Quote of the Day: What Easter Means

Freedom is the ability of every person to exercise his own free will, rather than be subject to the will of the government or anyone else. Free will is a characteristic we share in common with God. He created us in His image and likeness. As He is perfectly free, so are we.

When the government takes away our free will, the government steals a gift from God; it violates the natural law; it prevents us from having and utilizing the means to the truth. The moral ability to exercise free will to seek the truth is a natural right that all humans possess, and the government may only morally interfere with the exercise of that right when one affirmatively has given it away by using fraud or force to interfere with the exercise of someone else’s natural rights.

We know from the events 2,000 years ago, which Christians commemorate and celebrate this week, that freedom is the essential means to discover and unite with the truth. And to Christians, the personification, the incarnation, the perfect manifestation of truth is Jesus — who is the Christ, the Son of God and the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

On the first Holy Thursday, Jesus attended a traditional Jewish Passover Seder. Catholics believe that at His last supper, He performed two miracles so that we could stay united to Him. He transformed ordinary bread and wine into His own body, blood, soul and divinity, and He empowered His disciples and their successors to do the same.

On the first Good Friday, the Romans executed Jesus because they were persuaded that by claiming to be the Son of God, He might foment a revolution against them. The revolution He fomented was in the hearts of men and women. The Romans had not heard of a revolution of the heart; nevertheless they feared a revolution that would disrupt their worldly power, and so they condemned Him to death by crucifixion.

Jesus had the freedom to reject this horrific event, but He exercised His freedom so that we might know the truth. The truth He manifested is that His acceptance of the destruction of His body would enable Him to die so that He could rise from the dead. On Easter, three days after He died, that manifestation was complete when He rose from the dead. By doing that, he demonstrated to us that while living we can liberate our souls from the slavery of sin and our free wills from the oppression of the government, and after death we can rise to be with Him.

Easter — which manifests our own immortality — is the linchpin of human existence. With it, life is worth living, no matter its costs or pains. Without it, life is meaningless, no matter its fleeting joys or triumphs. Easter has a meaning that is both incomprehensible and simple. It is incomprehensible that a human being had the freedom to rise from the dead. It is simple because that human being was and is God.

Jesus is the hypostatic union: not half-God and half-man, not just a godly good man, but truly and fully God and at the same time truly and fully man. When the Romans killed Jesus, they killed God. When the dead Jesus rose from His tomb, God rose from the dead.

What does Easter mean? Easter means that there is hope for the dead. If there’s hope for the dead, there’s hope for the living. But, like the colonists who fought the oppression of the king, we the living can only achieve our hopes if we have freedom. And that requires a government that protects freedom, not one that assaults it.

This is from Judge Andrew P. Napolitano at the LewRockwell.com

Happy Easter! (image source)

Quote of the Day: The Rights Trap: They haven’t made you free

The Rights Trap is the belief that your rights will make you free.

It’s not hard to fall into this trap and become preoccupied with your rights as a way of getting what you want. You’ve probably heard since childhood that you have certain rights — to life, liberty, property, the freedom to pursue your happiness.

In addition, it’s easy to feel that someone owes you certain things in a relationship — such as respect, honesty, or fair play.

Unfortunately, rights exist only in theory. In practice, they don’t accomplish much — no matter how much people may discuss them.

By implication, a right to something means that someone else must provide that something, whether or not he wants to. A right to your property, for instance, means that you should be allowed to keep your property — even if others want to take it. A right to a job means that someone must provide a job for you even if he prefers not to.

Rights are invoked only when there’s a conflict of interest. Otherwise, there’s no need for them.

One reason it’s so easy to walk into the Rights Trap is that it sometimes seems to be the only way to deal with a conflict. But that’s only one of three methods of handling such situations. You can:

1. Rely upon your rights to get you what you want.

2. Find a way to make it in the other person’s self-interest to provide what you want.

3. Find a way of getting what you want without his being involved.

This is from American writer, politician and investment analyst Harry Browne from How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (pdf here) as excerpted by the Daily Reckoning.

The article signifies a practical advice on how to steer clear of politics and concentrate instead on productive undertakings, read the rest here

Richard Ebeling: The Case For Freedom and Free markets in the writings of Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek and Ayn Rand

Dr. Richard Ebeling, American libertarian author, former president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and professor of economics, in a recent speech dealt with the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand as providing for the intellectual and ethical foundations for the case of Freedom and Free markets.  

From Dr. Ebeling at the Northwood University Blog (bold mine)

Three names are widely associated with the cause of human freedom and economic liberty in the 20^thcentury: Friedrich A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. Indeed, it can be argued that Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Mises, Socialism ((1936) Human Action(1949), and Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) did more to turn the intellectual tide of opinion away from collectivism in the second half of the twentieth century than any other works that reached out to the informed layman and general public.

Now, in the second decade of the 21st century their enduring influence is seen by the continuing high sales of their books, and the frequency with which all three are referred to in the media and the popular press in the face of the current economic crisis and the concerns about the revival of dangerous statist trends in the United States and other parts of the world.

The Influence of Mises, Hayek, and Rand

In Hayek’s case, his influence has reached inside academia, that bastion of the social engineering mentality in which too many professors, especially in the social sciences, still dream wistfully about society being remade in their own images of “social justice” and political correctness – regardless of the expense in terms of people’s personal and economic liberty.

Hayek’s message of intellectual humility – that there is more to the complexities of the world than any government planning or intervening mind can ever master – has forced some in that academic arena to take seriously the possibility that there may be “limits” to what political paternalism can achieve without undermining the essential institutional foundations of a free and prosperous society.

Mises continues to be recognized as the most original and influential member of the Austrian School of Economics during the greater part of the 20th century. Mises stands out as that unique and original thinker who proved why socialist planning cannot work, that government intervention breeds inescapable distortions and imbalances throughout the market, and how central bank manipulation of money and interest rates sets in motion the booms and busts of the business cycle. The current recession has brought new attention to the Austrian theory of money and economic fluctuations, which was first formulated by Mises in the early decades of the 20th century.

While the academe of philosophers is still not willing to give Ayn Rand the respect and serious attention that others believe she rightly deserves, it is nonetheless true that her novels and non-fiction writings, especially The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) and Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal (1966), continue to capture the interest and imagination of a growing number of students in the halls of higher education in the United States. In other words, her ideas continue to reach out to that potential generation of “new intellectuals” that Rand hoped would emerge to offer a principled and morally grounded defense of individualism and capitalism.

The Common Historical Contexts of Their Time

Hayek, Mises and Rand each made their case for freedom and the political order that accompanies it in their own way. While Mises was born in 1881 and, therefore, was 18 years older than Hayek (who was born in 1899) and nearly a quarter of a century older that Rand (who was born in 1905), there were a number of historical experiences they shared in common, and which clearly helped shape their ideas.

First, they came from a Europe that was deeply shaken by the catastrophic destruction and consequences of the First World War. Both Mises and Hayek saw the horrors of combat and the trauma of military defeat while serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army, as well as experiencing the economic hardships and the threat of socialist revolution in postwar Vienna. Rand lived through the Russian Revolution and Civil War, which ended with the triumph of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the imposition of a brutal and murderous communist regime; she also experienced “socialism-in-practice” as a student at the University of Petrograd (later Leningrad, now St Petersburg) as the new Marxist order was being imposed on Russian society.

Second, they also experienced the harsh realities of hyperinflation. Rand witnessed the Bolshevik’s intentional destruction of the Russian currency during the Russian Civil War and Lenin’s system of War Communism, which was designed as a conscious attempt to bring about the abolition of the market economy and capitalist “wage-slavery.” In postwar Germany and Austria, Mises and Hayek watched the new socialist-leaning governments in Berlin and Vienna turn the handle of the monetary printing press to fund the welfare statist and interventionist expenditures for instituting their collectivist dreams. In the process, the middle classes of Germany and Austria were decimated and the social fabric of German and Austrian society were radically undermined.

Third, Rand was fortunate enough to escape the living hell of socialism-in-practice in Soviet Russia by being able to come to America in the mid-1920s. But from her new vantage point, she was able to observe the rise and impact of “American-style” collectivism, during the Great Depression and the coming of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. In Europe, Mises and Hayek watched the rise of fascism in Italy in the 1920s and then the triumph of Hitler and National Socialism in Germany in 1933, the same year that FDR’s New Deal was implemented in the United States. For both Mises and Hayek, the Nazi variation on the collectivist theme not only showed it to be one of the most deadly forms that socialism could take on. It represented, as well, a dark and dangerous “revolt against reason” with the Nazi’s call to the superiority of blood and force over the human mind and rational argumentation.

Their Common Premises on Collectivism and the Free Society

What were among the common premises that Mises, Hayek and Rand shared in the context of the statist reality in which they had lived? Firstly, I would suggest that it clarified conceptual errors and political threats resulting from philosophical and political collectivism. The “nations,” “races,” “peoples” to which the totalitarian collectivists appealed resulted in Mises, Hayek and Rand reminding their readers that these do not exist separate or independent from the individual human beings who make up the membership of these short-hand terms for claimed human associations.  Anything to be understood about such “collectives” of peoples can only realistically and logically begin with an analysis of and an understanding into the nature of the individual human being, and the ideas he may hold about his relationships to others in society.

Furthermore, political collectivism was a dangerous tool in the hands of the ideological demagogues who used the notions of the “people’s will,” or the “nation’s purposes,” or the “society’s needs,” or the “race’s interests,” to assert their claim to a higher insight that justified the right for those with this “special intuitive gift” to guide and rule over others.

Secondly, all three rejected positivism’s denial of the human mind as something real, and as source for knowledge about man and his actions. Mises and Rand, especially, emphasized the importance of man’s use of his reasoning ability to understand and master the world in which he lived, and the importance of reasoned reflection for conceiving rational rules and institutions for a peaceful and prosperous society of free men.  Mises and Rand considered the entire political trend of the 20thcentury to be in the direction of a “revolt against reason.”

Even Hayek, who is sometimes classified as an “anti-rationalist” due to his emphasis on the limits of human reason for designing or intentionally constructing the institutions of society, should also be classified as an advocate of man’s proper use of his reasoning powers when reflecting on man and society. While the phrasing of his arguments sometimes created this confusion, in various places Hayek went out of his way to insist that he was never challenging the centrality of man’s reasoning and rational faculty. Rather, he was reminding central planners and social engineers that one of the important uses of man’s reasoning ability is to understand the limits of what man can and cannot know or hope to do in terms of trying to remake society according to some preconceived design.

Thirdly, all three firmly believed that there was no societal arrangement conceivable for free men and human betterment other than free market capitalism. Only a private property order that respects and protects the right of the individual to his life, liberty, and honestly acquired possessions give people control over their own lives. Only the voluntary associative arrangements of the marketplace minimize the use of force in human relationships. Only the market economy allows each individual the institutional means of being free from the power of the government and its historical patterns of plunder and abuse. And only the market economy gives each individual the latitude to live for himself and use his knowledge and abilities to further his own ends as he best sees fit.

And, finally, Mises, Hayek, and Rand all emphasized the importance of the intellectuals in society in influencing the tone and direction of political, economic, and social ideas and trends. These “second-hand” thinkers of ideas were the driving force behind the emerging and then triumphing collectivist ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries. They were the molders of public opinion who have served as the propagandizers and rationalizers for the concentration of political power and the enslavement and deaths of hundreds of millions of people – people who were indoctrinated about the need for their selfless obedience and sacrifice to those in political power for a “greater good” in the name of some faraway utopia.

The Consequentialist Rationale for Freedom

But where they differed was on the philosophical justification for the free society and the rights of individuals within the social order. Both Mises and Hayek were what today might go under the term “rule utilitarians.” Any action, policy or institution must be evaluated and judged on the basis of its “positive” or “negative” consequences for the achievement of human ends.

However, the benchmark for such evaluation and judgment is not the immediate “positive” or “negative” effects from any action or policy. It must, instead, be placed into a longer-run context of theoretical insight and historical experience to determine whether or not the policy or action and its effects are consistent with the sustainability of the overall institutional order that is judged to be most effective in furthering the long-run possible goals and purposes of the members of society, as a whole.

Thus, the rule utilitarian is concerned with the “moral hazard” arising from an action or policy implemented. That is, will it create “perverse incentives” that results in members of society acting in ways inconsistent with the long-run betterment of their circumstances?

Welfare payments may not only involve a transfer of wealth from the productive “Peters” in society to the unproductive “Pauls.” It may also reduce the motives of the productive members of society to work, save and invest as much as they had or might, due to the disincentive created by the higher taxes to pay for the redistribution. At the same time, such wealth transfers may generate an “entitlement” mentality of having a right to income and wealth without working honestly to earn it. Thus, the “work ethic” is weakened, and a growing number in society may become welfare dependents living off the honest labor of others through the paternalistic transfer hands of the State.

The net effect possibly is to make the society poorer than it otherwise might have been, and therefore making everyone potentially worse off in terms of the longer-run consequences of such policies.

Read the rest here.

I would add the great Murray Rothbard, but contra rule utilitarians Mr. Rothbard was a champion of natural rights based libertarianism

Myth of the Greater Good: Philippine Government to ‘Blast’ Illegal Settlers for Flood Project

Recently I quoted Wendy McElroy’s the Myth of the Greater Good.

Yesterday’s headline news would seem like a great example

From Yahoo.com

The government is prepared to "blast" houses and other illegal structures along riverbanks and waterways if inhabitants refuse to transfer to safer areas, Public Works and Highways Secretary Rogelio Singson said yesterday.

Singson said President Benigno S. Aquino III has authorized the use of force to remove obstructions in the tributaries in Metro Manila and nearby provinces, citing the government's "political will" to implement its P352-billion flood control and mitigation program.

He said the government plans to relocate around 190,000 illegal settlers in the water channels as part of its efforts to reduce floods and minimize casualty during stormy weather.

"I just received instructions from the President that if push comes to shove, we will have to blast the houses if they don't leave within a certain period," Singson said in a Palace press briefing after presenting the flood control master plan to the President.

Political priorities that cater to the alleged “greater good” as shown in the above are reactive, presumptive, short term oriented and populist. Such also demonstrates the innate nature of the state.

The usual stereotyped responses by the government to fleeting immediate popular concerns are short term oriented, where the typical solution centers on throwing of more money at the problem, more regulations or prohibitions and or more taxes.

Never mind that the past centrally planned flood projects have been ineffective. Nobody questions if such fiascos have mainly been consequences of the knowledge problem and of the fragility of central planning operating on a highly complex environment. Everybody has been made to superficially think or believe that such blemishes have been mainly about the lack of money and or mismanagement and of the supposed necessity of government action.

So to address these, for politicians and the bureaucracy, such failures require even grander and more lavish projects. Of course these will be accompanied by the presumptions of expertise.

And anything that obstructs on their visions has to be met by force. Since environmentalism has been today’s politically correct theme, thus illegal settlers or squatters have become targets for coerced actions.

The so-called poor, whom were frequently used as convenient rationalizations for raising taxes, have been transformed into objects of political wrath.

Political priorities are dynamic. The shifting nature of government’s attention greatly depends on popular circumstances which dominate the headlines or which reflect on the public’s opinion.

A few months back, the public has been mesmerized with territorial claims dispute. And with calls for populist nationalism, the government’s response has been to increase their budget with implicit popular approval. According to globalsecurity.org, the Armed Forces modernization bill that would add 75 billion pesos ($1.8 billion) for defense spending over the following five years to acquire more weapons, personnel carriers, frigates and aircraft. Yet all such increases in military spending will hardly bolster the nation’s defense or do anything substantial to address the so-called controversial regional dispute.

Instead what these does is to pressure taxpayers into supporting non productive activities which will be used against them.

In the future, should there arise other popular immediate concerns such as natural calamities, e.g. earthquakes or tsunamis or others, expect the response to be the same—throw money at the problem, and wish or hope for their success.

Current political obsession over the environment comes in response to the monsoon rain flooding where popular opinion has been shaped by flawed ideas of environmental experts. One of whom has even blamed economic growth and urbanization as responsible for the current disasters.

Never mind if the citizens of the metropolis have shown increased wellbeing from economic development (table from NSO).

For the environmentalist religion, the argumentative framing has been to put up a strawman and beat them down.

The thrust of the environmental nirvana fallacy extrapolates that we should remain poor so as to allegedly “save the environment”. Yes, use one event (fallacy of composition) to highlight the need for socialist interventionist misanthropic (anti-people) policies by ignoring all other important factors.

High approval ratings thus becomes a license for political boondoggles premised on the supposed omniscience of “experts” whose reasoning can’t even pass the logical rigors of economics.

High approval ratings also mean that current policies have been designed based on the outcome most preferred by the median voter—Median Voter theory or populist politics.

Yet politics has always been a zero sum or even a negative sum activity.

So the Philippine government has turned the heat against the illegal settlers or squatters whom incidentally are mostly creatures of the state through the decriminalization of squatting or the Lina Law. The immoral statute has encouraged rampant squatting which has mostly been used by local politicians for election purposes.

Never mind too that despite the immorality of the actions of the illegal settlers who were mostly incentivized by law and became instruments of politicians, these people still have natural rights enshrined by Article 3 of the Philippine 1987 constitution (hat tip my beloved daughter) which holds that

No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor shall any person be denied the equal protection of the laws.

“The government is prepared to "blast" houses and other illegal structures” signifies that the privileges of the natural rights of life, liberty, or property only belong to the political class and to those designated by them. All the rest are standing vassals of the state and whose lives are seen merely as statistics.

This also shows that the nature of the state is institutional violence, such that violence and the threat of violence can be used indiscriminately, especially targeted against their own citizens, depending on the caprices of those that wield them.

As the great Professor Ludwig von Mises explained,

State and government are the social apparatus of violent coercion and repression. Such an apparatus, the police power, is indispensable in order to prevent antisocial individuals and bands from destroying social cooperation. Violent prevention and suppression of antisocial activities benefit the whole of society and each of its members. But violence and oppression are none the less evils and corrupt those in charge of their application. It is necessary to restrict the power of those in office lest they become absolute despots. Society cannot exist without an apparatus of violent coercion. But neither can it exist if the office holders are irresponsible tyrants free to inflict harm on those they dislike.

In reality, both illegal settlers and the threat of violence against them, to justify the administration’s new pet flood project, signify ethically as two wrongs which do not make right.

Yet for the current crop of politicians, high approval ratings translates to political superciliousness and the license to conduct political repression which elevates the risks of a tyrannical rule.

History shows us of the myth of the rational voter where people junk rationality in terms of politics to support “systematically biased ideas concerning economics” or widespread social ideas grounded on economic ignorance.

Populist politics have been premised on what people want to hear rather than what they need to hear.

Nazi chief Adolf Hitler’s popular rise to power should be a magnificent example. Chart from Spiegel Online

At the end of the day, the “greater good” is in essence the bamboozling of the gullible public using feel good political themes, for them to support the self-interests and the priorities of the political class coursed through institutionalized violence.

Quote of the Day: The Myth of the Greater Good

The 19th-century British individualist Auberon Herbert addressed the issue of the “good of the greatest number.” He stated, “There never was invented a more specious and misleading phrase. The Devil was in his most subtle and ingenious mood when he slipped this phrase into the brains of men. I hold it to be utterly false in essentials.”

Why is it false? Because the phrase assumes as a given that a higher morality requires the violation of individual rights. Or in Herbert’s words, “It assumes that there are two opposed ‘goods,’ and that the one good is to be sacrificed to the other good — but in the first place, this is not true, for liberty is the one good, open to all, and requiring no sacrifice of others, and secondly, this false opposition (where no real opposition exists) of two different goods means perpetual war between men.” [Emphasis added.]

Herbert is relying on two intimately related theories: first, “the universality of rights”; and, second, “a natural harmony of interests.” The universality of rights means that every individual has the same natural rights to an equal degree.

Race, gender, religion or other secondary characteristics do not matter; only the primary characteristic of being human is important. A natural harmony of interests means that the peaceful exercise of one person’s individual rights does not harm the similar exercise by any other person.

My freedom of conscience or speech does not negate my neighbor’s. The peaceful jurisdiction I claim over my own body does not diminish anyone else’s claim of self-ownership. Indeed, the more I assert the principle of self-ownership, the stronger and more secure that principle becomes for everyone.

Only in a world where rights are not universal, where people’s peaceful behavior conflicts, does it make sense to accept the need to sacrifice individuals to a greater good. This is not the real world, but one that has been manufactured for political purposes.

Herbert explained a key assumption that underlies this faux world: the acceptance of the “greater good” itself. He asked, “Why are two men to be sacrificed to three men? We all agree that the three men are not to be sacrificed to the two men; but why — as a matter of moral right — are we to do what is almost as bad and immoral and shortsighted — sacrifice the two men to the three men? Why sacrifice any one… when liberty does away with all necessity of sacrifice?”

Herbert denied the validity of “this law of numbers, which… is what we really mean when we speak of State authority…under which three men are made absolutely supreme, and two men are made absolutely dependent.” Instead of accepting the law of numbers as an expression of greater good, Herbert viewed it as a convenient social construct, calling it “a purely conventional law, a mere rude, half-savage expedient, which cannot stand the criticism of reason, or be defended… by considerations of universal justice. You can only plead expediency of it.”

To whom was the social construct of conflict convenient? Why would a faux world of inherent conflict be created? By solving the manufactured problems, a great deal of power was transferred from individuals to a ruling class.

Herbert wrote, “The tendency of all great complicated machines is to make a ruling class, for they alone understand the machine, and they alone are skilled in the habit of guiding it; and the tendency of a ruling expert class, when once established, is that at critical moments they do pretty nearly what they like with the nation…”

Rather than solve a social problem, the ruling class had a devastating effect on the welfare of common people, who became “a puzzled flock of sheep waiting for the sheepdog to drive us through the gate.” Ironically, by claiming the collective was greater, the few were able to assume control over the many. The “greater good” devolved to whatever served the interests of the ruling class.

This is from Ms. Wendy McElroy at the Laissez Faire Books.

All the popular appeal to the emotions couched on (collectivist) 'nationalism' have been no more than vicious propaganda intended to uphold the interests of the ruling class.

Differentiating Phony Rights from Real Rights

In a letter to a newspaper, Professor David Henderson refutes what the mainstream and leftists call as “rights”

A real right is, say, my right not to be murdered. The only responsibility that imposes on you and others is not to murder me. In other words, it's a responsibility not to do something. The "right" to good housing, though, is a phony right because it implies that someone else has a positive duty to provide it. And let's not hide behind government. The only way government can provide things is by forcibly taking from others.

Except for the preservation of the natural rights to life, liberty, and property, I’d be very leery of anyone claiming for (positive) “rights” (which are disguised grants to state power) as such would extrapolate to more taxes, restriction of civil liberties and inflation.

Video: Differentiating Natural Rights from Legal and Constitutional Rights

The educational video below from LearnLiberty.org, explains the differences of rights.

From Learn Liberty,

Individuals have rights. But are they natural? And how do they compare and contrast with legal or constitutional rights? Are legal or constitutional rights similar to those inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence? Professor Aeon Skoble distinguishes such constitutional rights, such as the right to vote, from the rights protected by governments and constitutions—natural rights not actually granted by governments themselves. He concludes that legal systems should create rights that are combatable with natural rights.