible for Medicaid. The idea that you can ask the American people to balance this budget on the backs of the elderly and the most vulnerable with no burden through tax reforms on the most fortunate Americans is fundamentally unacceptable.
Who are on whose backs?
Note Geithner’s phrase “this great nation with our great resources.” Evidently, Geithner means this phrase literally: that the resources of individual Americans belong to the nation.
Note also Geithner’s words “vulnerable” and “fortunate.” These words evade the crucial issue: Who produced the “great resources”? Who has a right to them?
Geithner’s choices of words are no accident. They reflect a philosophy that permeates the Obama Administration and Obama: that wealth and poverty are matters of luck, that therefore all resources morally belong to society, that therefore the wealthy are a burden to the poor, and that therefore the government must even out the luck and the burden by taking from the rich (the lucky) and giving to the least able to survive on their own (the most vulnerable).
Marx’s phrase, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” though evil, at least acknowledges openly that it is men of ability who produce wealth.
Geithner’s notion is less honest and more depraved: From each according to his fortune, to each according to his inability.
That no Republican ever challenges these notions is why the Republicans cannot win the current conflict over the budget and the debt ceiling, and cannot save America from eventual collapse.
July 23rd, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
As if having read my blog (Shared Sacrifice) from Tuesday and reprising his role as the villain, President Obama said this yesterday:
Look, I want everybody in America to do well. I want everybody to have a chance to become a millionaire. I think the free market system is the greatest wealth generator we’ve ever known. This isn’t about punishing wealth. This is about asking people who have benefited most over the last decade to share in the sacrifice. I think these patriotic Americans are willing to pitch in—if they’re asked—because they know that middle-class families shouldn’t have to pick up the whole tab for closing the deficit.
So this idea of balance, this idea of shared sacrifice, of a deficit plan that includes tough spending cuts but also includes tax reform that raises more revenue—this isn’t just my position. This isn’t just the Democratic position. This isn’t some wild-eyed socialist position. This is a position that’s being taken by people of both parties and no party.
I have never heard Obama state that he wants to force wealthy people to pay more to the government. What I have always heard from Obama is the euphemism of “asking.” Of course, this euphemism is dishonest. And, of course, the government has been punishing the “wealth generators” since income taxes were instituted in 1913.
Obama is right that, as I wrote on Tuesday, the notion of shared sacrifice is shared by both parties and among most independents too. But the position is indeed a socialist position.
Instead of forcing or even asking the wealth generators to sacrifice, a statesman for freedom would do well to address the wealth generators with these words from Ayn Rand (1957, 739–740) in her novel, Atlas Shrugged:
The despoiling of ability has been the purpose of every creed that preached self-sacrifice. The despoilers have always known it. We haven’t. The time has come for us to see. What we are now asked to worship, what had once been dressed as God or king, is the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent. This is the new ideal, the goal to aim at, the purpose to live for, and all men are to be rewarded according to how close they approach it. This is the age of the common man, they tell us—a title which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has managed not to achieve. He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he will be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce. But we—we, who must atone for the guilt of ability—we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward. Since we have the most to contribute, we will have the least to say. Since we have the better capacity to think, we will not be permitted a thought of our own. Since we have the judgment to act, we will not be permitted an action of our choice. We will work under directives and controls, issued by those who are incapable of working. They will dispose of our energy, because they have none to offer, and of our product, because they can’t produce. Do you say that this is impossible, that it cannot be made to work? They know it, but it is you who don’t—and they are counting on you not to know it. They are counting on you to go on, to work to the limit of the inhuman and to feed them while you last—and when you collapse, there will be another victim starting out and feeding them, while struggling to survive—and the span of each succeeding victim will be shorter, and while you’ll die to leave them a railroad, your last descendant-in-spirit will die to leave them a loaf of bread.
There is much more to this passage, but I don’t want to disclose spoilers. The entire novel is an answer to Obama and his ilk. More importantly, the entire novel is a tribute to and celebration of the wealth generators.
As I write this post, there are signs that the Republicans will soon capitulate to Obama and agree to raise the debt limit and to increase taxes on the most productive Americans. It seems that some Republicans are being spooked by hints that credit-rating agencies such as Standard & Poors are about to lower the U.S. government’s credit rating, as President George W. Bush was spooked in 2008 by those who claimed that the economy would collapse into depression without the TARP bailouts.
But if the Republicans don’t cave in by tomorrow, I will write about what our government should do specifically about this debt-ceiling “crisis.” Hint: We should admit that the government has been defaulting in spades since Franklin Roosevelt, and that the government is bankrupt. We should not raise the debt limit. We should continue military spending and eliminate most of the rest (though we should continue Social Security and Medicare for another year or so—and no longer). But more than simply cutting spending, we must explicitly renounce the notion of the welfare state.
Reference
Rand, Ayn (1957), Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House.
July 19th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
President Obama and fellow Democrats use the phrase “shared sacrifice” so often that the phrase is now a standard term. I have not heard any Republican use the term favorably, but neither have I heard any Republican dispute the notion. The only argument I have heard some Republicans raise is that the Democrats are hypocrites, not truly wanting to share the sacrifice.
This failure to challenge the Democrats on principle is why I think it is the Republicans, including those in the TEA Party, who will capitulate in the current debate over increasing the debt ceiling. The Republicans will agree to increases in taxes, increases in revenue for government, and continuation of oppressive government regulations of industry.
In a free society, no one is forced to sacrifice.
In a free society, a man is free to pursue his own interests, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. Sacrifice is a barbaric notion.
Millionaires and billionaires, those heroes whom Obama derides, are already subjected to the sacrifice of far more than half their lifetimes in the form of taxes and regulations. The government might as well let these heroes live free until the age of forty or fifty and then murder them and plunder all their wealth. Sadly, we are headed toward the second half of that policy without the first, for the same reason that Germany got there in the 1940s.
Then there are many just below the tier of millionaire who work for many years at a job they do not love, for enough savings to pursue a lifetime of what they do love: an art, a craft, an intellectual study, a less financially lucrative but more personally fulfilling business. Instead of accumulating such savings by, say, the age of forty, these individuals may have to wait until the age of seventy. By what right, and to what kind of people, does society sacrifice the best years of the lives of these individuals?
For the most eloquent refutation of the notion of sacrifice, read Ayn Rand. For a taste, see the quotations on the right panel of the home page of this blog.
July 4th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
Today I celebrated Independence Day by reading the Declaration of Independence and some pages of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Anyone who wonders about the connection is invited to read the right-hand column of the home page of this blog.
Second Renaissance Books once published a tear-off calendar, “Ayn Rand Quote of the Day • 1995.” Here is the entry for July 4:
The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law.
The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history. —The Virtue of Selfishness
{Rand [1963] 1964, 93.}
Reference:
Rand, Ayn ([1963] 1964), “Man’s Rights”, The Objectivist Newsletter 2(4): 13–14, 16. Reprinted in The Virtue of Selfishness, New York: Signet, 92–100.
June 29th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
I have just completed a revised and expanded version (80 pages, double-spaced) of my paper, “Past Longevity as Evidence for the Future”; it is available online here. (Update, 7/31/2011: This work is now available as an eBook; see here.) The original version was published in Philosophy of Science in 2009. Here is a one-sentence summary of the new version:
The Doomsday Argument, Self-Sampling Assumption, and Self-Indication Assumption are wrong; Gott’s delta t argument underestimates longevity, providing lower bounds on probabilities of longevity, and is equivalent to Laplace’s Rule of Succession; but Non-Parametric Predictive Inference based on the work of Hill and Coolen is consistent with a plausible theory of induction.
The paper explains what all these specialized terms mean, and assumes no prior knowledge of the literature on this topic. But the paper is technical; it assumes knowledge of probability theory and basic calculus.
The new version corrects some minor errors in the original, and it makes my refutation of the Doomsday Argument—a controversial thesis claiming that the risk of extinction of the human race is much greater than had been thought previously—more elegant. In my judgment, my refutation is definitive. Nevertheless, the following statement I made about the original paper still holds for the revised version: “Far more important than what the paper argues against is what the paper argues for: an objective means for using knowledge of the past as evidence for the future.” In my judgment, the methodology that I defend in the paper forms the basis of a calculus of induction.
In the paper, I build on Ayn Rand’s identification of characteristics as ranges of measurement ([1966] 1990, 6–11). For example, the color red is a range of measurements of frequency of light. Now suppose that I have selected a number—call the number n—of pebbles randomly from a bunch of pebbles that I know were created by a similar process, and I have observed all n pebbles to be red in color. The probability that the frequency of visible light reflected by the next pebble will be the highest among all the pebbles sampled is 1/(n+1). Therefore, the probability that the next pebble examined will be red is greater than or equal to n/(n+1).
Survival too is a characteristic. Survival of a species can be thought to persist so long as a measurement of danger to the species remains below a certain threshold value. If the species has survived for a million years, then the measurement of danger has been below that threshold for each of those years. In the absence of any trends or cumulative dangers, and in the absence of any knowledge of the degree of risk except that the degree of risk is constant, the probability that the measurement of danger in the coming year will be the highest on record is 1/1,000,001. Therefore, the probability of extinction in the coming year is less than or equal to 1/1,000,001.
This general line of reasoning (though not applied specifically to the question of the longevity of the human race), which I arrived at from the lead from Ayn Rand, was developed earlier in the field of statistics in a chain of gradual advances beginning with Harold Jeffreys (1932), continuing with Bruce M. Hill (1968) and culminating with Frank P.A. Coolen (1998). (See my paper for more references.) Statisticians such as Frank Coolen have taken these ideas even further. One contribution of my paper is to provide some further philosophic defense of and guidelines for the overall approach.
Of course I make no claim that Ayn Rand would have endorsed my line of reasoning. Thinkers attempting to build on the work of Ayn Rand hold widely divergent ideas on induction.
Though presenting a correct theory or even a promising one is more important than refuting a false one, there also is value in refuting the Doomsday Argument. The argument, along with numerous offshoots and related arguments sometime referred to collectively as ‘anthropic’ arguments, has been the subject of intense discussion and debate among philosophers and scientists for nearly three decades. (See my paper for numerous references.) Wikipedia lists the Doomsday Argument as one of ten “Unsolved problems in statistics.”
Moreover, the Doomsday Argument has been used to further an environmentalist agenda. Consider, for example, the following excerpt—which does a good job of giving a non-technical summary of the Doomsday Argument—from an article in the popular magazine Discover in 2000, when the magazine was owned by Disney:
… 99 percent of all species that ever lived have gone extinct, including every one of our hominid ancestors. In 1983, British cosmologist Brandon Carter framed the “Doomsday argument,” a statistical way to judge when we might join them. If humans were to survive a long time and spread through the galaxy, then the total number of people who will ever live might number in the trillions. By pure odds, it’s unlikely that we would be among the very first hundredth of a percent of all those people. …
Human activity is severely disrupting almost all life on the planet, which surely doesn’t help matters. The current rate of extinctions is, by some estimates, 10,000 times the average in the fossil record. At present, we may worry about snail darters and red squirrels in abstract terms. But the next statistic on the list could be us.
My refutation of the Doomsday Argument can be summarized as follows. The Doomsday Argument conflates the ideas of total duration and future duration. That is, the Doomsday Argument’s Bayesian formalism is stated in terms of total duration, but all attempted real-life applications of the argument—with one exception, an application by Gott—actually plug in prior probabilities for future duration. Moreover, the Doomsday Argument’s ‘Self-Sampling Assumption’—which claims that one’s temporal birth rank among all N humans ever to be born is equally likely to have been any number from 1 to N—contradicts the prior probability density functions for past and future duration in all realistic scenarios including all realistic scenarios presented by defenders of the Doomsday Argument.
In my original paper, I write, “If the Doomsday Argument and the Self-Sampling Assumption are to be rejected, they must be rejected for the right reason, lest a hidden baby be thrown out with the bathwater—especially since that hidden baby might be the ability to assess the future from the past.” In my new version, I write also, “Not only are the Doomsday Argument and the Self-Sampling Assumption false, but they also obscure the real prior probability assessments that one might have about an uncertain past, and they obscure the real manner in which learning more about the past can indeed update one’s probability assessments regarding the future.”
References
Coolen, Frank P.A. (1998), “Low Structure Imprecise Predictive Inference For Bayes’ Problem”, Statistics & Probability Letters 36: 349-357.
Hill, Bruce M. (1968), “Posterior Distribution of Percentiles: Bayes’ Theorem for Sampling from a Population”, Journal of the American Statistical Association 63: 677-691.
Jeffreys, Harold (1932), “On the Theory of Errors and Least Squares”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series A, 138: 48-55.
Rand, Ayn ([1966] 1990), “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology” [Part I], The Objectivist 5(7): 1-11. Reprinted in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Expanded Second Edition. Edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff. New York: Meridian: 1-18.
June 20th, 2011 by Ron Pisaturo
Behold the mind-boggling irrationality of those directing American foreign policy.
Today on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked a guest, “As you leave office, how much of a disappointment is it to you that Iran still [has] an active nuclear weapons program?” The guest replied,
Well, I think it’s an ongoing problem for the world, not just for the United States. I think that Iran with a nuclear weapon is extremely destabilizing. I think it could precipitate a nuclear arms race in the region. I think we haven’t thought through all of the consequences—or we haven’t talked enough about the consequences of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
The guest who made this statement was U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
If our defense leaders, presumably President Obama included, “haven’t thought through all of the consequences … of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons,” what possibly could they be doing that is more important? Though Russia and China are the most powerful potential foreign threats to America, Iran is currently America’s main enemy in the world. Iran is committed to destroying the United States and has already murdered countless Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon (through Hezbollah), and elsewhere.
On the other hand, if Gates and his associates—including our President—do not already know “the consequences of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons,” they could think about such consequences non-stop for the rest of their lives and still not know. The consequences are obvious to any rational individual. If Iran acquires deliverable nuclear weapons one day, Iran will use those weapons against Israel and/or the United States by the next day. Iran considers mass murder a great victory, no matter what happens to Iranians.
Gates ended his answer to Chris Wallace with this statement:
But my hope is that we can find a peaceful way to persuade these guys this is in their interest.
When do mass murderers respond reasonably to peaceful persuasion? When do mass murderers act in their rational interest? In particular, when have the leaders of Iran ever acted in a manner that Gates would regard as “in their interest”?
On September 16, 2007, when he was Defense Secretary in the Bush Administration, Gates appeared on Fox News Sunday and said this:
I will tell you that I think that the administration believes at this point that continuing to try and deal with the Iranian threat, the Iranian challenge, through diplomatic and economic means is by far the preferable approach. That’s the one we are using.
Since then, many more American soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan through Iranian support.
This havoc has been caused with weapons such as “Iranian-produced advanced rockets, sniper rifles, automatic weapons, and mortars.” Imagine what havoc Iran would cause with nuclear weapons. But such consequences have not been “thought through” by America’s leaders.
