Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

There Are Free Market Choices In Dealing With The Coronavirus Scare. The US Chose The Opposite Path.

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What’s the better for dealing with pandemic disease: martial-law quarantines imposed by the state according to geography, or keeping society open while trusting medical professionals, individuals, families, and communities to make intelligent decisions?
A month ago, such a question would have been purely hypothetical but the answer in the United States would have been settled. After all, this is a country of law, with a Bill of Rights, limits on state power, and an essential trust in freedom. Right?How times change in a crisis. Mayors and governors around the country are imposing quarantines, not because they work but because they don’t want to be blamed for failing to act. So let’s consider that essential question: what works?South Korea has seen a steady increase in new coronavirus cases for the latter half of the last week. The country had the fourth most cases of coronavirus in the world. There were no geographic quarantines enforced by armed guards. Instead, the sole focus was on widespread testing and isolating the sick.After averaging over 500 new cases per day back to the last week of February, between Friday and Sunday the daily totals numbered 438, 367, and 248 according to the Korea Center for Disease Control.How is it that without deploying the military or imposing widespread, enforced quarantine, the spread of coronavirus in South Korea is apparently slowing?Actually, there’s a better question: why should the U.S. copy China rather than South Korea?

The United States is deep in the throes of an election season at present, and so haughty invokings of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are recurrent (if not always coherent). Of course, talk is generally cheap – and all the cheaper when coming from the mouths of politicians. It’s in times of crisis that the veracity of one’s commitment to liberty and human rights is laid bare. The difference between the U.S. and China is that China makes no pretense of reverence for liberty, nor for the inviolate elevation of individual rights.

South Korea is leveraging private property rights to thwart the spread of the virus, with building owners posting and enforcing “no mask, no entry” signs. (Just imagine how many Americans would react to being turned away or denied service from a favored destination at the sole discretion of the proprietor.)

Drive-through testing stations have been set up nationwide through which individuals, after a ten-minute test, are notified within a few hours if infected. A voluntary, self-diagnosis phone app was created in the early stages of the pandemic, and “living and treatment” centers set up in a “soft quarantine” spirit.

Mostly, though, South Koreans are acting based upon their experience with the H1N1 pandemic in 2009: they’re washing their hands frequently, making an effort not to touch their faces, wearing masks, and social distancing to the extent possible. The high level of personal technology access in South Korea makes the lattermost eminently practicable, given the ubiquity of video telecommunications and other such technology.

Contrast this with developments in the few days since Italy put its entire country under quarantine, active cases have risen from between 5,000 and 6,000 to over 8,500. Deaths from the coronavirus have risen in that same time period from 366 to 631 (all figures as of March 10th).

It is true that certain aspects of South Korea’s handling of the outbreak nevertheless infringes upon individual rights, in particular where privacy is concerned. Using camera surveillance and tracking the cell phone and banking activity of individuals likely inflicted with the coronavirus is grossly in violation of any marginally libertarian principles. But the prevailing point is that with a far softer touch – vastly more respectful of the individual citizen than anywhere else, including our own putative bastion of freedom – the South Korean government has brought about superior outcomes than the much heavier handed, authoritarian measures of China, Italy, the U.S., and virtually every other afflicted nation.

Talking the talk and walking the walk

Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-Lip summarized the underlying premise of the South Korean government’s approach to arresting the spread of the coronavirus: “Without harming the principle of a transparent and open society, we recommend a response system that blends voluntary public participation with creative applications of advanced technology.”

While the global spread of the virus is still unfolding and the appearance of new strains may throw the proverbial wrench into Seoul’s policy mechanism, at present the results speak for themselves.

Every government action which reduces liberty from any starting point generates net costs, whether put forth under calamitous or idyllic circumstances. Freedom is not a fair-weather proposition. We love it and defend it because it works, in normal times or crisis times.

The quick decision among most countries to deploy their military, force the lockdown of communities, pressure firms to withhold their services, and paralyze individual movement reveals precisely what we suspected but did not fully know about our ruling classes. Our liberties are expendable when they say they are.

Peter C. Earle is an economist and with AIER; this article first appeared at aier.org.

The Media-Induced Coronavirus Panic Is Worse Than The Disease.

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The deliberate panic created over the coronavirus is not victimless. Far from it.

When the radioactive dust settles from this orchestrated panic-strategy, potentially hundreds of billions will have been lost, thousands of businesses closed, and millions of employees fired. On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by almost 1,500 points.

When the coronavirus first reared its ugly head, many in the media instantly saw it as a cheap and easy way to increase clicks, newspaper sales, viewers, listeners, and most especially ad revenue.

In the guise of “informing the public,” they intended to run scare headlines and stories to spike attention to their sites. And run them, they did.

One of the oldest axioms in the news business being: “If it bleeds, it leads.” The coronavirus was tailor-made for that requirement.

Except, now even the media executives pushing the scare tactics for hoped-for increased ad revenue have realized they went way too far and opened a Pandora’s Box they are unable to close.

The economic devastation ignited by the deliberate panic strategy is spreading like an unchecked wildfire.

In addition to the massive financial loss to our nation and the world is the haunting psychological trauma inflicted on untold millions now terrorized by the prospect of getting the virus.

Naturally, once it was clear that the panic was not only taking hold but spreading, craven politicians predictably jumped into the echo chamber to scream “The Sky is Falling” for partisan or self-serving reasons.

Well, how do you like what you’ve all done now?

The CDC reports that during the six-month run of SARS in 2003, (which was also a coronavirus) it cost the world an estimated $40 billion.

But, that $40 billion should not be viewed as some cold statistic. Rather it should and must be seen as the devastation inflicted upon real business, real jobs, and real lives. Don’t see numbers. Instead, visualize the faces of the thousands to hundreds of thousands of human beings who lost their jobs as their companies were either forced to cut back or go out of business altogether.

The panic created over this current coronavirus already far exceeds that of the SARS pandemic of 2003. Seemingly exponentially so.

That being the case, it’s safe to assume that when it’s all said and done and this strain of the coronavirus has run its course – as it will with a far smaller infection and fatality rate than the yearly flu — the financial punishment to businesses and the living and breathing human beings they employ will not only be far greater than the $40 billion in 2003, but truly catastrophic.

In 1987, when Raymond Donovan, former secretary of Labor under President Ronald Reagan, was rightfully acquitted of a smear-campaign and criminal charge, he famously asked: “Which office do I go to get my reputation back?”

Now, with potentially thousands of businesses about to close and collectively millions of people about to be (or already) fired from their jobs, where do those business owners and their employees go to get their livelihoods back?

Can they — and should they — be allowed to enter into a class-action lawsuit against those who willingly created a panic for ratings, ad revenue and political advantage.

I submit it’s a very legitimate question.

Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official. This article first appeared at issuesinsights.com.

Temple Grandin is the Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Who Thinks in Pictures and Lives Her Dreams

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In his 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Oliver Sacks studied seven individuals whose brains are wired in rare combinations of connectivity. According to Publishers Weekly, “In this provocative collection, the noted neurologist describes his meetings with seven people whose brain functions generate new perspectives on the workings of that organ, the nature of experience and concepts of personality and consciousness.”

One of the subjects of his analysis is the noted Professor of Animal Science and Poetic Justice Warrior Temple Grandin. By way of introduction, a founder of the Autism Society of America, Ruth Sullivan, relates meeting Grandin at their annual conference and asking her to speak in the 1980s,

Here, for the first time, was someone who could tell us from her own experience, what it was like to be extremely sound sensitive, “tied to the rail and the train’s coming.” She spoke from her own experience, and her insight was impressive. There were tears in more than one set of eyes that day.

As Dr. Bernard Rimland writes in the forward to Grandin’s 1986 book Emergence: Labeled Autistic, “Temple’s ability to convey her innermost feelings and fears, coupled with her capacity for explaining mental processes will give the reader an insight into autism that few have been able to achieve.”

Thinking in Pictures

In her 1995 book, Thinking in Pictures, Grandin describes in detail the specialized thinking of her mind. Clinically known as sensory processing, it is how the brain integrates all sensory inputs, both consciously and subconsciously. People whose minds inhabit some part of the autism spectrum experience hypersensitivity to one of more of these inputs. While she was able to think in photographically specific images, sound sensitivity was traumatic.

With the encouragement of her boarding school science teacher William Carlock, 18 year old Temple built her infamous “hug box.” Designed to relieve the stress caused by sensory overload, it became an obsession, and Carlock was able to redirect her creative energy into scientific experiments for testing the efficacy of her “squeeze machine”.

Grandin’s mind is gifted for being able to recall the visual memories in her head, in detail, like a moving picture. These movies can be played on an internal projector that rewinds, changes camera angle, and lighting. Compared to those of us whom Temple describes as neurotypical, words are her secondary mode of thought. Grandin’s primary thinking modality is “totally in pictures”. She also had the benefit of a loving and dedicated mother, whose second husband was able to arrange for Temple to spend her summer as a 15-year-old on his sister’s ranch in Arizona.

Grandin’s breakthrough, not considered possible for people living with autism at the time, was her successful integration of scientific inquiry, animal husbandry, and object-visual thinking into a highly productive career. She relates her good fortune as,

People on the autism spectrum don’t think the same way you do. In my life, people who made a difference were those who didn’t see labels, who believed in building on what was there. These people didn’t try to drag me into their world, but came into mine.

This is the essence of the economic way. Its what entrepreneurs do, and active minds. “The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less autistic, you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It’s like being in a play; I’m always in a play.”

Animals Make Us Human

In the 2006 version of Thinking in Pictures, Grandin upgraded her analysis of autism to include two other types of specialized thinking – the patterns of music, math and computer programming, and the logic of facts, words and historical narrative. During a presentation in Springfield, Missouri in February 2020, Grandin posed the question of how Ludwig van Beethoven, Michelangelo, or Thomas Edison would fare in today’s public schools.

Probably in the basement playing video games. Kids who are different often get obsessed with one thing. The misfits build things. Visual thinkers are good at seeing risks and solutions to problems. If you weed out all of the visual thinkers, you lose common sense.

In 1980 she published a study, and became one of the first scientists to prove, that animals are susceptible to visual distractions. Grandin later demonstrated that cattle who remain calm during handling exhibit greater weight gain. This led to designs for more humane cattle processing facilities, including curved fencing, that are now used throughout the beef industry.

As the author of over 60 peer-reviewed scientific articles, several books, and countless live presentations, Grandin also learned to adapt her preferred style of social interaction to the neurotypical world:

Autism is part of who I am, but career came first. I wanted to prove I wasn’t stupid. That was a very big motivation. I learned to show my work, that is how I got jobs.

Steve Silberman, author of Neuro Tribes, writes about Grandin that, “It became obvious to her, however, that she was not recovered but had learned with great effort to adapt to the social norms of the people around her.” As Poetic Justice would have it, Grandin is teaching the world to understand the social norms, and the neurodiversity, of the animal world.

You got to get away from words if you want to understand any animal. It thinks in pictures, it thinks in smells, it thinks in touch sensations – little sound bites, it’s a very detailed memory.

Her 2010 book Animals Make Us Human is a testament to her devotion to the respect animals deserve, and how to give them their best life, on their terms. Of course this suggests a possible contradiction, and provokes a lot of criticism. How can Temple Grandin advocate for animals who are doomed to slaughter?

Neurodiversity, Children, Animals, and Property

Academically, this is the intersection of animal ethology and commercial livestock, and she boldly addresses the issues in the September 2019 publication of Applied Animal Behavioral Science. In a previous comment, “I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right.” In her 2002 paper with Harvard psychology professor Marc Howard, Animals are Not Things, she makes the case that animals are property, and that law gives them ethical protections that respect reality.

As Hunter Hastings, co-chair of the Rescue California Educational Foundation, recalls upon meeting Ms. Grandin, “She’s a wonderful person who overcame major personal challenges, carved an individual pathway, changed an industry, inspired millions, and garnered high levels of respect.” But perhaps Temple Grandin’s greatest contribution to peaceful human progress will be to inspire Montessori-style childhood education, and the eradication of the greatest threat to childhood cognitive development – American progressive education. That is needed to avoid Grandin’s fear of

What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.

 

In Full-Blooded Socialist Systems, Access To Government Power Is The Paramount Avenue To Success.

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Organic Agriculture Is Primitive And Inefficient. And Heavily Promoted By The Anti-Capitalist Left.

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The Green New Dealers want us to think we have to either live more austere lives under coercive government policies or destroy the planet. Opponents of their plan, the theory goes, are willing to sacrifice the environment for short-term financial prosperity for the elite few.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Meeting Americans’ needs, especially those of the neediest, requires free markets that can realize and reward the benefits of technological innovations, big and small.

Big innovations are those such as the high-yielding grains created and made available by “Father of the Green Revolution” Norman Borlaug; small, incremental ones might be the introduction of disc brakes (a few decades ago) and the 5G networks soon to be widely available.

The authors of this piece have distinctly different diets, mainly because one is strictly kosher and the other is (emphatically) not, but we both enjoy eating red meat. And although we are sympathetic to concerns about the impacts of raising and consuming meat, some more valid than others, neither of us is inclined to become a vegetarian, nor do we support the sin tax on meat that some have proposed to fight climate change, spare animals, or whatever.

A remarkable innovation now enables us and other carnivores to enjoy something that tastes very much like meat, but is completely guilt-free. With seed funding from Bill Gates, Google and other innovation-oriented investors, a company called Impossible Foods has sought to address climate change by developing plant-based meat alternatives meant to appeal not to vegetarians, but to meat-lovers like us.

Despite the displeasure of cattle ranchers (because it’s competition), opposition from environmental activists (it uses “GMOs”), and – improbably – outrage from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (requires food safety testing on rats to satisfy the Food and Drug Administration), the Impossible Burger is hoofing it into the U.S. market in a big way.

The FDA has confirmed the safety of Impossible Foods’ plant-sourced leghemoglobin, a meat protein that is partly responsible for the taste, texture and appearance of meat. The burger even cleared another major regulatory hurdle when it was certified as kosher by the Orthodox Union.

Burnishing its high-tech chops, the company unveiled Impossible Burger 2.0 last year at the Consumer Electronics Show, where it created a sensation. These burgers create a win-win situation. They offer us the ability to reduce our consumption of (real) meat, should we wish to do so – and it’s good news for those who think the world would be better off if we did.

The only side effects from the Impossible Burger are headaches, heartburn, and panic attacks in the self-designated food elite who demand that we eat “naturally” to protect the planet.

Improvements in agriculture are typically continual and incremental, but cumulatively they can make a big difference, especially to those at the bottom of the food chain – subsistence farmers. But there are always naysayers, such as the activists who reject farming with state-of-the-art pesticides and crops developed with the most precise and predictable genetic techniques. Why would anyone do that?  Simple – they are mouthpieces for the purveyors of inferior, overpriced competing organic products, which are made with primitive practices that are wasteful of water and arable farmland.

How primitive is organic agriculture? Plant pathologist Steve Savage analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2014 Organic Survey, which measures productivity from most of the nation’s certified organic farms, and compared them with those at conventional farms, crop-by-crop and state-by-state. His findings are extraordinary: Of the 68 crops surveyed, organic farms showed a “yield gap” – poorer performance – in 59.

Many of the shortfalls were large: Organic strawberries yielded 61% less than conventional farms; fresh tomatoes, 61% less; tangerines, 58% less; cotton, 45% less; rice, 39% less; peanuts, 37% less.

“To have raised all U.S. crops as organic in 2014 would have required farming of 109 million more acres of land,” Savage concludes. “That is an area equivalent to all the parkland and wild land areas in the lower 48 states, or 1.8 times as much as all the urban land in the nation.”

Inexcusably, the federal government is heavily involved in setting standards for and promoting organic practices. The reason is something of a historical anomaly. When the organic standards were promulgated in 2000, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman was unequivocal about the fundamental meaninglessness of the organic designation: “Let me be clear about one thing, the organic label is a marketing tool. It is not a statement about food safety. Nor is ‘organic’ a value judgment about nutrition or quality.”

Truly disruptive innovation is not only rare, but as Impossible Foods is learning, bringing game-changing products to market requires overcoming resistance from entrenched interests that pretend to represent the public interest.

If we are to raise our standard of living, increase longevity, and protect the natural environment, new and innovative technologies will be essential. And we should let the marketplace decide their success or failure. In today’s polarized environment, that’s no nothing-burger.

Stier is a senior fellow at the Consumer Choice Center and a senior fellow at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.

Politicians And Government Do Not Create Any Prosperity, Despite Their Claims To The Contrary.

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Driving to the office today I passed several pedestrians. I killed none of them!

I could easily have done so. A flick of my wrist on the steering wheel at almost any time would have meant certain death for numerous pedestrians. But no! I let all of them live. I’m so proud of myself.

Suppose that you were one of these pedestrians and I solicit from you expressions of gratitude for my not running you over. How would you react? You surely, and rightly, would think me to be insanely brazen to seek your gratitude for my not bulldozing you with my car.

And yet politicians routinely seek — and receive — praise for actions that differ in no fundamental way from the actions of drivers who avoid running down innocent pedestrians.

We’re bombarded by news reports and campaign ads boasting of how this president or that governor “created” millions of new jobs or is responsible for whatever economic growth has occurred during his or her term of office. Such claims are on a moral and intellectual par with my claim that I deserve credit for not killing pedestrians with my car.

No politician creates prosperity. It is created by countless entrepreneurs, businesses and workers competing and cooperating within markets. For government to avoid obstructing these markets is indeed desirable — but it does not create the resulting prosperity. To insist otherwise would be no different from my insisting that I, as a driver who did not run over Ms. Jones as she walked back from the supermarket, am responsible for the tasty dinner she cooked that evening for her family.

Whenever that rarest of creatures — an honorable politician — manages to loosen some part of government’s grip on us, he deserves acclaim. Even he, however, doesn’t deserve credit for whatever economic growth and cultural flourishing follow. Such credit properly belongs to the many persons who create, innovate, take risks, save and work to produce what consumers want.

The idea that government deserves credit for all of the benefits produced by freedom is a special case of the deification of government. When deified, government is mistakenly seen as responsible for all good that happens in society — with all bad things being blamed on devils who, of course, must be banished by government.

A distressingly large number of writers contend that what looks like government’s refusal to intervene is really just a different form of government intervention. Here’s an example. Economist Warren Samuels writes that deregulation is simply government regulation carried out by enforcing private property rights rather than by enforcing bureaucratic edicts. According to Samuels, only the unsophisticated believe that when government deregulates it thereby reduces its sway over the economy.

Or consider Louis Hacker’s insistence that “the idea of laissez faire is a fiction. For the state, by negative action — that is, by refusing to adopt certain policies — can affect economic events just as significantly as when intervention occurs.”

Well, yes — in the same way that I, by not plowing my car through a sidewalk crowded with pedestrians, can affect events just as significantly as if I do use my car to kill pedestrians.

Only in the most base materialist sense are Samuels and Hacker correct: Insofar as government possesses power to restrict commerce, any self-restraint by government can be said to “affect economic events.” But such sophistry sneakily erects as the benchmark for evaluating government activity the maximum possible destruction that government could possibly inflict. So if the actual amount of destruction caused by government falls short of what government could have caused, government is credited with producing all that it refrained from destroying. Using such a benchmark, of course, is lunacy.

The Soviet military could have annihilated the United States population with an atomic attack at almost any time during the Cold War. Should we then credit the Soviet military for our current prosperity?

Refraining from interfering in other people’s affairs is simply the right thing for everyone, including government, to do. Our praise is properly reserved for people who heroically help others whom they have no duty to help, while our condemnation is properly reserved for people who intrude uninvited into innocent people’s lives.

Until someone convinces me that I deserve a ticker-tape parade every time I don’t run down a pedestrian with my car, I will find intolerable the misbegotten gratitude and applause that politicians receive for not destroying even more of our liberties and wealth than they currently ravage.

Why Ayn Rand Laughs – The Audacity of Dopes, the Impostor Syndrome, and Super Tuesday

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This article was originally published by the Center for Individualism in August 2018. Its relevance is only magnified during an election season, so its being reposted and enhanced for clarity.

The Metaphysical Versus The Man Made is a 1973 essay by Ayn Rand, in it she tells us,

Intelligence is man’s most precious attribute. But it has no place in a society ruled by the primacy of consciousness: it is such a society’s deadliest attribute.

This danger achieves critical mass when consciousness becomes confused and conflated with the primacy of existence. As philosopher Harry Binswanger explains, “this reversal is the inability or unwillingness fully to grasp the difference between one’s inner state and the outer world, thus blending consciousness and existence into one indeterminate package-deal.”

So why do intelligent and well-intentioned people rally behind demagogues whose highest aspiration is to win popularity contests, only motivation is to control others, and only proven solution is fiat currency?

Voters and the Impostor Syndrome

In her book, Pushing Your Envelope: How Smart People Defeat Self Doubt And Live with Bold Enthusiasm, author Maureen Zappala describes the Impostor Syndrome, where it comes from, and how to overcome it. As she defines it, the Impostor Syndrome causes good people to “discount their success and second-guess their abilities. Haunted by a fear of being unmasked as a fake, they remain beneath self-imposed limits, afraid of both success and failure.”

As a former project engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Zappala explains, “some limits need to be pushed. Airplanes fly within limits called the operating envelope, the set of conditions where they are aerodynamically safe and stable. Sometimes they push the envelope and fly near and even beyond these limits.” These limits are imposed by the laws of nature, but the Imposter Syndrome is about irrational, self-imposed limits.

According to the School of Life, thinking of ourselves as inferior is rooted in childhood, where we find out that “parents are really very different.” This gulf in status tells the child that “other people are not like us at all.” This is the nature of things. Whether its a rocket scientist exploring her relationship with gravity, or a child exploring his relationship with adults, it’s about people experiencing the reality of complex systems. As Zappala explains,

There’s a colossal amount of technical knowledge to learn and master. The pressure to stay on top of it can be overwhelming, and can make experts feel substandard, especially when they compare themselves to someone who appears to have more knowledge.

“And every day is different, unscripted and uncertain. Striving to impart calm can make even the best experts feel a bit unsure.” In his essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, economist Friedrich Hayek has a similar explanation which he calls the Knowledge Problem:

The nature of the problem of rational economic order is determined by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all separate individuals possess.

Rational individuals respect complexity, and accordingly, they can only guarantee that there is no single answer under conditions of uncertainty. But for those experiencing chronic self-doubt, their inner voice declares: “They all think I’m smarter than I really am! I feel like such a fraud.”

Demagogues and The Audacity of Dopes

As Hayek explains in The Road to Serfdom, “The higher the education and intelligence of individuals become, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values.” This would describe genuine achievers, yet they elect their overlords based on shallow platitudes.

The clinical term, “Impostor Syndrome,” may be confusing. Technically, it describes accomplished people who think of themselves as frauds. But there are many more among us who are the real frauds, and we all know what that personality looks like. They have accomplished nothing, yet have the audacity to force themselves on society as experts and visionaries with nothing more than the snake oil of monetary dope. They are attracted to government power and consign others to tribalistic voting blocs. Hayek explains,

If we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and common instincts and tastes prevail.

The irony is that the audacity of these dopes renders them immune from the chronic self-doubt inherent in the clinical definition of Imposter Syndrome. These intellectual frauds are what Nassim Taleb defines as Fragilistas. In his 2013 book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, he writes:

The Fragilista defaults to thinking that what he doesn’t see is not there, or what he does not understand does not exist. At the core, he tends to mistake the unknown for the nonexistent. Fragilistas are naïve rationalists.

For proof, consider their disregard for the complexity of systems like education, health care, housing, inequality, and economics — and their epic fails. One big clue should have been President Woodrow Wilson’s bombastic claim that the successful prosecution of World War I, The War to End All Wars, would lead to everlasting world peace and prosperity.

Healthy Self-Esteem is Essential to Civilization

To the jet pilot, the aircraft’s capabilities and the laws of physics are the operating envelope that must be respected. To the charlatan who ignores reality in their quest for control, there is no operating envelope — natural law is a mere nuisance. Hubris is their immune system from the artificial envelope created and “experienced by high achieving people who have difficulty internalizing their accomplishments.”

Externally, those experiencing the clinical version of Impostor Syndrome hold others in inordinately high regard, and vote for them. As The School of Life explains, “

What we know of others is limited to what they show us and tell us. It is a far narrower and edited source of information. It is an unhelpful picture of what others are really like.

And it’s exacerbated by the media attention, adoring fans, and monuments that are lavished on the Fragilistas who have accomplished little else but acquire power and unearned wealth. This lack of a self-awareness, spread among many Fragilistas, is fundamental to decivilization. As Rand teaches, “Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” Fortunately Zappala explains, “For the smart people who have earned success and respect, and yet are constantly self-aware of their anxieties, there are proven methods that will help them “defeat this self-doubt and live with bold enthusiasm.”

Do these anxieties occur when people look internally, and therefore subjectively, for their knowledge of existence? A good place to start is Philosophy: Who Needs It, and learn Why Ayn Rand Laughs with confidence knowing that individual achievers are essential to building civilizations.

Simone Biles

Great Athletes, Artists, Inventors, and Entrepreneurs Forge Principles for Aspiring to an Exultant Life

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Crime and Punishment is a great work of literary art by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It studies the psychopathology of guilt endured by the criminal himself. For Ayn Rand‘s sense of morality, to define justice in terms of punishment is backward. The achievement of principled values is essential to the human condition, and worthy of celebration. The moral sanction of our community and society is the ultimate reward for rational, virtuous behavior. Criminality is not the existential threat that deserves all the attention. Ayn Rand’s sense of justice expects admiration for heroes, and it should be commensurate with achievement, without subjective limits.

The Unspeakable “I”

In 1972, Olga Korbut transformed gymnastics by adding acrobatics to its ballet-like elegance, vaulting the sport to dreams of flying for young girls around the world. Four years later, Nadia Comaneci scored the first Olympic tens, the highest attainable, thereby creating a philosophical dilemma. Have the achievable limits of gymnastics been reached? Have the athletes merely surpassed a well-meaning, but subjective scoring system? Are the judges thumbs weighing on the scales of justice? Dare we question the motives of the egalitarian Olympic movement?

Enter Simone Biles, arguably the greatest gymnast on earth. In 2013, Biles won the All-Round competition at the US, then the World Championships, and amazed the World’s with her signature double layout with a half twist, aka “The Biles” (floor routine version) in 2014. She won an unprecedented third world All-Round the next year, and became an international sensation at the 2016 Olympics as a member of the US women’s incredible Final Five team. For the 2018 Worlds, she transformed The Biles for the vault (round-off on the springboard, half turn onto the vault, two full twists).

Last October, Biles won in a landslide at the Worlds by adapting The Biles for the beam (double twisting double dismount). However, her performance there will be remembered for “The Biles II,” a triple twisting double layout on her floor exercise routine. Former Olympic gold medalist and TV commentator Nastia Liukin said it best, “Simone’s got enough gold medals at home. Someone give this girl a crown.” Instead, her difficulty score on the beam was downgraded to “H” from its provisional “I” rating, even though no one else can do it.

Gymnastics has a necessarily complex scoring system, and great efforts are made for it to be transparent. Fortunately for human life on planet earth, there is an objective scoring system in free market economies, and no one needs to fabricate it – earned profit. The more difficult the challenge, the greater the profit for flawless execution. As Simone Biles rightfully earned the points for unprecedented difficulty and artistic execution, so has the entrepreneurial mind, for the same reasons.

It is Good. It is Mine.

Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged portrays such a mind, the inventor and industrialist Henry Rearden. After years of grueling mathematical and chemical gymnastics, he created and patented Rearden Metal. A lighter, stronger, and cheaper alternative to steel, it was desperately needed to support millions of lives. Yet he was denied justice for the crime of being good. Moral sanction was reserved only for self-sacrifice.

In Atlas, Rearden confidently faced the threat of prison, confiscation of his intellectual property, and gaslighting by his family. His wife Lillian advised, “I think you should abandon the illusion of your own perfection. The day of the hero is past.” Hopefully, no one uttered those words to Simone Biles, and she’s received the public recognition her achievements deserve. However, she must endure the judgment of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG),

The safety of the athletes is always a top priority and the sport in general, however the skill should be given the value it merits. There are many examples in the Code where decisions have been made to protect the gymnasts and preserve the direction of the discipline.

This is similar to the judgment Rearden endured from regulator Mouch, “The steel mills of the country are ordered to limit the production of any metal alloy to an amount equal to the production of other metal alloys by other mills.” After all, authoritarians dictate “the direction of the discipline” and “the safety of the athletes” according to their subjective merits, as these questions from Rearden’s Trial attest,

You speak as if you were fighting for some sort of principle, but what you’re actually fighting for is only your property, isn’t it? You pose as a champion of freedom, but it’s only the freedom to make money that you’re after!

According to espn.com, “FIG sometimes lowers the value of risky elements to make safer ones more attractive by comparison.” Perhaps FIG could ask Biles – You vault as if you’re fighting for your own values, aren’t you? You fly as a champion of human physiology, but it’s only the difficulty and execution points that you’re after!

Icarus Nails the Landing

There is no rational basis for dismissing or punishing what is good, only envy, whose cousin is guilt. Yet our postmodern culture believes money is the root of evil, profit an embarrassment, and wealth carries the weight of guilt to “give back.” Apparently, FIG believes that Simone is flying too close to the sun, as Icarus did in Greek mythology. Yet unlike Icarus, Simone returned triumphantly to earth, stuck the landing, and inspires millions of young people. Her beaming smile, like Rearden’s when pouring a ton of steel, is rooted in her rigid principles. As Ayn Rand reminds us in America’s Persecuted Minority,

Businessmen are the symbol of a free society – the symbol of America. If and when they perish, civilization will perish.

One criticism of Ayn Rand is that she lobbies for statues and ticker-tape parades for her high-flying Capitalist Heroes. Far from being elitists, they have no desire for glowing affirmation from parasites; only the assurance that production will not be punished and virtues of the mind will be revered, for their own sake. Ayn Rand can laugh because she had vetted the psychopathology of her critics in her novels. Her heroes reject self-sacrifice, and she repurposes mythology by promising a graceful landing for those who exercise Active Minds.

 

 

 

Capitalism Is The Best Form Of Philanthropy – As The Philanthropists Are Beginning To Realize.

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I’m always mystified by philanthropic foundations and how fruitlessly they disperse their capitalism-provided funds. Bloomberg Philanthropies spends a chunk of its $8 billion on “Sustainable Cities.” The new $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund is backing climate activists. The $12 billion Ford Foundation insists, “To address the climate crisis, we must address inequality.”

Huh? Way more than philanthropy, free-market capitalism gets people out of poverty, raises living standards and cures the world’s ills. Of the four things you can do with your money—spend it, pay taxes, give it away or invest it—investing is the only one that increases productivity, the scaffolding of capitalism and societal wealth.

So my eyebrows rose when I was offered a chance to meet Raj Shah, president of the $4 billion Rockefeller Foundation. Maybe I’d be able to gather some squishy grant-making examples to make fun of. Boy was I wrong.

Perhaps the Rockefeller difference traces in part to the foundation’s founder. John D. Rockefeller was an interesting guy, much-maligned despite bringing light and heat to the masses (and saving whales). On top of his heroic business efforts, he understood where philanthropy could be useful.

A favorite book of mine, Ron Chernow’s 1998 “Titan,” describes how Rockefeller made his money, then gave it away. He looked for big projects only he could fund, such as eradicating hookworm—a parasite that struck people who walked barefoot, predominantly Southern blacks. Rockefeller funded tests for thousands of rural citizens and provided shoes. It worked. One branch of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation uses a similar philosophy to fight malaria and HIV.

Mr. Shah told me about the Rockefeller Foundation’s recent deal to bring reliable power to millions of people in India. Worldwide, 840 million people live without access to electricity. Hundreds of millions more get only a few hours a day of expensive government-monopoly-provided current. Digital bits drive the First World, while the Third World still needs electricity.

Mr. Shah had a previous job funding power in emerging markets, so he had Rockefeller team up with India’s Tata Power in 2019, launching a $1 billion deal to build 10,000 mini-grids. With solar panels and battery backup, Mr. Shah explains, the project can deliver containers to remote parts of India and provide 24/7 electricity at a competitive price.

Wait, “price”? This is philanthropy; surely they give the electricity away. Nope. And that’s what makes this effort interesting. By providing smart meters, they create a market for electricity. Then voilà, all sorts of commerce is erupting. Someone buys a few sewing machines and starts a clothing company. Someone digs a well and provides irrigation to farms—all using juice from the grid, something we take for granted.

The Rockefeller Foundation and Tata Power hope to make electricity available to 25 million people. The 30-kilowatt-hour grids cost $60,000, a figure that drops as lithium-ion batteries get more efficient. They estimate that three-quarters of power will go to small businesses. Electricity prices have dropped from 80 cents to 23 cents, and may soon hit 12 to 15 cents—less than in California!

Rockefeller and its local affiliate, Smart Power India, have already enabled 250 mini-grids so far supporting 300,000 people and almost 10,000 enterprises. In the past three years, energy consumption has doubled, and revenue has increased by one-third for shops and more than 50% for commercial enterprises. That includes carpentry, wheat grinding, honey processing, mustard-oil production and water purification—much of which was unavailable before Rockefeller got involved. That’s productivity.

For the Rockefeller and Tata Power deal, 30% of the proposed funding is equity, split 80/20 between Tata and Rockefeller. The rest is debt. I learned a new term, as Mr. Shah calls his contribution “concessional capital”: No return-driven investor in his right mind would provide it, based on the risks of currency, rule of law and execution. Rockefeller intends to reap a small return or break even. That allows Tata to seek a 14% return on investment, which helps it get better debt financing—the road to scale.

A foundation seeding a project, then selling its output: It almost feels like, dare I say, capitalism! An abstract calculation might suggest $200 billion in grants could electrify the whole world. Sadly, that squishy stuff crowds out real investment. Instead, like venture capitalists, Rockefeller is to fund a sustainable business that will eventually build out all those grids. Africa is next, where a lack of electricity helps keep 400 million in poverty.

It’s too soon to know how far this could scale, because governments often get in the way. But it could popularize a new model for philanthropy—perhaps a fork in the road for a stodgy sector. Mr. Shah calls it “unlocking a solution for poverty.” Put up risk capital to identify a big problem, find a low-cost solution, and try a new business model to execute it. It could work for food distribution, water, internet access and maybe even the trendy climate stuff.

We knew capitalism and productivity fund philanthropy. Now philanthropy is mimicking capitalism! I didn’t see that coming.

This article first appeared at wsj.com. Write to kessler@wsj.com.

Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Garry Kasparov is the Champion for Chess, AI, and Capitalism

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Think of the game of chess as a war between two medieval armies. They are equally matched, identical sets of 16 pieces each, and the field of battle is finite with 64 squares. The only differences are the field generals. More specifically their experience, creative abilities, and fortitude. The object of the game is to defeat the opposing king with the fewest casualties, meaning the fewest moves possible. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu teaches “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

This is where it gets tricky, the best move against a weak opponent is different than the best move against a strong one, and neither work against a grandmaster. Sun Tzu continues, “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” In chess, to know the enemy is to know their mastery of the possible combination of moves on the chess board. Its estimated the number of possible moves in a game of chess is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, but chess mastery is only concerned with the ones that expedite victory. Cognitive skills and fortitude are the essentials that matter.

In a modern economy, the division of labor and specialization are paramount. In our postmodern economy, if freedom is preserved, technological innovation is limitless. Former world champion and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov is the Poetic Justice Warrior on the cutting edge of all of it.

Considered the greatest chess player of all time, Kasparov became world champion at age 22, and held the title for fifteen years. He remained the highest rated player in the world until he retired twenty years later, in 2005. However, Kasparov is best known for the match he lost in 1997 to IBM’s Deep Blue computer. At the time, he insisted that computing power could not overcome the creative genius of the world’s best grandmasters. Kasparov didn’t quite know his enemy.

Man Versus Machine, Not!

Like any rational human being, Kasparov was able to process new evidence, test it against his existing propositions, discard false premises, and maintain his principles for living that are inviolable. Active minds do this. As he reflects in a TED Talks presentation,

It was a blessing and curse to be the proverbial man in the man vs. machine competition. No one remembers who failed to summit Mt. Everest before Sir Edmund Hillary. I was Everest. Human creators reached the summit. Deep Blue was the tourist. Nobody remembers that I won the first match.

Capable of 200 million calculations per second, Deep Blue’s hardware had limitless stamina. Yet it was artificial intelligence (AI) – the algorithms embedded in its software – that transferred the cognitive ability of its IBM creators into the only chess move that would eventually stymie the world’s greatest chess player. On the 20th anniversary of standing alone at the precipice of unprecedented Creative Destruction, Kasparov published Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins,

I make it clear that my loss to Deep Blue was a victory for humans. It’s hard to look at the big picture during times of disruption and rapid change. But the transfer of human labor to technology is the story of human civilization. Our standard of living gets better, we live longer and healthier lives.

Free market economists like Poetic Justice Warrior Jesus Huerta de Soto understand that computer algorithms are best suited for the physical sciences, and a game of chess has many of those characteristics. The pieces are inanimate objects, not innovative actors. The field of play is not dynamic, and the game ends in checkmate, stalemate, concession or draw. No one dies, and the game starts anew. As Kasparov teaches, chess is “a closed system,” and in contrast, “People say, oh, we need to make ethical AI. What nonsense. Humans still have the monopoly on evil. The problem is not AI.”

Setting Man Free From Men

Garry Kasparov, like Poetic Justice Warrior Ayn Rand, was born in what became Soviet Russia. They share that unique and essential perspective, and know their enemy all too well. As Kasparov explains, “In chess the rules are fixed and the outcome is unpredictable, whereas in Putin’s Russia the rules are unpredictable and the outcome is fixed.” For Rand, the outcome is guilt. If the bureaucrat thinks your prices are too high, you are guilty of price gouging, and if your prices are too low, you are guilty of predatory pricing. If they think your prices are competitive, you are guilty of collusion.

The outcome was also explained by Poetic Justice Warrior Frederic Bastiat, “The relationship between persons and legislators appears the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter.” You are to be molded, or else. Rand avers in her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, “Our country was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s.” Certainly not the potter’s; yet Kasparov, like Rand, has found Putin’s objective of defeating the individual to be alive in America,

I’m enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of socialism. It corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty.

The corrosion of the human spirit negates cognitive skills and fortitude, and is the essential strategy for turning people into chess pawns of potter’s clay – social justice warriors molded by state-run media and education. They march and scream to replace their opportunity for self-creation with their cowardly grievance societies. As an activist for capitalism, Kasparov explains,

A centrally planned economy cannot imitate this engine of creative destruction because you cannot plan for failure. You cannot predestine which two college drop-outs in a garage will produce the next Apple.

As Poetic Justice Warrior Czeslaw Milosz explained, the Russian mechanism (hailed by Sanders and his pawns) is very fragile, yet America’s education and media elites harbor no gratitude that America exists. This passive injustice is that evil described by Kasparov.

Children – Chess – Cognition – Volition – Capitalism

Chess is a game that teaches critical thinking and purposeful action. It enriches the mind of any child with problem-solving skills, long-range planning, and independence. Students learn the capability of each piece and how they work together in a complex system. They learn to identify opportunities, evaluate threats, and take calculated risks. However, its imperative to transfer these skills to open system solutions.

Garry Kasparov has promoted scholastic chess for decades, and upon his retirement from professional chess in 2005, he organized the United Civil Front in Moscow. Its stated goal is an open federal system for free elections, and it stands in direct opposition to the political machine – a closed system, that maintains power for Vladimir Putin, and gets people killed. Kasparov knows his opponent: “To stay in power, Putin does not ask why, he asks why not.” To Kasparov, the difference between Sanders and Putin is communist propaganda. While Sanders is selling its old, failed, deadly concepts to useful idiots,

Putin doesn’t try to sell you anything. Its all about doubts. He’s very good at that. He uses western technology to undermine the free world. It’s all about disruption.

For Kasparov, technology must be harnessed to preserve and promote freedom.

Playing chess well is a marvelous experience, but not an end in itself. As Poetic Justice would have it, Kasparov transcends that, and has some Sun Tzu-quality advice for America, “Removing the moral component from foreign affairs has been a catastrophe. Since 1992, its like a pendulum. It’s very important to recover American prestige in the world.”

 

 

 

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