Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

We Should Celebrate Individualism And Reject All Forms Of Collectivism. Every Collectivist Disparages Every Individual.

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If it’s a coincidence that “individual” begins with a letter that’s also a closely associated word, it’s a happy one indeed. Individual and I are inseparable. “I” is the pronoun used to refer to oneself as the speaker, writer, thinker, or actor. Without exception, “I” is an individual, not a group or a collective of any sort.

In keeping with my individuality, I seek to be as independent and self-reliant—a burden to no one—as my abilities allow.

This fact is worth endless celebration. For the profound truth it represents, we should be thankful every waking moment of our lives. I rejoice that I’m not a replica, an appendage, or a cog. Like each and every one of you reading this, I’m a completely specific, utterly unique, self-winding, and inner-motivated one-of-a-kind. No other human in our planet’s history was or is exactly like me or precisely like you, either. I’m not someone’s robot. I will resist efforts to program me or collectivize me into something I’m not. If ever you catch me trying to program or collectivize you, blow the whistle so I come to my senses.

I’m appalled at the ease with which some people speak of their fellow citizens as though they are liquids to be homogenized or tools to be manipulated—not by request but by the force of political power. It’s all for the nebulous collective good, they assure us, but for some reason they are willing to do us harm to achieve it.

In keeping with my individuality, I seek to be as independent and self-reliant—a burden to no one—as my abilities allow. I will speak for myself and gladly accept responsibility for my actions. And I have rights, the only kind of rights that make any sense: individual rights. I will never willingly forfeit them by jumping into a communal blender for the sake of some abstraction called “society.”

This makes me an enthusiastic and unabashed proponent of individualism and as fierce an opponent of collectivism as you’ll find. In a 2013 article titled “Snowstorms or Snowflakes,” I explained:

A collectivist sees humanity as a snowstorm, and that’s as up-close as he gets if he’s consistent. An individualist sees the storm too, but is immediately drawn to the uniqueness of each snowflake that composes it. The distinction is fraught with profound implications.

If this point is lost on you, then watch the 1998 DreamWorks animated film, Antz. The setting is an ant colony in which all ants are expected to behave as an obedient blob. This is very convenient for the tyrant ants in charge, each of which possesses a very unique personality indeed. The debilitating collectivist mindset is shaken by a single ant who marches to a different drummer—namely, his own self—and ultimately saves the colony through his individual initiative.

Barbatus, voiced by actor Danny Glover, is one of the ants in Antz who lives his entire life as an indistinguishable bit of the collective blob known as the colony. In his last words to Z, the hero of the story voiced by Woody Allen, he says, “Don’t make my mistake, kid. Don’t follow orders your whole life. Think for yourself.”

Reflecting on that poignant moment later, Z sadly confides to another ant, “He just died in my arms like that. You know, I don’t think he ever once, in his life, made his own choice.”

Never to make a choice of your own is, to me, what Hell must be like.

Individualism embraces human nature, our inherent individuality. Collectivism attempts to thwart it. The largest, most horrendous mass murders in history were collectivist crusades against the individual. Stalin, responsible for a minimum of 20 million murders, is widely reputed to have declared that “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

The collectivist disparages the individual. He tells us there’s some higher moral good to “the group,” especially if he gets to define it or run it. Collective entities invariably reduce to very specific individuals telling other individuals what to do—or else!

Individualism is sometimes portrayed as anti-social. Nothing could be further from the truth. FEE’s Dan Sanchez explains:

As individualists have long emphasized, self-interest draws individuals toward mutually advantageous exchanges: toward “doing business” with one another.

After all, it’s the individual, not the collective, who decides to marry, to form a family, to employ people, to enjoy parties and other social get-togethers, to create wealth and trade, and to be neighborly in a thousand ways.

As Ayn Rand warned,

Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.

I invite you to celebrate the individual, today and every day. It’s who we are, the way we were made, the way we grow, the way we make a difference in the world.

 

Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus at the Foundation for Economic Education

In America, Britain And Israel, Elites’ Power Struggles Eliminate Even The Pretense Of Government Doing Anything Useful For Citizens.

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America’s two parties have given up all pretense of pushing any program for the rest of the current president’s term (which still has over 30% of its length to run).

Forget about another round of growth-driving tax cuts, immigration reform, infrastructure, fixing the health care system, a common trade policy. Anything the American people might like to see.

The only objective on one side: impeachment. On the other: simple survival.

In the UK, the political system is similarly paralyzed. The government is seeking to achieve the people’s will on Brexit on reasonable terms — or even any terms at all. But rogue members of the ruling Conservative Party have voted to ensure it can’t leave the European Union without a deal, which means it has lost its negotiating leverage to achieve such a deal. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to appeal to the people through a new election. But party rebels have scotched that path forward as well.

In Israel, neither of two major alliances won enough seats in this month’s election to cobble together a majority, and voices across the political spectrum are calling for a so-called “unity government.” But one side won’t join a coalition that includes Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces indictment on corruption charges. The prime minister’s party won’t form a government without him. A potential kingmaker (who forced the second election in a year) says he won’t sit with the prime minister’s party, either, unless it deep-sixes its Orthodox Jewish coalition partners, which the bloc refuses to do.

In short, the world’s three most important democracies, all rendered ungovernable.

One might ask, along with Gromeko in the film Dr. Zhivago responding to the murder of Czar Nicholas and his family, “What’s it for?”

Zhivago’s explanation: “To show there’s no going back.”

Power, once seized, must be held tightly, at all costs. And every threat must be extinguished, by any means necessary.

Big Brother has for decades been systematically wiping out competing forces in all three countries, hollowing out institutions that previously ordered society — family, religion, cultural cohesiveness.

Everywhere, the family is in crisis. Marriage rates are at record lows in the United States, with only around a quarter of adults under 34 married, as government programs systematically undermine the institution. The same phenomenon is sweeping the UK. And even though Israel maintains some of the highest rates of marriage in the developed world, it is also experiencing more committed singles.

The church is plummeting in power and influence. With government forcing religious faith out of the public square and the educational system radically secularized, “nones” — those with no belief — continue to be the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population at nearly 30 percent.

But that’s nothing compared to the UK and, surprisingly, Israel. More than half of the UK population — and three-quarters of young people — says it has no religion. And in Israel, the largest group of adult Jews — more than 40% — now defines itself as “secular/not religious.”

Even a cohesive society as a countervailing force has been obliterated, in particular by demographic change. Immigration policy has been used, essentially, to swap out electorates for “multicultural” populations increasingly dependent on the government to hand out favors. Single-parent families resulting from the rout of marriage are equally in need of the Nanny State’s assistance. In Israel, an influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union is behind increasing secularization, and Arabs make up the fastest-growing indigenous population.

Culture- and economically-shocked voters in all three countries have responded with revolts against government power — uprisings now being brutally suppressed. President Donald Trump has been on the defensive against misused intelligence and law enforcement assets since before he took office. Every effort he has made to control America’s borders has been slapped down with unprecedented nationwide injunctions by forum-shopped judges — including just last week.

And a single CIA whistleblower has thrown another monkey wrench into the gears of constitutional government, alleging not only misuse of power, but the dreaded “coverup.” Headlines on that charge, ironically, popped up two days after the president released, in an act of unheard-of transparency, the full transcript of the phone call with a foreign leader that occasioned it.

Meanwhile, along with the desertion of anti-Brexit Conservatives, Boris Johnson’s latest setback in his struggles to free the UK from its European overlords stems from a ruling against a government parliamentary maneuver — by a Supreme Court that didn’t even exist a decade ago.

And what of the corruption charges that weakened  Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel? They involve allegations of — hang on to your hat — using the power of his office to obtain favorable media coverage. An “unprecedented” insertion of law enforcement into the political process, according to an Israeli law professor, on a “very shaky legal foundation.”

The message from elites in all three countries: there’s no going back. We will not relinquish the reins of power, and will shut down your governments to ensure our control over them — and you.

Unlike Democratic Voting, Markets Give You A Genuine Say.

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Peter Earle eloquently exploded the notion that voting in political elections is an exalted means of self-expression. Few myths are more lethal to liberty than that which equates freedom with majoritarian democracy – and no fallacy does more to fuel this myth than that which declares the essence of freedom to be the right to vote.

In reality, voting is an extraordinarily skimpy and muted means of giving voice to your individual values, hopes, concerns, and preferences. And the right to vote is certainly no great bulwark to protect your liberty.

Bondage by the Majority is Bondage Nevertheless

Nearly all people, regardless of their political and ideological stripes, vigorously reject this conclusion about voting. Even you, dear reader, likely resist it. Yet its truth cannot seriously be contested. In what meaningful way is your freedom protected if, as a result of an election in which you vote, 51 percent of your fellow citizens cast their ballots for a candidate who promises to raise your taxes against your will, to forcibly obstruct your ability to buy imports, and to prevent your teenaged daughter from competing for a summer job by offering to work at an hourly wage below the state-imposed minimum?

The fact that you were among the thousands or millions who cast a ballot in this election does nothing to make you more free than you would be had you not voted or had these impositions been foisted on you by a monarch.

The typical response to my observation goes something like this: “But at least each voter had a say!” To which I reply “Say what? What say?”

A Say that’s Virtually Silent

It’s true that you cast a ballot and that your vote was counted. But your vote – your “say” – was only the faintest of muffled whispers. If you voted for the losing candidate, your request for government not to intrude into your life in the ways promised by the victorious candidate is ignored. You must obey the commands that will now issue from the state. And these commands silence the very real say that you and your family would otherwise have had in the market.

With more of your income taxed away and with customs agents blocking your access to imports, you have less of a say in how your earnings are spent. With your daughter unable to offer to work for a wage below the state-imposed minimum, she has less of a say in choosing the kind of job she holds and in the specific terms of her employment.

Notice that the say that you have in the market is always real and effective. Unlike in political elections, if you prefer to dine this evening at a Japanese restaurant rather than at an Italian restaurant, you will dine at a Japanese restaurant. No one overrides or ignores your choice. And you don’t have to spend precious time and energy convincing a majority of your fellow citizens to expressly give you permission to dine at the restaurant of your choice.

Notice also that your say in the market is more articulate than is your say in political elections. By voluntarily spending your money on the spicy-roll combo, the signal that you send is precise and clear: this evening you want the spicy-roll combo and not any of the many other menu items. In contrast, by voting for candidate Smith rather than candidate Jones, the signal that you send is cloudy. Did you vote for Smith because of her opposition to tariffs or in spite of her opposition to tariffs? No one other than you – and certainly not Smith – knows.

Or perhaps you voted not so much for Smith as against Jones, whose promise to raise the minimum wage intensely frightens you. But if Smith wins, you and other voters get not only her opposition to raising the minimum wage – a policy position that you favor – you also get Smith’s policy positions on countless other issues, not all of which you support. Voting at best allows you to express your opinion about which candidate you prefer; it does not allow you to express your opinion on each of the many different individual issues that are at stake.

Preference-intensity Is Real and Important

Nor does voting allow you to express your preferences’ intensities. If you vote for Smith rather than Jones, you tell the world only that you prefer Smith to Jones. Your vote says nothing about how much you prefer Smith to Jones. Your preference for Smith over Jones might be intense or it might be tiny. Whatever it is, your vote doesn’t say.

The failure of voting to give voice to the intensity of each voter’s preferences is significant. Suppose that Smith wins 51 percent of the votes to Jones’s 49 percent. Suppose also that nearly everyone who voted for Smith has only a slight preference for Smith, but that nearly everyone who voted for Jones intensely prefers Jones to Smith. Is it then the case that Smith is the people’s preferred candidate? The correct answer isn’t obvious.

In your everyday life you of course experience the rank-ordering of your preferences – for example, you prefer to drive an SUV rather than a sedan. But you also experience the intensity with which you hold your preferences – your preference for an SUV over a sedan can range from enormous to negligible. And in everyday life you can express the intensity with which you hold your preferences – say, by willingly paying a much higher price for the SUV if your preference for that vehicle over the sedan is high.

In our one-person-one-vote system, you have no comparable ability to express the intensity of your preference for candidate Smith over candidate Jones. Your vote is mute about the intensity of your preferences.

Your Say in Markets Is Taken Much More Seriously than Is Your Say in Elections

My argument here is not that you should not vote. Rather, my argument is that you should not be duped into believing that voting is either the essential exercise of freedom or that the ‘voice’ you have at the polling place is remotely as clear, as loud, or as effective as is the ‘voice’ you have in the market and in other private spheres. If more people understood this reality, surely there would be less enthusiasm among those of us who live in democracies for giving to the state ever more power over our lives.

Like Most Things In Government, Anti-Trust Policy Is Terribly Misguided.

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By all indications merger and acquisition activity is on the rise. In the first five months of 2019 companies announced over $1 trillion in mergers and acquisitions, a 14% increase from the same period in 2018. This is generally good for the economy, the consumer, and the shareholders as all Americans are set to benefit from the economies of scale, the increased innovation, lower prices and stronger stock market returns that generally accompanies this kind of activity.

While it is difficult to pinpoint one specific reason for the increase in corporate consolidations, recent developments including the president’s tax reform bill, large corporate cash reserves and strong equity and debt markets may all be contributing to this flurry of activity. The need to maintain our technological edge in the face of growing global competition is another.

The United States is quickly losing its research and development edge against the rest of the world, a key metric of economic success. In 1960 the United States accounted for over two-thirds of all R&D activity. Since then the total U.S. share of R&D has fallen to 28% and is risk at of greater decline as foreign competitors put a strong emphasis on developing new technologies.

Over the past two decades China, for example, has emerged as a global science and technology leader. Since 2000 China’s share of global R&D more than quintupled from 4.9% to 25.1%. At this pace of growth they could well soon overtake American innovation. Mergers can help reverse this trend.

Pooling collective corporate resources offers economies of scale that increases capabilities and helps advance technologies. By eliminating the redundancy of fixed costs, savings can be passed down to consumers in the form of lower prices and leveraged to fund additional research and development.

Ultimately, strategic mergers ensure that companies can compete in rapidly changing markets both domestically and abroad. The Trump administration is constantly looking for ways to even the playing field against China. They have leveled tariffs against a number of imports and just recently labeled China a currency manipulator in response to their efforts to devalue the Yuan. Allowing companies to take advantage of natural synergies in order to streamline costs and make them more competitive is an underutilized tool that the administration should employ more often.

While the headlines of business pages have primarily been devoted to tech and pharmaceutical mergers recent movements in the defense and aerospace sector, specifically the proposed merger between Raytheon and United Technologies, demonstrate how strategic mergers can prove beneficial to national security as well.

Just as technology companies need to continuously compete with foreign developments so does our defense industry. U.S. defense-related R&D has fallen from 36% of global R&D to 4% today and will likely fall further as defense budgets come under additional pressure in future years. To ensure America maintains its edge against foreign adversaries the federal government will have to rely more heavily on contractors and commercial companies to leverage their integrated capabilities for cost-effective innovation.

Naysayers have been raising anti-trust concerns about the merger, arguing that joining the two companies will remove a source of competition and increase the pricing power of the new entity. But defense only accounts for 25% of United Technologies’ business and a mere 1% of the two company’s sales overlap.

Many of the most vocal critics of this proposed merger also happen to be activist investors who are motivated more by short-term profits than generating long-term value. This modus operandi is devastating to private research and development. One study, for example, found that after companies were held for a median period of 423 days by activist hedge funds, funding for R&D was cut by more than half.  Another study found that companies, under pressure from activist investors, are defensively making cuts to R&D harming long term technological innovation in the economy.

At the end of the day, commonsense mergers are essential to American competitiveness. While every merger deserves the appropriate scrutiny to allay relevant anti-trust concerns and not all will pass the sniff test, deals like the Raytheon-United Technologies merger and similar partnerships in innovation are key to ensure that America maintains its technological edge, both in the commercial and defense sectors.

Michael Busler is a professor of finance at Stockton University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in finance and economics. He obtained his doctoral degree from Drexel University.

Follow The Money To Understand Who Benefits From Faking A Global Climate Crisis.

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I must disagree upfront with the overt criticism and vilification of Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old actress (and daughter and granddaughter of actors) who looks as though she being manipulated — and fed her lines — by adult climate profiteers and alarmists who know full well what they are doing.

I watched her speech to the United Nations; her facial expressions and emotions come across as rehearsed and fabricated, much like those of an inexperienced thespian trying to play a difficult role.  Even experienced actors who lack special training cannot, for example, portray convincing villains because it is clear that their gestures and emotions are rehearsed as opposed to genuine.

A skilled actor who knows the story can often improvise a performance for a specific scene even if he has not been given a script for it.  “Greta Thunberg without a script to read from” suggests, on the other hand, that she does not really know the story and cannot play her role without a script.  She punts at the end by saying, “I think you should give some questions to the others as well.”

Cui Bono: Who Benefits?

What motive would others have to use a teenage girl to support their agenda?  The usual motive is money, and a lot of it: a Green New Deal for investment banks and other climate profiteers and a raw deal for everybody else.  Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) wrote a 2009 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal called “Cap and Trade Would be a Boon for New York” that bragged about how much money Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase were going to make from this agenda.  The late but unlamented Lehman Brothers was yet another company that hoped to profit from cap and trade.

David Vitter (R-La.) discussed this in “Legislative Hearing On S. 1733, Clean Energy Jobs And American Power Act”:

Senator Gillibrand wrote an insightful op-ed last week in the Wall Street Journal titled ‘Cap and Trade Could Be a Boon to New York.’  This article provided important insight into who will make money and how much.  The Senator from New York stated that ‘carbon permits could quickly become the world’s largest commodities market, growing to as much as $3 trillion by 2020.’  That is $3 trillion that has to be generated by the work of America’s farmers, refiners, miners, small businesses and manufacturers and then redistributed to Wall Street.  It will perhaps be the greatest transfer of wealth in U.S. history.  And it may very well be the greatest scam ever thrust on the people of the United States.  This program would be the equivalent of TARP in perpetuity for a handful of financial institutions that have already been bailed out once.

Vitter added, “Senator Dorgan recently stated that ‘I know the Wall Street crowd can’t wait to sink their teeth into a new trillion-dollar trading market in which hedge funds and investment banks would trade and speculate on carbon credits and securities.  In no time they’ll create derivatives, swaps and more in that new market.  In fact, most of the investment banks have already created carbon trading departments.  They are ready to go.  I’m not[.]”

Cui bono?  Investment banks that handle but do not produce wealth, the kind of speculators that gave us the Great Depression and the more recent financial failures of 2008, and United Nations denizens that would love nothing more than to leech off the productivity of the United States and other industrialized nations, and all at the expense of working people around the world.

The Climate Activists Talk but Don’t Walk

Actions speak a lot more loudly than words, and those of the climate activists speak for themselves because they don’t walk their talk.  Andrew Gilligan (2009)’s “Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges” states that the airport expected 140 private jets, each of which emits far more carbon dioxide per passenger than commercial aircraft.  “The top hotels — all fully booked at £650 a night — are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.”

The British pound is currently worth about $1.25 U.S., but it was closer to $1.50 in 2009, which means that the hotel rooms in question were roughly $1,000 a night.  The December 2009 U.S. government per diem lodging reimbursement for Copenhagen was $290 per day, or roughly 30% of that, paid by the climate conference attendees.  Employees of the U.S. government, employees of corporations, and consultants and contractors whose customers pay for their lodging do not get to stay in $1,000 or even $500 hotel rooms, or fly in anything but coach on a commercial aircraft.

This is far from an isolated example.  Celebrities used private jets to attend Google’s 2019 climate change summit in Sicily, thus reinforcing the perception that they do not really believe that greenhouse gas emissions are a problem, or, if they do, they simply do not care.

We Aren’t Doing “Nothing”

Contrary to Thunberg’s assertion “How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight,” the world’s makers (power, manufacturing, construction, chemical, and transportation industries), as opposed to the takers (climate profiteers and United Nations), have been acting to reduce the waste of energy, and therefore unnecessary carbon emissions, for years.  The U.S. Department of Energy promotes the ISO 50001 standard for energy management systems, which calls on organizations to identify significant energy uses and also gaps between current and potential (lower) energy consumption.  Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) promotes the design of energy-efficient and also water-efficient buildings that save money for their owners and tenants rather than climate profiteers.  The United States government has promoted Energy Star appliances for decades.

Engineers and scientists, as opposed to celebrities and U.N. delegates, also gave us the light-emitting diode (LED) bulb that costs less than a fifth as much as a traditional incandescent bulb to operate.  Indian engineers have meanwhile given us the Tuticorin coal-fired power plant that converts its carbon dioxide into a saleable byproduct, and at a profit.  Japan’s setsuden (energy saving) campaign is yet another positive role model worthy of imitation.  We should continue to look to the world’s producers, and the world itself, rather than its parasites for genuine energy-saving solutions that put money into the pockets of the world’s makers rather than its takers.

 

Henry Hazlitt – The Economic Conscience of Everything Western Civilization Has Achieved.

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The only way to introduce Poetic Justice Warrior Henry Hazlitt is directly, with clarity, focused on principles, and using examples. This is exactly what he did during seventy years of writing, nearly every day, promoting the virtues of classical liberalism and the morality of capitalism. Hazlitt’s greatest asset was a highly trained mind, one that he developed on his own. During his last year of high school Hazlitt recalled that he “developed what I suppose might be called intellectual awareness.” When he was 21 years old he published his first book, Thinking as a Science. In it he writes,

Have you not often been in a waiting room, noticed people all around you reading, and finding yourself without any reading matter, and wished that you had some to occupy your mind? Did it ever occur to you that you had within you the power to occupy your mind, and do it more profitably than all those readers? Did it ever occur to you to think?

Hazlitt is talking about thinking with a purpose, to solve a problem, to choose a course to pursue. Real thinking, hard thinking, independent thinking, a systemization of all thought. Quoting Ella Wilcox, “It would do for education, government and economics what the alphabet did for language, movable type for printing, and the scale for music.” His systemization is based on a hierarchy of explicitly defined values, something most people are averse to.

Economics in One Lesson

While Henry Hazlitt wrote 20 books including The Anatomy of Criticism, Man vs. the Welfare State, The Foundations of Morality, The Failure of the New Economics, The Conquest of Poverty, the novel Time Will Run Back, Economics in One Lesson became the most popular basic book on economics of all time. As entrepreneur and author Tom Malone says about Economics in One Lesson.

Hazlitt points out the vital need to understand economic policies in terms of how they impact the individual, saying, “What is harmful or disastrous to an individual must be equally harmful or disastrous to the collection of individuals that make up a nation.” He demolishes the major economic fallacies that are promoted by power-lusting politicians and collectivists of every stripe.”

Not only did Hazlitt make rational economic thinking available to mass audiences, he did the same thing with the irrational, convoluted, and pretentious economic thinking of John Maynard Keynes. Chapter by chapter, line by line, Hazlitt took apart Keynes’ widely accepted General Theory by applying Keynes’ ideas to real-life economic choices. Anyone who reads Hazlitt’s principled and consistent The Failure of the New Economics could never abide by Keynes’ General Theory, but statists and collectivists everywhere consider it the bible for their economic central planning schemes.

Hazlitt also understood that Keynes was nothing but a neo-Marxist, and had plenty to say about Marx. For example,

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness. This basic hatred is the heart of Marxism.

From a young age Hazlitt realized that the attacks against capitalism were gaining momentum. But unlike most conservatives, he knew in his heart that capitalism had to be defended on ethical grounds.

The Foundations of Morality

At the age of 70, in 1964, Hazlitt wrote The Foundations of Morality, a book about which he said he was most proud. In fact, during Hazlitt’s 70th birthday celebration, Poetic Justice Warrior Ludwig von Mises toasted,

In this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you are our leader. You have indefatigably fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious to destroy everything that human civilization has created over a long period of centuries. You are the economic conscience of our nation.

Extraordinary praise coming from the man whose personal motto was Virgil’s Aeneid. “Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it.” In this book Hazlitt declared that capitalism must be defended on moral grounds, not practical.

What is under attack is the capitalist system; and it is attacked mainly on ethical grounds, as being materialistic, selfish, unjust, immoral, savagely competitive, callous, cruel, destructive. If the capitalistic system is really worth preserving, it is futile today to defend it merely on technical grounds (as being more productive, for example) unless we can show also that the socialist attacks on ethical grounds are false and baseless.

Henry Hazlitt’s relentless defense of human flourishing, sometimes single-handed, is rooted in his personal path toward self-creation. As a boy he attended a school for poor, fatherless boys (his father died at Henry’s age 2). His stepfather died when he was 13, leaving the family in dire straits again. In high school he set his mind on becoming a philosophy and psychology student at Harvard. Instead, he attended New York City’s tuition-free City College, dropped out, and went to work for the fledgling Wall Street Journal. His university was books and he was a marvelous student, first in his class.

The Wisdom of the Stoic

Hazlitt continued to write and work for another 28 years after The Foundations of Morality, including a compilation, along with his wife Frances, titled The Wisdom of the Stoics. He summarized his work as “I’ve been preaching liberty as against coercion; I’ve been preaching capitalism as against socialism; and I’ve been preaching this doctrine in every form and with any excuse.” His fellow freedom fighters are some of the most influential thinkers, authors, economists and activists of the 20th century.

As H. L. Mencken said upon selecting Hazlitt to succeed him at the American Mercury, he was the “only competent critic of the arts that I have heard of who was at the same time a competent economist, one of the few economists in human history who could really write.” Hazlitt’s review of Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom led to a Reader’s Digest condensed version and helped catapult this book to worldwide acclaim. In 1950 he was also the co-founder of the libertarian magazine, The Freeman. It eventually became the Foundation for Economic Education, and now the stellar online magazine fee.org.

One of his heroes was Poetic Justice Warrior Frederic Bastiat; they shared a talent for reductio ad absurdum. As Hazlitt replied to Eleanor Roosevelt’s The Curse of Machinery, “Why should freight be carried from Chicago to New York by railroad when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?” He was also an acquaintance of another proud defender of capitalism, personal liberty, and the morality of America’s founding, Poetic Justice Warrior Ayn Rand.

As poetic justice would have it, Hazlitt told Ms. Rand that Mises had remarked about Rand that “he was the most courageous man in America.” She was delighted and Hazlitt introduced them.

 

 

 

 

The Driving Force Of Free Markets Is Empathy. Only The Entrepreneur Who Prioritizes Other People’s Needs Can Be Successful.

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Both capitalists and anti-capitalists frequently accuse capitalism of being a system driven by selfishness and greed. Capitalism’s defenders sometimes say: “By nature, man is selfish, which is why socialism will never work. Capitalism better reflects the fundamental characteristics of human nature.” Anti-capitalists claim that capitalism promotes the worst characteristics in man, especially greed.

But are greed and unbridled selfishness really the driving forces of capitalism? Human self-interest is one—not the only—driving force of all human action. But this has nothing to do with a particular economic system. Rather, it is an anthropological constant. In capitalism, however, this self-interest is curbed by the fact that only the entrepreneur who prioritizes other people’s needs can be successful.

There is overwhelming evidence to suggest that empathy, rather than greed, is the true driving force of capitalism. Empathy is the ability to recognize and understand another person’s feelings and motives, and this is the most important characteristic of successful entrepreneurs.

Take Steve Jobs as an example. He came up with the iPhone and other products because he understood modern consumers’ needs and desires better than anyone else. Under capitalism, consumers can (and do) punish companies that behave selfishly and lose sight of the needs of their customers.

The same applies to Mark Zuckerberg, today one of the world’s richest people. He created Facebook because he knew better than other entrepreneurs what people wanted. Like all successful entrepreneurs, it was consumers who made Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg so rich. For many years, the Albrecht brothers were the richest people in Germany. They earned their fortunes from the food discounter Aldi, which was founded on the principle of offering good quality products at very reasonable prices. This was the same recipe for success followed by Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, who was consistently one of the richest people in the United States.

Consumers’ purchasing decisions confirm that Jobs, Zuckerberg, the Albrecht brothers, and Sam Walton had correctly understood their customers’ desires, needs, and emotions.

Of course, under the capitalist system, there are also examples of companies that have acted selfishly and lost sight of the wants and needs of consumers.

One example is Deutsche Bank, which has faced thousands of lawsuits. Such companies are punished under capitalism, not only by the law but far more so by the market. Deutsche Bank lost its position as one of the world’s leading banks because it put the interests of its investment bankers above those of its customers and shareholders.

Even companies that appear omnipotent today, such as Google or Facebook, will not retain their power forever.

A company’s most important asset is its image, and companies that behave like Deutsche Bank end up incurring massive damage to their images and reputations; their customers lose confidence and flock to their competitors.

In socialist systems, on the other hand, consumers are powerless and at the mercy of state-owned companies. If a state enterprise acts with no regard for the needs of consumers, they have no alternative under socialism because there is no competition.

Under capitalism, consumers can (and do) punish companies that behave selfishly and lose sight of the needs of their customers. Every day, customers vote on the company with their wallets—by buying its products or not.

Monopolies under capitalism are a temporary phenomenon. Even companies that appear omnipotent will eventually be ousted by new competitors as soon as they overreach their power and lose sight of their customers’ needs.

Ever since capitalism has existed, anti-capitalists have criticized the system’s inherent tendency to create monopolies. Lenin wrote over 100 years ago that imperialism and monopoly capitalism are the last stages of capitalism. But the monopolies he criticized at the time no longer exist. Even companies that appear omnipotent today, such as Google or Facebook, will not retain their power forever. Other companies and ambitious young entrepreneurs will seize the opportunity as soon as Google or Facebook starts to act too selfishly.

What is strange is that socialists who criticize capitalism for its tendency to form monopolies are in favor of state-owned companies. After all, the state is the most powerful monopolist of all, with the ability to brutally trample on the needs and wishes of its citizens through its means of coercion and because there are no alternatives for the customer.

The fact that people and companies pursue their own interests is the same in every society. This is not a specific feature of capitalism.

Under capitalism, though, only those entrepreneurs and companies who prioritize their customers’ interests rather than their own self-interest will achieve success in the long-term. Companies that fail to understand and respect what consumers want will lose market share and may even disappear entirely as they are driven out by other companies that better meet their customers’ needs.

Empathy, the ability to recognize the desires and needs of others, is the true basis of capitalism—not unbridled greed and selfishness.

 

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is a historian and sociologist. He is also a world-renowned author, successful businessman and real estate investor. His most recent book, The Power of Capitalism, was released in 2019.

 

The Cult Of The Presidency Is Getting Stronger And The Constitution Is Getting Weaker.

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Kamala Harris wants you to join her cult. But don’t worry: membership is voluntary — that is, unless a plurality of your fellow voters wants to join, in which case you’ll be automatically enrolled.

You see, Harris’ cult is the “cult of the Presidency.” Coined by Gene Healy, the phrase describes the worship that so often accompanies what many Americans consider to be a grand, magisterial office from which all good things flow, and all evil seeks to corrupt. In their peculiar astronomy of this mindset, the Oval Office occupies the center of the universe. Everything revolves around it.

Congress Who?

The Presidency is a jealous god. It tolerates no competitors to its power. And neither does Kamala Harris.

Over the course of her campaign, she has repeatedly promised to bypass Congress and take unilateral action on a whole host of intensely divisive issues. On immigration, she has vowed to issue an executive order granting citizenship to “Dreamers” (migrants brought to America illegally by their parents). On the environment, she says she will declare a “state of water emergency” and force the country to re-join the Paris Climate agreement. She also wants to ban the use of fracking.

Many observers have noted how dictatorial these statements sound, and rightly so. To follow through on any one of these proposals would be deeply suspect, but the sheer number of them, coupled with Harris’ brazenly peremptory attitude, must leave no doubt as to her authoritarian ambitions.

For Harris, Congress is at best merely an advisory body. As a kindly gesture, the President may ask Congress for permission to do something, but he or she does not really require their assent. During a CNN town hall, Harris said she would deliver an ultimatum to Congress on gun control:

[U]pon being elected, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the courage to pass gun safety laws. And if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action. And specifically what I’ll do is put in place a requirement that for anyone who sells more than five guns a year, they are required to do background checks when they sell those guns.

Essentially, Harris would ask Congress to rubber-stamp her gun-control policies in order to give them the appearance of legitimacy. But if they refuse to comply, she can simply forgo such formalities.

At worst, Congress is a frustrating (and ultimately vestigial) obstacle to Harris’ domestic policy goals. They have, for example, stubbornly failed to pass the “Green New Deal,” a massive government-enforced overhaul of the economy intended to fight climate change. Should they continue to remain idle on this issue, Harris warns, she will get rid of the filibuster. How she plans to do this is unclear: the filibuster is an internal Senate procedure and therefore not constitutionally subject to presidential decree. But the Cult of the Presidency knows no limitations.

The Constitutional Road Less Traveled

Harris’ attitude is unfortunately emblematic of America’s obsession with the presidency. We have become accustomed to organizing society around the president, whoever it may be. If the stock market goes up, we praise the president; if it goes down, we criticize him. When there’s a natural disaster, we expect the president to be directly involved in the relief efforts. When there’s a mass shooting, we expect him to visit the survivors and memorialize the victims.

Our society’s obsession with the president is both a cause and a consequence of his immense power. Public policy today is almost exclusively directed from the Oval Office and so of course we end up paying a lot of attention to the chief executive.

But at the same time, this cult-like attention helps to feed the behemoth that is the imperial presidency. After all, everyone can name the president, but very few know who their own congressional representative is. Fewer still can name the Speaker of the House. It is only natural, then, that folks look to the president for everything: he is often the only national political figure they are even remotely familiar with.

On a practical level, many of Senator Harris’ political ilk have acquiesced to the use of executive power simply because it’s the easiest way to get things done. Unlike the hyper-partisan “do-nothing” Congress so often derided by Harris, the president, by virtue of being a single person, is not hampered a lack of consensus. If left unimpeded by a passive Congress and deferential courts, the president as head of the executive branch may simply enforce the nation’s laws in any way he pleases. Under these circumstances, it should come as no surprise that presidents are increasingly pushing their luck and creating new laws unilaterally.

On the other hand, Harris is deeply critical of how President Trump has been governing. But rather than lead a fight from the Senate to reassert the authority of Congress, and thereby limit the damage a bad president can inflict, as she certainly could, Harris has been campaigning to increase the president’s power. Her main critique is not that the president is too powerful, but merely that the wrong person is in office.

The cult of the Presidency is getting stronger and the Constitution is getting weaker. And that should concern us all.

This article by Tyler Curtis appeared at mises.org Sept 23, 2019

The Idea Of Alternative Currencies That Are Not A Government Monopoly Is Catching On.

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Mastercard, one of the big players now looking at this new money, is starting a cryptocurrency team.

“Do you have the desire to work at the cutting-edge intersection of payments and cryptocurrencies,” MasterCard asks. Those hired will “monitor crypto currency ecosystem trends” and “develop new products and solutions.”

A credit card expert called it “a smart move.”

Bill Hardekopf, CEO of LowCards.com, says Mastercard “sees there’s a lot of activity in this area. Even if it isn’t going to offer its own cryptocurrency, they know it’s important to have people who understand the subject.”

Others Already Playing the Money Game

Mastercard is part of the Libra Association, which includes Pay Pal, Visa, and other big players. Libra intends to create “a globally, digitally native, reserve-backed crypto currency built on the foundation of blockchain technology.”

There were between 2.9 million and 5.8 million users of a cryptocurrency wallet in 2017, according to a Cambridge University study. Most used bitcoin. Four years before that there were between 300,000 and 1.3 million users.

“Mastercard,” says Panda Analytics CEO Bill Xing, is “trying to build a crypto wallet solution, possibly an alternative to Facebook’s Calibra cryptocurrency, which is supposed to begin next year. It is preparing for the situation when crypto (peer-to-peer transaction) is adopted as the mainstream payment solution.”

Direct Transactions without Intermediaries

Peer to peer means that the middleman in today’s traditional transaction could disappear if cryptocurrencies revolutionize money. Cryptocurrencies are decentralized because there is no intermediary; transactions are party to party through electronic addresses without central banks. In fact, they represent a vote of no confidence in the policies of central banks. They see central banks as consistently devaluing money through currencies that aren’t backed by anything but government promises. Critics call this unbacked currency “fiat money.”

Some countries ban alternative currencies. Others embrace them or acknowledge tax them. In 2014 the IRS ruled bitcoin will be treated as property, subject to capital gains taxes.

Today there are hundreds of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is the biggest.

These currencies’ value is volatile. Some investors make millions. Others lose big. But the idea of competition between currencies goes back at least to the 1970s. This was an idea explored by economist F.A. Hayek’s 1976 book Denationalisation of Money.

Hayek contended the “government monopoly of money must be abolished to stop the recurring bouts of acute inflation and deflation.” He also argued that the increasingly outrageous overspending of government — which can now be seen in the federal government’s one-trillion-dollar deficit at a time of supposed strong economic growth — would be restricted if the money monopoly was ended.

“The monopoly in money by government,” Hayek wrote, “has relieved it of the need to it keep its expenditure within its revenue and has thus precipitated the spectacular increase in government expenditure over the last 30 years.” Hayek’s wrote these words back in the mid-1970s. Since then, government overspending, deficits, and debt have progressively worsened. Trillion-dollar deficits are now routinely accepted. Few seem worried about government overspending.

Democrats call for trillions of dollars in new spending. Republicans such as Dick Cheney now defend this massive red ink with the assurance that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”

Actually, several economists told me in a story I did for the New York Post about a decade ago, that the true amount of federal government red ink was a lot more than what the government was saying.

Central Banks Want to Preserve Their Monopolies

But what if the money revolution succeeds? As in any revolution, today’s top dogs have the most to lose.

“In theory,” Xing says, “if these payment companies don’t study new technology around bitcoin or explore new business models, they could be out of business in the next decade.”

So, a revolutionary money is developing. Some governments are trying to stop it for an obvious reason: human nature. Almost everyone would like to be in a monopoly position but competition prevents it in a functioning marketplace. However, governments have the legal power to make competition go away or prevent it from coming back in the cases of goods and services that were once offered privately but are now prevented by the power of government.

Here in New York, where we have the terrible state-run subways, all major pols agree that the state system, no matter how bad it becomes — and millions of subway riders can attest to their egregiousness — must be continued and no privatization allowed. That’s even though, in the earliest period of the subways, when they were considered “an engineering marvel,” and private transportation companies were an essential part of the system. They were later driven into bankruptcy by government price controls. The subway fares, under private companies, were never allowed to raise above a nickel. That’s something that changed quickly once government took over.

More Money Screwups

The movement for alternative money is the result of the history of government monetary mismanagement.

It is a sad story of government central banks and monetary disasters. The Great Depression, of course, happened on the Federal Reserve’s watch.

And most monetary historians agree that the explosion of the money supply in the early 1970s, just before the election of 1972, was a disaster. The easy money policies, designed by Fed chairman and President Nixon appointee Arthur Burns, bolstered the president’s re-election. This created a Potemkin village effect.

The economy grew in the short term, then blew up creating the 1970s stagflation, ruining millions of lives for about a decade. Interest rates went over 20 percent, a nightmare for interest-sensitive industries.

The Fed’s easy money led to low or no growth along with high inflation rates. That was something that Keynesian economists, backed by a devotion to the Philips curve, had previously said would never happen. It happened.

It is logical that many historically literate people want to take away the money-making monopoly from government central banks. Their records of frequent recessions and sometimes depressions, inevitably lead to a boom and bust cycle.

Those governments that want to ban these new money developments may be fighting those who have come up with a better mouse trap. Canute like, the central bankers and their political allies may be trying to stop an inevitable wave.

Gregory Bresiger (GregoryBresiger.com) is an independent business journalist. Thius article appeared at mises.org on Sept 24, 2019.

“Dog Eat Dog” Is A Horribly Inappropriate Metaphor For Competition Among Entrepreneurs To Serve Customers Better.

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Dog-eat-dog, “survival of the fittest” rhetoric has long been a favorite grenade thrown by opponents of private property, voluntary exchange systems (i.e., capitalism without crony as a modifier). But it is striking that they never answer a central question without which their verbal assaults are logically meaningless—fit for what?

Fit as Determined by Reward

Murray Rothbard may have stated this best in Man, Economy, and State:

To apply the principle of the “survival of the fittest” to both the jungle and the market is to ignore the basic question: Fitness for what? The “fit” in the jungle are those most adept at the exercise of brute force. The “fit” on the market are those most adept in the service of society. The jungle is a brutish place where some seize from others and all live at the starvation level; the market is a peaceful and productive place where all serve themselves and others at the same time and live at infinitely higher levels of consumption.

What is fit, and therefore who is fit, depends on what is rewarded. As Sheldon Richman put it, “The ‘fittest’ are those who best meet the requirements of the system.” Matt Zwolinski extends the analysis to what being the fittest does not mean:

To be “fit” is not necessarily to be “better” or “more virtuous” than one who is unfit. All that fitness means, in the evolutionary sense, is adaptation to environment.

Zwolinski’s makes his meaning clear with an example:

The fact that a rattlesnake will outlive a horse in a desert doesn’t make the rattlesnake morally better than the horse. It just means that the rattlesnake is better adapted to surviving in the desert.

And David Henderson brings it closer to home, citing Stalin and street gangs as examples of how, as the most ruthless, they were the fittest for survival in their human jungles, but that those jungles provide

no protection of the rights of someone who simply wants to go about his or her business peacefully. Peaceful, productive people are in fact sitting ducks waiting to be picked off by the violent.

To best understand what is fit and who that makes fittest, it is useful to return to the sine qua non of capitalism: private property rights.

Private property prevents the physical invasion of a person’s life, liberty, or property without their consent. By preventing such invasions, private property is an irreplaceable defense against aggression by the strong against the weak.By enriching most those who are most productive, capitalism makes those they deal with more fit for survival, as well.

In other words, private property protects those fit for voluntary cooperation against those fit for the jungle.Ludwig von Mises explainedprivate property as the basis for “joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees the other partner’s success as a means for the attainment of his own,” creating a situation where people benefit from looking for ways to help you rather than ways to hurt you. That is also why, by enriching most those who are most productive (most fit for voluntary cooperation), capitalism makes those they deal with more fit for survival, as well.

Rothbard recognized that

The free market, therefore, transmutes the jungle’s destructive competition for meager subsistence into a peaceful co-operative competition in the service of one’s self and others… On the market, everyone gains. It is the market—the contractual society…that permits the “weak” to live productively.

He also described the jungle as where “the stronger crush the weaker” but markets as rewarding “those better at serving others.” And who would not rather be served than crushed?

So how should we characterize fitness for market economies?

Unlike the domination of some by others suggested by dog-eat-dog imagery, the marketplace rewards those who cooperate best in providing others what they want. Market competition—the freedom to offer cooperation on terms one is willing to accept—allows capitalism to create wealth out of otherwise latent abilities. And it favors those better able to serve others, however weak they may be in politics or social power.

Capitalism’s competition in production was captured well by George Reisman when he wrote:

Instead of…animals striving to grab off limited supplies of nature-given necessities, with the strong succeeding and the weak perishing, economic competition under capitalism is a competition in who can increase the supply of things the most…offering the best and most economical products their minds can devise…in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

Zwolinski recognized the “peaceful economic competition that exists within industrial society” as a crucial “evolutionary advance from early forms of more violent competition.” William Graham Sumner saw that

markets turn the competition of man with man from violence and brute force into an industrial competition under which men vie with one another for the acquisition of material goods by industry, energy, skill, frugality, prudence, temperance, and other industrial virtues.

Ken Ewert added that

Markets reward morality in the form of honesty, keeping commitments, entrepreneurship, and hard work turned to others’ advantage.

These characteristics are dramatically different from those fittest to survive in an environment of arbitrary power. There, those most willing to use coercive power to reward friends and punish enemies are most likely to attain their desired results at someone else’s expense, in contrast to the fittest in markets, who make others their friends by their creative and productive willingness and ability to serve their desires.

Finally, to understand the emptiness of the dog-eat-dog critique of market competition, we need to return to its results. Steven Horwitz saw that

Once people no longer needed permission to innovate, and once the value of new inventions was judged by the improvements they made to the lives of the masses…the poor began to live lives of comfort and dignity.

And Howard Baetjer Jr. put it all together when he wrote,

In the market, people cooperate in a production process. Not limited to nature’s bare provision, they transform natural resources and produce an abundance of new goods. Each tries to provide what others want. All contribute; all gain from others’ efforts.

Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. This article first appeared at FEE.org

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