Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance
Reliving We The Living

Devotion To Your Rational Life Is The Primary, Essential Force For Human Peace and Prosperity.

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Chapter 17, Part II is the chilling story of Kira’s escape to Latvia in Ayn Rand’s 1936 epic novel, We the Living. In a principled life of motion and purpose, she chose an arduous journey from the mental and physical torture of the east, and toward the modern, classical liberalism of the west.

After what seemed like endless days and nights on a desolate train ride, Kira’s journey necessitated a brief rest stop to change clothes and eat.  Ahead of her lay the night-long, final trek across a barren, winter frontier. It compelled only the essentials, so Kira gambled on a safe-house,

She knocked at a door. A man opened it. She slipped a bill into his hand and tried to explain. She did not have to explain much. Those in the house knew and understood.

In the previous chapter, and in a chance meeting on her way to the train station, Gen Z’s Kira ran into her beloved Uncle Vasili on the streets of Petrograd, now Leningrad. While he desperately clung to hope that Europe will somehow rescue Russians from Soviet slavery, Kira told him,

Uncle Vasili . . . over there . . . where I’m going . . . I’ll tell them about everything . . . It’s like an SOS . . . And maybe . . . someone . . . somewhere . . . will understand . . . .

Prior to that, Andrei had surrendered his body to Soviet totalitarianism in Chapter 15, and Leo was surrendering his mind. After learning of her relationship with Andrei and being released from jail, Leo explains, “Because, you see, that sets me free.” Kira then asks, “Free . . . from what Leo?” He answers, “From a little fool who was my last hold on self-esteem.” Millennial Leo had been defeated by overwhelming, government-enforced selflessness.

Conversely, it seems hatred of President Trump is rooted in his refusal to be defeated over his love for America. His resilience and perseverance in the face of desperate and virulent opposition is not unlike Kira’s, and his arrogantly confident egoism befits Leo. As a result, Trump represents a grave threat to 2020 America’s war and welfare statists. Taking his turn, former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich threatened on October 18th,

When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.

Despite greed and cowardice being the hallmarks of ‘Democratic’ Socialism’s exponents, Joe Biden being the exemplar, as reported by the New York Post on October 14th, Leo finally asked Kira, “Have you nothing to say?” She turned and looked at him calmly, and answered, “Only this, Leo: it was I against 150 million people. I lost.” Men against Man.

Yet, Kira had not lost her fitness for living or right to moral justice. Because self-esteem is a matter of life and death, pride defends the meaning of Kira’s life, her most precious ideal,

She had to walk west. That was the only problem, that was the total of all problems. She did not have to think. She had to get out.

Here, Ayn Rand has identified Kira’s singular goal and its essential action. To live demanded the reason of Western civilization because the mysticism of the east meant death by altruism or force. For Kira, her devotion to logic led to one thing – the energy of her mind and body coordinated in pursuit of her ultimate goal, and it was time to act.

While all other options had been exhausted, Kira had been here before. At the end of Part I, chasing every possibility offered by the Soviet socialist criminal gang, she got Leo to a sanitorium in Crimea to save his life. Now, it was Kira’s turn, and this is the extraordinary and beautiful message of We the Living. Your life and happiness are your highest value; not Society, not God, not others, and not retribution.

This is the essence of the Preamble to America’s Declaration of Independence, and also the advice received from Leonard Peikoff (author of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand) by teaching impresario Lisa VanDamme, and posted online on October 16th,

A few years in, I considered getting out of education. I sought guidance from people I respected. The worst advice: Figure out where you want to make an impact; to change the world. From Leonard: Reflect on your week. What made you the most happy? Extract principles about what activities bring you satisfaction. Pursue a career that features those.

However, for most 2020 Americans, Kira’s message from Uncle Vasili and millions of Russians is not getting through. Public education is grounded in public service, social justice, non-profit work, and giving back. All based on the false premise that there is “something greater than yourself.” While Robert Reich may be an irrelevant turd from the 1990’s, the depravity of “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” have been popular among government elites in over 40 countries and three decades.

Perhaps the most egregious example is the aftermath of terrorist Nelson Mandela’s “Democratic Socialism” disaster. As Martin van Staden, Head of Legal Policy at the Free Market Foundation of South Africa wrote in 2017,

We were supposed to move away from the Apartheid mentality. Instead, we have doubled down. The so-called Prevention of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill of 2016 is perhaps the gravest threat to freedom of expression which South Africans have ever faced.

Kira Argounova’s attitude and behavior offer the glorious alternative to fighting for reparations or revelation – pride. When Leo asked her, “What is there to bind me?” She looked straight at him, and only her lips moved as she answered with the greatest calm of her life: “Nothing Leo.” Chapter 16 ended, “Well good-bye, Uncle Vasili” . . . “Good-bye, Kira.” She walked away without looking back.

Never letting setbacks get in the way of her aspirations, and with freedom on the horizon, in defense of man against men, Kira’s mind, body, and spirit achieved its ultimate clarity,

She smiled, as if she had lived it. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be. A moment or an eternity – did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

Whatever You Think Of Google, Please Don’t Cheer For The Government’s Manufactured Anti-Trust Case.

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We’re pretty skeptical about anti-trust laws on principle. They’re government weapons in the ongoing war against the private sector. Even in that context, the stunt the DOJ is pulling in suing Google is especially egregious.

The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it was launching an antitrust lawsuit against Google alleging that the search giant’s deals with browser and operating system developers to make Google a default search engine amounted to anticompetitive behavior. The suit bears all the hallmarks of a political stunt—an unnecessary government intervention in the online search market that has little chance of yielding any meaningful benefit to consumers.

Oddly, the suit does not target Google’s dominance in the online advertising space, which has often been the focus of critics, but Internet searches, where it seems least plausible to claim the company enjoys anything like a monopoly. Internet users have a wide variety of easily-accessible options for online searches: While Google is the default search engine for most browsers and mobile operating systems in the United States, users can elect to use competitors such as Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo with almost no effort, either by manually visiting those pages, or by taking a few seconds to change their default engine settings. Though Google commands the lion’s share of search traffic, it is hard to seriously claim this is because consumers lack for choices—which would normally be a precondition of claiming a company enjoys a “monopoly.”

Just as Google itself rapidly displaced many older search engines like AltaVista and AskJeeves—which had become defaults for users in the 1990s—the company would quickly lose its dominant position if most users found that competitors yielded more relevant results, just as users routinely download and install apps that provide superior functionality to those already installed on their devices. Moreover, Google’s arrangements with operating system and browser developers are not materially different from, or more “anticompetitive” than, analogous deals for prominent product placement in stores familiar from brick-and-mortar markets. Indeed, those arrangements may produce consumer benefits by subsidizing the production of software that is free to the user. Nor is it credible to claim, as DOJ does that Google has established a stranglehold on search defaults by dint of its deep pockets: Its primary rival in competitive bids to be “default search engine” is the not‐​exactly‐​penurious Microsoft.

Some relevant evidence comes from the European Union, where antitrust regulators recently forced Google to unbundle its search and browser offerings from its Android mobile operating system. Android users are now presented with a menu of search engine choices when setting up a new device, rather than defaulting to Google. The primary result has been that Google began charging mobile manufacturers to license its operating system. Google’s share of the online search market in the EU, however, has not changed measurably at all. While it would be unsurprising if, over time, the new “choice screen” eventually shaved a few percentage points off Google’s share, there is not much evidence for the view that lazy and uninformed consumers are being systematically tricked into using a search engine they would eschew if they were only compelled, rather than merely permitted, to make an active choice.

Perhaps most disturbing, there are indications that this suit may be politically motivated. Attorney General Bill Barr reportedly overrode career antitrust attorneys who did not believe the case was sufficiently strong in order to rush a complaint out the doors. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) responded to the suit by declaring on Twitter that “Big Tech” was “out to get conservatives,” and the Attorney General would not let them “get away with it,” though the suit itself is not explicitly concerned with the company’s supposed political leanings. Eleven state attorneys general have joined the Justice Department suit, all of them Republican.

In short, it is impossible to divorce this action from its political context: Pundits and elected officials on the right, not least among them the current president, routinely bash Silicon Valley by alleging (on the basis of, to put it charitably, highly dubious evidence) that tech companies systematically wage a vendetta against conservatives. Now, weeks before a national election, the attorney general has taken a very public swing at one of the primary villains of this narrative, employing arguments that seem conspicuously at odds with Republicans’ traditionally far more restrained view of antitrust. If this weak suit has been rushed to court in order to punish a company that many on the right perceive as harboring a “liberal bias,” it would constitute not just witless economic policy, but an egregious abuse of power.

Are We Reliving We The Living?How Many Americans Will the New York Times Kill?

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In 1932, New York Times journalist Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting about life in the Soviet Union. His perceived expertise, flowing from his position as the paper’s Moscow Bureau Chief, ended after 14 years in 1936. To explain Duranty’s dishonesty, colleague John Chamberlain wrote in 1991,

The main count against Duranty is he was Stalin’s man. I heard Duranty, on one of his trips to New York, say three million people died in Ukraine in a man-made famine. This seemed to me tremendous news. Duranty, worried about a return visa, denied he had ever said it.

The fix was in for the American communist propaganda machine. Thankfully, and contemporaneous to Duranty, a young female writer named Alisa Rosenbaum had escaped the Soviet occupation of Russia in 1926. Her pretense for a travel visa was to go to America, promote atheism, and return to Russia to write about the evils of capitalism. Instead, to protect her family, she changed her name to Ayn Rand, and while in her mid and late twenties, wrote her first novel – We the Living.

Beginning in 1933 (Duranty was still the Times Moscow Bureau Chief), the manuscript was rejected more than a dozen times in America, over a three year period, and finally published by Macmillan in 1936. Two years prior, Rand wrote a letter to the renowned American individualist H. L. Mencken, that said in part,

I intend to be the first one in a new battle which the world needs as it has never needed before, the first to answer the many advocates of collectivism, and answer them in a manner which will not be forgotten. I have heard so much from that other side, and so little in defense of man against men.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has not forgotten. The Nobel Prize winning economist wrote an editorial on October 22, 2020 titled How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill? The article then describes the attributes of personal liberty in terms that no American, especially Ayn Rand or any advocate of rational egoism, would recognize.

While Duranty’s Pulitzer was his reward for protecting Soviet-style economic central planning, Krugman’s Nobel was his reward for protecting Keynesian-style economic protectionism for young industries in developing countries. Of course, his New Trade Theory was supported by complex and technical economic modeling that was easily debunked.

So how do we account for the rise of authoritarianism in 2020 America? The totalitarian regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan were defeated in World War II. By the 1970’s, John Keynes’ watered-down Marxist economics was exposed as an immoral fantasy by Austrian school economists Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. Their bookends were the radical philosophy of Ayn Rand and the journalistic integrity of Henry Hazlitt in the 1960’s, and the political leadership of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Brian Mulroney in the 1980s.

As Richard Salsman, Duke University professor of political economics and philosophy explains, the resurgence of legitimate liberalism described above is despised in today’s university system. But instead of ideological authoritarianism, today’s political gangs are unprincipled and pragmatic. They merely pull Marxism off the shelf because it somehow legitimizes their quest for power over others. Its virulent bigotry is irrelevant.

It was ignorance, incompetence, and pragmatism that ruled Soviet Russia in the 1920’s, and Ayn Rand’s novel, We the Living, dramatized this. Hers is the story of the enslavement of a nation, and more importantly, the spirits crushed by a Marxist criminal gang, except one.

As relevant as ever, philosopher Leonard Peikoff wrote in 2008, “Do we know it yet, even this late? Do we know the nature of a dictatorship as it grows ever more visible in the land of the free? If we do at all, it is thanks in large part to the works of Ayn Rand.”

In 2020 America, we are faced with an important choice. Either the life premise of Ayn Rand and capitalism, or the death premise of the New York Times and socialism. Lives of motion and purpose or lives of stagnation and retribution. As Salsman explains, putting “democratic” in front of it does not make it humane.

To help readers appreciate Ayn Rand’s contribution to the cause of personal liberty, the centerforindividualism.org has launched a project called Reliving We the Living. The characters and circumstances of the novel have been studied and compared to current events, and we hope in a way that gives meaning to Gen Z and Millennial readers who take the time to appreciate this work for themselves.

 

Bottom-Up Solutions Are Better Than Top-Down. There Are Plenty Of Examples.

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We work hard to delegitimize politicians and political institutions, especially their top-down plans and one-size-fits-all systems to control us all and tell us what’s right. Is there an alternative? There most certainly is: bottom-up systems of civil society. There are examples all around us.

Every year witnesses the publication of countless books. Some are interesting, and a few are inspiring. The forthcoming book by Charles Koch (businessman and philanthropist) and Brian Hooks (CEO of philanthropic community Stand Together), “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,” is both interesting and inspiring.

While the book shares personal and intimate details about Koch’s life, it starts off, as many free market-oriented books do, with his realization as a young adult that bottom-up economic systems are better than top-down ones at leveraging human creativity to improve everyone’s living standards.

This truth, while important, isn’t new. The 18th-century economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” was the principle’s first iteration. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and many other scholars enriched our understanding that top-down systems produce one-size-fits-all “solutions.” Even when they are highly inefficient, the failed outcomes of a political process are more difficult to replace or modify than are market-based outcomes.

In contrast, bottom-up systems produce many options simultaneously, letting people choose how to best satisfy their needs. And the competition between different market options promotes improvement over time.

This book’s comparison of top-down with bottom-up is conveyed in a surprising way: through its application to civil society, a network of people and institutions that exists outside of the sphere of government and commerce that is too often overlooked by free market scholars. In the free economic market, producers use their skills to compete and provide the best services to consumers. Likewise, the most vibrant civil societies are powered by the same bottom-up forces, but the kind of wealth they create is different. Civil-society wealth is made up of thousands of often nonprofit institutions for the purpose of helping people who are poor, disadvantaged and disenfranchised.

As in free commercial markets, civil society is decentralized. It takes on multiple faces, serving different populations and needs. But its engine is genuine compassion, a glue that holds communities together.

Variety of this sort cannot exist in a top-down system, a truth that’s illustrated through the stories the authors tell of social entrepreneurs dedicated to serving others. These civil-society entrepreneurs are former inmates, drug addicts, gang members and what some might brand “losers.” But their losses turn into wins when they find purpose for their lives.

Take Antong Lucky. He’s a natural-born leader whose life was transformed in prison when someone told him, “If you can lead these dudes to do wrong, you can lead them to do right.” Lucky took this lesson to heart. After he got out of prison, he joined Pastor Omar Jahwar at Urban Specialists, a nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming inner-city culture away from violence.

We also encounter the chef who created Cafe Momentum, a transformative restaurant that helps kids coming out of juvenile detention to believe in themselves and find their paths on the outside. The Phoenix is another innovative organization that helps those struggling with addiction, many of whom had been imprisoned. As Koch writes, “The Phoenix isn’t just beating addiction — it’s helping the root causes of participants’ poverty,” so it also helps former addicts’ families and friends.

Alice Johnson was serving a life sentence without parole for delivering messages to cocaine dealers. Her sentence was commuted, and now she’s a devoted advocate for criminal justice reform. As she writes in the book: “I am but one person. You are but one person. But together we are many. And we can make a difference.”

Indeed, this book is about how we’re all part of a community that can make a difference. We all have different talents, experiences and callings. A bottom-up system helps people discover who they could be. Some of us are called to be philanthropists (thanks to the wealth created in the marketplace); others are called to be both partners and philanthropists to these social entrepreneurs (such as Koch); others are called to fight poverty or violence; others fight for equality. Richard Tafel, for instance, fought for gay civil rights, including marriage equality, starting in the 1980s.

In his book, “Democracy in America,” French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville describes with admiration America’s vibrant civic society. I thought of him as I read this book, of course. But I also often thought about Adam Smith, who said, “Man, naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” This book, including each of its authors, is about lovely people and what they do for each other in civil society.

Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article appeared at creators.com.

Appalled By Politicians’ Pretensions? Inexplicably Blinded By Political Lies? Get Your Magic Spectacles Here.

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At Center For Individualism, we are fans of economic thinking, notably Austrian economics. There is a clarity of thought that comes from solid theory, realistic cause-and-effect analysis, and analyzing the long term. It’s available to all.

Any competently taught course in principles of economics should give each student the thrilling sense that he or she is being fitted with an almost miraculous pair of eyeglasses. This special ocular device, however, is worn not on the nose but in the mind. And the fact that it is thus invisible to the eye is itself ironic, for this marvelous instrument enables those who are equipped with it to see features of reality that are invisible to the great majority of human beings.

My favorite name for this astonishing mental tool is “the economic way of thinking.” When worn properly, it reveals even to college freshmen phenomena largely unnoticed by the general public. Such phenomena include the increased unemployment of low-skilled workers caused by minimum-wage legislation, the fact that tariffs do not result in a net rise in the number of jobs in the home country, and that government-imposed safety requirements on consumer goods often make consumers less safe.

The economic way of thinking brings into sharp focus a world otherwise invisible!

Unfortunately, relatively few people understand the economic way of thinking. But failure to think like an economist isn’t evidence of stupidity. Nor is it an offense: Every one of us fails to understand what is understood by specialists in countless other fields. Such is the inevitable fate of the puny human mind. This puniness is an important reason for specialization, which enables each of us to benefit from the unique knowledge possessed by others.

And so while a good economist is always eager to help fit non-economists with economic-way-of-thinking spectacles, he or she is not baffled by non-economists’ blindness to phenomena that economists see clearly. Such blindness is commonplace. And although regrettable, it’s also explicable.

Inexplicably Blind

What is inexplicable is blindness to phenomena that ought to be seen clearly by any adult of sound mind regardless of that mind’s specialization. Even more regrettably, the world is filled with this sort of inexplicable blindness.

One example of inexplicable blindness is acceptance by Americans in their mid-50s and older of the claim that ordinary Americans in the early 21st century suffer a standard of living no higher than was enjoyed by ordinary Americans in the 1970s and 1980s. If you, like me, are a middle-class American old enough to remember the era of Ford-Carter-Reagan, you should be awe-inspired when you contemplate the enormously improved living standards of today. Yet very many Americans of my age and older inexplicably are blind to this improvement.

Unlike 40 or so years ago, today nearly all ordinary Americans have personal cell phones. Most of these phones will stream music from a vast catalog directly into the owners’ ears, on command. These phones allow instant messaging, surfing the web, photography, banking transactions, summoning of ride-sharing services, and sending and receiving e-mail. Each such device has a clock the accuracy of which would have drawn the envy of Howard Hughes.

When used as an actual telephone, calls can be made across the continent without any of the pricey long-distance charges that made such calls in the ‘70s minor luxuries. And, if they wish, during conversations callers can see each other.

Consider also supermarkets. Compared to today’s emporia, those of just a few decades ago were like dingy stores run by Soviet commissars. Or consider cars. The lowest-priced new car today has standard features – safety and entertainment – that were either unavailable 40 years ago or affordable only by the superrich.

I could go on. Experience alone should be – but, alas, inexplicably isn’t – sufficient to prompt every middle-aged and older American to hoot with laughter at the incessantly asserted claim that ordinary Americans today are economically no better off than were their peers four decades ago.

This fact doesn’t mean that all is rosy. While today’s higher standard of living is real and significant, problems in certain sectors – most notably, health care, housing, and education – do somewhat mask the general improvement.

And so we encounter another phenomenon to which many people are inexplicably blind; namely, the reality that, because these three sectors are ones cursed by especially heavy government intervention, problems there are likely caused by such intervention. Inexplicably, however, many people point to higher costs in these three sectors as justification for moregovernment intervention meant to protect Americans from higher costs!

Inexplicably Gullible

Equally inexplicable is the widespread trust that people put in politicians. How, for example, can anyone who watched senators questioning Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett come away with an impression other than that these elected officials – Democrats and Republicans alike – are either stupendously stupid or monstrously Machiavellian?

Or consider this report by Peggy Noonan on a recent exchange between the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; the subject was yet another proposed covid-19 “stimulus” bill:

He [Blitzer] said it’s not about him but people in food lines. Mrs. Pelosi: “And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. We know them. We represent them and we know them. We know them. We represent them.” “Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs.”

“I am sensitive to them because I see them on the street begging for food,” Mr. Blitzer said.

Mrs. Pelosi: “Have you fed them? We feed them.”

Nancy Pelosi presides over a chamber of politicians who vote on taxing and spending bills that transfer money from some Americans to other Americans – a fact that (inexplicably!) propels Ms. Pelosi to boast that she and her colleagues, not taxpayers such as Mr. Blitzer, feed poor Americans. On top of this appalling pretension, Ms. Pelosi expects CNN’s audience to believe that she and her Congressional colleagues “know” poor Americans in a way that non-politicians don’t.

As Peggy Noonan wrote about this interview, “It was bonkers.”

And yet most people continue to defer to people such as Pelosi … and to Trump, and Biden, and Cuomo, and Newsom, and to other such people, in Washington and in state capitals, who routinely parade in plain view their raw ambition, their delusions of possessing supernatural powers, and their lack of ordinary human decency.

Inexplicably, though, countless Americans demand that such untrustworthy people be given even more power. These Americans remain blind to the reality that power, once created, is inevitably seized by such people. This blindness is not merely inexplicable, but also fatal.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article appeared at AIER.org.

Entrepreneurship Is An Epic Calling.

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Many of us feel the pull of contributing to something “bigger than ourselves”. It could be a cause, a charity, a movement, a great project. It could be mentorship in a collaborative organization. Some people even claim that working for the government qualifies: representing (or regulating) the people.

But doing something “bigger than ourselves” does not have to be interpreted purely as a collectivist principle (sacrificing the rights of the individual for the common good), nor as altruism (living for others and not for oneself).

Almost 250 years ago, Adam Smith pointed out that it is not out of benevolence that the butcher, the brewer and the baker provide customers with dinner. Rather, it is out of self-interest. Which is an 18th century way of describing the entrepreneurial ethic of service.

Ethic of service

In an entrepreneurially driven market, customers – by buying or not buying, repeat purchasing or not, subscribing or not – determine what is produced. To be successful, businesses serve customers. They spend an enormous amount of time and money to understand customers and their preferences and needs, and expend all of their resources in an effort to meet those needs in the way that gains approval. Customers are rational seekers of betterment – they buy what will make their lives better, from their own perspective. They seek happiness. That’s what entrepreneurs deliver: better and happier lives.

The reward for utilizing today’s resources in ways that generate the greatest future improvement to society is profit. It is society’s way of pointing to where entrepreneurs should direct their best efforts. The ethic of service is sustained by reinvesting profit into more investments that benefit customers.

The epic calling of entrepreneurs is to join and accelerate this cycle of service, betterment, profit and reinvestment.

Ethic of Innovation

The market in which customers have all the power is highly dynamic. The genius of customers is to be never satisfied. Betterment is their goal, and betterment never stops. There is always something better in the future, and always a new entrepreneurial market entrant or new R&D team to design it and offer it.

The result of this dynamic is a continuous stream of innovation – new and better products, services, techniques, delivery systems, restaurants, food, payment systems, movies, TV’s, computers, smartphones, and V/R headsets. It’s better service at every store from the high street to the mall, and every dry cleaners and every nail salon and every gas station and repair shop, because innovation includes treating people better while serving them better. The dynamics of the market means that a customer who receives good service from any provider makes that the standard in judging all others. The momentum in the dynamic entrepreneurial economy is always forwards and upwards, towards betterment.

Ethic of digitization

Digitization brings rapid betterment at an ever-increasing pace. It’s exponential. Entrepreneurs both initiate this phenomenon and harness it. Entrepreneurs brought us the internet and websites and search engines and e-mail and online shopping. They made almost infinite amounts of information available to us – certainly much more than anyone can consume or use. The digital economy brings abundance, the opposite of scarcity, which is what economists have told us is the norm in markets. Under digital abundance, all choices are going to become richer and richer, the cost we pay for things we value is going to become lower and lower (irrespective of what governments do to their fiat money – amazon.com is going to offer more and more choices and deliver better and better quality at faster speeds whatever the state of the dollar; we may pay with a different currency).

Entrepreneurs employing digital means to serve customers better will operate in this new world, pursuing and exploring the digital challenge: what are the boundary conditions of higher quality at lower cost? How can they bring digital betterment to everyone in the world?

The emerging standard of digital betterment is that new services need to be 10X better than whatever is already in the marketplace in order to get customers to turn their heads, pay attention, and change from their current services, which are already excellent. The resultant compounding of improvement will rapidly elevate our life experiences.

And, in fact, digitization puts customers even more in charge – interactive technology brings more empowerment and control to customers than ever. We can compare prices more easily, benefit from the experiences of others who supply ratings and reviews, perform more tasks more quickly and easily, and orchestrate our own system of services and experiences in exactly the combinations we prefer. Customers will decide which digital providers they choose to allow into their lives. Only the best will qualify, and entrepreneurs will strive to be in that group.

Ethic of private property

It has been pointed out, most notably by Ludwig von Mises, that the entrepreneurial system requires acknowledgment and protection of private property to operate. Investors are free to invest in projects they judge to have the potential for high returns, founders are free to allocate their own time and resources to their innovative ideas, and customers are free to spend their own money on offerings that please them. This private property-based entrepreneurial system has brought the world increasing standards of living and quality of life for roughly 250 years, lifting billions out of poverty and squalor. Today’s entrepreneurs preserve that progress, despite the efforts of socialists to reverse it and replace private property with state ownership and bureaucratic control. No calling is higher.

Better world, better society

There is no shortage of pessimists who see the world through the lens of decline. Most of this is partisan politics, which is, indeed, descending to new lows. Some of it is politics combined with scientism (as in climate change fear). A good antidote to this pessimism is Hans Rosling’s book, Factfulness, which compiles hard data from impeccable world sources demonstrating the incredible, consistent and ongoing global progress in fields like life expectancy, child mortality, reduced incidence of poverty, growth in living standards, levels of education, elimination of disease and even reduced pollution.

Entrepreneurship makes all of these possible via positive thinking, ideation, innovation, organization, and analytics. But, beyond these functions, entrepreneurship is the dominant force for good in the world. Entrepreneurs are optimistic (because they see the opportunities for progress), polite (because they value relationships), collaborative (to make relationships productive), law-abiding (the wrong side of the law is unprofitable), non-violent (violence is also unprofitable), and civil (because community building contributes greatly to success).

Epic calling

In Yu-Kai Choi’s book Actionable Gamification, which is an insightful analysis of human values, Epic Meaning & Calling is the core drive that is in play when a person believes they are doing something greater than themselves. Entrepreneurs experience that calling. Whatever their individual firm, invention, project or initiative, they feel the higher calling of betterment, and they derive part of their psychic profit from responding to that calling. They feel different and special because of their role and their contribution.

And their contribution is, indeed, special. They are the drivers of the free market economy that raises everyone’s potential and attainment. They are the pillars of a collaborative culture of achievement and accomplishment. They are the creative catalysts of change. Society is better the greater the role and influence of entrepreneurs.

More of us should respond to the epic calling.

Progressivism

The Progressivism Of The Future Is Really Just The Socialism Of The Past.

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Whenever the Left talks of global goals and programs, they are proposing central planning on a global scale, which requires an end to the entrepreneurial market economy. The language in their documents and publications makes their intentions clear. 

The world is currently in the midst of a newly aggressive drive to bring about a new socialist order through a powerful and “efficient” technocratic state. This new order has been labeled as “progressive,” but it is merely the latest version of the socialist impulse which we have seen before in the form of socialism and communism.

A War on Private Property

Summed up in a single sentence, the plans of the communists aim at the abolition of private property. From there, the other major demands follow, such as abolishing the family, nation, and countries, and finally, as Marx noted, “communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.” In as much as the program of liberalism “if condensed into a single word….is private ownership of the means of production” (as described by Ludwig von Mises), the program of the communists is the abolition of private property.

A Promise of Efficiency and Expertise

Yet Marxian socialism—i.e., communism—has not found many followers in the United States. The communist appeal to justice and equality found more resonance in the old world. To have an appeal to the Americans, socialism had to be packaged differently. In the United States, the gospel of socialism appeared under the name of “progressivism” and was preached as bringing society to the highest degree of efficiency.

Under President Woodrow Wilson, progressivism attained its first peak as the dominant philosophy of the state. Society was to these socialists a single organization. The bureaucrats as public administrators found a vivid expression in the political novel Philip Dru: Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow by Edward Mandell House, who was a very close friend of Wilson and who served as the president’s most important political and diplomatic advisor.

This vision of progressivism requires:

  • Government and labor representation on the board of every corporation
  • Sharing the profits of public service companies
  • Government ownership of the means of communication
  • Government ownership of the means of transportation
  • A comprehensive system of old-age pension
  • Government ownership of all healthcare
  • Full labor protection and governmental arbitration of industrial disputes

Beyond that, other demands and programs put forth and realized by the progressive movement have included eugenics, population and birth control, family planning, prohibition, antitrust legislation, public education, central banking, and an income tax.

These echo of the planks of the Communist Manifesto, which included demands to

  • Centralize the means of communications and to put the means of transport in the hand of the state
  • Extend the control of the state across the factories and over all land
  • Implement a heavy progressive income tax and abolish the rights of inheritance
  • Centralize credit in the hands of the state and establish a central bank of an exclusive monetary monopoly

Unlike the Communist Manifesto, the progressives did not preach a proletarian revolution but spoke out in the name of efficiency and demanded the bureaucratic rule of expert public administrators. In a specific way, the progressive movement presents an even worse program than Marxism. As Murray Rothbard summarized it, the progressive movement brought about a profound transformation of the American society:

from a roughly free and laissez-faire society of the 19th century, when the economy was free, taxes were low, persons were free in their daily lives, and the government was noninterventionist at home and abroad, the new coalition managed in a short time to transform America into a welfare-warfare imperial State, where people’s daily lives were controlled and regulated to a massive degree.

Socialism in Disguise

Guiding mankind to heaven on earth by transforming society is the quintessential message of socialism, beginning with the “utopian socialism” of the nineteenth century and leading up to our time with the demand for a “concrete utopia.” Yet different from the Marxist mythology that socialism would be the unstoppable successor of capitalism, history shows that the “socialist phenomenon” has appeared time and again throughout history. Instead of being the model of the future, socialism is, de facto, a failed idea of the past.

Socialism is the attempt to create a new social order at will. Yet one cannot construct “order” to one’s wishes. The volitional realization of a socioeconomic system results in establishing society as a single state-dominated organization and as such, it is necessarily hierarchical and must be based on command and obedience instead of the free association of the people as it happens in a spontaneous order.

President Wilson failed in his plan to bring the United States into the League of Nations and establish an organization to promote a new world order in tune with the visions of the progressives. For some time, the Americans resumed the tradition of individualism and isolationism. Yet with the Great Depression and World War II the chance of transforming the society and putting bureaucratic experts at the top came back with a vengeance under the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With the end of the world war returned the chance to establish a network of international organizations with the mission of organizing society and the economy under the auspices of bureaucratic experts. This happened with the founding of the United Nations and its several subgroups and sister organizations to become active in finance, education, development, and health.

The International Push

With the launch of the United Nations, progressivism as a program of what James Ostrowski calls “destroying America” has attained a global platform. The main seat of this philosophy has moved into the headquarters of the United Nations Organizations. From its start, the United Nations has been the light bearer of global progressivism.

The protection of the environment and “global health” proved to be the ideal pretexts to move forward the agenda of progressivism. In June 1994, the UN Agenda 2021 was initiated by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and called for the imposition of “sustainable development” on a global scale. While Agenda 2021 was still relatively modest in its demands and nonbinding as to its full execution, the later Agenda 2030 let the cat out of the bag. The new agenda was adopted when the heads of state and government and high representatives met at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in September 2015. At this meeting, they approved the adoption of “Global Sustainable Development Goals” about comprehensive and far-reaching universal and transformative goals and targets.

The new agenda describes a program of comprehensive government takeover of almost all aspects of personal life. With no nods to human freedom and market coordination, the document lists seventeen goals that should be met through a bureaucratic takeover of society on a worldwide scale. Behind popular promises such as the end of poverty and hunger, healthy lives, equitable education, and gender equality lurks the agenda to impose global socialism. Demands such as the reduction of income inequality within and among countries, sustainable consumption and production patterns, and building inclusive societies for sustainable development, are parts of an overriding plan to do away with the market economy and to impose comprehensive state planning.

Claiming the “perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill-health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being” (chapter 1, preamble), the conference calls of a “global partnership for sustainable development.”

Under the heading of “program areas” the agenda stresses “the links between demographic trends and factors and sustainable development.” The growth of the world population combined with “unsustainable consumption patterns” endangers the planet, as they “affect the use of land, water, air, energy and other resources.” Under point 5.17 of its objective, the conference demands: “Full integration of population concerns into national planning, policy and decision-making processes.” Protecting the environment requires the comprehensive regulation of the world population which in turn makes it necessary to control personal behavior.

In short, the adoption of this “new world order” would mean the abolition of private property, or what Mises regarded as the liberal program—a world based on private property. If enacted, this project will fail in the end, but it will bring immense suffering in the meantime.

Dr. Antony P. Mueller is a German professor of economics who currently teaches in Brazil. See his website and blog.

Existence Proves America’s Independent Virtues and Servant Leadership’s Sacrificial Vices.

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The eleventh week of our We the Living Study Group on Facebook ended with Part II – Chapter 15, and with Gen Z’s Kira asking herself about Andrei’s suicide. While attending his state sponsored celebration of the ultimate self-sacrifice, “Kira Argounova stood without moving and listened attentively. Her eyes held a question she hoped the world could answer. She wondered whether she had killed him, or the revolution had, or both.” Yet, among the crowd there was widespread ambivalence,

The Field of Victims of the Revolution was in the heart of the city, on the shore of the Neva, a vast, white desert stretching a half mile. A bald spot on the scalp of Petrograd. A woman hissed, “What do they have to commit suicide about? Who the hell was he, anyway?”

Andrei Taganov was someone who had not yet failed the Krylenko test. Nikolai Krylenko was president of the supreme tribunal for prosecuting military trials in 1920’s Soviet Russia. As the leading enforcer of “socialist legality,” his courts determined a person’s continued existence on political whim.

Today we call it social justice, and it’s most prolific apologist is Edward R. Murrow award winner Keith Olbermann. One week after leaving Disney owned ESPN, this perfect storm of anger, ignorance, and arrogance declared on October 8th,

The task is twofold, the terrorist Trump must be destroyed, and he and his collaborators – the Williams Barr’s, the Kyle Rittenhouse’s, and the Amy Coney Barrett’s must be prosecuted, convicted, and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it!

For contrast, on October 15th, Dr. Leonard Peikoff, giant of philosophy and intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, was celebrated on the occasion of his 87th birthday as the perfect storm of reason, humor, and generosity. In a small aside during his first-ever zoom conference, he inserted independently, “I am voting for Trump, thank you.” Yet last week, the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary committee proceeded to give Judge Barrett the Krylenko treatment, implicitly demanding she toe their Party line for approval to the US Supreme Court.

Hoping to crack her independent virtues, Judge Barrett was steel, and steel doesn’t lie. The moral corruption and hubris of these Senators was best described by Kira’s cousin Victor at Andrei’s memorial. A Soviet sellout himself,

Our only aim is the honest toil which profits no one, but all. The lesson we are to learn here today is a Party that rules by sacrificing itself to those it rules.

Today we call it servant leadership, “for a more just and caring world,” by golly. As its progenitor Robert Greenleaf explained, “The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.” Of course, “other people” is ambiguous, and one’s highest priorities are their own, if they so choose.

Servant leadership implies we are poor, dumb slobs in the chaos of existence; desperate for benevolent dictators in a malevolent universe, or as Kira protested to Andrei in Chapter 13, “you’ve tried to tell us what we should want.” No matter, the important thing is for the independent virtues of the leader to be sacrificed for the “goodness of humanity.”

In contrast, when Kira first met Leo early in Part I, her subconscious mind immediately recognized his independence,

Kira leaned against a lamp post, looking straight at his face, and smiled. She did not think; she smiled, stunned, without realizing she was hoping he would know her as she knew him.

When Kira subsequently met Andrei, she subconsciously also recognized his independence,

She stared up into two gray eyes that looked like the eyes of a tamed tiger. For one short second, they looked at each other, silent, hostile, startled by each other’s eyes.

However, Kira did not smile at Andrei. Instead, during their second encounter, she asked, “Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Comrade Taganov, how much you have to learn!” After Leo’s arrest by Andrei’s goons in Part II – Chapter 13, she tells him,

No, you didn’t know. But it was simple. Go where men live in your Red cities and see how many cases like this you can find. (Leo) wanted to live. You think everything that breathes can live? You’ve learned differently, I know.

For Kira, her life, and Leo’s, were primary standards of value. The alternative was to cease to exist. They were exceptional because they took ownership of their futures. “Now look at me! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. Something that knows how to want, isn’t that life itself?” Regarding the State as the highest standard, she asks Andrei, “Do we want the crippled, creepy, crawling, broken monstrosities that we’re producing? Are we not castrating life in order to perpetuate it?” 

In the Red cities of 2020 Democratic party teacher’s unions, their creepy monstrosities march, chant, loot, burn, and kill. These selfless “peaceful protestors” are the State heroes for Victor Dunaev’s “honest toil which profits no one.” No kidding. Yet, Kira demands Andrei recognize the ones who may be fighting for their own independence,

Aren’t those who know how to live, aren’t they too precious to be sacrificed in the name of any cause? What cause is greater than those who fight for it? And aren’t those who know how to fight, aren’t they the cause and not the means?

This amazing chain of events, masterfully crafted by Ayn Rand, begins in Chapter 10. There, Timoshenko delivers Poetic Justice to Morozov’s face when he learns that he’s the ultimate victim. In Chapter 11, Andrei exposes Pavel’s corruption to his Soviet chief, and in Chapter 12, Leo challenges Andrei’s veneer of integrity. Yet it is in Chapter 13 when Kira blows up their entire house of cards. She tells Andrei how and why she had to use him to save Leo,

There was a big commissar and I went to see him. He told me, why couldn’t one aristocrat die in the face of the USSR? I’m grateful to that commissar. He gave me permission to do what I’ve done. I don’t hate him. You should hate him. What I’m doing to you – he did it first!

Now Kira wondered if the revolution had ended Andrei’s existence, or had she? Neither, Andrei had chosen reverence for the other-worldly ideals of “others” that necessarily suffocate the human spirit.

Will Gen Z Make America Socialist?

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Every Monday, Mark Shupe posts an article here at Center For Individualism analyzing We The Living, Ayn Rand’s novel of Russia in the 1920’s, after the communist revolution. He draws insightful parallels with America in 2020. The novel’s young heroine tries in her own way to resist socialism. Are we Reliving We The Living? Today’s young people in America seem to be pulling towards socialism, not away from it. 

Last week, I wrote about a proposition on the California ballot that would give 17-year-olds the right to vote in some California elections. California’s push for the youth vote got me thinking about how recent college graduates and others entering the workforce are dealing with the economic and career implications of 2020.

On a recent episode of the financial podcast Business Casual, New York Times economics reporter Eduardo Porter shared his thoughts on the market, the economy, and what lies ahead. He thinks a financial recession could push younger Americans to the political left.

Porter cited research about how generations that come of age during a recession have moved to the left.

A 2009 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Growing up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy”,  gives us additional clues on how recessions could change generational perceptions on hard work versus luck.

It argues, “that large macroeconomic shocks experienced during the critical years of early adulthood shape preferences for redistribution. Individuals who grew up during a recession tend to support more government redistribution and believe that luck is more relevant than effort in determining economic success in life.”

The paper estimates that voter opinion swings could be as high as 15 percent due to impact of economic shocks on younger voters.

Looking to history, the findings are not far-fetched. Many notable economic downturns have related to political shifts to the left – the Great Recession and President Obama and the Great Depression and FDR to name two.

I also looked for any studies on the impact of smaller recessions on American voting preferences. “Economic Conditions and Electoral Outcomes: Class Differences in the Political Response to Recession,” was a 1978 study on voting during the 1958 and 1960 congressional and presidential elections in the American Journal of Political Science.

The study found that voters tended to blame incumbents for bad economic policies, regardless of party affiliation, and vote them out accordingly, “One basic finding to emerge from this study is that voting behavior is responsive to economic conditions, as these are reflected in the financial situations of families and individuals.” Interestingly, a 1975 study found similar conclusions, but noted “economic upturns have no corresponding effect.”

If the eyes are the window to the soul, as Cicero, Shakespeare, or the Bible claims, then polls are the window to political leanings.

A May 2019 Morning Consult poll found that Gen Z, the youngest generation entering the current job market, and Millennials, my generation, were more likely to feel positively toward socialism. Another footnote in the survey; Gen Z said that the 2008 financial crisis was the least likely to impact their worldview.

Those findings were further solidified in a follow-up poll in the spring of 2020 by Morning Consult. The “Gen Z Worldview Tracker” talked to 1,000 Americans aged 13 to 23-years-old about social justice issues like Black Lives Matter, their support for President Donald Trump, and the impact of the coronavirus.

Respondents viewed capitalism as the least favorable compared to socialism, social justice, and more. Thankfully, democracy had the highest score on this question – so that’s something to cheer.

In an Axios poll from October 2019 of 2,100 American respondents, 70 percent of millennials surveyed and 64 percent of Gen Z said they would vote for a socialist candidate. A May 2020 Vice article on Gen Z political leanings headlines the quote of a college student who said, “It’s much more stigmatized to say you’re a capitalist, in my experience.”

The push back against capitalism is not limited to younger generations. On The Roth Effect, Pacific Research Institute economist Wayne Winegarden and host Carol Roth had an enlightening conversation about the growing resentment of anything considered “capitalist.” Roth even pointed out that capitalism is a dirty word these days and she uses “free market” instead.

Due to COVID-19, the coronavirus shutdowns, and a decent look at the coming generation of youth voters, America could be at the start of a shift in public policy. It looks like younger generations could favor policies more common in socialist countries, setting the stage for the start of the new decade.

The impacts of the lockdown, arguably one the most severe economic shocks in modern history, will also impact the decision made this November and may be the driving force between younger Americans and adherence to our classic economic and political theories.

Evan Harris is a media relations and outreach manager at PRI.

There’s No Real Science When Politicians “Follow The Science”. It’s Scientism, Something Quite Different.

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Why we chose this article: Politicians use the term “following the science” to justify their predetermined partisan policies. The idea of scientism – fake science to justify political action – has been around since F. A. Hayek introduced the term in the 1940’s.

Many governors, particularly Democratic ones, have justified their states’ lockdowns with the common slogan, “We are following the science.” When Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar barred the nation’s health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, from independently signing any new rules regarding vaccines, requiring instead his approval, some virus experts expressed concern that the politics would now get in the way of the science.

The mantra of “follow the science” is not unique to the politics of the virus. Politicians offer a similar justification for policies on climate change. Just as the science about Covid-19 “justifies” lockdowns, the science of climate change is used to support spending and regulatory policy that will deliver zero net emissions.

The idea of following science as opposed to politics is a trope that goes back to the beginning of the progressive era. In 1887 Woodrow Wilson, then a professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College, wrote a famous paper arguing that public administration could be separated from politics because it could follow a scientific logic rather than succumb to the corruption of politics. His ideas and similar ones became, in turn, a justification for an expanded administrative state. Within administration, experts would deliver regulations for the public good based on science. This “conveyor belt” model of administrative law in fact suggested that there needed to be fewer constitutional restraints on administrative agencies than on the legislature, because administrative agencies were constrained by science.

The conveyor belt model of administration has been largely abandoned even by most liberals. Experts do not always agree on the science. Moreover, the facts do not themselves dictate policy. Considerations of value are central to choosing policies, particularly when administrative agencies are given substantial delegated power from Congress. For instance, the FCC is to grant licenses to television stations in the public interest. But no set of facts can tell us what the public interest is. As a result of this recognition, administrative law was reformed by the Administrative Procedure Act to require more public input on rules and more searching review of the rules by the judiciary. Since Ronald Reagan, every president has also required major rules to be vetted centrally to make sure they are consistent with the overall political choices of the administration.

But the mantra of “follow the science” is even more problematic when applied to politics than administration. It is not possible to make politics subsidiary to science. First, the facts are open to dispute as are some of those about climate change, for instance. Second, no one set of facts is likely to dictate any result. Policies on climate change affect economic growth and that is another set of facts that must investigated. And as James Rogers has noted, the radical uncertainty present in most judgments about human affairs requires prudential judgments, not just scientific modeling.

But most importantly, politics demands debate about values, not just facts. There are tradeoffs between different policies. The Green New Deal may hamper economic growth and thus harm generations to come. As a result, it may be wiser to adapt to a warming climate rather than try to prevent it at great cost. Moreover, it is a question of value, not fact, as to who should bear the burden of climate changes policies—this generation or future generations who, because of technological acceleration, may be substantially richer.

It is much better for a politician to claim she is following science when she is closing the schoolhouse door than admit that she is in bed with the teachers’ union.

The conveyor belt view of politics is ultimately based on a philosophical fallacy. One cannot derive “ought statements” from “is statements.” David Hume demonstrated this point centuries ago. That recognition is not to devalue science. Using science to assess the likely costs and benefits of policies with the benefit of science helps us make better tradeoffs, whatever values we embrace. But it cannot replace debates among different values or determine the appropriate tradeoffs between them.

If the conveyor belt of science dictating politics has fallen out of favor in administrative law and is even more obviously inapplicable to politics in general, why are so many politicians returning to its rhetoric? The reason is that, even if it is an intellectually bankrupt tradition, it remains politically useful. Scientism is an attempt to shut down political debates.  It shifts the discussion from questions of value, which are accessible to all, to questions of facts which are in the domain of the experts, thus shifting the terrain of the debate. It also hampers the evolution of expert consensus, because when science becomes a front for politics, dissenting from the party lines becomes harder even for experts. And it allows progressives to portray their opponents as ignorant. That has been a common trope of progressive politics: conservatives are the stupid party.

But hiding behind science is bad for policy and worse for the civic health of the nation. The lockdown is a case in point. It is simply not the case that the facts about the transmission of the virus are sufficient to justify a lockdown by themselves. A policy of lockdown may help prevent transmissions and some deaths. But it also exacts huge costs to the economy, to our cultural life, and indeed to the mental well-being of Americans. Both lower growth and diminished mental health result in deaths as well as other harms. It may well be that the lockdown has been a contributing factor to the riots that have swept many cities across the nation. That is not to say that any particular lockdown is not justified. But enforcing a lockdown is not a decision that can be based on science alone. Instead, it requires prudential judgments of the sort that we elect leaders to make. As this essay was being written, the World Health Organization announced that lockdowns should not be the primary method of controlling the virus. This change of position highlights the dangers of hitching public policy to claims about contestable science.

Nor can determining the necessarily fine-grained rules for an optimal policy toward the virus possibly be made simply on the basis of science.  Should a city permit the opening of bars and restaurants during the time of the virus to support these businesses and workers, but not open schools for small children who cannot easily learn online? Science cannot answer that question, but that is what my city of Chicago is doing. In fact, a study shows that whether public schools are open in a jurisdiction has more to do with the strength of the teachers’ union there than the local conditions of the virus. It is much better for a politician to claim she is following science when she is closing the schoolhouse door than admit that she is in bed with the teachers’ union.

By distorting policy, scientism in politics also leads to political divisions. Some voters recognize that politicians are hiding behind science in making decisions that they may dislike. And the result often is an anti-scientific populism that not only rejects the scientific façade of decision making but the science as well. And this natural reaction makes rational debate and good policy more difficult, because science is indeed relevant to many political decisions, even if it is not determinative of them.

Our polarized politics has many causes, but scientism is fast becoming an important one. Scientism is not a restraint on populism. Instead, scientism and populism are evil twins of civic discourse that drive out the sober and deliberative judgments that can help a nation hold together and flourish.

John O. McGinnis is the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University. This article appeared at lawliberty.org
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