Democracy. Democracy. We’re All for Democracy!

Communists, socialists, and fascists, as well as the usual American political suspects, Democrats and Republicans, have all advocated, and today still advocate, democracy.
 
The notion of a “soviet,” let me point out, was a locally elected communist council or committee, common in the USSR. Similar “elections” occurred in Maoist China. In World War II, the German people were “advised” to vote for the Nazi Party. And elections were also held in Mussolini’s Italy.*
 
Then, there are the “democratic socialists,” who seek to vote socialism into power. The problem with these “democrats,” as F. A. Hayek pointed out in 1944 (chap. 10), is that coercion, sometimes severe coercion, is required to implement the democrats’ policies, and lacking the will to coerce its unwilling citizens, ruthless dictators step in to put the Garden of Eden called socialism into practice.
 
The amount of blather today spoken and written about democracy approaches infinity. The word “blather,” according to the unabridged dictionary, means “to talk [or write] foolishly or nonsensically.” Somehow that word doesn’t seem accurate, and perhaps it is too kind. How about BS? Which means to talk or write in a way that sounds good to others, while not knowing or caring about the facts. You know, “Facts don’t matter, so I’ll just BS my way through.”
 
In today’s political context, BS is Goebbelsian propaganda. Say it loud and say it a lot, said Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief. After a while, even though there may be no factual basis for the blather—I mean, BS—uncritical readers and listeners will begin to believe it.**
 
I could go on but probably should stop here to talk about the real (accurate, objective) meaning of democracy.
 
Fundamentally, democracy means unlimited majority rule, and entails voting that the king’s subjects in the days of monarchy were not allowed to do. The empowerment that voting gave citizens was a significant appeal to the classical liberals.
 
In ancient Greece and Rome, there was voting, but no concept of rights. Citizens, meaning adult males, did possess certain legal protections. So, in 399 BC, Socrates, as an adult male citizen of Athens, was entitled to a trial after being accused of impiety and corruption of the youth. Conviction and condemnation to death was by majority vote.
 
Women, children, slaves, and resident aliens possessed no such protections.
 
The Greeks and Romans, as well as the founding fathers of the United States, viewed democracy as a form of tyranny—dictatorship of the many, as opposed to a dictatorship of the one or few. The many, as the founding fathers also believed, quickly degenerates into factions vying for power.
 
“Direct democracy,” a term bandied about sometimes today, means everyone votes on every issue and delegate in the government, which is impossible in any sizeable country, though the state of California attempts it every election with its nearly infinite list of propositions that clutter the ballot.
 
The original US form of government was a constitutional republic, a considerably limited authority constrained by a Bill of Rights. The House of Representatives, one from each district, was and still is elected by the citizens of those districts, but the Senate was elected or chosen by the respective state legislatures. This provided a balance of power between the national government and the states.
 
The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1913 at the insistence of the early progressives, established the election of senators by statewide plebiscite, making most of the federal government popularly elected. Only the election of president, via the electoral college, retains a small semblance of the original balance of powers.
 
The Bill of Rights prohibits the government (and criminals) from taking certain actions. Most importantly, it prevents the majority from voting away our rights. The problem today is that blather, or rather BS, reigns supreme in discussions of rights. Does anyone in public life know what the concept means? No, they don’t care. They only say what sounds good.
 
Rights are freedoms of action, that is, the freedom to take any action I choose to sustain and enhance my life, which includes the acquisition, use, and disposal of property, without being coerced one way or another by the government (or by a criminal), dealing with others through voluntary cooperation. “One way or another” means the government cannot force me to do what I do not want to do, such as get a vaccine or serve in the military, or force a woman to get an abortion. Nor can it forcibly prevent me from doing what I do want to do, such as raise my prices or increase the water pressure in my shower, or forcibly prevent a woman from getting an abortion.
 
Freedoms of action also especially include speaking and writing as I see fit, such as criticizing the government, providing one understands the presuppositions and complications I discussed last month.
 
Today’s “democracy” is in fact an oligarchy of unelected bureaucrats, many of whom are totalitarians both in spirit and practice. The system has also been described as “government by lobby,” because big businesses spend enormous amounts of money to influence congress and the bureaucrats to pass laws and regulatory rules in favor of the lobbyists.
 
Our de facto system is fascism: nominal—meaning "in name only"—private ownership of business and personal property, as well as of each of our lives, but extensive government regulation and control of it all. The system is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship, ruled by the despotic elites in power. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out (esp. chap. 1 and 2), any mixed system, unless corrected, must move inexorably to full dictatorship, a system we came close to enduring over the past five years.
 
Sometimes, one will hear the words “liberal democracy” or “constitutional democracy,” but the meaning of both depends on what is understood as “liberal” and “constitutional.” If, respectively, classical liberalism and the US Bill of Rights are meant by the adjectives, they are accurate. Voting is then used essentially to select new leaders thus ensuring a peaceful transition of power.
 
“Democratic republic” is also heard. When used and understood as Thomas Jefferson understood it—voting under a constitution and bill of rights to select leaders—it is accurate. If not, it is likely more BS.
 
Today, the blather and BS are so common in political discussions that the concept of democracy becomes whatever the speaker wants it to mean, which makes it a buzzword to scare the ignorant and unthinking into going along with the speaker and to disparage his or her opponents.
 
Democracy in fact is a form of dictatorship.
 
 
* Aristotle tells us (1295a11–12) that barbarians even elected their despotic monarchs.
 
** On BS, think of your local used car sales rep, no offense intended to those reps who shoot straight and are honest. There are many.

Positivism

The philosophy of positivism—also called logical positivism and logical empiricism—has for decades been the bane of science, especially the human sciences.
 
The concept “positivism” that I am using is broader than the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle in the1920s–1930s, which attempted, but failed, to find Immanuel Kant’s noumenal world through symbolic logic applied to sense data. Positivism (495–98), as it is still used today and derives from the work of August Comte, means the use of the so-called scientific methods of physics and chemistry to attempt to discover laws of human behavior and events.
 
All science, that is to say, must be quantitative, and if it is not quantitative, it is not science. The post-Kantian premises of positivists, in their attempt to defend science, are the following: the entire branch of philosophy called metaphysics is meaningless—that is, the concept cannot be “empirically verified”—and universals, facts, values, and, especially, truth are similarly unknowable and therefore meaningless. Awareness of reality is restricted to directly perceived concretes. At best, say the positivists, we can try to come up with “successive approximations” of statistical probabilities, but we will never reach “absolute” certainty or “eternal” truth, and, of course, all science must be “value-free.”
 
Thus, an endless parade of statistical studies to incrementally—and slowly—pretend to develop science, never achieving the status of universality because universals, well, as stated above, are metaphysically meaningless. This method, or epistemology, is gospel in the so-called social sciences today, which I prefer to call human sciences, the sciences of homo sapiens that emphasize and study the animal that possesses a volitional consciousness. The human sciences, in other words, study human nature as the being who exercises, or does not exercise, the capacity to reason.
 
The two fundamental special sciences of human nature are psychology and economics, that is, respectively, the science of the motivation and behavior of individual human beings, healthy or unhealthy, and the science of cooperating individuals in a social setting the aim of which is to generate and produce peace and prosperity.
 
Austrian economists do not agree with the positivist mantra, preferring the method of logical reasoning, the process of identifying correct concepts and integrating them into principles, then integrating principles into theories—leaving Newtonian-type algebraic equations to the physicists and chemists. Sigmund Freud essentially did the same thing in the development of psychoanalysis.
 
Austrian economist F. A. Hayek in his 1974 Nobel laureate address did not use the word “positivism,” but did say that scientism and the scientistic attitude of insisting on using the methods of physical science in the social sciences “quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.” Scientism is a close synonym of positivism and is defined by Hayek as a pretense of knowledge.
 
Positivism over the years has been criticized, notably for its contradiction that metaphysics is meaningless—because that statement itself is a metaphysical assertion.
 
What positivism in particular lacks, among its many other faults, is a sound theory of universals and theory of abstraction from abstractions, which I have written about in previous posts (1, 2, 3).
 
According to Ayn Rand, universal concepts are formed by omitting the measurable differences of the concept’s referents—length, width, and height, for example, of several perceived, concrete objects we come to identify and label as “tables.” After identifying other similar but, in some respects, different perceived concretes—such as chairs and beds—we omit the measurements of size and focus on, but also omit, the different purposes of tables, chairs, and beds, retaining their use in a human household to form the concept “furniture,” which is an abstraction from abstractions.
 
When we move to broad abstractions in psychology and economics, such as depression and the business cycle, we require focused attention on the chain of abstractions from perceived concrete to broad abstraction—and back to the perceptual level. This mental effort—and it is mental effort—is precisely what is lacking in positivism because, as they say, the abstractions are “analytic,” arbitrary constructs, subjectively defined. Only “synthetic” perceived concretes can be true or false.
 
The mental effort in forming and correcting our abstractions from abstractions is precisely what led Ayn Rand (67–68) to say, rather pointedly:
 
Like a spoiled, disillusioned child, who had expected predigested capsules of automatic knowledge, a logical positivist stamps his foot at reality and cries that context, integration, mental effort and first-hand inquiry are too much to expect of him, that he rejects so demanding a method of cognition, and that he will manufacture his own “constructs” from now on.
 
Karl Popper (chap. 1) denied that he was a positivist though his premises are positivistic. He attempted to defend science by proposing the still widely accepted criterion of “falsifiability,” that is, the notion that a concept is valid only if it can be falsified.
 
Meaning precisely what? In the human sciences, the answer to this question is that concepts, or rather “constructs,” must be “operationalized” in order to test them using the experimental-statistical methods of the physical sciences. If that cannot be done, the concept cannot be falsified.
 
Operationalization means to make measurable. What is the measuring instrument to be used in the human sciences, where volition is the fundamental premise? Well, first of all, volition is not relevant because it cannot be “falsified” and, besides, real science does not acknowledge such “pseudoscience,” which, as Popper might say, is akin to astrology.
 
Therefore, following the Popperian method, such constructs as “attitude” from psychology and “utility” from economics must be measured by administering a “paper and pencil” instrument called a questionnaire to a sample of five hundred or more people. The collected data is then analyzed, perhaps using sophisticated multivariate statistics. Probability estimates and confidence intervals are calculated. Universals are never discussed or considered relevant or possible.
 
If a concept cannot be measured using this method, it cannot be falsified. It is therefore meaningless and invalid.
 
Popper states that science begins with highly informed guesses” (conjectures) and then attempts to falsify or refute them (chap. 3; my italics). Similarly, economist Milton Friedman (14) says that economic research, in the positivist-Popper tradition, begins with “wildly inaccurate” assumptions that we test and attempt to “empirically verify,” or rather “falsify.”*
 
The problem here is that the terms “guess” and “hypothesis” do not have the same referents. A hypothesis begins with significant evidence about what we are studying, but not enough to draw a definite conclusion. A guess has little or no evidence.
 
 “Empirical verifiability” of the positivists and Popper’s alternative of “falsification” are not essentially different. They both constrict science—all science, not just the human sciences—to perceived concretes and the experimental-positivistic-behavioristic methodology, essentially dismissing broad abstractions and logical reasoning.**
 
As Rand’s theory indicates, the essence of science is measurement omission, not measurement, and the proper method of doing science is conceptualization. The criterion of what is true or false, that is, the correct identification of reality, is Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Whatever violates the law in the name of science should be called pseudoscience.
 
Which seems to be an appropriate descriptive of positivism.
 
 
* Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” Friedman, however, apparently regretted writing this essay.
 
** The experimental-positivistic-behavioristic terminology is psychologist Abraham Maslow’s disapproving description of positivist epistemology (xlvi).

On the Separation of Church, Science, Education, and Business from the State: Avoiding Repressive Fascism

A suggested revision of the First Amendment of the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, scientific research, education, or business activity, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

When the state meddles, bad things happen—besides violating our rights.
 
The origin of the notion of a dividing line between church and state, or more correctly, “a theory of two powers,” as Britannica.com writes, goes back to Mark 12:13-17 when Jesus replied to questioning by the Pharisees who were attempting to trap him in a dilemma: either offend his followers by saying taxes should be paid to Rome or be arrested for treason for telling them not to pay.
 
Jesus replied: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God” (Mark 12:17, New Living Translation).
 
Prior to this statement, church and state were inseparable. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the Church continued to dominate life, though by the tenth century numerous secular rulers had arisen to compete with and manipulate the Church. Over the centuries, conflict between church and state, as well as conflicts between the newly founded religious sects, led to many bloody wars. In the eighteenth century the notion of individual rights and separation of religion and state became expressed in the US’s First Amendment.
 
Classical liberals of today understand the separation as complete, as in “leave us (the citizens) alone” to pursue religion or not and in the manner we choose. The state should stay totally out of religious life.
 
As writer Collin Killick put it: “Laws that establish religion in government, even if created with the most benign intent, could put our nation on a path toward repressive theocracy” (emphasis added).
 
And “repressive” is how the state has been relating to science and business.
 
Former Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorf, though not fully calling for laissez-faire of science by the state, is calling for the decentralization of scientific research. Kulldorf challenges the domination of government string-pulling in science because the government, especially in public health as controlled by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, dispenses most of the research money, deciding who gets it and which problem will be studied. Two-thirds of research money comes from federal, state, and local government sources, with well over half from the US government.
 
The gatekeeping, not to mention censorship, by the government on scientific research became apparent throughout our recent past two years of covid totalitarianism, as I have described the ordeal.
 
Kulldorf’s coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, Sunetra Gupta, calls the science-controllers cartels: government agencies, journal editors, and peer reviewers, all of whom determine promotion, tenure, and research in academia.*
 
“Repressive scientism,” using F. A. Hayek’s term for a “pretense at science,” is what we seem to have been given. The disastrous effect of logical positivism on science today cannot be overstated. Quoting from the description of Hayek’s book, The Counter Revolution of Science, at Mises.org:

There was once such a thing as the human sciences of which economics was part. The goal was to discover and elucidate the exact laws that govern the interaction of people with the material world. It had its own methods and own recommendations.

Throughout the twentieth century, however,

the economy and people began to be regarded as a collective entity to be examined as if whole societies should be studied as we study planets or other non-volitional beings.

As molecules, in other words, or billiard balls and other inanimate objects. “Science had turned from being a friend of freedom into being employed as its enemy.” From a methodological individualism, where the individual entity or person was the unit of analysis, to a methodological collectivism—the group, or collective, as the unit.
 
The new, repressive method now applies to all sciences. And that is the collectivization and herd conformity (or groupthink) of science that we have today with the government in charge.
 
What we are left with is a narrow range of conventional research, sometimes flawed (or even fraudulent), and neglect or repression of creative thinking and disagreement with the establishment.
 
Decentralize all research to the university level, says Kulldorf. Let universities distribute the money and publish their own scientists’ findings through open (not blind) peer review. The process would speed up research and publication and perhaps lead to innovative findings.
 
The best solution, of course, would be to separate education completely from the state, but that would mean making universities businesses, which they are, as are churches. They just are not profit-making businesses, which they should be. (See Applying Principles, pp. 187-90.)
 
The fundamental issue is to completely separate business and state. Paraphrasing Killick, “Laws that regulate and control businesses could put our nation on a path toward repressive . . . fascism.”
 
Which is what fascism in its essence is. Socialism owns everything and everyone; fascism, a variant of socialism (perhaps we should call it the “Omicron” of socialism??) leaves some property private, but only in a nominal sense. It still controls everything and everyone at the governmental level.
 
It is the total, airtight control we have endured over the past two years.
 
 
* See my discussion of academic research, the peer review process, and its effects on science in Applying Principles, pp. 123-32, 140-42.

Profits over People or Primacy of Profits?

The favorite refrain—ad nauseam, actually—of the communist-fascist left is that capitalism and its representatives, entrepreneurs, care nothing for people.* Profits are all that capitalists seek, exploiting both workers and customers.

In response to such Marxist blather, let me just say that profits are sales minus costs and the only way to earn a profit under true capitalism is to create and deliver a product (a good or service) to customers at a price that exceeds its cost. To do so, the created value must meet a need (a requirement for the improvement of the customer’s life) or want (an optional value that a market segment likes and wants, though not everyone has to like or want it) of the entrepreneur’s prospective customers.

Contrary to “profits over people,” this is the meaning of profits through customer satisfaction. Everyone in the company from CEO (the market entrepreneur) to lowly stock person must first consider the customer’s needs and wants before making any decision or taking any action. Most small businesses, as examples of this practice, face significant competition because they suffer fewer government regulations and enjoy fewer favors than their larger counterparts.

In today’s non-capitalistic mixed economy of government privileges and punishments for the favored and unfavored, the paperwork of bureaucratic management requires that entrepreneurial attention be turned away from customers to the government in order to comply with the imposed rules and regulations and for the profits the (political) entrepreneurs can acquire (not earn) through government-granted privileges.

This is one source and meaning of profits over people, because, in a government-by-lobby mixed economy, (usually big) businesses vie with one another for government favors. Customers, as a result, may be thrown an occasional crumb, maybe even a product improvement if it will keep the government happy, the taxpayer money flowing, and the competition at bay. Think in particular of the many occupational licensing monopolies (ranging from hair stylists to hospitals and insurance companies), public utilities and schools, and all broadcast, cable, and social media.** Today’s big businesses in general.

The more serious issue, however, when talking about profits is whether or not profits are a deduction from worker wages. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx say they are. This primacy-of-wages doctrine led Marx to develop his exploitation theory asserting that capitalists—for the sake of profit—reduce workers to subsistence living. Hence, the major source of modern blather from the many historically and economically ignorant who mouth the slogan “profits over people.”

Economist George Reisman takes this issue head on and provides a strikingly clear and revolutionary identification of profits as the original and primary form of income, disagreeing with both Smith and Marx. Reisman writes (p. 19***):

Capitalists do not create profit and subtract it from wages. On the contrary, they create wages and the other costs which are subtracted from sales revenues, and thus the capitalists reduce the proportion of sales revenues that is profit.

Profits exist prior to capitalists. Reisman cites Adam Smith’s example of poor people who collect Scotch Pebbles on the shore of Scotland, then sell them to stone cutters. All receipts, states Reisman, are profits, because the collectors have no costs. Sales revenue of the pebbles is all income, not wages as Smith contends (p. 15; Smith, p. 33).

Sole proprietors of retail stores who work the stores entirely by themselves do have costs (rent, cost of goods) and the difference between sales and costs is the their profit. When the proprietors hire helpers, they pay a wage, which further reduces their profit. This is how profit and wages come into existence, both made possible by the capitalists.

Since wages are payments made in exchange for the performance of labor, “capitalists do not impoverish wage earners, but make it possible for people to be wage earners” (p. 19, Reisman’s italics). Reisman supports this statement by quoting F. A. Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians where Hayek writes that the so-called proletariat created by capitalism “was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided” (Hayek, p. 16, my italics).

Thus, Reisman concludes that “between wage earners and capitalist there is in fact the closest possible harmony of interests,” not exploitation (p. 21). And by extension, since workers are also customers, we can conclude that there is not a clash but the “closest possible harmony of interests” between capitalists and customers.

Adam Smith observed that the rate of profit is lower in wealthier countries (Smith, p. 159). Reisman points out that this is because a greater percentage of total national income is spent on research and development, buildings and land, parts and materials—and wages—than in poorer countries. Workers, as consequence, should lobby for a greater, not lesser, degree of capitalism. The greater the degree of capitalism, the wealthier the country, which means higher wages and standard of living for everyone (pp. 20-21).

Capitalism brings into existence not just a proletariat that did not exist before, but an entire middle class that did not exist at all before the rise of capitalism.

Far from seeking “profits over people,” capitalists put labor and customers front and center. Capitalism, as Reisman argues, is run for the sake of the masses.

How does the communist-fascist left, i.e., socialism and its variants, view the people? Socialism, says Reisman, “is run for the benefit of the ruling elite at the cost of starvation wages” (p. 55). The socialist totalitarian state is a giant monopoly akin to the post office, as Lenin envisioned, which means only one employer in the economy and no competition for labor. Thus, the incentive for the elite is to keep the citizenry—the masses—alive, barely, at minimum subsistence. The only exceptions often are for those who help maintain the elite’s power, such as the secret police and its intelligence services, the military, and perhaps star athletes, dancers, and actors who bump up the dictators’ frail egos.

Capitalists, one might say, to borrow a word from the Marxists, are in the vanguard of progress!

The elite of the communist-fascist left, in contrast, are the ones who put dachas and several million dollar chateaus over the people.


* In an earlier post, I wrote that the designation communist-fascist left “works because differences between the two systems are superficial and Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms. ‘Left’ on the political spectrum means total control of life and economy.” Thus, the word “totalitarian” is redundant when speaking of the totalitarian left, though perhaps “totalitarian” should be used interchangeably with “communist-fascist.” Both communism and fascism are consequence and goal of progressive ideology.

** For the distinction between market and political entrepreneurs, see last month’s post and Burton Folsom’s The Myth of the Robber Barons.

*** All subsequent free-standing page references are to Reisman’s 114-page monograph Marxism/Socialism, A Sociopathic Philosophy Conceived in Gross Error and Ignorance, Culminating in Economic Chaos, Enslavement, Terror, and Mass Murder: A Contribution to Its Death. This work easily could and should be used as a text or supplement in high school and college economics classes. For a fuller treatment of this issue, see Professor Reisman’s magnum opus Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, especially pp. 473-85 and throughout chap. 11. For a summary presentation of his theory of aggregate profit, see my article “Reisman’s Net Consumption, Net Investment Theory of Aggregate Profit” in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, July 2004 (available here).
 

Meanness and the Moralization of Concretes

Many years ago, a friend debated a woman on a radio show about environmentalism. My friend, of course, argued for free markets while the woman argued for the use of the government as solution to nearly all problems.

After the show, I asked my friend what the woman looked like. He said, “She looked mean.”

His statement has stuck in my mind all these years because I think it says something about the motivation of the left, even though judging people by surface appearances can be risky. Just because someone looks mean, or sad, or happy does not indicate the essence of their psychology deep down.

And not all leftists would have the same mean look as this woman. Some are ignorant (of many things, not just the nature of socialism, but also of history). Others may act like our best friends, as con artists are capable of doing, and some may be close relatives.

Be that as it may, meanness is essential to the nature of socialism because government-imposed regulations and laws that violate individual rights are imposed through initiated coercion and enforced through initiated coercion. At some point, punishments of violators of the regulations and laws must increase from fines or minor jail sentences to major imprisonment and executions.

This is where the meanest, or rather, morally worst, as F. A. Hayek refers to them (1; 2, chap. 10), rise to the top of the “compassionate” socialist ladders and become vicious dictators.

In today’s culture with the collapse of epistemology and ethics, intellectual arguments are no longer given for socialism and socialist policies. What passes for reasons why such policies should be followed and approved are, well, “mean looks,” also known as “virtue signaling,” often of a peculiar character that might be called “the moralization of concrete objects and actions.”

Universal abstractions, which are what ethics works with and attempts to demonstrate by reference to an objective standard, have disappeared from discussion. Aside from dirty air and water being declared immoral, today it is likely to be red meat. Or a wall around your home (or country). Or fossil fuels. Or plastic shopping bags, straws, gasoline cans with air holes, many books said to contain “bad” ideas, which, of course, then also means certain ideas, especially those that can be interpreted as “offensive” and therefore “bad,” and so on, ad nauseam. The list is potentially endless.

A universal abstraction says something like “do not lie,” which then applies in all concrete instances in which lying could occur. Or, to state the principle in a less deontological form, that is, allowing for personal consequences, “do not lie unless under threat of physical force or invasion of privacy.” This latter abstraction is what underlies and justifies self-defense in our Anglo-Saxon legal system.

Note that neither principle singles out to condemn as immoral any one concrete object or action. In ethics (or morality—the words are synonyms), broad abstractions are applied to concretes. It is the actions of individuals that can be moral or immoral. The concretes are neither.

Two principles, opposed to each other, do lie behind most discussion today of political issues. The first says: “Objects (usually products) and actions that are inherently harmful or dangerous must be regulated or banned.” The second states: “Acts that initiate physical force against another must be banned, whereas acts between consenting adults that inflict no harm should be legal.”

The former is the Progressives’ guide to lawmaking in the United States, though it probably goes back to the Divine Right of Kings, Roman Emperors, and any chieftain in control of a tribe.

Two questions undercut the universality of this principle: (1) what is meant by inherent harm or danger? and (2) who is going to decide the issue? What one person considers  inherently harmful or dangerous may not be so viewed by another. Think skydiving several times a week versus crossing a busy intersection. People differ in their assessments of potential harm.

In controlled societies, rulers in charge claim to know what is best for their subjects. Chieftains, emperors, kings, and bureaucrats and legislators all decide what is inherently harmful or dangerous. Controlling and banning more and more objects and actions, all of which is accomplished through coercion—because that is the only way to maintain such control—is what eventually leads to dictatorship. Dictatorship by excessive law, or just by fiat.

The second principle above derives from John Locke’s theory of individual rights, as clarified by Ayn Rand. The starting—the beginning, the initiating—of physical force, as opposed to the defensive repelling of an attacking thief or potential murderer, is what must be banned from human relationships.

This universal principle, applied consistently to every area of our lives, gives us laissez-faire capitalism. When all of us are left alone to pursue our own values according to our own judgment, we—each one of us—can then decide for ourselves what is inherently harmful or dangerous. We then—each one of us—can decide for ourselves whether or not to engage in such an inherently harmful or dangerous action.

It is frankly no one else’s business whether we choose to take the easy path or the more challenging one. This is what is meant by a free society.

Now we may sometimes get a mean look from someone close to us, say a relative or spouse, who says something like, “You’re crazy. You can’t do that. It’s dangerous!” But whatever “it” happens to be, the relative or spouse is not likely to be pointing a gun at us.

The mean look of my friend’s environmentalist debater, on the other hand, along with many other of her leftist colleagues, consider their holier-than-thou virtues to be signaling only one thing: “You are immoral—for thinking this concrete object or action should not be regulated or banned. We know best and aim to make it law that you will be fined or imprisoned if you continue to use the object or take the action.”

This is a government gun talking and this is how government guns, when the law is passed, violate individual rights.

Mean looks do say something and do have consequences. Are the people with mean looks well-intended?

On the Worst—and Best—Rising to the Top

When initiated coercion is legalized, it attracts those who are willing to use it.*

Those who are more willing to use legalized, initiated coercion than those who are hesitant will advance faster in the system. Eventually, the more willing rise to the top. The more willing, then, use the initiated coercion against those they have bypassed and anyone else who gets in their way.

This in essence, though not his words, is the identification made by F. A. Hayek in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom (chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top”).

The identification explains how and why an interventionist, increasingly bureaucratized government becomes a dictatorship.

The way Hayek put it is that “democratic statesmen” expect citizens to approve of their coercive policies peacefully through discussion and majority vote. As this does not work, and leads to chaos, those with “lower moral and intellectual standards” step in to take over. They appeal to the “docile and gullible,” uniting them with a “hatred of an enemy” and “envy of the better off.”

A casualty along the way is language, meaning the rise of Goebbelsian propaganda, with the word “liberty” being the first to go, or rather, turned on its head, Orwellian fashion, into its opposite.

By “democratic statesmen,” Hayek means the democratic socialists who thought they could avoid a Marxist violent revolution by voting their brand of initiated coercion into power. Instead, they paved the way for the Lenins, Stalins, Mussolinis, and Hitlers of the twentieth century.

The “docile and gullible” in today’s political climate are the patsies of the socialist/fascist left. They are those alleged victims who in reality are beneficiaries and opportunists of our entitlement culture. They are the ones who clamor for coerced handouts and privileges in the name of reparations for past discrimination and in the form of protections and other initiated coercions against the hated enemies, their alleged current persecutors.

The “hated enemies” of today have congealed around several targets. Historically, ever since the rise of the early Progressives from their democratic socialist beginnings, and continuing in the present, the favorite Marxist whipping boy has always been, and still is, big business—“America’s Persecuted Minority,” as Ayn Rand so aptly put it.

Other hated targets include white straight males and, of course, our current president, and anyone who dares to disagree with the socialist/fascist left’s mantra.

Envy of those “better off” targets is the motivation of our contemporary “democratic statesmen” and their “docile and gullible” followers.

Envy—not a self-confident, self-responsible, and independent psychology.

The way, indeed, is being paved for a modern-day . . . well, who knows what.

In contrast to the upward mobility of the worst in government, the most competent and able, self-responsible, and independent individuals—the best—rise to the top in free-market businesses.

When ability is recognized and rewarded, as in a private, profit-making business in a totally free market, which means where there are no interfering regulations imposed as a result of initiated coercion, the most competent at identifying what will improve human life and most able to deliver created goods and services to their customers will advance.

In business, competence and ability are rewarded. In a bureaucratized government, willingness to develop new laws and regulatory rules and the desire to execute them, which means more opportunities to coerce, is the criterion of advancement.

In business, the criterion and means of success, and therefore the means to high profits to sustain and grow the business, is customer satisfaction, that is, making products better than the competition to meet the objective needs (the requirements for an improved life) and wants (optional tastes) of the customer.

The day to day work, whether by employee or entrepreneur, entails a myriad of detailed communications, both outside the company, with customers and suppliers, and within the company, to employees in the various departments necessary to run the business. All of this “myriad detail,” then, must be coordinated to produce and deliver the product in a timely, need- and want-satisfying manner.

Those who possess the greatest ability to communicate with others and to motivate them in a positive way, and who can retain the greatest detail, which includes surveying the company for means of improvement and, especially, the market for opportunities, will be the ones to advance.

Today, however, we do not have the kind of freedom I have described above. Today, we live in a “mixed economy,” which means a mixture of freedom and dictatorship.

Business people today are harassed by thousands of regulations—legalized, initiated coercion—that deflect attention from the proper operation of their companies.

As a result, the incentives become mixed. Some incentive of customer satisfaction remains, but much of the time today is spent on compliance with the regulations, many of which conflict with customer satisfaction.

Increased prices is the most obvious conflict, but reduced supply and elimination of some products from the line also follow the increased regulation.

In heavily regulated industries, the “best” who rise to the top are likely to be the ones who are good at working with regulators, complying with the rules. In such industries, the business has become so bureaucratized that it operates much like a government bureau—meaning incompetent and indifferent to customer needs and wants.

It’s not uncommon for “successful” bureaucrats in these businesses to join government agencies to become regulators themselves and administrators of legalized, initiated coercion.

This is where we are today. Only time will tell how far the socialist/fascist left pushes us.


* “Legalized, initiated coercion” is the pernicious opposite of the constitutionally valid and rights-based self-defensive use of force.

On the Need to Take People (Including Politicians) Seriously, Not Literally

Facts matter. And I have complained many times (Applying Principles, pp. 293-95, 307-15) about the lack of concern for facts.

But what if they don’t matter? What if the people you love and work with, or the ones you admire (or don’t admire) from a distance, say, politicians, sling inaccuracies around with seeming abandon? For example, inaccuracies from ignorance, faulty and selective memory, sins of omission, exaggeration and serial embellishment, bullshit, or even fabrication?

I’ve sat at many a lunch and dinner, both personal and professional, in which hyperbole was the main course, and in many academic meetings consisting mainly of selective memory and BS.

When this happens, should we stomp our feet and cry boohoo, as the press today is doing in relation to our current president?

The press, including the anchor of a network sympathetic to the current president, continues to rail on and on about the many less than factual statements coming out of the White House.

As if other presidents have not played fast and loose with the facts! Or spent twenty-plus minutes BS’ing an answer to a simple question. Other presidents have been slicker—more polished—than the current one, as a Wall Street Journal column pointed out recently. The problem is that the press takes our current president literally, but not seriously.*

This is a mistake in human relationships—for all of us, not just the press.

As a young man, straight out of undergraduate school, I worked for a service firm in midtown Manhattan. Our task was to process certain jobs and deliver the results to customers. When clients complained about not receiving their jobs, a familiar phrase of the production manager was, “Tell ‘em it’s on the truck,” when it wasn’t. I did not whine to the manager and say, “You’re a bad person.” I did lie a couple of times, but quickly learned not to promise what I could not deliver and developed a number of techniques for keeping my clients happy.

One of those techniques was to translate misstatements of the people I worked with—the production manager was not the only one expert at misrepresenting facts—and consequently to learn how to enjoy their company. They were all respectable people who had their own psychologies. Getting to know them was key to understanding them and thereby to working with them.

Why can’t the press do the same with our current president? And tame their intemperate headlines and articles?

Children who stomp their feet and throw tantrums are insecure because they do not feel loved. The press’s personal identity today is simultaneously being attacked and ignored. They are not feeling the love!

They are not feeling the love because the press, especially those who represent the bi-coastal elites, have set themselves up—on a pedestal—as intellectual guardians of the free society.

As F. A. Hayek wrote in 1949, the press (along with other self-appointed intellectuals) filter and disseminate fundamental ideas to the populace. Their filter requires that the selected ideas “fit into [their] general conceptions, [their] picture of the world which [they regard] as modern or advanced.” The “modern and advanced” ideas today are those of the Marxist Progressive Left. Anything else is assumed to be old-fashioned, backwards, and anathema to their version of a free society.**

The pedestal that the press has been sitting on for the past many years is now crumbling, if not being knocked from under them. This, they cannot tolerate.

Our current president does not give a hoot about the political correctness mantra that the press promotes as gospel. That the press does not, or deliberately chooses not to, acknowledge the ideas on which they base their screeds is enough alone to call them biased.

Telling the press that they are biased and that they sometimes fail in their factual inquiries and publish what appears to be fabricated news is, for them, beyond the pale. For them, this is tantamount to threatening censorship and those who criticize them are assumed to be actual or wannabe dictators.

Tweaking another person’s defense value or defense mechanism, such as telling a compulsive talker “you’re a big mouth,” is insulting and is experienced by the talker as a considerable threat—literally to their pseudo-self-esteem, not actually or seriously to their physical well-being.

Tweaking the press’s pretentious defense value that views themselves as guardians of the free society is what is going on now. Literally, they feel a considerable threat—to their pseudo-self-esteem, not actually or seriously to press freedom.

Add to this that it is difficult to take the press’s whines seriously, because literally what they write (the Marxist Progressivism of the Left) promotes destruction of the free society. They certainly are not promoting the genuine protection of individual rights or anything resembling an authentic (classical) liberalism.

For the press to take our current president and the sense of life of his supporters seriously, they would have to reexamine their own unexamined premises. For as badly mixed as are our current president’s ideas and those of his supporters, and despite what either of them might literally say, their sense of life captures the essence of what once did make America great: namely, being left alone, that is, free, to pursue their own values through hard work and achievement, followed by appropriately earned rewards for the effort.

If the press wants to be taken seriously as defenders of the free society, which means they want to convince the public that they know how to present alternative viewpoints, they should take a serious look at the fundamental ideas on which laissez-faire capitalism is based.

Yes, it would be nice to live in a perfect world in which everyone shoots straight and factually. However, we don’t live in such a world and free will and psychology preclude it from ever happening. Therefore, we must learn to cope with the imperfections that confront us.

Distinguishing the serious from the literal would be a good first step. This means looking for what people are really saying, deep down, and what they really mean.

Focusing only on the literal can create fantasy relationships.


* The expression, referring to our current president, goes back at least to this article in The Atlantic.

** Hayek’s argument is summarized here. I say “Marxist Progressive Left” to distinguish this brand of Leftism from the earlier Bismarckian type of the 1890s to about 1930. See Thomas C. Leonard’s extensively documented book on the early Progressives and my comment on the book (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).