Atlas Shrugged Comes to Detroit
In a perverse way, I’m glad that there are places such as Greece and Illinois. These profligate jurisdictions are useful examples of the dangers of bloated government and reckless statism.
There also are some cities that serve as reverse role models. Detroit is a miserable case study of big government run amok, so I enjoyed a moment or two of guilty pleasure as I read this CNBC story about the ongoing decay of the Motor City. Here are some excerpts:
Detroit neighborhoods with more people and a better chance of survival will receive different levels of city services than more blighted areas under a plan unveiled Wednesday that some residents fear may pit them against each other for scarce resources.
…[T]he boundaries of the 139-square-mile city aren’t receding. The plan also backs away from forcing the redistribution of what’s left of the population into areas where people still live and where the houses aren’t on the verge of caving in.
…Detroit’s population of about 713,000 is down about 200,000 from 10 years ago, according to U.S. Census figures, and has fallen more than 1 million since 1950. Some areas have fewer occupied homes than vacant ones.
…A 2010 survey found Detroit had 33,000 vacant houses and scores of empty, weed-filled and trash-cluttered lots.
How predictable, I thought. This is what happens when vote-hungry politicians adopt policies that reward people for riding in the wagon and punish the folks who are pulling the wagon.
Ayn Rand on the Front Page of Ecuador’s Major Newspaper
El Universo, the newspaper with the largest circulation and the paper that publishes my weekly column, ran a mostly blank front page today that features only this quote from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed.
This quote is from Francisco D’Anconia’s speech on “The Meaning of Money” which you can read here. (I used it in my column last month.) How did Rand’s quote get there? It’s a response to the latest and most prominent attack on freedom of the press in Ecuador and Latin America.
In less than four months the Ecuadorian courts, known for being slow, resolved the specious lawsuit President Rafael Correa filed against op-ed writer and editor Emilio Palacio, the directors of El Universo and the newspaper itself for libeling the country’s president. According to Correa, Palacio slandered him in this op-ed (in Spanish), and the newspaper and its directors “contributed” to committing the supposed crime. Incidentally, this court has had five different judges overseeing this case since February; the last one came in on Monday and issued his judgment yesterday, minutes before his authority expired.
The court’s decision sentences the directors of El Universo and Emilio Palacio to three years in jail and orders them to pay a total of $30 million to the President. The judge also ordered that the newspaper company pay an additional $10 million to President Correa.
This decision sets a dangerous precedent of making third parties responsible for what an individual says. It is a clear act of intimidation of all independent media outlets and of the citizens of Ecuador. Even though this is not the first blow to freedom of expression during this government, it certainly is the most radical given the context. On May 7th, a referendum gave the President unprecedented power to essentially pack the courts. Soon, the entire judiciary will be on the long list of state institutions captured or co-opted by the executive (including the constitutional court, the electoral authority, and the national assembly, among others).
Once the judiciary is completely captured and after this historic decision, we can expect more self-censorship or more people sued/jailed for expressing their opinions, or a combination of both. It is a harsh blow against liberty in our country, but a logical outcome of Correa’s populist push to centralize ever more economic and other power in his own hands.
Female Force: Ayn Rand
John Blundell, former director of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, has written a new comic book biography of Ayn Rand. Find it in comic book stores, at Barnes and Noble, or on Amazon. Publisher Bluewater says:
“Female Force: Ayn Rand” will hit comic shops and online retailers on June 22nd. The 32-page comic retails for $3.99….
The comic book provides an entertaining yet scholarly look at the author of such seminal works as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Even 30 years after her death, her sales of her books continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands each year. Bluewater also worked with the Ayn Rand Institute on the comic book.
“When the American economy went into a nose dive recently what did we all turn to? Did we dig out battered old Econ 101 textbooks? Did we turn to the writings of some aged Ivy League professor? NO! Instead we dusted off or repurchased The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged those great classic American novels by Russian immigrant Ayn Rand which deal so brilliantly with the fundamentals of a free and prosperous society of responsible individuals,” said author John Blundell.
Blundell, author of Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady as well
as Bluewater’s Thatcher bio comic, and formerly the Director General of the
Institute of Economic Affairs in London, emphasizes the relevancy and
potency of Rand’s Objectivism ideas in 21st century America.
Blundell also has a book coming in September, Ladies for Liberty: Women Who Made a Difference in American History. That one, I think, will have words but no pictures.
Communitarians and Libertarians
Communitarian “guru” Amitai Etzioni debated Roger Pilon at Cato two weeks ago. Also me, 18 years ago. And last week he had two postings at the Encyclopedia Britannica blog. I offer some thoughts on individualism, communitarianism, and implausible misrepresentations of libertarianism at the Britannica today.
When I hear communitarians like Etzioni describe the libertarian view of individualism, I wonder if they’ve ever read any libertarian writing other than a Classic Comics edition of Ayn Rand….
There’s no conflict between individualism and community. There’s a conflict between voluntary association and coerced association. And communitarians dance around that conflict.
Do you believe that “The libertarian perspective, put succinctly, begins with the assumption that individual agents are fully formed and their value preferences are in place prior to and outside of any society”? Of course not. Who would? Read the Britannica column to find out who says you do.
Ayn Rand Sells Magazines
This article about donors who want to give colleges money with strings attached, published in Bloomberg Markets and splashed across a full page of the Sunday Washington Post, leads with the story of former BB&T chairman John Allison’s campaign to get the books and ideas of Ayn Rand into college classrooms and is lavishly decorated with big photographs of Rand.
Most of the story is actually about much less titillating demands — donors who variously want a say in hiring the next football coach, a change in the school’s tuition policy, a rejection of money from other donors. But apparently editors know that Ayn Rand’s name can bring in the readers. So they act in their rational self-interest and put her name on the cover and her picture at the top of the page.
At least the Post had the good sense to drop the dumb last line of the Bloomberg story: “As private donors gain more power on campuses, it’s just the kind of shift away from state control that Rand would applaud.” Actually, giving private money to state institutions is not the sort of privatization that libertarians seek. (And Ayn Rand was a libertarian, whether she liked to admit it or not.)
The Libertarian Moment?
On NPR, Mara Liasson tells Melissa Block that we’re in a “libertarian moment” in politics:
BLOCK: And Ron Paul appears to be running. Again, he got a lot of devoted followers on the Internet last time during the 2008 bid, not so many votes in the primary. So this time around, is he a significant addition to the Republican field or more of an asterisk?
LIASSON: Well, I don’t think he’s a huge factor in terms of the nomination. In the 2008 GOP primary, he got only about 6 percent of the Republican vote. However, as you said, he does have a devoted following, lots of libertarian-leaning young people. He can raise millions of dollars online in a single day in one of his famous money bombs. So he brings energy to the party, and the Republican Party base seems to have caught up to him on the issues.
The GOP is in a real libertarian moment right now, and Paul has always been all about the debt and the deficit and taxes and spending. You could call him the godfather of the Tea Party.
Of course, Paul may have to split the libertarian Republican vote with former two-term governor Gary Johnson. Johnson also was “a Tea Partier when tea-partying wasn’t cool,” according to the Capitol Report of New Mexico. He vetoed 750 bills in eight years, not counting line-item vetoes. And since today’s libertarian moment goes beyond spending and health care to include rising support for gay marriage and marijuana legalization, Johnson might be better positioned to ride that wave and attract younger and independent voters.
Footnote: Two weeks ago NPR speculated about an Ayn Rand moment building from the financial crisis to the opening of Atlas Shrugged.
Friday Links
- They passed the bill, and now we’re finding out what’s in it.
- We’re finding out that the war in Libya could really be about protecting European interests.
- In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand described a world in which government both partly produced and partly subsidized goods; we’re finding out she wasn’t far off the mark.
- We’re finding out that “American exceptionalism” is a cloak for military adventurism.
- The longer America fights a war on drugs, the more we find out about how detrimental it is to our fiscal outlook:
Friday Links
- What are Republicans doing to stop ObamaCare? Not much.
- Conflating the Taliban with al Qaeda isn’t helping our foreign policy dialogue.
- “Sitting in a Volt that would not start at the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, a GM engineer swore to me that the internal combustion engine in the machine only served as a generator, kicking in when the overnight-charged lithium-ion batteries began to run down.”
- The new issue of Regulation looks at price gouging, soda taxes, the Durbin Amendment, and more.
- Who should decide when we tap into strategic oil reserves: The president? Or market forces?
Charles Murray on Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand’s books have been selling strongly for more than 50 years, a constant irritant to the literary and academic establishments. And since the acceleration in government growth about 18 months, they’ve been selling better than ever. In the middle of that surge of interest, two new biographies of Rand were published, whose authors were featured at a Cato Institute Book Forum last fall. Now Charles Murray, the author of such books as Human Accomplishment and What It Means to Be a Libertarian, reflects on Ayn Rand in a review of those books.
Murray does a great job of showing what was wrong — and what was very right — with Ayn Rand. To the certain annoyance of her fans, Murray insists that “there is a dismaying discrepancy between the Ayn Rand of real life and Ayn Rand as she presented herself to the world. The discrepancy is important because Rand herself made such a big deal about living a life that was the embodiment of her philosophy.” Nevertheless, he muses, “Why then has reading these biographies of a deeply flawed woman—putting it gently—made me want to go back and reread her novels yet again? The answer is that Rand was a hedgehog who got a few huge truths right, and expressed those truths in her fiction so powerfully that they continue to inspire each new generation.” He concludes:
Ayn Rand never dwelt on her Russian childhood, preferring to think of herself as wholly American. Rightly so. The huge truths she apprehended and expressed were as American as apple pie. I suppose hardcore Objectivists will consider what I’m about to say heresy, but hardcore Objectivists are not competent to judge. The novels are what make Ayn Rand important. Better than any other American novelist, she captured the magic of what life in America is supposed to be. The utopia of her novels is not a utopia of greed. It is not a utopia of Nietzschean supermen. It is a utopia of human beings living together in Jeffersonian freedom.
I note that the excellent new group blog Pileus got to this review before I did. Plenty of other good thoughts there, too, on topics ranging from Adam Smith to David Souter to a comparison between Rand and Marx.
Objectivist-Libertarian Summer Conference
I’ll be speaking at Free Minds 2010, along with Nathaniel Branden, Anne Heller, David Kelley, Tibor Machan, Henry and Erika Holzer, Nigel Ashford, and two dozen more scholars and practitioners of Ayn Rand’s ideas and other libertarian thinkers. The conference will be held in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington and Reagan National Airport, June 30 to July 8. If that’s too long, you can register for either the pre-July 4 or the post-July 4 half of the seminar. Either way, you can spend July 4 wandering the city the Founders established and wondering what they would think.
Ayn Rand Is In
Who would have thought? The Washington Post, which took two months to run a review of the two important new books about Ayn Rand that were published in October, now declares Ayn Rand to be “In” for 2010. Well, technically, in the paper’s annual New Year’s Day Out/In list, it declares “Twihards” (fans of the Twilight series, I take it) to be Out and “Randroids” to be In. But the splashy display in the print paper illustrates “Randroids” with a classic photo of Ayn Rand, the one that graces the cover of Barbara Branden’s biography The Passion of Ayn Rand.
Rand had a pretty good 2009, so it’s impressive that the Post thinks she’ll be bigger in 2010.
While the renewed interest in Rand has been noticed everywhere from the Times Higher Education Supplement to the Wall Street Journal to the left-wing Campus Progress, William Kristol apparently missed it entirely. He wrote on December 29 about the revival of conservatism in response to the challenge of the Obama administration.
Of course, as conservatives, we also know many of the very best ideas are old ideas. And I’m struck by how many people are rediscovering Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit,” Irving Kristol’s “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” or Tocqueville’s account of soft despotism in “Democracy in America.”
There are great ideas to be found in that list of books. But as everyone but Kristol has noticed, the author who’s really being rediscovered in this first 18 months or so of financial crisis and government expansion is Ayn Rand. Consider the sales figures for the different books. In 2009 about 2000 copies of The Fatal Conceit were sold. (Kristol should have cited The Road to Serfdom, which sold 21,000, more than double its sales the year before and about six times its sales in 2007, before the financial crisis began.) About 20,000 copies of various editions of Democracy in America. And 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged, along with 95,000 copies of The Fountainhead and even 60,000 copies of Anthem. (Two Cheers for Capitalism is out of print, so its rediscoveries can’t be tracked by BookScan.) It’s clearly Ayn Rand who has gotten the most help from the Bush-Paulson-Geithner-Bernanke-Obama-Geithner-Bernanke policies of the past 18 months.
Note: In addition to the new books on Rand from two of the world’s greatest publishers, the revitalized Laissez Faire Books has just published, for the first time in book form, the lectures on Ayn Rand’s philosophy that Nathaniel Branden gave back in the 1960s. Known then as “The Basic Principles of Objectivism,” now published as The Vision of Ayn Rand, these lectures were instrumental in tying Rand’s fiction to philosophy, politics, and economics, and in creating one of the first organized libertarian movements. As I said in a jacket blurb:
This is the most important work on Objectivism not written by Ayn Rand, available at last in book form. These lectures were delivered by the person closest to Ayn Rand, designated by her as her intellectual heir, often with her sitting in the audience and answering questions about them, and endorsed by her. Rand’s subsequent falling out with Nathaniel Branden over personal matters doesn’t change that. This is the organized, comprehensive treatise on Objectivism that Ayn Rand never wrote. Philosophers, historians, and economists may — and should — debate the claims of Objectivism. In this book they have a systematic work with which to engage. These lectures were also a milestone in libertarian history, as the lecture sessions brought together for the first time large numbers of young people who shared an enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and the individualist philosophy. The lectures were given as taped courses in more than 80 cities, and people drove for miles to listen to them on tape. Wasn’t that a time!
It’s Stossel Thursday
Yes, folks, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: John Stossel launches his new weekly show on the Fox Business Network Thursday evening at 8 p.m. (Even though the vaunted Fox News machine can’t seem to put a notice about it on their website, I have it on good authority that the show will go on!) Rumor is he’ll be talking about Ayn Rand on the first show. It’s a good time for a show about freedom and limited government — as the Baltimore Sun says, “Stossel’s new show should have no trouble finding an audience of viewers eager for a discussion about the pedal-to-the-metal pace of expansion [of government] since Barack Obama took office.”
Some people ask, Why give up ABC for the smaller Fox networks? (Presumably, these are not the same people who asked Stossel for years, “Why don’t you go to Fox? They’d love you there.”) The good news is that now Stossel has an hour a week to talk about freedom — as well as appearances on other Fox shows such as Beck and O’Reilly. His hour-long specials at ABC were excellent, and drew solid ratings, but ABC hasn’t put one on in more than a year. And even his “Give Me a Break” segments on 20/20 had become rare. So what’s the point in being part of a big but declining network that isn’t actually interested in serious political commentary? Now he’s on a smaller but growing network that wants him to do 44 hours of pointed commentary and analysis, plus contribute to other shows.
If you haven’t seen Stossel’s ABC specials, you need to. I can never decide which one I think is best. Of course, I’m partial to “John Stossel’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics,” in which I get a bit of screen time. But “Greed,” with Walter Williams, David Kelley, and Ted Turner, is great, too. And so is “Is America #1?,” featuring Tom Palmer. But there were plenty of others — “Stupid in America,” “Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?,” “John Stossel Goes to Washington,” “Sex, Lies, and Consenting Adults.”
You can view some of them, including “Is America #1?,” at a website called Freedom Channel. And for the time being, at least, you can still watch lots of shorter Stossel videos at ABC News.
But meanwhile — tell your mama, tell your pa, to watch “Stossel” this Thursday at 8 p.m. on Fox Business Channel. And note: it will repeat at 10 p.m. Friday, giving you a chance to show ABC what they lost by watching “Stossel” instead of “20/20.”
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