| Monday, November 17, 2008 |
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The Loss of Values Due to Contradiction
By Gina Liggett @ 12:01 PM   
Two current events I have selected have nothing in common, except for being in the news. Well, they also pertain to underlying rational values that are at risk of being destroyed by their own best advocates. Why? Because their champions are trying to operate under contradiction.
On the heels of the joyously-resounding defeat of Colorado's "personhood" amendment comes another threat to abortion in Colorado. This time a private citizen, Mark Hotaling, is suing Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains and Boulder Valley Women's Health center for violating the state's constitution. He claims that federal dollars received by these clinics are illegally being used to perform abortions. Hotaling says he's just standing up "for the will of the people and the constitution." For this, he's getting moral support from Ms. stand-up-for-the-people Kristi Burton, the evangelical who got Amendment 48 on the ballot "to empower the citizens to have a choice" about when life begins. And he's getting financial and legal support from the influential Religious Right group, the Alliance Defense Fund.
In the other story, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the $700 billion bailout plan won't include the purchase of troubled assets from banks after all, a turn-around from the original plan. And unlike the rescued financial sector, the American auto industry might not get the additional help it's been asking for. Stock exchanges revolt in their roller-coaster tumble with daily bad news about the economy and over worries of how governments will fix it.
What values are at stake here?
In the first story, the value is the right to abortion. As writers on this blog and on Politics without God have argued, abortion is an absolute, inviolable right. Ayn Rand explains the right to abortion in her famously clear and pithy way: "An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being."
In the second story, the value is free trade. Free trade is the unencumbered right for free individuals and companies to voluntarily exchange goods or services with each other to their own mutual benefit on terms they both agree on. Because humans must create what they need to survive and thrive, and because they can't individually make everything they need, a market for such exchange is required. It reflects the sum of "all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants," thereby creating wealth.
In a society based on rational principles, it is possible to protect the right to abortion under any and all circumstances; and it is possible for free trade to proceed to any degree of wealth that can be created by human ingenuity. But not so in a society where contradiction is introduced and enforced.
In the first story, the women's health and abortion clinics vociferously defend a woman's legal right to abortion as granted by the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade. Yet they are willing to accept the expropriated earnings of wealth from others in society in the form of government grants in order to survive. While the clinics in the lawsuit deny directly using federal funds for abortion, they still must play by the arbitrary and ever-changing rules of those who hold the monopoly on force (i.e., the government). In the end, the right to abortion becomes conditional.
In the second story, the biggest intervention in the marketplace in American history has just happened. But decades of regulation, restrictions and biased preferences haven't led businesses to rise up and crusade for their right to free trade. It's led to just the opposite: the despairing cry for help using the expropriated earnings of others in society in the form of bailouts. Business are boldly proud and assertive when things are going well; but when things are not, they crumble under pressure and want a quick fix by any means from those who hold the monopoly on force (i.e., the government). In the end, the right of free trade becomes conditional.
It is a contradiction that we can uphold and pursue rational values that require freedom while accepting the conditions set by those who hold the monopoly on force. We have nobody to blame but ourselves: American citizens, with their endless special-interest appeals to their legislators, have allowed this untenable situation to unfold.
You can't be free and sleep with the devil. Or, as Ayn Rand more eloquently puts it: "a contradiction cannot be achieved in reality and... the attempt to achieve it can lead only to disaster and destruction."
Abortion rights are being chipped away every year. And we are in a worsening financial crisis of unprecedented proportions. The only way out is to eliminate the contradiction. The only way out is to hold government to its proper, non-contradictory function of protecting individual rights. And it is the citizens who must take this corrective action.Labels: Abortion, Finance, Politics
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| Comments on "The Loss of Values Due to Contradiction" |
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 | Monday, November 17, 2008 at 12:37:04 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Adam Reed
E-mail: adamreedatalumdotmitdotedu
URL: http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/areed2
The opposition - the Marxists during the "Red Decades" of the 30's and 40's, the Christianists today - exploit these contradictions using the Wedge Strategy and its variants. I am in the process of writing about those strategies, with Part I at http://borntoidentify.blogspot.com/2008/11/wedge-strategy-part-i-es ... .
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| Monday, November 17, 2008 at 13:16:46 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Vic P
The Big 3 Auto Companies complain that the foreign auto makers received tax incentives and other advantages from states like North Carolina and Tennessee which allowed those foreign companies to flourish but disadvantaged the states of Michigan and Ohio which are homes to the Big 3. However that's the genius of the US Constitution which made the states standalone economic entitities responsible for their own governance and economic success. Now the Big 3 are using the overgrown Federal Gov't and taxpayer money to regain a market they lost through their own mismanagement.
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| Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 8:54:36 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Paul Hsieh
E-mail: paul(at)geekpress(dot)com
URL: http://www.geekpress.com
Here's part of a first-hand account on how unions (and bad management) have put the Big 3 auto makers in their current position:
http://www.regularfolksunited.com/index.php?tab=article_view&ar ...
...[A]s a former supervisor of UAW workers at a GM facility, I will say that poor management and union malpractice made the Detroit Three uncompetitive long before the government sent in their arsonists.
To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard earned money of the best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers while tying up the industry with thousands of pages of work rules that make it impossible to be competitive. And the spineless management often makes short sighted decisions to satisfy the union and maximize immediate benefits over long term sustainability.
The strength of the union and the weakness of management made it impossible to conduct business properly at any level. For instance, I had an employee who punched in his time card and then disappeared. The rules were such that I had to spend hours documenting that this man was not in his three foot by three foot work area. I needed witnesses, timed reports, calls over the intercom and a plant wide search all documented in detail. After this absurdity I decided to go my own route; I called the corner bar and paged him and he came to the phone. I gave him a 30 day unpaid disciplinary lay off because he was a "repeat offender". When he returned he thanked me for the PAID vacation. I scoffed, until he explained: (1) He had tried to get the lay off because it was fishing season; (2) The UAW negotiated with GM Labor Relations Department to give him the time WITH PAY.
I supervised a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked approximately five hours per day for eight hours pay. They could easily load one third more rail cars and still maintain their union negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of upper management to my request to boost production was that I should "not be naive".
One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading yard with a female "entertainer" who danced for them and then "entertained" them in the RV. With no other management around, I went to Labor Relations for assistance. As a twenty five year old woman, I was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The Labor Relations Rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none applied directly of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes at lunch? The only "legal" cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one person suffered any consequence.
Another employee in the plant urinated on the feet of his supervisor as a protest to discipline. He was, of course, fired…that is until the union negotiated and got his job back.
Eventually I was promoted to a management position where I supervised salaried employees at HQ. As I left the plant I gave management a blunt message. I told them that I expected the union to act like the union, but I was disappointed that management didn't act like management.
This is why, with deep regret and sympathy for the many fine folks who work in the auto industry, I think it is time for consequences. Let them file Chapter 11 and reorganize. Let management act like management and the union stop destroying our competitiveness. And let the government get out of the business of business...
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| Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 16:02:45 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Gina Liggett
E-mail: GLiggett(at)comcast.net
It is beyond absurd that it's gotten this bad with the union behavior and power. Their jobs can just go straight to hell...
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| Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 21:53:19 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: KPO'M
E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net
While I take issue with some of the assertions (such as that Ayn Rand is at the heart of the modern libertarian movement), I think this is otherwise a pretty decent analysis of Alan Greenspan, and on point to the theme that it is impossible to operate under contradiction.
http://mises.org/pdf/sechrest-greenspan.pdf
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| Thursday, November 20, 2008 at 23:10:56 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
KPO'M,
It is in fact the case, historically, that Ayn Rand is at the heart of the modern libertarian movement, even though that was never by Ayn Rand's own intention.
Back in 1964, Rand endorsed Barry Goldwater's candidacy for president, if not wholeheartedly, at least strongly. Many of her followers became active in the Republican Party and in organizations such as the Young Republicans and the Young Americans for Freedom. Rand's political ideas became part of the common currency of those organizations. But there were always tensions between the Objectivists and other people who advocated laissez-faire, and the more nationalist elements, largely focused on the military draft; and by the late 1960s, the group that included the people influenced by Rand had partly walked out and partly been pushed out of the "conservative" movement. Those are the people who became the nucleus of the libertarian movement. Many of them were young, but they were influenced by older people who had formerly been associated with Rand, including Murray Rothbard and John Hospers.
The Libertarian Party emerged somewhat later, and was never endorsed by all libertarians. (The major other position was principled non-voting; many of the people who took that approach were also anarchists who considered any government to be inherently coercive.) But the Libertarian Party's original statement of principle, which was that in joining you renounced the initiation of force as a means of achieving goals, was directly inspired by Rand's principle that "force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use."
There are lots of libertarians who've felt the need to attack Ayn Rand, and to insist that they aren't speaking for her ideas. But many of the key libertarian formulations can be traced to Rand's writings, and the typical libertarian reading lists include a lot of the books that used to be recommended reading for Objectivists, such as the writings of Mises and Paterson. Anyone trying to understand libertarianism who doesn't know Ayn Rand's writing is going to be at a loss much of the time.
Whether libertarians *understood* Rand's ideas is, of course, a different question.
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| Friday, November 21, 2008 at 21:20:03 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: KPO'M
E-mail: ka84796(at)comcast.net
You may be right, but I think a reader can be confused into thinking that Ayn Rand was an advocate of libertarianism. That said, I think it is spot on in terms of Greenspan, and why Rand may have been deceived by him. It is also a good defense of the common criticism that the current financial crisis is somehow a repudiation of laissez-faire capitalism. I see a major opportunity for Austrian economics to jump to the forefront (having been one of the few economic theories to predict this mess for years). Pointing out that Rand advocated Austrian economics is an important part of defending and advancing Objectivism, IMO.
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| Friday, November 21, 2008 at 22:06:25 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/profile
KPO'M,
That argument about Greenspan and Austrian economics is certainly valid. But I think it also needs to be noted that advocacy of Austrian economics is widespread among libertarians. The Mises Institute, for example, call themselves libertarians, and in fact appear to be out and out anarchocapitalists, but at the same time they strongly advocate the Austrian theory of money, credit, and economic fluctuations, are deeply critical of current financial policy, and were predicting economic disaster for years before it became obvious. So at least as far as the current economic crisis goes, the identification of Ayn Rand as a libertarian doesn't seem all that likely to generate misinterpretations. Rather, the libertarians face the same popular confusion that Objectivists do: the identification of the current mess as a result of a free market.
Not all libertarians hold sophisticated ideas about economics. But those who do predominantly favor the Austrian school, just as Objectivists do. There is no distinctive "libertarian economics" or "Objectivist economics" that I know of. The differences between the two are to be found elsewhere.
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