Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Big Government Rules, Big Business Kowtows.

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In an earlier article, I explained that the euthanasia of America’s proprietor class did not bode well for political moderation this election cycle and so far extremism has indeed carried the conversation.

Since then, I’ve been musing about why “Big Business” did not clamor for a quick end to lockdowns and “mostly peaceful” protests. Indubitably, some big corporations benefited from bailouts and being labeled “essential” businesses. Some think Democrats will give them even more cash. A few probably relished the opportunity to blame the Covid catastrophe for “restructurings” that would have been necessary sooner or later anyway.

But something else must be going on for corporations to donate so much to Black Lives Matter and Goldman Sachs to endorse Joe Biden on economic grounds. A facile analysis would suggest that they simply think Biden will win and want to be on the right side of the administration and of “history.” But investment bankers and other top corporate executives did not reach the top by placing simplistic bets they could lose. What they must have calculated is that the probability of Biden winning and persecuting them for being on the wrong side is greater than the probability of Trump winning and persecuting them.

This thought struck me while reading one of Milton Friedman’s lesser-known productions, “The Fragility of Freedom,” [Brigham Young University Studies 16, 4 (Summer 1976): 561-74:], which he presented at Brigham Young University as a double bicentennial talk about the relationship between the United States and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Old Milt was trying to figure out why big businesses put up with New York City’s disastrous fiscal policies and, more broadly, why they did not criticize obviously dumb government policies like President Ford’s silly WIN (Whip Inflation Now) program.

Given what has happened (and not happened) this year, his analysis is prescient:

“If you were a businessman at the head of a great corporation you would think three times before you spoke out on a major issue. You would look over your left shoulder and see the IRS getting ready to come and audit your accounts and you would look over your right shoulder and see the Department of Justice standing only too ready to launch an antitrust suit against you. And then, if you had more shoulders than two, you would ask what is the FTC going to do about my advertising; and what is the FDA going to do about the products I produce; and what is the Safety Council going to do about this, that and the other thing? You are not free to speak if you are in that position” (p. 566 ). [Emphases added.]

Talk to any Left-leaning person, as I often have to do (an occupational hazard of being a college professor in 21st Century America), and you’ll learn that they assume that big businesses run the country until the masses can be stirred to oppose them. That might have made sense when Karl Marx’s spectre still roamed the earth and US X, General Y, and Standard Z appeared an even match for Uncle Sam. But what company today does not know that Washington can crush it, if not for breaking Law A, then for running afoul of Regulation B, or tax provision C, D, E, or F?

Both major parties have evinced the right to use the power of the state to punish political opponents. The difference is that a victorious (or lame duck) Trump, an economic nationalist if nothing else, would be much more likely to use the federal government’s power to go after foreign corporations, like Huawei and TikTok, than to poison Wall Street or Silicon Valley for his children by taking revenge on Big Banks or Big Tech. The Obama-Biden administration, by contrast, used federal bureaucracies to thwart domestic nonprofits that espoused “dangerous” views, like the virtues of slowing the growth of the national debt (the nerve of the Tea Party!), and a President Biden will not likely be any less vindictive.

Then Friedman’s little talk turned from prescient to eerily prescient and very relevant to the Great Barrington Declaration:

“I ask myself whether the professors who teach medicine at any medical school in this country, most of whose research is being financed by the National Institutes of Health, whether they are really free to speak out against socialized medicine and against further involvement of the government in medicine. Some of them obviously will. But is there the slightest doubt, to use the famous words of the Supreme Court, that their dependence for the major source of their financing on the Federal Government has a ‘chilling effect’ on the freedom of speech?” (pp. 566-67). [Emphasis added.]

Note that Friedman is not making the silly argument, all too popular these days, that every X that gets some $ from Y will be beholden to Y. He is arguing that the government provides such a large percentage of the funding of medical scientists that most of them will not speak out against it because it holds, in the parlance of Adam Smith’s day, “the power of the purse.” In addition to withholding future funding, Uncle Sam could also unleash its regulatory and tax minions on any medical scientist daft enough to defy him.

So why have only a few score scientists spoken out about the irrationality of Covid lockdown policies? Friedman explains that too!: “About the only people who now have full freedom of speech are people in the fortunate position I am in — a tenured professor at a major institution on the verge of retirement” (p. 567). Note that almost all of the most vocal scientific critics of lockdowns are senior professors at big universities, or already retired!

(Other major sources of opposition, like the AIER and Reason, are independent nonprofit organizations established long ago and funded from pots of dead donor money and numerous small ongoing donations, none of which is big enough to influence editorial policy one iota. Such organizations sell Truth as they see it and if you want to pitch in, that is great, but your donation will not buy you a say in what they say.)

Friedman then warns his university audience that universities will reap as they sowed, accurately predicting that they will be ruled from Washington soon enough, and will deserve it because they “have been in the forefront in persuading the public at large that the doctrine of individual responsibility is a false doctrine; that the source of all good things is Big Brother in Washington” (p. 567).

Well, Big Brother is here, along with doublethink, thoughtcrime, unpersons, 2+2 = 5, and newspeak/doublespeak. A quick visit to the local supermarket and Twitter will provide ample evidence that 2020 is actually 1984. What remains to be seen is if all of us Winstons will profess our love of Big Brother in the end or if our dystopian year ends in a Brave New World or at Fahrenheit 451.

But maybe our tribulations will induce us to reap the seeds that Friedman sowed in 1976 and embrace his full-throated vision of Public Choice theory? “The fundamental difference between the political market and the economic market,” he explained, “is that in the political market there is very little relation between what you vote for and what you get. In the economic market you get what you vote for” (p. 569).

Future generations, if there are any, will look back at 2020 and wonder why anyone thought themselves a member of a “democratic society” simply because they could cast a ballot every now and again. The people (demos) do not rule, self-interested government officials do. Big government, Friedman understood, is inherently authoritarian because it dictates how two of every five dollars of economic value is spent. Only by returning to limited government, voluntary association, and self-reliance can Americans reject this dystopian year and return to, not utopia, but happiness, which the nation’s Founders understood as prosperity mixed promiscuously with liberty.

Why Are Politicians Wrong About COVID Policies? Because They Use The Wrong Kind Of Thinking.

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If you’re working to improve your leadership capability, what exactly should you be trying to develop? The experience of the 2020 pandemic offers a powerful lesson: A critical skill a leader must bring to the table is the ability to figure out what kind of thinking is required to address a given challenge. Bring the wrong kind of thinking to a problem and you’ll be left fruitlessly analyzing scientific data when what’s desperately needed is a values-informed judgment call. Or, just as bad, you’ll trust your instincts on a matter where a straightforward data analysis would expose how off-base your understanding is.

Mistakes like this happen all the time, because different kinds of human effort require different kinds of knowledge. This is no novel claim of our own — it’s only what Aristotle explained more than 2,000 years ago. He outlined distinct types of knowledge required to solve problems in three realms. Techne was craft knowledge: learning to use tools and methods to create something. Episteme was scientific knowledge: uncovering the laws of nature and other inviolable facts that, however poorly understood they might be at the moment, “cannot be other than they are.” Phronesiswas akin to ethical judgment: the perspective-taking and wisdom required to make decisions when competing values are in play — when the answer is not absolute, multiple options are possible, and things can be other than what they are. If you’re a farmer designing an irrigation system or a software engineer implementing an agile process, you’re in the techne realm. If you’re an astronomer wondering why galaxies rotate the way they do, you’re in the epistemic realm. If you’re a policymaker deciding how to allocate limited funds, you’re in the phronesis realm.

The reason that Aristotle bothered to outline these three kinds of knowledge is that they require different styles of thinking—the people toiling in each of these realms tend toward habits of mind that serve them well, and distinguish them from the others. Aristotle’s point was that, if you have a phronetic problem to solve, don’t send an epistemic thinker.

But imagine that you’re a leader of a large enterprise that has challenges cropping up regularly in all three of these realms. There are plenty of techne problems as you work to adopt effective methods and tools in your operations. You also have epistemic challenges; anything you approach as an optimization problem (like your marketing mix or your manufacturing scheduling) assumes there is one absolutely right answer out there. And firmly in the realm of phronesis would be anything you label a “strategic” matter — decisions on mergers and new product launches, for example, involving trade-offs and recognizing that the future holds various possibilities. As a leader presiding over such a multifaceted organization, it’s a big part of your job to make sure the right kinds of thinking are being marshaled to make those different kinds of decisions. This means that you personally need to have some facility with all the different modes of thinking — at least enough to recognize which one is the best fit to a given problem, and which people are particularly adept at it.

That’s all the more true for the largest leadership challenges in the modern world, those that are scoped so broadly and are so complex that all these kinds of thinking are called for by one problem, in one facet or another. Think, for example, of a corporation facing a liquidity crisis. Its leaders need to marshal epistemic expertise to discover the optimal resolution of loan covenants, issuance restrictions, and complex financial instruments — and the phronetic judgment of where short-term cuts will do least damage in the long run.

This brings us to the Covid-19 global pandemic and the challenges it has presented to leaders at all levels — in global agencies, national and local governments, and businesses large and small. To be sure, almost all of the world was blindsided by this catastrophe and early missteps were unavoidable, particularly given misinformation at the outset. Still, it has now been 10 months since patient zero. How can the devastation still be running so rampant — and have segued, unchecked, from deadly disease to economic disaster?

Our diagnosis, not as medical experts but as students of leadership, is that many leaders stumbled in the fundamental step of determining the nature of the challenge they faced and identifying the different kinds of thinking that had to be brought to bear on it at different points.

In the early weeks of 2020, Covid-19 presented itself as a scientific problem, firmly in the epistemic realm. It immediately raised the kinds of questions to which absolute right answers can be found, given enough data and processing power: What kind of virus is it? Where did it come from? How does transmission of it happen? What are the characteristics of the worst-affected people? What therapies do most to help? And that immediate framing of the problem caused leaders — and the people they influence — to put enormous weight on the guidance of epistemic thinkers: namely, scientists. (If one phrase should go down in history as the mantra of 2020, it is “follow the science.”)

In the U.K., for example, this translated to making decisions based on a model produced by researchers at Imperial College. The model used data collected to date to predict how the virus would spread in weeks to come (quite inaccurately, unfortunately). At the frequent meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies there was one government official in attendance, and early on, he tried to inject some practical and political considerations into the deliberations. He was promptly put in his place: He was only there to observe. Indeed, members expressed shock that someone from the world of hashing out policy would try to have influence on “what is supposed to be an impartial scientific process.”

But the reality was that, while scientific discovery was an absolutely necessary component of the response, it wasn’t sufficient, because what was happening at the same time was an escalation of the situation as a social crisis. Very quickly, needs arose for tough thinking about trade-offs — the kind of political deliberation that considers multiple dimensions and is informed by different perspectives (Aristotle’s phronetic thinking). Societies and organizations desperately needed reliable processes for arriving at acceptable balances between factors of human well-being too dissimilar to plug into neat equations. Pandemic response was not, as it turned out, a get-the-data-and-crunch-the-numbers challenge — but since it had been cast so firmly as that at the outset, it remained (and remains) centered in that realm. As a result, leaders were slow to begin addressing these societal challenges.

What was the alternative? What should a great leader do in such a crisis? We believe that the right approach with the Covid-19 pandemic would have been to draw on all the relevant, epistemic knowledge of epidemiologists, virologists, pathologists, pharmacologists, and more — but to ensure that the scope of the problem was understood as broader than their focus. The tendency of the epistemic habit of mind is to go narrow, into pockets of science where it is possible to arrive at absolute, can’t-be-otherwise answers. The right approach would have been to factor those contributions into what was understood from the outset to be a sprawling, complex system of a challenge that would also call on holistic thinking and values-balancing decisions. If leaders had from the outset framed the pandemic as a crisis that would demand the highest level of political and ethical judgment, and not just scientific data and discovery, then decision-makers at all levels would not have found themselves so paralyzed — regarding, for example, mask mandates, prohibitions on large gatherings, business closures and re-openings, and nursing home policies — when testing results proved so challenging to collect, compile, and compare.

We admit we are painting with a broad brush here, undoubtedly some leaders balanced competing priorities and managed the calamities of 2020 more effectively than others. Our objective here is not to point fingers but simply to use the extremely prominent example of Covid-19 to underscore a fundamental but under-appreciated responsibility of leadership.

Part of your job as a leader is to frame the problems you want people to apply their energies to solving. That framing begins with comprehending the nature of a problem, and communicating the way in which it should be approached. Calling for everyone to weigh in with their opinions on a problem that is really a matter of data analysis is a recipe for disaster.  And insisting on “following the science” when the science cannot take you nearly far enough is a way to paralyze and frustrate people beyond measure.

This ability to size up a situation and the kinds of knowledge it calls for is a skill you can develop with deliberate practice, but the essential first step is simply to appreciate that those different kinds of knowledge exist, and that it’s your responsibility to recognize which ones are called for when. Aristotle’s efforts notwithstanding, most leaders haven’t thought much about realms of knowledge and what problems they can solve. Expect that to change as enterprises, and societies, take on increasingly complex and large-scale challenges — and leaders are increasingly judged on the thinking that goes into them.

Right Now Is A Great Time To Start A Business.

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People are often afraid to go out on an entrepreneurial limb – but now’s a better time than ever to build a business. Recessions and unstable periods often present the best opportunities to start new companies. During the 2008 financial crisis, for example, startups like Uber, AirBnB and many others were founded partly as a response to changing market dynamics.

In a little-known challenge to the economic fallout of the pandemic, millions of people have turned the crisis into an opportunity for progress. That is especially true in the United States. According to the Census Bureau, new businesses are springing up at the fastest rate in more than a decade. So far in 2020, the bureau has received more than 3.2 million applications for employer identification numbers. The comparable figure for the same period last year was 2.7 million.

Faced with furloughs or layoffs, many people are fashioning their own form of work. They see the pandemic as a now-or-never time to pursue a dream. (See related story, here.) Choose your cliché to explain this burst of entrepreneurship: Necessity is the mother of invention. Sweet are the uses of adversity. If life gives you lemons...

Some people can obtain loans, but many start with their own savings, driven by the passion of a good idea to invest in a new service or product. They tap into unexplored creativity, flexibility, and adaptability. “The most important lesson of COVID-19 is learning to adapt,” Myriam Simpierre, who opened a neighborhood grocery in New York City, told MarketWatch. “Distribution channels go awry. Prices change. A pandemic happens. Anything can happen. You have to be adaptable.”

Another entrepreneur who opened a hair salon makes sure she regularly sweeps the sidewalk out front and provides a bowl of water for passing canines, giving her an opportunity to “talk to everybody” passing by. In turn, she says, the neighborhood has embraced her business.

While many existing businesses have been forced to shut down, optimistic newcomers push ahead, in part out of a joy in being their own boss. The pandemic has produced a supercharged version of “creative destruction,” the theory that a good economy thrives when older businesses lose their way and innovative ones spot an opening. That churn is also putting the lie to the idea that only big corporations will survive the pandemic.

One reason many of these new businesses are enjoying early success is that customers crave in-person buying experiences after long periods of social isolation. That’s especially true when customers can meet new people, such as in a cafe. Other entrepreneurs spot new trends – such as a strong demand for bicycles – that they can supply.

A personal trainer in Madison, Wisconsin, who lost his job, started a mobile bicycle repair business, investing about $1,000 in equipment. Now he’s booked fixing bikes at people’s homes all day long, earning more than he did in his previous job.

“It feels like I built a rocket and lit it – and now I’m just holding on to the tail,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

Starting a new venture can be scary. But it can also be liberating. People find they must draw on their innate qualities, such as a humility to serve or the courage to test a new idea. Those are the fuel behind any new venture and are just one of the salves during the pandemic.

Setting The Record Straight On Income Inequality.

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Much Progressive thought is based on the theory of power structures. It states that all disparities, inequalities and differences in economic and cultural power in society must inevitably be attributed to innate discriminatory forces within that system. This idea originates from Karl Marx’s theory of Surplus Value: it states that an employer making profit is inherently a form of worker exploitation.

This explains the Left’s utter obsession with income inequality: the gap between what an Indian farmer and Bill Gates earn. The growing concern about income inequality rests on three premises: first, that it has risen substantially in recent decades (and that it is as bad as the public perceives it to be). Second, that it can be explained as the rich exploiting the poor. Third, that relative disparities in wealth and income are more important than the absolute living standards of the poorest. Let’s examine each in turn.

You’ve all heard Bernie Sanders or AOC rant on about the proportion of capital which the richest 1% in society own. The assumption amongst many is that this share of wealth has been increasing since the 1970s. Whilst it is easy for politicians and media figures to blurt out statistics along these lines, the truth is that the measurement of income inequality is much more complicated than it looks. There is a great number of factors one must consider when measuring such: are you looking at government transfers? Are you looking at peoples’ incomes before or after tax? Are you including income from capital gains? And if you are, then are those gains at accrual , or having been realized ? Are you considering the friction between public assets and private assets? Because welfare transfers discourage people from saving and investing in private assets, like pensions, or saving accounts. Are you taking into account family size, which, having been reduced, increases the incomes of the poorest? Are you considering that a lot of income is underreported, which is why many economists prefer consumption data to income data when measuring peoples’ living standards. And perhaps most significantly, age must be considered. Age and income correlate very well – so as societies age, a greater share of the population will be dominated by those who get high incomes from pensions and other assets they’ve invested in over time. When one includes all these factors, studies have repeatedly shown that there has been no increase in income inequality since 1970, or if there has, it has been much more moderated than public perception. When one takes into account the accrual of capital gains, Armour et al. (2014 ) demonstrate the exaggeration of the increase in inequality. When you examine consumption data, instead of just income data, a 2001 study came to a similar conclusion. When you look at tax records, instead of simply reported income, the same shocking truth is discovered . No, I’m kidding, tax records are really more reliable . When changes in labour market and household composition (like family size) are adjusted for, one finds something similar . Most interestingly, however, age plays an important role in income inequality, as verified by a 2017 Fraser Institute study , which estimated that up to 80% of all inequality in Canada can be explained by an ageing population.

The record on income inequality was set straight by a 2014 Cato Institute book : Anti-Picketty: Capital in the 21st Century, in response to Thomas Picketty’s famous book which hypothesised a dramatic increase in inequality (and consequently became the new Das Kapital). It refuted all the arguments it put forward, as well as debunk the alarm surrounding inequality. (For further reference, you can read another paper published by the same think-tank, which did something similar).

So, is income inequality rising at dramatic rates, while the rich get richer and the poor become increasingly more impoverished? No.

The second premise of the inequality brigade is that income disparities can only be explained by the rich exploiting the poor. This is patently wrong. The causes of poverty I addressed in my previous article for the Mises Institute. However, to review again, the strongest predictor of poverty in the United States is single motherhood, confirmed by CDC statistics . As it is written on page 275 of Robert Bartley’s book Seven Fat Years:

“ ….Data from the CPS show that about one half of all families with a female householder, no husband present were in the lowest income quintile. The increase in this type of family would cause an increase in measured income inequality ”.

Single motherhood is the best predictor of poverty in the US. There are also high housing costs, which may well be a strong cause of inequality – whether it has increased dramatically, increased moderately, or even plateaued. High housing costs (as well as smaller houses) are a result of government regulations which restrict supply. High regulations also restrict the spaciousness of housing. It’s why countries with lower housing regulations tend to have larger houses (just look at Canada, America, Australia New Zealand, countries with low housing regulations, in comparison to most European countries, which have the opposite).

The third premise of the inequality alarmists is that disparities between the rich and poor seem to matter more than the absolute living standards of the poorest. In response to this, I always give this thought-experiment. Where would you rather live? A society where the richest 10% earn 11 times more than the bottom 10%, but where the poor are on incomes of $40,000 a year and have access to high quality goods and services. Or, would you want to live in a society where there is complete income equality, but where everyone is on an annual income of $10,000. Now, obviously I’m committing a false dichotomy here. However, if you prefer equality to absolute prosperity, then you ought to be more inclined to answer ‘the latter’. Income inequality is essentially a useless measure of living standards. Whilst societies in which the poor are poor may have high levels of inequality, it does not follow that all societies with high/rising inequality have an impoverished poor, or that societies with low/dropping inequality have a rich poor. For instance, the country with the lowest inequality on earth is Ukraine – with a Gini coefficient of just 25. A country with much higher inequality is Australia – with a Gini coefficient of 35.8, nearly 11 points higher than Ukraine’s. Yet Australia’s living standards are clearly much higher than Ukraine’s. Rising inequality does not mean declining living standards – whilst declining inequality does not mean rising living standards.

Since the 1990’s, income inequality has risen in China. Yet is this of any moral relevance? During that time, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty.

Another good example of this ethical problem is the economic record of the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990), who famously liberalised Britain’s economy and fought the trade unions. During her premiership, income inequality increased dramatically – causing a rise in the number of people living on relatively low incomes (incomes relative to higher ones) – yet, this did not mean that the poor suffered under her. Quite to the contrary . The percentage of Brits living on absolute low incomes declined from 60% in 1979 to just over 40% in 1990 (and around 35% in 1997, when her Conservative government was finally voted out of office). This can be found on page 12 of a 2010 ONS report .

With all this in mind, consider that forcing inequality to drop may (for certain) involve suppressing people’s freedoms. Making people completely equal – or, at least, approaching completely equal – could involve the expropriation of wealth and property, which people won’t agree to easily. Freedom is much, much more desirable than equality. Freedom is contingent on the supreme rational faculties of the human being – and thus, the freedom of the individual, and the freedom of a society, are a reflection and an exercise of those innate human capacities. Income equality has no moral basis: there is no ethical reason why people ought to earn exactly the same, especially when the productivity and importance of different forms of labour vary. Thankfully, the American people agree with me. It’s why an overwhelming 77% of them value freedom over equality.

Pursuit of Happiness and the Virtue of Selfishness, Or Politics of Pull and the Vices of Selflessness.

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Chapter eight of Ayn Rand’s novel We the Living, Part II ends with Gen Z Irina’s dreams crushed in a Siberian gulag, and Chapter nine begins with her millennial brother Victor’s Communist Party promotion. The two are related, he engineered his sister’s devastation despite insisting “I want you to realize that my party membership is a sacred trust not to be utilized for purposes of personal advantage.”

On her way to prison for the crime of being good, Irina asks Kira a question she might have asked her pragmatic brother, “There’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it, Kira? What?” In our We the Living online forum, Clementine contributes part of a conversation with her teenage daughters,

My younger daughter was analyzing the question of what is happiness, and realizing the contradictions in altruism. What’s the point of living? Why are we alive? Who do we live for?

Victor’s reward is little different than Joe Biden being awarded the Democratic presidential nomination for ravaging the reputations of Judge Robert Bork in 1987 and Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991. After all, as Victor tells his new bride Marisha, “My dear, we must never forget, our social duties come first, above all personal considerations.” For contrast, later in chapter nine, Kira tells her boyfriend, “Leo, I can’t reproach you. I can’t blame you. I know what you’re doing. I know why you’re doing it. But listen: its not too late.”

Leo had given up on his future; living for the present was his only option. Refusing to submit, Kira can’t reproach him because of Andrei, to whom she says, “You were the best your Party had to offer the world.” Andrei replied, “Say I’m a traitor. Maybe I am. And maybe I’ve just stopped being one. You see, I feel certain of nothing in that involved mess they call existence, of nothing but you.” He was going in the opposite direction of Leo, but for similar reasons.

Leo gave in to the mystics of muscle whose duty is to Society; Andrei to the mystics of the mind whose duty is to God. To them, existence was no longer real, they had become selfless. To Kira, existence was primary and human ideals follow. Her virtue was selfishness, Leo was the higher value, and her life and happiness an end in itself. Conversely, 2020 America’s Democratic party is dominated by the Bernie Sanders & Sandy Cortez coalition of baby boomers and millennials (Motto: Go Pound Sand!) who share a perverted sense of romance about the Soviet ideal of self-sacrifice.

In Chapter 10 of this 1936 novel, former Soviet naval officer Stepan Timoshenko prophesizes them by telling us how this works, “You know more about it than I do, more than millions of young fools do, that watch us from all over the world with worshiping eyes. We had fools who thought in their doomed hearts that we made it for all those downtrodden ones who suffer on this earth. But you and me, Comrade Morozov, we have a secret.” In this wonderfully crafted scene by Ayn Rand, Timoshenko brings the reader in on their two big secrets,

With a smile that frightened Morozov more than the laughter: Don’t look so scared, you don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m nothing but a wretch, beaten by you, Comrade Morozov.

The terror Morozov felt is the same terror Kira had felt in the Petrograd train station when she witnessed Morozov condemning a desperate old woman to Soviet police. Except there’s one big difference: Kira was selfish – she wanted to live as people were meant to live. Instead of pounding sand in a society of zeroes, Kira wanted to turn it into cement and glass, or maybe silicon wafers some day. Morozov’s looting evades reality because it produces nothing. No self-esteem is selflessness.

Evading reality was his death sentence in the court of moral justice, and Timoshenko was the officer of the court delivering the verdict. Last week, officers of the court Joe Biden and Kamala Harris gave clear indications of their intention to pervert America’s justice system – pack the US Supreme Court into a super-legislative political instrument for Soviet-style class warfare. A “bonehead idea” according to Biden in 1983, and that’s saying something.

In Chapter 11, Andrei tells Kira about his plan to report Syerov’s black market operations with Leo and Morozov to his chief, “I’m expecting the highest integrity from the men I am going to face. Don’t make me face them with less than that on my part.” Andrei didn’t want to know what Kira might have known about Leo’s business, and Chapter 12 reveals the integrity charade. While begin arrested by Andrei and his goons, Leo questions their pretense, “I realize that one should know how to respect the grandeur of authority under all circumstance. No matter how trying to the self-respect of those in power.” Leo and Andrei both understood the scam rooted in fear.

Equally absurd, last week, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an inane 25th Amendment commission for removing President Trump. As only he can, Trump exposes this, “Crazy Nancy is the one who should be under observation. They don’t call her Crazy for nothing! She’s gone crazy, she’s a nutjob. I think they put it in so they can put Kamala in, replacing Biden.” In a similar vein, Andrei’s plan was to get the Soviets to expose their own looting, and him regain his self-respect. He explained to his chief, “It will also be important to explain how a penniless aristocrat laid his hands on the very heart of our economic life.”

The economic life of 2020 Democrats is their Green New Deal – a cabal of crony corporatists, environmental lobbies, socialist foundations, progressive think tanks, and government agencies looting human productivity under the guise of saving the planet. Biden, Sanders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton come to mind as famous examples among many thousands of politicians who became wealthy from “public service” careers that produced nothing. Because of this, the productive virtues of the individual mind are the greatest threat to Party ideology, except the selfless kind.

Accordingly, President Trump is reviled by political elites and their loyal voters whose minds were stunted by The Comprachicos of progressive government education. Fortunately, our Facebook study group proves the remedy exists, and its rooted in the volition of human consciousness, as Clementine explains,

Gen Z is searching for answers in the collectivist “serving something greater than yourself,” and sensing that has no real purpose. My daughter was working her way to that conclusion as she started reflecting on the character of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.

Government Stimulus Spending Is Extracted From Prior Private Production, And Is Therefore De-Stimulating.

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Communications experts tell us that even the most basic points must be repeated many times to generate awareness and understanding. John Tamny is not shy about reasserting his core point that free market economic growth comes prior to – and makes possible – government spending.

Annual U.S. federal government expenditures can be measured somewhere north of four or five trillion. On the other hand, politicians in Yemen spend somewhere in the range of $5 billion. What’s going on?

Are we to assume Yemen’s political leadership is particularly parsimonious with taxpayer money? And is the low level of government spending there the reason for the country’s history of extreme poverty?

To read New York Times reporters Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley, someone lacking the most basic of economic knowledge might assume the latter. Based on what Casselman and Tankersley imagine powers country economic growth, one would perhaps conclude that Yemen’s problem is a stingy central government. If the politicians there would just tax and subsequently spend more, the economy would boom.

Casselman and Tankersley recently authored a front page story that led with the headline “Without Stimulus, Dire Outlook for the Economy.” Translated for readers who are still asleep, the U.S. economy will implode unless Congress extracts trillions from the private sector, only to write checks with it and spend it on favored projects. Weak economy? Just expand the footprint of Congress.  You can’t make this up.

It’s plainly lost on the two reporters that what they imagine to be stimulus is in fact a consequence of growth. Growth that already happened.

Casselman and Tankersley believe the U.S. economy can’t survive sans excess government spending, but the actual truth is that there’s no government spending without economic growth first. Think about it. Then think about it some more. What you read in the newspapers and what economists tell you is backwards.

Government spending is what comes after economic growth. It’s logically not a driver of it. Politicians spend less in Yemen than do U.S. politicians not because they’re thrifty with the money of others, or because Mises’s classic book Socialismnever leaves their sides, or because they think Keynes’s General Theory was bunk. They spend very little precisely because there’s very little economic growth in Yemen to tax or borrow against.

Economic growth, then government spending. Economic growth, then wasteful spending that journalists and economists naively refer to as “stimulus.” The headline for the piece by Casselman and Tankerseley was incorrect because their analysis was. “Stimulus” can’t enhance the U.S. economic outlook simply because stimulus is only possible insofar as the U.S. economic outlook has long been enhanced. Most dynamic in the world enhanced.

It’s all a reminder that the New York Times is not “fake news.” Not at all. It’s the best source of information in the world. More realistically, the Times is the best example of what news is when the reporters of it are highly emotional people. When the economy is weak it just seems so simple to say that government should hand out the money of others to get it moving again. Except that governments can only “stimulate” the depressed if they’re depressing the stimulated. It gets worse.

You see, the emotional also believe consumption drives economic growth. It just seems like it’s true. If we buy things, the economy will boom.

Actually, buying is the easy part. What’s more of a challenge is producing so that we can buy things. The latter requires investment. Investment renders us more productive, and thus more capable of buying things.

Which speaks to the bigger problem of government spending. In order to dole out trillions, the feds extract funds from those with means; as in the very individuals most capable of investing what’s left over after they consume. This explains why government spending is much more hazardous than it stimulating the depressed through depression of the stimulated. In truth, government spending is all about depressing those most capable of stimulating, which is always and everywhere a consequence of investment.

Bringing it back to Casselman and Tankersley, it’s lost on them that absent panicky politicians responding to a virus with lockdowns of economic activity, the U.S. economy wouldn’t presently be so weak. Translated for those a little bit slow on the uptake, the Times reporters believe the very political class that helped depress the economy should be empowered to centrally plan its revival.

That the revival plan constructed by politicians and cheered by Casselman and Tankersley amounts to politicians passing around the trillions of others just adds to the Twilight Zone nature of today’s economic discussion. The economy is weak, so hand trillions to Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell to revive it with.

Implicit in the droolings of reporters and the politicians they lionize is that the second half of the 20th century was just a bad dream, as opposed to a tragic stretch of decades in which politicians arrogated to themselves control over the means of production on the way to a body count of over 100 million. In reality, the 20thcentury’s 2nd half was real. And it was awful for those who suffered a massively expanded political footprint.

Looked at through a modern-day lens, what didn’t work in total doesn’t work partially. Untaxed and unspent wealth doesn’t sit idle as Casselman and Tankersley’s emotions tell them; rather it’s directed to its highest perceived use by profit-motivated investors. You don’t grow a weak economy through increased central planning.

Casselman and Tankerseley believe government spending is necessary to revive a gasping economy. No, that’s not serious. Government spending is the often wasteful result of a booming economy. More of it now will slow today’s nascent recovery. If readers are still confused, just check out Yemen.

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, where this article first appeared, and Vice President at FreedomWorks.

7,621 Scientists And Medical Practitioners Say: Re-Open Immediately And Completely.

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When will Americans push back against the lockdowns? There is no scientific justification for them; they are a pure power play.

Early this week, three of the world’s top epidemiologists published the Great Barrington Declaration, a short treatise that advocates a controversial approach to managing the coronavirus pandemic. Professors Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University argue that societies across the globe should reopen immediately and completely.

Instead of observing measures designed to slow the spread of the virus, the young and healthy should resume normal activity in order to incur herd immunity and thereby protect those vulnerable to severe illness. The authors urge the adoption of this strategy, which they call “Focused Protection,” in light of increasing evidence that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. . . Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

As of this writing, the Declaration has been signed by 3,089 other medical and public health scientists, 4,532 medical practitioners, and around 70,000 members of the general public.

While these scientists are not the first to express such views, given the degree to which their stance conflicts with the prevailing wisdom that everyone has a moral obligation to participate in efforts to “stop the spread,” it is not surprising that they have already encountered significant opposition. Among their primary detractors is Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who considers their proposal akin to a suggestion that society “cull[] the herd of the sick and disabled. It’s grotesque.”

It is hard to see where Gonsalves reads into the Declaration, which seeks to balance the interests of all demographics, a call to “cull[] . . . the sick and disabled.” This accusation is merely part of the drama in what has become coronavirus theater.

Gonsalves’s more measured, and conceivably legitimate, argument is that, since around fifty percent of the United States population is vulnerable, those most likely to experience severe illness cannot simply be separated out from the rest of society. Some version of this notion – that the strategy is logistically unfeasible and therefore must be discarded– is the most prevalent critique of the document. Gonsalves and others, for instance Dr. Michael Head at University of Southampton, also contend that the declaration’s premise is false, because no one in the scientific community is calling for either extended or extensive lockdowns.

But this latter claim is simply untrue. Many prominent scientists have called for extreme lockdowns in the United States, as recently as last month. While they claim this would eradicate the virus entirely, it is becoming increasingly evident that such suppressive measures last only as long as they are in place.

Once lifted, the virus simply resurges, as has been demonstrated by countries such as Peru,which initially implemented one of the world’s most extreme lockdowns and now has one of the worst outbreaks. Melbourne, Australia, has been under a severe lockdown for over a month, despite having declared early victory against the virus. The United Kingdom has been enacting various forms of shutdown for several weeks after having been more or less open for the summer, and the mayor of New York City and governor of New York State have been threatening to impose localized lockdowns in Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods in which cases are rising. Thus, whether endorsed by the scientific community or politicians, forced closures of schools and businesses are the default mechanism for managing rising cases in many parts of the world.

Lockdowns are no strawman, contrary to the claims of Gonsalves et al.

As for Gonsalves’s more compelling concern, it is true that protecting vulnerable members of society who do not reside in nursing homes, while allowing the rest to go about their lives, is not a simple feat. But the many scientists who conclude that, therefore, Focused Protection is not viable are woefully misguided. Initially, some portion of the vast resources that societies are expending to lock down could be diverted to this project. But more importantly, the critics’ position drastically underestimates the harm lockdowns inflict on a society.

Oxfam recently published a report concluding that 130 million more people will probably die of starvation due to supply chain disruptions resulting from lockdowns around the world. As Time magazine explains, that is exponentially more people than will succumb to the virus itself. The CDC has estimated the probable occurrence of more than 93,000 “non-Covid ‘excess deaths’ this year, including 42,427 from cardiovascular conditions, 10,686 from diabetes and 3,646 from cancer. Many are due to government shutdowns of non-essential medical care.” That is in this country alone.

Likewise, mental health is deteriorating; substance, child and domestic abuse are increasing; and children, especially those who come from families without means, are falling behind in school. Countless businesses have closed, many for good, spelling financial disaster for their owners and hardship for employees. All of this is due to lockdowns, despite the common misattributions in headlines to the “coronavirus” itself.

While Gonsalves and the other critics are quick to argue that Focused Protection is “grotesque,” at no point do they address the crux of the matter, which is that the harms of locking down and social distancing, especially to the young, outweigh the benefits. Their opposition stems from the myopic worldview that led to lockdown and social distancing strategies in the first place: that the pandemic is a uniquely horrible problem that justifies sidelining all others in the quest to solve it.

Instead, as we have seen over the past seven or eight months, the coronavirus is just one among countless difficulties that the world faces; when contemplated dispassionately, it does not stand out the way that, for instance, nuclear war or a truly apocalyptic pandemic would. At 1.05 million deaths over the past nine or ten months, the coronavirus appears to be a problem along the lines of, for example, traffic accidents, which cause 1.35 million deaths per year, or tuberculosis, which results in 1.5 million deaths annually.

Most of us understand and accept that preventing these deaths must be balanced against other interests. If, for instance, we banned vehicular travel in order to avoid deaths resulting from traffic accidents, but doing so caused 130 million deaths from supply chain disruptions, we would immediately recognize this as a failing proposition. Clearly, the same logic ought to apply here.

Critics of the Great Barrington Declaration correctly observe that we will not be able to prevent every death from coronavirus among the vulnerable. But their argument rests on the false assumption that preventing coronavirus deaths is more important than anything else, and while efforts can be made to mitigate collateral damage, in the end all must give way to this overarching goal.

Rather, like all else in life, mitigation efforts must be balanced against the injury those measures cause. Since lockdowns will probably cause more deaths by starvation alone than the coronavirus, never mind the myriad other harms, the critics’ position simply does not withstand any scrutiny. By contrast, the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration expressly recognize both sides of the equation and seek to minimize coronavirus deaths among the vulnerable and suffering inflicted upon the nonvulnerable. It should be obvious which is the better approach.

Jenin Younes is a public defender in New York City
Prosperity Is The Apex

Prosperity, As Measured By Increasing Per Capita GDP, Is Enhancing Everyone’s Lives. Why Is the Left Against It?

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Measured by per capita GDP growth, all Americans are enjoying a higher standard of living than in the past. Those lives are longer, too. All thanks to capitalism. Why do some people protest this?

In Friedrich Hayek’s 1954 book Capitalism and the Historians, the late French philosopher and political economist Bertrand de Jouvenel noted a baffling historical trend: “Strangely enough, the fall from favor of the money-maker coincides with an increase in his social usefulness.”

Hatred Of Capitalism

In surveying the history of capitalism from its inception in the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century when he was writing, De Jouvenel was struck by an ironic and counterintuitive phenomenon. By “money-maker,” he meant the capitalist entrepreneurs who became rich by supplying the masses with more consumer goods. Entrepreneurs generated the economic growth that uplifted standards of living; hence, their “social usefulness.”

De Jouvenel aptly wrote “strangely enough” to characterize the fact that as capitalists raised standards of living in each succeeding generation, the hatred of capitalists increased instead of diminished. This is paradoxical, but true. The more prosperous our society has become, the more the creators of that prosperity and the system that enables it have been vilified. How dare those wicked capitalists break the iron grip that abject poverty had held over the masses of human beings throughout millennia of history!

This graph of world per capita wealth over the last two thousand years tells an amazing story. (A chart of US per capita GDP growth shows a similar trajectory over the last 230 years.)

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Mass poverty was the norm for centuries. That finally began to change in the late 1700s with the emergence of capitalism. The nineteenth-century socialist reaction to capitalism condemned capitalism for not making every human being prosperous equally and simultaneously. It’s true: some prospered before others. As I have explained before, the reason that there was not faster economic progress for more people in the 1800s was not that evil capitalists were exploiting workers, but simply that there were not enough capitalists to “exploit” (employ) more workers and mass produce more goods.

Explosive Growth

Looking at the graph, you can see that economic growth accelerated explosively in the twentieth century. (Note that growth became much more rapid after the end of slavery, which debunks the fallacious assertion that America’s great wealth depended on slavery.) In the United States, per capita income rose (in 1990 dollars) from $5,301 in 1913 to $31,178 in 2008 and life expectancy from 53 years to 78 years. In short, more Americans are living longer lives at higher standards of living than ever before due to our capitalist system. That has happened despite the considerable handicaps of bureaucratic regulation, wasteful pork barrel politics, and government redistribution of wealth. (There is also more prosperity outside the United States than ever. See chart above and my article “Ready for Some Good News?”)

Despite the astounding success of the free enterprise system in producing unprecedented prosperity, antagonism toward capitalism is growing, and popular politicians are adopting platforms that are essentially socialist. Indeed, the paradox of prosperity that De Jouvenel noticed almost seventy years ago remains firmly intact, for capitalism has never been more fruitful and never more hated by its beneficiaries than it is today.

Inexcusable Economic Ignorance

The present fascination with socialism and hatred of capitalism reflects a combination of willful historical blindness, lack of simple common sense, and inexcusable economic ignorance:

  • Anyone even casually familiar with twentieth-century history should know that socialism has failed miserably, causing economic retrogression and impoverishment wherever it has been tried.
  • Common sense should recognize that since capitalism is a system where entrepreneurs compete with each other to produce what people want, and socialism is a system in which producers produce what the state wants, then obviously people prosper more under capitalism.
  • Most appalling and bitterly ironic about so many Americans enthusiastically, even fanatically, espousing socialism in 2020 is that this year marks the centenary of the most important economic discovery of the twentieth century: in 1920, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained with irrefutable logic that socialism must inevitably discombobulate and reduce economically rational production because it obliterates the market-based price system necessary to coordinate production. Shame on the economics profession for remaining silent about this fundamental truth and allowing dangerous economic ignorance to persist.

Facts

Fact: it is free market capitalism that has made us wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of our great-great grandparents. Fact: the socialist alternative simply does not work. For anyone to favor replacing the world’s greatest wealth-creating system with a proven wealth-destroying system is to spurn prosperity, forsake rationality, and court destruction. That is the grim reality of the paradox of prosperity.

Mark Hendrickson is adjunct professor of economics at Grove City College. 

Liberty

Equality, Liberty, And Justice Caused – And Continue To Cause – Great Enrichment For All.

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The world is rich and will become still richer. Quit worrying.

Not all of us are rich yet, of course. A billion or so people on the planet drag along on the equivalent of $3 a day or less. But as recently as 1800, almost everybody did.

The Great Enrichment began in 17th-century Holland. By the 18th century, it had moved to England, Scotland and the American colonies, and now it has spread to much of the rest of the world.

Economists and historians agree on its startling magnitude: By 2010, the average daily income in a wide range of countries, including Japan, the United States, Botswana, and Brazil, had soared 1,000 to 3,000 percent over the levels of 1800. People moved from tents and mud huts to split-levels and city condominiums, from waterborne diseases to 80-year life spans, from ignorance to literacy.

You might think the rich have become richer and the poor even poorer. But by the standard of basic comfort in essentials, the poorest people on the planet have gained the most. In places like Ireland, Singapore, Finland, and Italy, even people who are relatively poor have adequate food, education, lodging, and medical care—none of which their ancestors had. Not remotely.

Inequality of financial wealth goes up and down, but over the long term it has been reduced. Financial inequality was greater in 1800 and 1900 than it is now, as even the French economist Thomas Piketty has acknowledged. By the more important standard of basic comfort in consumption, inequality within and between countries has fallen nearly continuously.

In any case, the problem is poverty, not inequality as such—not how many yachts the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt has, but whether the average Frenchwoman has enough to eat. At the time of Les Misérables, she didn’t. In the last 40 years, the World Bank estimates, the proportion of the population living on an appalling $1 or $2 a day has halved. Paul Collier, an Oxford economist, urges us to help the “bottom billion” of the more than seven billion people on earth. Of course. It is our duty. But he notes that 50 years ago, four billion out of five billion people lived in such miserable conditions. In 1800, it was 95 percent of one billion.

We can improve the conditions of the working class. Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little—and anyway, expropriation is a one-time trick. Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet, and more to an expanding middle class.

Look at the astonishing improvements in China since 1978 and in India since 1991. Between them, they are home to about four out of every 10 humans. Even in the United States, real wages have continued in recent decades to grow—if slowly—contrary to what you might have heard. Donald Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, and others who have looked beyond the superficial have shown that real wages are continuing to rise, thanks largely to major improvements in the quality of goods and services, and to nonwage benefits. Real purchasing power is double what it was in the fondly remembered 1950s—when many American children went to bed hungry.

What, then, caused this Great Enrichment?

Not exploitation of the poor, not investment, not existing institutions, but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic.

The liberal idea was spawned by some happy accidents in northwestern Europe from 1517 to 1789—namely, the four R’s: the Reformation, the Dutch Revolt, the revolutions of England and France, and the proliferation of reading. The four R’s liberated ordinary people, among them the venturing bourgeoisie. The Bourgeois Deal is, briefly, this: In the first act, let me try this or that improvement. I’ll keep the profit, thank you very much, though in the second act those pesky competitors will erode it by entering and disrupting (as Uber has done to the taxi industry). By the third act, after my betterments have spread, they will make you rich.

And they did.

You may object that ideas are a dime a dozen and that to make them fruitful we must start with adequate physical and human capital and good institutions. It’s a popular idea at the World Bank, but a mistaken one. True, we eventually need capital and institutions to embody the ideas, such as a marble building with central heating and cooling to house the Supreme Court. But the intermediate and dependent causes like capital and institutions have not been the root cause.

The root cause of enrichment was and is the liberal idea, spawning the university, the railway, the high-rise, the internet and, most important, our liberties. What original accumulation of capital inflamed the minds of William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth? What institutions, except the recent liberal ones of university education and uncensored book publishing, caused feminism or the antiwar movement? Since Karl Marx, we have made a habit of seeking material causes for human progress. But the modern world came from treating more and more people with respect.

Ideas are not all sweet, of course. Fascism, racism, eugenics, and nationalism are ideas with alarming recent popularity. But sweet practical ideas for profitable technologies and institutions, and the liberal idea that allowed ordinary people for the first time to have a go, caused the Great Enrichment. We need to inspirit masses of people, not the elite, who are plenty inspirited already. Equality before the law and equality of social dignity are still the root of economic, as well as spiritual, flourishing—whatever tyrants may think to the contrary.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, adjunct in classics and philosophy, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Throughout History, Free Market Policing Has Proven To Be A Better Solution.

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Recent riots in Louisville were only the latest in a long string of violent, raging mob riots by the criminal Marxist BLM movement, their mostly-white “antifa” thuggish allies, and assorted looters. In this case, “Two police officers have been shot in Louisville, Ky., amid riots following the announcement of an indictment in the shooting of Breonna Taylor. Louisville chief of police Robert Schroeder confirmed that the officers were shot and were taken to a local hospital. Schroeder told reporters that one of the officers was undergoing surgery but in stable condition, while the other was alert and stable. Police have arrested one suspect in the shooting. . . after a grand jury charged just one of the officers involved in the shooting of Taylor in a botched drug bust. Rioters clashed with police throughout Louisville, burning trash cans and calling to defund the city police department.”

Last May, hundreds of businesses in the state’s Twin Cities — Minneapolis and St. Paul — were damaged or looted during four days of unrest. In Los Angeles, “National Guard troops arrived in the nation’s second-largest city overnight after a fourth day of protests Saturday saw demonstrators clash repeatedly with officers, torch police vehicles and pillage businesses. Mayor Eric Garcetti said he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom for 500 to 700 members of the Guard to assist the 10,000 Los Angeles Police Department officers. The California National Guard is being deployed to Los Angeles overnight to support our local response to maintain peace and safety on the streets of our city,’ said the mayor, who ordered a rare citywide curfew until Sunday morning. Firefighters responded to dozens of fires, and scores of businesses were damaged. One of the hardest-hit areas was the area around the Grove, a popular high-end outdoor mall west of downtown where hundreds of protesters swarmed the area, showering police with rocks and other objects and vandalizing shops. About 3,000 protesters demonstrated in Brooklyn, and were pushed back by NYPD officers releasing chemical mace after the protests turned violent. A woman was arrested and charged with attempted murder after she threw a Molotov cocktail into an occupied police car.

Things are likely to get worse. A story in The New York Times, a paper very sympathetic to the BLM hoodlums, admits that rioters plan to assault suburban white areas. They will demand that the white residents, who are often elderly, bow down to them and surrender their homes. “Nearly four months after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, some protesters against police brutality are taking a more confrontational — and personal — approach. The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come ‘out of your house and into the street’ and demonstrate their support. These more aggressive protests target ordinary people going about their lives, especially those who decline to demonstrate allegiance to the cause. That includes a diner in Washington who refused to raise her fist to show support for Black Lives Matter, or, in several cities, confused drivers who happened upon the protests.”

Ordinary Americans cannot rely on the police to protect them. In many cases, leftwing governors and mayors have ordered to police to stand down. For them, solidarity with the rioters is more important than the lives and property of decent citizens. We have seen the absurdity of rioters being called “peaceful protestors” when videos show cities aflame. When the police do their duty and counter the violence of the thugs, they are vilified as racists, indicted, and even shot at and killed. In these circumstances, they are hardly likely to stay on the job. If the police don’t protect you, you have no legal recourse, and in some places, police won’t even investigate cases of looting. “’Neither the Constitution, nor state law, imposes a general duty upon police officers or other governmental officials to protect individual persons from harm — even when they know the harm will occur,’ said Darren L. Hutchinson, a professor and associate dean at the University of Florida School of Law. ‘Police can watch someone attack you, refuse to intervene and not violate the Constitution.’ The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government has only a duty to protect persons who are ‘in custody,’ he pointed out.”

What then are we supposed to do? In an interview on the Tucker Carlson show September 23, Danny Coulson, a retired Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI, condemned the rioters. But he thought that there was something even worse than the burning and looting, and this was the main reason he condemned them. Their actions might lead to “vigilante justice”. People must not take the law into their own hands—that could lead to chaos. Instead, we must unify around support of the police.

His advice is useless, and it rests on a false premise. How can we support the police, when they aren’t protecting us? His advice is like urging us to put out a fire with a hose unattached to a hydrant. The false premise is that vigilante justice is bad. Is it? Let’s look at the definition of the term: “Vigilantism is the act of enforcement, investigation or punishment of perceived offenses without legal authority. A vigilante (from Spanish vigilante) is practitioner of vigilantism.”

In other words, you are a vigilante if you exercise your basic right of self-defense, without the permission of the predatory State that support the rioters and looters. In fact, if people defended and protected themselves, the result would not be chaos, but a far better system than we have now. As the great Murray Rothbard explained, people in a free market society would defend themselves by hiring private protection agencies. The agencies would compete to provide the services customers wanted, rather than cater to the whim of a mob or promote venality and power-seeking, as officials of the State do now. As Murray again and again stressed, the free market is always better at supplying goods and services than the State, and protection and defense are no exceptions.

He explains in For A New Liberty, “Free-market police would not only be efficient, they would have a strong incentive to be courteous and to refrain from brutality against either their clients or their clients’ friends or customers. A private Central Park would be guarded efficiently in order to maximize park revenue, rather than have a prohibitive curfew imposed on innocent—and paying—customers. A free market in police would reward efficient and courteous police protection to customers and penalize any falling off from this standard. No longer would there be the current disjunction between service and payment inherent in all government operations, a disjunction which means that police, like all other government agencies, acquire their revenue, not voluntarily and competitively from consumers, but from the taxpayers coercively. In fact, as government police have become increasingly inefficient, consumers have been turning more and more to private forms of protection. We have already mentioned block or neighborhood protection. There are also private guards, insurance companies, private detectives, and such increasingly sophisticated equipment as safes, locks, and closed-circuit TV and burglar alarms. . . Every reader of detective fiction knows that private insurance detectives are far more efficient than the police in recovering stolen property. Not only is the insurance company impelled by economics to serve the consumer—and thereby try to avoid paying benefits—but the major focus of the insurance company is very different from that of the police. The police, standing as they do for a mythical ‘society,’ are primarily interested in catching and punishing the criminal; restoring the stolen loot to the victim is strictly secondary. To the insurance company and its detectives, on the other hand, the prime concern is recovery of the loot, and apprehension and punishment of the criminal is secondary to the prime purpose of aiding the victim of crime. Here we see again the difference between a private firm impelled to serve the customer-victim of crime and the public police, which is under no such economic compulsion.”

Private law enforcement isn’t just a theoretical idea, as we can see from British and American history. In Britain, “Throughout the period 1674 to 1829 many victims of crime were able to identify and apprehend the culprits before contacting a constable or a justice of the peace to secure their arrest. . . Londoners continued to help apprehend suspected criminals. As the Proceedings frequently illustrate, cries of ‘stop thief!’ or ‘murder!’ from victims often successfully elicited the assistance of passers-by. . . victims frequently paid thief-takers to locate and apprehend suspects. Moreover, the difficulties the authorities had in identifying and apprehending criminals led them to offer rewards to those whose arrests led to the conviction of serious criminals, and pardons to accomplices who were willing to turn in their confederates. Increasingly, ordinary Londoners left the task of securing criminals to people who were motivated to do so by the prospect of financial or other rewards.”We see the same thing in America. “The development of policing in the United States closely followed the development of policing in England. In the early colonies policing took two forms. It was both informal and communal, which is referred to as the ‘Watch,’ or private-for-profit policing, which is called ‘The Big Stick’ . . . These informal modalities of policing continued well after the American Revolution. It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States.”

Danny Coulson was horror-stricken about people hiring private bodyguards, but what is wrong with that? Instead, we should support our basic right to self-defense. This is guaranteed by the Second Amendment, but our rights don’t depend on the State and its Constitution. By the way, the recently sainted Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted to end the individual right to keep and bear arms. Our rights come from natural law, and only the free market can enforce them and protect us.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr is Chairman of the Mises Institute. This article first appeared at lewrockwell.com.

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