A common criticism I hear of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is, “Yeah, it’s great fiction. But life is not like that. In real life, businessmen don’t have integrity like Hank Rearden’s.”

Guess again, Mr. Critic.

The last time you saw a non-evil Japanese businessman portrayed in any motion picture — whether the movie was filmed in America, Japan, or some other place — did he ever say anything like this?

First, each individual should work for himself — that’s important. People will not sacrifice themselves for the company. They come to work at the company to enjoy themselves. That feeling would lead to innovation. The most important thing for me, is me [boldface added].

Would you believe that those words were spoken by a real-life Japanese inventor-engineer-industrialist?

His name is Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motor Co., Ltd. Every time you see a car with “Honda” on it, think of the sort of man who made it possible.

The archetypal Japanese businessman is supposed to be a collectivist who thinks that, when necessary, he must sacrifice his own happiness for the sake of the corporation he works for. And he must restrain his own emotions for the sake of “social respectability.” At least, that’s what I’ve heard.

I showed the above quotation to several people. One, an American who had lived in Japan for several years, said, “It’s shocking that a prominent Japanese businessman would say that!” Someone else chimed in, “Maybe he was already old when he said that. In Japan, old people can get with saying what young men cannot.” Incidentally, I first learned of this quotation from Edwin A. Locke’s excellent book The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators.

One would expect the CEO of a major Japanese corporation to utter the usual altruist platitudes. Tachi Kiuchi, the managing director of Mitsubishi, is an expert at that. Here is a sample:

Conventional wisdom is that the highest mission of a corporation is to maximize profits. Maximize return to shareholders. [Ha! If that were the conventional wisdom, the world would be a less stupid place. --S.H.] . . .

That is a myth. It has never been true. . . . …profits are not an end. They are a means to an end. The economic bottom line only exists to feed the social bottom line.

My philosophy is this: We don’t run our companies to earn profits. We earn profits to run our companies. . . .

What I learned from the rainforest is easy to understand. . . . Consume less, and be more. It is the only way. . . .

Only together can we make the world whole.

Yawn. As if those cliches weren’t spoken by the CEO of almost every big corporation, U.S.-based or Japan-based.

Soichiro Honda expresses thoughts that are much more original and stimulating. His pro-selfishness quotation comes from this Monday, January 27, 1987 New York Times article, which also provides these gems from him (the last one is my favorite):

* “Government officials should always act to protect the public interest. But they tend to become an obstacle when you try to do something new.”

* “Generally speaking, people work harder and are more innovative if working voluntarily…”

* “‘I think it’s very important to be sensitive to seemingly trivial psychological matters.”

* “I have some ideas. But I always find out that younger people have done them already. Young people are wonderful — I just can’t beat them. They’ve learned from our experience, and then they add their own ideas. Many older people talk about ‘kids these days.’ I have never used that expression.”

From what I have read of Honda, he was always a very strange man. He was not only a rebel and an eccentric by Japanese standards, but even by American ones. He began as an uneducated tinkerer who worked on motorcycles on his own. A life-long autodidact, he taught himself most of what he needed to know about mechanics. When he came to recognize certain important gaps in his knowledge, he went to engineering school — not because anyone else expected it of him, but merely to solve the specific problems that were plaguing his business.

It is often assumed that someone as innovative and independent as Howard Roark could never have existed in Japan. It is true that Japan has too much social conformity and cultural collectivism (actually, even the most individualistic countries have too much collectivism). However, it is entirely inconceivable that post-World-War-II Japan could have become such an innovative economic powerhouse if its private sector didn’t tolerate a certain level of Roarkian originality and innovation in business. Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka of Sony did not live their private lives with the same independence as Roark, but they did show such independence in their professional lives. They found a technology invented in the United States called “video-tape recording” (partially invented by Ray Dolby of Dolby Stereo fame), and noticed that no one in the USA utilized it because it was too expensive. Ibuka — an engineer and inventor himself — put his best engineers on the project and developed a new cost-feasible model of this invention.

Even from the time of the Meiji Restoration to its pinnacle of power during World War Two, Japan existed in what we would consider “Third World subsistence poverty.” Were it not for some exercises in Roarkian independence from 1945 onward in the scientific, engineering, and industrial sectors, Japan would not be the wealthy powerhouse that it is today. It is therefore fitting that Ayn Rand once told a Japanese architect who liked The Fountainhead that “philosophical ideas hold true for all people everywhere and…there will always be men who will respond to a philosophical truth in every country on earth” (letter to Y. Ashihari, February 26, 1951, in Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner, [New York, NY: Plume, 1997], p. 493).

Insofar as they conform to Tachi Kiuchi’s conventional platitudes, Japanese companies flounder. Inasmuch as they adopt Honda’s constructive attitude, Japanese companies open up many grand opportunities for themselves.

When I read Honda’s words and about his life, he is definitely not as philosophically sophisticated as Roark was at the climax of The Fountainhead. Perhaps he can be called “The Roger Enright of Japan.” I would say that maybe he was as wise as Hank Rearden was in the first fifth of Atlas Shrugged.

Honda even faced a situation similar to something out of Atlas.

In the 1950s, MITI — Japan’s Ministry of International Trade & Technology — was under the misapprehension that Japanese industry would not be able to compete against U.S. industry unless it was managed by the State. It sought to create a government-regulated automobile cartel that allowed no more than three companies to export their cars to the United States. Much like the Railroad Unification Plan and Steel Unification Plan of Atlas, this was the original Auto Unification Plan, anticipating Barack Obama’s reign by decades.

As one website tells the story,

This was at a time when the powerful Ministry of Trade and Industy (MITI) was trying to unite several small companies into a third large one to compete with Toyota and Nissan. MITI and the Department of Transportation tried to discourage Honda from adding to the number of companies, but he persisted. He won MITI’s permission by coming out with a low-priced small sportscar, the S 500, which was different from anything produced by the other companies. He followed it up with other sports models. His company was still very small, producing only three thousand cars in 1966 — half of what Toyota was turning out in a week.

This is how Honda himself saw it in his own translated words:

I deluged him [the MITI bureaucrat] with complaints, because I couldn’t understand it at all. To hell with the Specified Industry Promotion Law! I had the right to manufacture automobiles, and they couldn’t enforce a law that would allow only the existing manufacturers to build them while preventing us from doing the same. We were free to do exactly what we wanted. Besides, no one could say for certain that those in power would remain there forever. Look at history. Eventually, a new power would always arise. I shouted at him angrily, saying that if MITI wanted us to merge (form a joint venture with another company), then they should buy our shares and propose it at our shareholders’ meeting. After all, we were a public company [he means a privately owned company that is publicly traded on the stock market]. The government couldn’t tell me what to do.

As always, the government certainly did tell him what to do! Fortunately, however, Honda triumphed:

The basic MITI policy regarding Japan’s car industry was compiled into the Temporary Measures Bill for the Promotion of Specified Industries in March 1963, and was submitted to the 43rd Session of the National Diet. However, the session was adjourned in July without a resolution. The bill was resubmitted to the 46th session starting in January 1964, but did not pass. The bill was eventually abandoned without anyone really knowing its ultimate destiny.

Justice prevailed, which is why the economy did as well. Can you imagine how much worse off Japan, the USA, the world, and common decency would have been had that law been passed?

Honda was an independent freethinker who peaceably lived according to his own rational judgment, and stood up to a State threatening to throttle it. If Japan, the USA, and anywhere else had more people like that, we would be in a much better situation.

The more I learn about Soichiro Honda, the more I like him.

Even his initials are good.

As an engineer, Honda mostly preferred to handle the research & development side of his business. He left the bookkeeping and accounting to a capable, no-nonsense gentleman named Takeo Fujisawa, who has been described as a “loner.” In this PDF, Fujisawa is quoted saying,

“President”…isn’t a rank expressing greatness in a person. When some people become president, however, they start strutting about like they’re field marshal. President is the most hazardous occupation known to man.

He was talking about the presidents of big corporations. But, these days, I think those words more accurately apply to Presidents of whole countries, even those in the First World.

So, yes, Mr. Critic, you can find qualities like Hank Rearden’s in the entrepreneurs who lead the freer nations’ economies. If you can’t find them, you might want to consider searching with greater concentration and scrutiny.

Honda: Motorcycle mechanic and tinkerer turned auto mogul

* There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran’s internal affairs. The deep belief that everything – especially anything in English – is already and by definition an intervention is part of the identity and ideology of the theocracy.

* It is a mistake to assume that theayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.

* The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured experts.

That last observation also applies to the Obama administration. Want to take a non-interventionist position? All right, then, take a non-interventionist position. This would mean not referring to Khamenei in fawning tones as the Supreme Leader and not calling Iran itself by the tyrannical title of the Islamic republic. But be aware that nothing will stop the theocrats from slandering you for interfering anyway. Also try to bear in mind that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed. (Hint: Don’t make your sole reference to Iranian dictatorship an allusion to a British-organised coup in 1953; the mullahs think that it proves their main point, and this generation has more immediate enemies to confront.)

 

Read More…

By Robert Tracinski and Tom Minchin

There is rising recognition that introduction of a carbon tax under the guise of “cap and trade” will be personally costly, economically disruptive to society and tend to shift classes of jobs offshore. Moreover, despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations, global warming seems to have taken a holiday….

With public perceptions changing so dramatically and quickly it is little wonder Ian Plimer’s latest book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, has been received with such enthusiasm and is into its third print run in as many weeks. [It's now up to the fifth printing.]

The public is receptive to an exposé of the many mythologies and false claims associated with anthropogenic global warming and are welcoming an authoritative description of planet Earth and its ever-changing climate in readable language.

One of the most remarkable changes occurred on April 13, when leading global warming hysteric Paul Sheehan—who writes for the main Sydney newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, which has done as much to hype the threat of global warming as any Australian newspaper—reviewed Plimer’s book and admitted he was taken aback. He describes Plimer, correctly, as “one of Australia’s foremost Earth scientists,” and praised the book as “brilliantly argued” and “the product of 40 years’ research and breadth of scholarship.”

What does Plimer’s book say? Here is Sheehan’s summary:

Much of what we have read about climate change, [Plimer] argues, is rubbish, especially the computer modeling on which much current scientific opinion is based, which he describes as “primitive.”…

The Earth’s climate is driven by the receipt and redistribution of solar energy. Despite this crucial relationship, the sun tends to be brushed aside as the most important driver of climate. Calculations on supercomputers are primitive compared with the complex dynamism of the Earth’s climate and ignore the crucial relationship between climate and solar energy.

To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2, or a small proportion of one variable—human-induced CO2—is not science. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly.

In response, this is Sheehan’s conclusion: “Heaven and Earth is an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.” This cannot be interpreted as anything but a capitulation. It cedes to the global warming rejectionists the high ground of being “evidence-based,” and it accepts the characterization of the global warming promoters as dogmatic conformists.

The political impact has been manifested in a series of climb-downs as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s government has been forced to delay its plans for cap-and-trade controls. On May 4, the government announced it would postpone the onset of the scheme until mid-2011, a year later than originally planned.

On June 4, this delayed emission trading scheme passed the House of Representatives despite a vote against it by the opposition. But it now faces almost certain defeat in the Australian Senate. Whereas the Labor government controls 32 votes in the Senate, the opposition Liberal-National coalition controls 37 and is committed to vote against it if the Rudd government will not grant more time to consider the outcome of the Copenhagen climate conference in December and US Senate deliberations. This itself is a compromise position, because many of the coalition parliamentarians now want to vote unconditionally against an ETS in any form.

There are 7 other votes in the Senate: five Greens who say the scheme doesn’t go far enough but who could be induced to go along; one independent, Nick Xenophon, who has pledged to vote against the bill unless the government waits till after Copenhagen; and one other, Senator Steve Fielding of the Family First Party, who has decided to investigate the whole thing first hand. Fielding could turn out to be the single deciding vote.

His story is particularly interesting. Andrew Bolt, who has been leading the charge against the global warming hysteria for years, notes that Fielding’s investigation “could blow apart the great global warming scare.”

Fielding went to the US to assess the American evidence for global warming at close quarters. As Melbourne’s Age reported on June 4:

Senator Fielding said he was impressed by some of the data presented at the [US Heartland Institute's] climate change skeptics’ conference: namely that, although carbon emissions had increased in the last 10 years, global temperature had not.

He said scientists at the conference had advanced other explanations, such as the relationship between solar activity and solar energy hitting the Earth to explain climate change.

Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian’s disregard for self-important government officials. Here is how The Age described his challenge:

Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.

Telling an Australian you’re not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded:

Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….

As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.

What Fielding’s questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo’s tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust.

And that’s what makes Plimer so influential—not just his credibility as a scientist, but the righteous certainty with which he dismisses man-made global warming as an unscientific dogma. He writes: “The Emissions Trading Scheme legislation poises Australia to make the biggest economic decision in its history”—Australia generates 80% of its electricity from coal, which would essentially be outlawed—”yet there has been no scientific due diligence. There has never been a climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma.”

Plimer is not a “skeptic,” a term which would imply that he merely has a few doubts about the global warming claims. Instead, he rejects the whole myth outright, and this seems to have emboldened and liberated a great many Australians who were already chafing under global warming conformity. As Plimer puts it:

[T]here are a large number of punters [Australian for "customers" or "gamblers"—in this case, skeptical customers who may or may not buy what the government's selling] who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion. Green politics have taken the place of failed socialism and Western Christianity and impose fear, guilt, penance, and indulgences onto a society with little scientific literacy.

Australia is not that different from America. If a shift in public opinion against the global warming dogma can happen on one side of the earth, it can happen on the other—especially when the US edition of Plimer’s book, scheduled for July 1, hits the stands.

His role, Plimer says, is to show “that the emperor has no clothes.” After three decades of relentless global warming propaganda, it’s about time.

The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America’s first black president, and a man promising the “new,” we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.

…

With the Sotomayor nomination, Mr. Obama has made the same mistake his wife made in her “This is the first time I am proud of my country” remark: bad faith toward an America that has shown him only good faith.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A14

Today conservatism is stigmatized in our culture as an antiminority political philosophy. In certain quarters, conservatism is simply racism by another name. And minorities who openly identify themselves as conservatives are still novelties, fish out of water.

Yet there is now the feeling that without an appeal to minorities, conservatism is at risk of marginalization. The recent election revealed a Republican Party — largely white, male and Southern — seemingly on its way to becoming a “regional” party. Still, an appeal targeted just at minorities — reeking as it surely would of identity politics — is anathema to most conservatives. Can’t it be assumed, they would argue, that support of classic principles — individual freedom and equality under the law — constitutes support of minorities? And, given the fact that blacks and Hispanics often poll more conservatively than whites on most social issues, shouldn’t there be an easy simpatico between these minorities and political conservatism?

‘Compassionate conservatism’ was clever — as a marketing ploy.

But of course the reverse is true. There is an abiding alienation between the two — an alienation that I believe is the great new challenge for both modern conservatism and formerly oppressed minorities. Oddly, each now needs the other to evolve.

Yet why this alienation to begin with? Can it be overcome?

I think it began in a very specific cultural circumstance: the dramatic loss of moral authority that America suffered in the 1960s after openly acknowledging its long mistreatment of blacks and other minorities. Societies have moral accountability, and they cannot admit to persecuting a race of people for four centuries without losing considerable moral legitimacy. Such a confession — honorable as it may be — virtually calls out challenges to authority. And in the 1960s challenges emerged from everywhere — middle-class white kids rioted for “Free Speech” at Berkeley, black riots decimated inner cities across the country, and violent antiwar protests were ubiquitous. America suddenly needed a conspicuous display of moral authority in order to defend the legitimacy of its institutions against relentless challenge.

This was the circumstance that opened a new formula for power in American politics: redemption. If you could at least seem to redeem America of its past sins, you could win enough moral authority to claim real political power. Lyndon Johnson devastated Barry Goldwater because — among other reasons — he seemed bent on redeeming America of its shameful racist past, while Goldwater’s puritanical libertarianism precluded his even supporting the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson’s Great Society grandly advertised a new American racial innocence. If it utterly failed to “end poverty in our time,” it succeeded — through a great display of generosity toward minorities and the poor — in recovering enough moral authority to see the government through the inexorable challenges of the ’60s.

When redemption became a term of power, “redemptive liberalism” was born — a new activist liberalism that gave itself a “redemptive” profile by focusing on social engineering rather than liberalism’s classic focus on individual freedom. In the ’60s there was no time to allow individual freedom to render up the social good. Redemptive liberalism would proactively engineer the good. Name a good like “integration,” and then engineer it into being through a draconian regimen of school busing. If the busing did profound damage to public education in America, it gave liberals the right to say, “At least we did something!” In other words, we are activists against America’s old sin of segregation. Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

But conservatism sees moral authority more in a discipline of principles than in activism. It sees ideas of the good like “diversity” as mere pretext for the social engineering that always leads to unintended and oppressive consequences. Conservatism would enforce the principles that ensure individual freedom, and then allow “the good” to happen by “invisible hand.”

And here is conservatism’s great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive — and thus a source of moral authority and power — conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America’s bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression.

Added to this, American minorities of color — especially blacks — are often born into grievance-focused identities. The idea of grievance will seem to define them in some eternal way, and it will link them atavistically to a community of loved ones. To separate from grievance — to say simply that one is no longer racially aggrieved — will surely feel like an act of betrayal that threatens to cut one off from community, family and history. So, paradoxically, a certain chauvinism develops around one’s sense of grievance. Today the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement.

And this identity calls minorities to an anticonservative orientation to American politics. It makes for an almost ancestral resistance to conservatism. One’s identity of grievance is flattered by the moral activism of the left and offended by the invisible hand of the right. Minorities feel they were saved from oppression by the left’s activism, not by the right’s discipline. The truth doesn’t matter much here (in fact it took both activism and principle, civil war and social movement, to end this oppression). But activism indicates moral anguish in whites, and so it constitutes the witness minorities crave. They feel seen, understood. With the invisible hand the special case of their suffering doesn’t count for much, and they go without witness.

So here stands contemporary American conservatism amidst its cultural liabilities and, now, its electoral failures — with no mechanism to redeem America of its shames, atavistically resisted by minorities, and vulnerable to stigmatization as a bigoted and imperialistic political orientation. Today’s liberalism may stand on decades of failed ideas, but it is failure in the name of American redemption. It remains competitive with — even ascendant over — conservatism because it addresses America’s moral accountability to its past with moral activism. This is the left’s great power, and a good part of the reason Barack Obama is now the president of the United States. No matter his failures — or the fruitlessness of his extravagant and scatter-gun governmental activism — he redeems America of an ugly past. How does conservatism compete with this?

The first impulse is to moderate. With “compassionate conservatism” and “affirmative access” and “faith-based initiatives,” President George W. Bush tried to show a redemptive conservatism that could be activist against the legacy of America’s disgraceful past. And it worked electorally by moderating the image of conservatives as uncaring disciplinarians. But in the end it was only a marketer’s ploy — a shrewd advertisement with no actual product to sell.

What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other — two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior.

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. I always secretly loved Malcolm X more than Martin Luther King Jr. because Malcolm wanted a fuller human dignity for blacks — one independent of white moral wrestling. In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience.

Liberalism’s glamour follows from its promise of a new American innocence. But the appeal of conservatism is relief from this supercilious idea. Innocence is not possible for America. This nation did what it did. And conservatism’s appeal is that it does not bank on the recovery of lost innocence. It seeks the discipline of ordinary people rather than the virtuousness of extraordinary people. The challenge for conservatives today is simply self-acceptance, and even a little pride in the way we flail away at problems with an invisible hand.

 

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

What could such statements possibly mean– in any context– other than the new and fashionable racism of our time, rather than the old-fashioned racism of earlier times? Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups. Thomas Sowell

People who don’t like “the rich” or “big business” or the banks may be happy that President Obama is sticking it to them. But such arbitrary powers can be turned on anybody. Thomas Sowell

There is no evidence that struggle automatically makes you a better person.

Sometimes, instead of making you appreciative of a society in which someone born at the bottom can rise to the top, it leaves you embittered that you had to spend years struggling, and resentful of those who were born into circumstances where the easy way to the top was open to them. Thomas Sowell

A critic does not, as a rule, devote thousands of words and his best verbal pyrotechnics to dismissing a novel which he asserts in the beginning of a review should not be taken seriously. Edward Cline

Race talk often portrays black Americans as downtrodden and deserving of white people’s help and sympathy. That vision is an insult of major proportions. Walter Williams

rights are not social gifts but political principles based on facts of reality. These facts don’t bend to the so-called will of society. That’s why the most fundamental question a Supreme Court justice must answer is what in fact do the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and happiness include? Thomas Bowden

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. Shelby Steele

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. It tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important.
          — Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition” The Romantic Manifesto, p. 45.
 

In that spirit I want to recognize some artists here.

 

Justice David Souter’s retirement from the Supreme Court presents President Barack Obama with his first opportunity to appoint someone to the High Court. People who are speculating about whether the next nominee will be a woman, a Hispanic or whatever, are missing the point.

That we are discussing the next Supreme Court justice in terms of group “representation” is a sign of how far we have already strayed from the purpose of law and the weighty responsibility of appointing someone to sit for life on the highest court in the land.

…

We would have entered a strange new world, where everybody is equal but some are more equal than others. The very idea of the rule of law would become meaningless when it is replaced by the empathies of judges.

…

The biggest danger in appointing the wrong people to the Supreme Court is not just in how they might vote on some particular issues– whether private property, abortion or whatever. The biggest danger is that they will undermine or destroy the very concept of the rule of law– what has been called “a government of laws and not of men.”

…

While President Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal — getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of the power of the federal government and an ever-declining restraint by the Constitution of the United States.

…

This is consistent with everything else that Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long track record of alliances with people who reject the fundamentals of American society.

…

Barack Obama’s vision of America is one in which a President of the United States can fire the head of General Motors, tell banks how to bank, control the medical system and take charge of all sorts of other activities for which neither he nor other politicians have any expertise or experience.

…

The only thing on the side of those who understand this, and who oppose it, is time. Reshaping the Supreme Court cannot be done overnight, the way Congress passed a vast spending bill in two days.

…

Since Justice David Souter is likely to be replaced by another liberal, it is all too easy to say that it is no big deal. But with all the indications already as to how the Obama administration is trying to remake America on many fronts, the time to begin alerting the public to the dangers is now.

 

What must be done to recover from this financial crisis? Barack Obama rightly stresses that we first must understand how today’s problems emerged. It is “only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.”
Unfortunately, Obama (along with most of the Washington establishment) has created only misunderstanding. In calling for a massive increase in government control over the economy, he has evaded the mountain of evidence implicating the government.
For example, Obama’s core explanation of all the destructive behavior leading up to today’s crisis is that the market was too free. But the market that led to today’s crisis was systematically manipulated by government.

Fact: this decade saw drastic attempts by the government to control the housing and financial markets–via a Federal Reserve that cut interest rates to all-time lows, and via a gigantic increase in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s size and influence.

Fact: through these entities, the government sought to “stimulate the economy” and promote homeownership (sound familiar?) by artificially extending cheap credit to home-buyers.

Fact: most of the (very few) economists who actually predicted the financial crisis blame Fed policy or housing policy for inflating a bubble that was bound to collapse.

How does all this evidence factor into Obama’s understanding of “how we arrived at this moment”? It doesn’t. Not once, during the solemn 52 minutes and 5,902 words of his speech to Congress did he mention the Fed, Fannie, or Freddie. Not once did he suggest that government manipulation of markets could have any possible role in the present crisis. He just went full steam ahead and called for more spending, more intervention, and more government housing programs as the solution.
But a genuine explanation of the financial crisis must take into account all the facts. What role did the Fed play? What about Fannie and Freddie? To be sure, some companies and CEOs seem to have made irrational business decisions. Was the primary cause “greed,” as so many claim–and what does this even mean? Or was the primary cause government intervention like artificially low interest rates, which distorted economic decision-making and encouraged less competent and more reckless companies and CEOs while marginalizing and paralyzing the more competent ones?
Entertaining such questions would also mean considering the idea that the fundamental solution to our problems is to disentangle the government from the markets to prevent future manipulation. It would mean considering pro-free-market remedies such as letting banks foreclose, letting prices reach market levels, letting bad banks fail, dismantling Fannie and Freddie, ending bailout promises, and getting rid of the Fed’s power to manipulate interest rates.
But it is not genuine understanding the administration seeks. For them, the wisdom and necessity of previous government intervention is self-evident; no matter the contrary evidence, the crisis can only have been caused by insufficient government intervention. Besides, they are too busy following Obama’s chief of staff’s dictum, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” by proposing a virtual takeover of not only financial markets, but also the problem-riddled energy and health-care markets–which, they conveniently ignore, are also already among the most government-controlled in the economy.

While Obama has not sought a real explanation of today’s economic problems, Americans should. Otherwise, we will simply swallow “solutions” that dogmatically assume the free market got us here–namely, Obama’s plans to swamp this country in an ocean of government debt, government controls, and government make-work projects. But alternative, free-market explanations for the crisis do exist–ones that consider the inconvenient facts Washington ignores–and every American should seek to understand them.
Those who do will likely end up telling our leaders to stop saying “Yes, we can” to each new proposal for expanding government power, and start saying “Yes, you can” to Americans who seek to exercise their right to produce and trade on a free market.

Alex Epstein is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual

Rights. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute

and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged”

and “The Fountainhead.”
 
 
 
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