The comments, as usual, are full of the usual pragmatism that shows up when an Objectivist op/ed shows up at PJM.  They are usually of this sort — a conservative who chides the writer for “errors” which are merely artifacts of his own incomprehension.  (The most advanced of these are the ones that dimly recognize that principled thinking is afoot, but chide the writer for burdening his point with “amateur philosophy”.)

What suddenly jumped into my head was the realization that this sort of thing exactly parallels a well-known phenomenon from history, which not only concretizes the “epistemological primitivism” I’ve been writing about, but is an instance of it: the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific.  (Ironically, the reason why it was fresh in my mind was because I’d read some comments on conservative blogs recently, aptly applying the label to some Leftists.)

From the Wikipedia article:

“A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.”

Lacking any kind of grasp of the nature of what they saw, including its causal origins, the islanders imagined that by re-creating the accidental surface details of American military personnel — i.e. what they could perceive — they could somehow enjoy the full benefits of their presence once more.

That isn’t merely an apt description of how conservatives view the U.S. Constitution — and liberty itself; it’s precisely the same phenomenon (even down to “traditional”,  “Deities” and “ancestors”).

The only difference, is that the ignorance of the South Sea natives was not deliberate.

Last week, Daniels penned an article critical of Ayn Rand at The New Criterion.

Yawn.  Nothing new there, right?  It’s just Whittaker Chambers all over again.  But something different happened this time.  Objectivists shot back.  They did so in enough numbers that Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, found it necessary to cherry-pick some of the nastier ones for mockery over at Pajamas Media.

But there is one comment there that he did not address at all.  It may very well be due to his not having seen it, but an equally plausible explanation — one that I consider to be equally as likely, in the absence of any other information — is because it eviscerates Daniels and his pretenses to competence in discussing Rand, by means of that weaponry which forever relegates conservatism to to pretender status in the realm of the intellect: ideas.

It is a devastating critique — so much so that Diana Hsieh posted it in its own article at Noodlefood.

Go read the whole thing.  It is meaty, and argues throughout from the Objectivist position of strength: our epistemology.  Marshall uses it to hammer home his core point, always coming to it from different angles but delivering the same blow to which conservatism has no answer.

“Daniels, however, demurs from looking too deeply into the matter. But while he steers clear of the ideas in the cultural milieu…”

“Daniels, however, does not attempt to identify or explain why the current fad of intellectual snobbery is an obsession with nihilism…”

“Daniels never examines what ideas the “totalitarian mindset” consists of, or what philosophy underlies it. In fact, apart from vague notions of “inhumanity” and “authoritarianism,” I don’t believe that Daniels knows what a “totalitarian mindset” is, which is why he can be so flippant with the label.”

“Mr. Daniels does not ask such questions nor offer answers. He does not write about ideas.”

“Daniels does appear to have read The Fountainhead (alas, apart from skimming The Virtue of Selfishness that seems to be the extent of his reading from Rand), but he is unable to name its theme: individualism as intellectual independence…”

“What is clear in his analysis of The Fountainhead is that Mr. Daniels can’t get past his hang-up on the details of architecture to evaluate the ideas at its core.”

“Again, this is the whole of his case. And again Daniels does not write about ideas, but superficial non-similarities–Stalin also spoke Russian and had a respiratory system, don’t you know.”

“Such superficial and baseless evaluations are the closest Daniels gets to Rand’s ideas. He spends the rest of the article attacking a straw man.”

This is the end result of pragmatism: a crippled intellect, so incapable of handling ideas that its only possible defense while still attempting to maintain at least a pretense of intellectuality, is to pretend that they don’t exist; the famous “Blank out”.  We saw that pattern on this blog in Clayton Jones’ comments on this post, and Marshall lays it bare with Daniels.

In those rare times when conservatives actually do try to address ideas, the most bizarre — and revealing — things result.  With Jones, the one time he risked dealing with the *principles* of American government, he ended up equating the principle of limited government to anarchy (!)  Daniels does this several times, most notably in his declaration of Ayn Rand as being “Soviet”.  And who can forget Whittaker Chambers’ hysterical screeching, thirty-four years before Godwin: “to the gas chambers, go!”

But Marshall goes even further; via Daniels’ own words, he eloquently reveals the conservatives’ emotional motivation for their avoidance of ideas: they fear them, and the black art (epistemology) that involves them:

“If Daniel’s had read her works or listened to her lectures, he would have observed that she made her case by laying out the evidence that led her to draw the abstract conclusions that became her philosophy. But why bother thoroughly investigating someone you are going to critique when you believe that ideology as such is just window dressing for dark, bestial impulses?”

The root and meaning of conservatism’s insistence upon being an “anti-ideology” is its deep-seated, fundamental mistrust of the human mind, of reason and of everything that proceeds from it.  For such minds, “black art” is a precise description of epistemology.

So it should be no wonder why conservatives should find themselves confused and frightened by ideas.  They lack the tools required to comprehend them as such.  Like primitive tribes who rely on faith to ameliorate their helplessness in the face of physical nature, conservatives do the same to address their helplessness in dealing with ideas.

In closing, I can do no better than to close with Paul Marshall’s last line, which is an epitaph for the intellectual pretenses of Anthony Daniels and of conservatism itself:

“”Anthony Daniels’s writing can sparkle. He can entertain with erudite and obscure trivia. But he seems unwilling to think deeply about ideas. Consequently, his intellect is as wide as an ocean, but as shallow as a puddle.”

(A key spoiler follows below the break.  It is not necessary to read the story first to grasp my point, but I highly recommend it; it is a good one.)

The story dealt with a future where there was a world named Vexvelt, which was shunned by all the other civilized planets in the galaxy because incest is not only accepted there, but actively encouraged.  When the protagonist in the story visits Vexvelt, he finds that it is a virtual utopia — and that its rejection of the incest taboo is in fact precisely why it has achieved such prosperity and peace.

There is a line spoken at one point by a magistrate, one of the few outside Vexvelt who knows the truth about the planet.  At one point after the protagonist describes the “sanity” of the Vexveltian society, the magistrate said a line which still sticks in my head:  (paraphrasing from memory)

“I would rather go stark, raving MAD than ever endure such sanity!”

Sturgeon later explained that the particular taboo was not the point of the story.  From Wikipedia:

“Sturgeon wrote the story with an afterword that makes it plain that [the taboo] is not the real issue here, but rather how we manufacture falsehoods and turn them into perceived ‘truths.’ How we often take something harmless, then add and build on the perceived ‘truth’ to the point of creating something that is positively harmful.”

The funny thing for me, is that as much as incest is seen as repulsive by nearly everyone, writing a story like that did not damage Sturgeon’s career.  If you examine his Wikipedia page, there is no mention of any big controversy over it.  His writing career continued, and to this day Sturgeon is regarded as one of the stars of science fiction, and rightly so IMO.

Ever wonder what might have happened to him if he had made Vexvelt the only egoist society in the galaxy — if the harmful idea the Vexveltians rejected had been altruism?

I don’t have to wonder.  Paul Shirley, a former ESPN basketball writer and former player, questioned altruism in clear terms recently in connection with the Haiti disaster, and the responses were (not to put too fine a point on it), batshit crazy.  Evidently, altruists too would rather go “stark raving mad”.

As much as I respect Sturgeon’s writing, I can see why he might have seen the risk of being construed as an advocate for incest to be less dangerous than to be seen as questioning that other, far more harmful taboo.

I don’t expect them to actually precipitate one on purpose, but the basic premise — that the American Left is in a do-or-die position — is very likely correct.

Objectivists have been saying for years that the Left is at the end of its intellectual road, and that its position in control of the academy is slowly slipping away.   I think the Left knows this as well.   I believe that the core Left is afraid that if they don’t succeed in pushing America over the tipping point during this administration, they may never get this chance again.

What is this goal — this “tipping point” to which I refer?

I see it as that point where “tax eaters” — those dependent upon government handouts, in one form or another, and their enablers — permanently outnumber and outvote the tax payers and their allies.  Europe is already past this point, and a few US states — California, for example — are as well.

The Left knows that tax-eater constituencies are permanently beholden to them, thanks to what the conservatives call the “liberal ratchet”.  How many times have we heard the whine “but if they take away our handouts, we’ll have nothing”?  Once a government program is ensconced in the economic structure of the country, it is well-nigh impossible to extract (given our current cultural climate), much like an inoperable tumor.   The expectation is that once this voter base is sufficiently large, the trend will become irreversible, and liberty will be permanently removed from the mainstream.

This is the real motivation behind the push to install socialized medicine now.  This was the point of the Left’s substitution of “democracy” for freedom over a hundred years ago: to set the country on a path towards the initial type of tyranny that bears the closest superficial resemblance to freedom: the tyranny of the majority.

Once this happens, The American Left can finally start down the same road towards permanent struggle and war that the Left has followed everywhere else in the world.  The only way out for the producers will be to revolt — go on strike — or enact a literal revolution.  These are extreme options, all but certainly entailing the loss of the comforts of modern society — the threat thereof which which all but the most James Taggart-ish of the core Left will count on to keep them under the yoke.  “Oh, you’ll do something, Mr. Rearden.”

That’s the crossroads we are at right now.  Down one road is Weimar… the other, America.

We were last here in the late ’60’s and ’70’s, when the Great Society was installed, the government was openly debasing the currency, and “malaise” was prevalent.   It was, however, too soon.  Ronald Reagan derailed the Left’s train in the 80’s with an unexpected resurgence of conservatism (due to the temporary migration of the not-sufficiently-dead Enlightenment ideas over to the Right).

Still in possession of the mantle of American liberalism, the Left in 1980 was confident in its ability to wait out the Reagan effect for a generation, and they did.  As expected, the conservatives ran out of steam (thanks to the logically necessary rise of the religious wing of conservatism), and by 2008, the Left was ready to pick right up where they left off.

But something’s gone wrong.  Those pesky Enlightenment ideals, mangled as they are by 40 years of identification with conservatism, still won’t die!  They are still breathing, as the rise of the Tea Parties and Ayn Rand’s rising profile clearly signal.

And last but not least, the mask is falling off; American left-”liberalism” is past its expiry date.  The left is now seen as what they are — socialists — by greater and greater numbers of Americans.  Caught between the false alternative of socialist Left and theocratic Right, millions of Americans are finally smelling the left-right trap and declaring themselves as Independents.

These are all signals that the Left itself is in serious danger of being irretrievably marginalized, and I think they know it.  The Left is reaching the end of its road faster than America is reaching that tipping point.  This wasn’t supposed to happen!

So it should be no wonder that they are going for broke now.  They fear what we hope — that they will run out of gas before America is brought down.  They know that the time for a Hail Mary pass to get us over that tipping point, is now — and success in this regard outweighs the short-term political pain that will follow.

This is the root of the split on the Left regarding the current bill.  Those core Leftists who support it have concluded that they won’t be able to achieve socialized medicine this go-around, and so are hoping that another Cloward-Piven round of mucking up the system with further regulations and mandates will induce the country to demand a full takeover out of frustration.  Others, however, are afraid that this classic pattern may not occur — that the changes in America that I have noted here, will result in a completely different reaction against government control that will marginalize the socialist Left for good.  This faction wants the public option back in *now*.

Which of them is right?  I do not know.  That’s the nature of a crossroads…. it could go either way.  In either case, I don’t believe that times in America have ever been as interesting as they are now, in my lifetime.

Adventures in Activism: A True Story of Protest, Arrest, and Release

The Greenville News — Corrupt from Core to Top

The next time some conservative invokes state’s rights or some other such variant of “locality of government power” as a check against government power, slap him (or her) with this one.

Via Diana.

Yes, the policies Obama wants to pass are likely worse than what McCain would have done (though certainly not the gaping differences that many conservatives would have us believe). The tradeoff involved with the risk of such policies being passed, however, is that even if you grant that McCain’s less socialistic version of health-care reform (for example) would have done less damage in the short term than Obama’s, McCain’s would likely have passed.

It would have been sufficiently watered-down to avoid generating much of any reaction; the moderate conservatives would be useless as any sort of check on things, because it’s “their guy”.  And what serious Leftist would oppose a Republican doing their work for them, even if it isn’t moving as fast as they’d like?  Moreover, McCain’s statist policies would have helped add to the ossified dead weight of entitlements that weigh this country down, as did Bush with Medicare Part D.

Electing McCain would have worked as the political equivalent of the bailouts: deferring risk now, at the expense of greater risk later.  What mandate Obama received in 2008 is nothing compared to the bottled-up landslide we’d have seen in 2012 after four more years of Republican rule.

But since it’s Obama, the story is completely different. Where McCain would have kept the water muddied, Obama clarifies it. Where McCain would have maintained the status quo of ordinary partisanship, Obama’s explicit Leftism has energized the Left’s actual opposition: not conservatives per se, but Americans — individuals asserting a modicum of moral sovereignty. Obama clarifies and energizes a truly *American* opposition, one defined along the correct lines of individualism versus collectivism, instead of the meaningless one of left vs. right.

This is why the Obama presidency, despite its clearly greater downside risk compared to McCain in the policies that he seeks to implement, nonetheless has an upside for which there was no chance with McCain: that little or nothing gets done during his administration, the best possible political outcome available for this four year term.

Obama is playing for much more than McCain would have — but unlike McCain, Obama stands to lose it *all*.

And that’s the nub of it right there.   For the supporters of freedom, voting for Obama was an act of doubling down on America — a willingness to risk electing the most statist candidate yet seen in this country, to bet on the rise of a genuinely American opposition (as opposed to merely conservative), one strong enough to defeat him.

By contrast, a McCain vote amounted to nothing more than an “insurance bet“.  It’s the move you make when you expect to lose, and seek to cut your losses.

The bet is not yet won. However, as uncertain as I am for their long-term prospects (in particular the likelihood of their being eventually co-opted by conservatism), the Tea Parties have already exceeded my highest initial expectations, in terms of both duration, and in resisting co-option by the usual suspects on the Right (though these particular expectations were quite low). I and others remain cautiously optimistic.

Against that backdrop, now observe how a Leftist builds upon the mainstreaming of the defanged view of the Ninth and Tenth Amendment in coining a new epithet: “tenthers”, which is a classic smear of the principled view as being on a level with 9/11 “truthers” :

More important, there is something fundamentally authoritarian about the tenther constitution. Social Security, Medicare, and health-care reform are all wildly popular, yet the tenther constitution would shackle our democracy and forbid Congress from enacting the same policies that the American people elected them to advance. After years of raging against mythical judges who “legislate from the bench,” tenther conservatives now demand a constitution that will not let anyone legislate at all.

The author, Ian Millhiser, is telling us, with a straight face, that a clause which restricts State authority, is “fundamentally authoritarian“.  Earth to Millhiser: “shackling our democracy” was literally the precise and exact point of the entire Constitution.  Millhiser has just told us that the Founders were authoritarians.

This, I submit, is obviously insane, and conservatives will simply dismiss it as the usual Leftist insanity.  But they evade the real point here in doing so.

What IS the point, is that Millhiser is in fact correct in describing the principled view of the Tenth Amendment as “fringe”.   This Orwellian insanity is mainstream — the “American Prospect” is hardly fringe, and neither is The New Republic, who echoes their dismissal of the principled view as “mad ravings” (!)

What sets the stage for Millhiser’s bold-faced contradiction?  What — or who — is responsible for the “fringe” status of the so-called “tenther” (principled) view?

You get one guess.  Without this marginalization of the principled view by pragmatists, it would be Millhiser and his insanity which would be on the fringe.

The left-right synergy of the insanestream marches on.

Among those seven votes supporting ACORN was junior New York senator Kirsten Gillebrand:

“While Senator Gillibrand finds the actions of certain ACORN employees to be reprehensible and will ask ACORN leaders for a full investigation and plan to prevent any further abuse, the truth remains that thousands of New York families who are facing foreclosure depend on charitable organizations like ACORN for assistance.”

As always, altruism is the great whitewash, the ultimate shield for evil of any size.  “But they help people!” is the whine of ACORN’s apologists everywhere.  This isn’t new.

The real story here is the wider pattern of which ACORN is merely a small part: how altruism deters and disarms our culture’s moral immune system.

Observe, for example, the mainstream media, who have been pilloried again and again in the conservative blogosphere for ignoring this story.  It’s easy to see this as mere MSM leftward bias, and that undoubtedly exists… but the political aspect is a mere surface manifestation of a much deeper problem: the altruist bias of the entire culture.

It is not only politics which steers most reporters clear of targets like ACORN; as altruists themselves, they are reluctant to sink to such depths of “cynicism” as to question the motives of those who are “just trying to help people”.  Altruism makes even the hardest heads go soft.

As for those few with sufficient integrity to forge ahead, there is the derision and ostracism to be expected from their altruistic colleagues, and from altruistic readers, even should they turn out to be right (let alone if they turn out to be even slightly wrong.)

I have every reason to believe that Charles Gibson of ABC really did have no knowledge of the story; he didn’t dare look, lest he see. Who’s an altruist going to believe — ACORN, or his lying eyes?

Journalists are supposed to be the eyes and ears of a free society; what good are they when they refuse to see or listen?

Many are aghast at the willingness of how comfortable the ACORN workers were with the idea of aiding and abetting the “pimp and prostitute”.  Much has been made of the idea that the workers just went along with it all as if this was something they did every day…  but what I saw was the openness of those who see little or no risk in what they are doing.

Even the fact of ACORN’s demise is problematic; they were only brought down because of their political ideology.  That gave their conservative enemies the “get-out-of-altruism-free card” they needed to dismiss ACORN’s altruistic activity as merely a front to hide their real agenda.

What they certainly do not grasp is that this is the entire point of altruism — to provide moral cover and justification for immorality.  Altruism works very well for this purpose, because that IS it’s purpose.  That’s what it is for.

It is a dead certainty that there are hundreds and thousands of organizations and individuals like ACORN, that mainstream media is equally reluctant to question  — not only Leftist ones, but religious conservative ones too, all of them relying on altruism as a weapon to disarm their victims, and as a shield to deter suspicion.  Even the most cynical of potential investigators will see their resolve weaken, even when in possession of substantial evidence(or even proof) of wrongdoing, when faced with an individual or organization that is well cloaked in the mantle of altruism.

Other ACORN-like groups might take the warning, but few will bother, or need they… in particular the non-partisan ones that lack the political vulnerability.  The gap ACORN leaves behind will be quickly filled by others, now forewarned, while the media continues to not look, and not see.

O’Keefe and Giles have indeed whacked themselves a big altruist mole, but unfortunately that’s all they did.

In it, Paulhus attempts to claim that the stories of misery in Canada are emanating primarily from Alberta and Ontario, where there are smidgeons of private health care being permitted for the moment — so therefore, those little smidgeons of private health care must be the root of the problems there!

While Mr. Paulhus catches up on his basic logic skills, the rest of us can dig into the facts he’s evading.

But first, let us give him some credit: by trying to tell us that Ontario and Alberta don’t count anymore, he nonethless admits thereby that things really aren’t all candy-stripers and balloons in the Great White North.  Instead of telling us how nice the system is in Canada, now it’s all about how great things are in Saskatchewan!

As I am familiar with this playing field, this moving of the goalposts by Paulhus will avail him no good.  The facts on the ground must be pretty bad in Alberta and Ontario for the Canadian socialists to be chewing their own legs off in the trap like that.  Of course, what Paulhus fails to note for our non-Canadian audience is that Ontario and Alberta together contain half or so of the population.  Those are big legs.

The stories like this that I know of through personal connections and direct experience all predate the advent of that smidgeon of private medicine that is currently permitted in Ontario.  This privatization was undoubtedly prompted by the Chaoulli case in Quebec that I noted earlier; that case is only binding in Quebec at present, and yet Ontario and Alberta have since found it necessary to permit that smidgeon to order to alleviate the ongoing slow collapse (and likely Chaoulli-inspired legal consequences) of the system. This failure has been long in coming, and was thoroughly manifest long before the privatization; the latter is obviously  a *response* to the crisis, not its cause.

(I’d be interested in knowing more about what is going on in Quebec, where Chaoulli has legal force. That Paulhus fails to mention it makes it a good bet that Quebec also breaks his narrative to some extent.)

But wait, there’s more! (with apologies to Billy Mays, RIP): the “transfer payment” subsidy.

These payments are part of an interprovincial welfare program, which the federal government uses to redistribute tax wealth from the “have” provinces to the “have-not” ones. You can bet that Alberta (oil) and Ontario (manufacturing base) are “have” provinces… while Saskatchewan, the birthplace of Canadian socialism, has long been a “have-not”.

The extent to which things are medically “better” in Saskatchewan is the extent to which their system is subsidized — by Alberta and Ontario. Paulhus and his ilk are no better than those Easterners in the early ’80’s who crowed about the National Energy Program and the low gas prices it brought about… while carefully failing to look too deeply into what that cheap gas was costing Albertans.

UPDATE: well, I’d almost have lost that bet; Saskatchewan has been a relatively small net recipient of transfer payments of late, and won’t even qualify for any in 2009-2010.  Ontario and Alberta, however, remain the net losers in this deal.

Recently, Stephen Hawking made this error when he said that “he would not be alive if it weren’t for NHS”; he does not account for what would have existed in its place: the superior medical facilities that would have existed in the unseen free market.

The irony of all this is that despite Mr. Hawking’s protestations, the fact remains that one of the things that was very nearly “unseen” by the NHS was in fact Dr. Hawking himself.

(Via Billy Beck)

Whether they meant to do it or not, this “cleansing” of the children’s book market in favor of books printed after 1985, will do the same for the ideas printed after that date.

Note in particular this comment from the linked article at The Atlantic:

Burning or banning books is one of the worst things that can happen in an open society. But in this case it is not the CONTENT of the books that is being restricted, but the potentially dangerous materials that were used to create the books.

The following simply could not be more apt:

You don’t want some recalcitrant hacks to come out with treatises that will wreck our entire program, do you? If you breathe the word “censorship” now, they’ll all scream bloody murder… But if you leave the spirit alone and make it a simple material issue – not a matter of ideas, but just a matter of paper, ink and printing presses… [y]ou’ll make sure make sure that nothing dangerous gets printed or heard – and nobody is going to fight over a material issue.

– Dr. Floyd Ferris discussing Directive 10-289, from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.

This passage was already close to the mark vis-a-vis McCain-Feingold (“Money is not speech”); it’s nearly literal in this case.

Some time ago, Arnold Kling did so when he proposed that individual states should perhaps “experiment” with government health care — as if  the experiment has never been tried before, all over the world and here in the United States at least twice (Tennesse and Massachusetts), with ample results.

Is Kling an idiot?  Hell no, I wish it were only that!    No, the answer is that Mr. Kling is a pragmatist.  He tells us so himself:

“Suppose that instead of looking at health care policy as a means to push an ideology or score political points, we examine it from a pragmatic American vantage point. What works? What does not work?”

Kling knows all about TennCare, Massachusetts, Canada and the rest of the world.  He is simply unwilling to abstract from those failures the crucial clue that perhaps there is something wrong in principle with government health care, in much the same way that there is something wrong in principle with the notion of perpetual motion machines.

And yet, while the persistent inventors of perpetual motion machines are properly regarded as the crackpots they are, pragmatists like Kling continue making the same proposals again and again, and expect to be taken seriously.  Here’s David Bernstein with a “Serious Health Care Reform Proposal” (linked approvingly as “sensible” by Glenn Reynolds), all suggesting like Kling that the sensible thing to do is to ignore the available data in the burn wards and go right ahead and stick our fingers into the flame to see if it burns this time.

Some might call that insanity; I call it pragmatism.

If pragmatists were the tribesmen in the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, the U.S. Constitution would be the Coke bottle.  One of the absolute worst symptoms of how the primitives are destroying the artifact even as they venerate it, is the attack on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

These two Amendments are intended to act as catch-alls; they are the most explicitly principled Amendments in the entire Bill of Rights, notwithstanding their flaws. They plainly mean that any rights not expressly enumerated in the Bill of Rights nonetheless lies outside the purview of the federal government. The Founders plainly intended to address the pernicious arguments of future pragmatists who might attempt to utilize the enumeration of rights in the Bill to claim that what is not enumerated, is fair game for the government. This was important enough for the Founders that they dedicated *two* Amendments to the task.

And that still wasn’t enough.

Here, in the comments, observe how several Leftists blithely insist that the Ninth Tenth Amendment doesn’t mean what the blog author thinks it does. One provides a link.  Then watch what happens when the conversation turns to the Commerce Clause and the Raich decision.

And here, observe a good illustration of the legal doctrine that is used to defang the Ninth Amendment — as approvingly written by a conservative, Clayton Jones (who, tellingly, wrote it in response to Steven den Beste, who correctly notes:  “So where most of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights were quite specific, the 9th and 10th Amendments were intended to make fundamental statements about the basic philosophy behind our government. They were intended as broad guidelines.”)

(and before any of you libertarians start smirking, note that the three men linked in the first part are all well-known for libertarian leanings).

Sadly, he does not grasp that the difference is due entirely to the fact that the Constitution was and is a magnificent expression of principled thought, while modern laws are expressions of pragmatism.  From an epistemological standpoint, the Constitution is like an artifact of a long-vanished, advanced civilization, incomprehensible in its nature, origins or workings to the primitives who venerate it without comprehending it.

I am reminded of the third and most famous of Arthur C. Clarke’s “three laws“:  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”   What we are seeing dramatized now, here and elsewhere, is the philosophical root of what Clarke said: any sufficiently advanced product of principled thought is, in the eyes of pragmatists, indistinguishable from luck.

As Milton Friedman correctly wrote, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. By extension, therefore, so is deflation — which is why, contrary to mainstream economists, we are not in a truly deflationary period at present, insofar as there is no reduction in the supply of *money* that has happened over the last two years. Rather, it is demand destruction that has been happening, and that’s a horse of a different color.

The root of the confusion is ignorance of Say’s Law. Essentially, Say’s Law says that production of goods constitutes the demand for the other goods in an economy.

If I produce a widget that others in the market find desireable, I can trade it for the things they have that I want. The more desireable my widget is, the greater the value, and the greater the demand my production represents.

“Money” is not special as far as Say’s Law is concerned. Money is a particular commodity that, by virtue of certain characteristics — durability, high value (compactness), fungibility, divisibility etc. — serves as a store of value and as a medium of exchange, and is therefore chosen as common denominator of value.

Apart from that, prices are understood as the exchange ratio between the particular commodity designated as “money”, to all the other goods in the economy, are determined by supply and demand of *each* of the goods involved in a transaction.

Where things go off the rails, is that fiat money is an artificial commodity; that is, it has no innate utility, and extremely fluid supply. Wood, for example, has utility independently of its market value; if wood were sufficiently common, it would have no market value — it’s price would be “free” — but it nevertheless retains value as construction material, fuel for fires etc. All “real” commodities have utility, including gold; this is the root of gold bugs’ claims that gold can never drop to zero value.

According to Say’s Law, if I create widgets of a given utility, I am presenting increased demand to the market. If I make a lot of them, this has two effects, each the mirror image of the other.

The first is that my increased production, qua increased *demand*, pushes up prices of all other goods in the economy; to the extent that more goods are traded for my widgets, there are less goods available to be traded for other things in the market.

The second is that my increased *supply* of these widgets, drives my price down; my profit per widget is reduced.

However, the actual utility of each widget DOES NOT CHANGE. The $10 widget of today is the same as the newfangled $100 widget of last year. (This is not accounting for innovations that increase the utility, or decrease the cost, of the widgets). The net result is that all market participants are better off for having my widget, and this is the net increase in *genuine wealth* that I have brought about by means of producing items of genuine utility; that utility is what drove demand for my product.

Fiat currency, however, while it behaves the same in the market, has no utility (apart from the physical commodities involved in coins and bills) — and that is what makes it so dangerous as a store of value.

Normally, if someone produces something that has no utility or value, nobody will want it. It adds no wealth to the economy, and so there is no market for it. This is what the government is doing — producing something of no utility: dollars.

However, it has forced the issue via legal tender laws. By forcibly inserting this artificial commodity into contracts as money — as the denominator of value — the government attempts to repudiate and subvert Say’s Law.  Legal tender laws are an attempted substitute for utility.

Now, once that is done, fiat currency can and does work just fine as money (as a means of exchange, to be specific). To the extent that each one of us trades goods or services for dollars, those dollars do in fact stand for the value of these goods and serves, *so long as the market demand for them does not appreciably change between the point of acquisition and the point of spending. That is the problem with fiat currency, which the mainstream insists is a feature, not a bug: the government has the power to radically ramp up supply of its “good” by multiple orders of magnitude more speed than the rest of us can ramp up the supply of *our* actual goods in the economy!

This has multiple consequences.

The first one is confiscation, as detailed by Ayn Rand in “Egalitarianism and Inflation”. Imagine that gold was money, but that the government had the magical ability to suck it away from you, right out of your vault. Every year, there would be 4% or so of it gone. This is what inflation is doing; when the government boosts the money supply by 4%, it comes out ahead by the amount of the wealth “purchased” by that increased “demand”, while the value of the dollars that you have in your possession shrink by the same amount.

Note that the amount of value that you put into earning those dollars, however, did not change! You still put in 8 hours, or sold X amount of a good, to get it. The government has essentially stolen 4% of your created wealth. That is the function of fiat currency, the “back door” created by the legal tender laws.  All the supposed benefits of fiat inflation — in particular the reduction of dollar-denominated debt — is in fact the amelioration of debt and the artificial increase of market demand, at the expense of savers.

It should be noted that, since it is dollars that are being devalued, that those who are able to hold hard assets as hedges against inflation are NOT in fact coming out “ahead”.  If they saved in gold, for example, they have X ounces now, just as they did then. The price of those ounces went up, but so did the prices of whatever they can buy with those extra dollars they would realize from the sale.   This is how gold and hard assets protect wealth; they lack the “back door” of fiat currency, and are immune to confiscation by inflation. (The government has to use more overt and direct means in those cases).

The second one is just as bad; this is where Say’s Law avenges itself. This is why we are hearing all about “deflation” today, and why that is horribly wrong.

Remember that all the goods in the economy actually are goods — i.e. they are things with utility — except one: the fiat currency. The market does not acknowledge the difference (it is forbidden to do so); the fiat currency acts as an artificial commodity, as a demand factor just like all the other goods in the economy. This, however, is a subterfuge: the fiat currency, unlike all genuine goods, does not find its genesis in the creation of actual wealth. It does not, therefore, satisfy the conditions of Say’s Law. New fiat currency represents artificial demand; it masquerades as wealth, but in fact there is nothing there. The government does not create wealth when it creates money.

While market participants are legally forbidden from refusing fiat currency, they are nonetheless free to adjust to the supply changes.  Its only way to account for the loss of wealth is via inflation — i.e. by the transfer of wealth from holders of older dollars paid for by actual wealth creation, to those who hold “new” dollars created from nothing. This is the dilution that underlies inflation, and the source of the “false demand signal” that causes misallocation and misdirection of wealth in the economy.  This is why now, as in the Depression, we have the symptom which mainstream economists see as the problem: frozen wealth in the form of excess inventory of certain goods.

Now examine our current situation. What has been happening is that the bursting of the housing bubble has been destroying real wealth. Essentially, if you traded a net amount of real wealth for a house, then the value of that house dropped by half, you have lost half your net worth by misallocation — you paid too much, and half of that wealth is now “frozen” in the house (which retains its utility). Essentially, the false demand signals that came from earlier inflation by government, drove perceived value of houses far above their proper level, in regard to the actual value a house represents. Artificial demand, in the form of new dollars released by cheap credit, bid up the prices of houses, attracting a flood of both new and old dollars (which represented real wealth created by those who earned them) into the real estate market, by far the best performer at the time the new dollars entered the economy after 9/11.

When the bubble burst, while the amount of dollars around remained the same, the amount of real wealth dropped precipitously — frozen in the physical form of excess houses. Frozen wealth is essentially wealth whose utility is far less than its price — so nobody buys it; it presents no demand for any goods. This is demand destruction, the subtraction of the demand emanating from *real wealth*, from the economy.

Demand destruction is the root of the current recession; it represents the economy suddenly realizing that there is far less wealth — and therefore less real demand — than was previously thought. It is essentially a correction of the error induced by the false demand signal caused by the earlier creation of money by the government.

Because of Say’s Law, this destruction of real wealth translates into a reduction in real demand. This is why prices have not risen — and that is why mainstream economists are calling our current situation *deflationary*. Now remember that mainstream economics, unlike those of the Austrian school, do not distinguish between real wealth generation and the creation of fiat currency.

This failure is why people are applying the term “deflation” — a reduction in the money supply — to what is actually a reduction in real wealth. This is why individuals across the political “spectrum”, from Reason’s Steve Chapman and Glenn Reynolds to conservative and leftists economists alike — are calling for actual inflation — an increase in the money supply. They are blind to the fact that an increase in the money supply is not an increase in real wealth, and therefore is not an offset to what they are calling “deflation”.

This is why prices must rise, and why we are in for at least a decade of impoverishment — via 1970’s inflation at a minimum. They are essentially attempting to replace real demand (from real wealth production, now lost and/or frozen) with the artificial demand of new dollars. Since new dollars have no utility, the amount of real wealth in the entire economy will remain reduced — but the apparent market demand, augmented by the new dollars, will be higher than it should. This is what started the whole thing!

Do you see the insanity now, of the make-work projects and deliberate supply reductions of the New Deal?  Do you see why the only difference between then and now, is the presence of fiat currency — that we’ll see inflation instead of depression, but the net impoverishment across the whole economy will be the same?

More dollars chasing fewer goods (because of lowered production of goods and services following from the earlier demand destruction) will boost prices, suck more wealth from savers into consumption — which is more actual wealth destruction — eventually leaving us all much poorer.

….

A final addendum, in regards to the extent that government does not inflate, it can borrow, or raise taxes.

Borrowing only serves to delay the inflation, since the fund must be repaid, eventually — and the greater debt is an added incentive to inflate. It is worth noting that the German hyperinflation of 1923 arose because of the German government’s obligations to foreign governments under the Versailles Treaty; it simply printed marks to make payments.

Taxation speeds the impoverishment up, by direct confiscation.

The end results are the same.

Notice that Derbyshire characterizes these four “notions of liberty” originally described by David Hackett Fischer, as being “subtly different”.  Let us examine these differences, to see how “subtle” these differences are.

1.  “Publick” liberty.  This is the so-called “collective” liberty of democracy.  This is the “liberty” of communism, socialism and fascism, where the individual moves only by permission of the collective — which, of course, means the State.  The freedom to obey, in other words.

1A.  “Soul” liberty.  Originating with the Puritans, as above, this is essentially the freedom to do what God — in the person of the rulers — tells you to do.

2.  “Hegemonic” liberty.  This, in short, is the “liberty” of the feudal aristocracy — which Derbyshire tells us with a straight face, “cohabited quite comfortably with race slavery”).

3.  “Reciprocal” liberty.  This is what we know now as freedom of thought — though Fischer and Derbyshire construe it primarily as being the individual’s prerogative to follow God *instead* of man.  This is “soul liberty” with the State middleman removed; here each individual is (in principle) free to determine for himself what God is really saying.

4.  “Natural” liberty.  From the description, this is the only one of these which emphasizes freedom of action, and by implication, of private property.  It is the only one that sets the individual against an imposed “order”.  Of course, the quotes chosen by Fischer and Derbyshire characterize it as anarchic.

It should be clear that 1, 1A and 2 are instances of tyranny, not “liberty”.  Since when is the difference between liberty and tyranny “subtle”?!?!   If all of these were liberty, what is the “tyranny” against which all of these stand opposed?  What is the principle common to all of these that makes them all instances of “liberty”?

Derbyshire is giving us a snapshot of the pre-American conceptions of liberty, in particular how fragmented and confused it was, as compared to the unitary principle of individual rights of 1776.  This is valuable in and of itself.

But consider the implications!  The historical facts that Derbyshire has given us, refute two key conservative falsehoods.

First is the idea that America was the culmination of a gradual process built upon a long tradition (going back to Christ).  Observe the sharp discontinuity between these “four notions” and the American principle.  While Americanism does indeed draw upon existing ideas that go way back in history, it does so in the way that Isaac Newteon or Albert Einstein did in physics — by introducing  a radical new integration that jettisons long-established errors and resolves ancient contradictions. In this case, the errors being eliminated are Derbyshire’s #1 (democracy) and #2 (aristocracy), while secularizing #3 (freedom of ALL thought) and integrating it with #4 (individual  moral sovereignty).

Second, is the idea that *current* conservatives understand what liberty is.  John Derbyshire has just confessed, on the open Internet, that his view of liberty is pre-American — conceptually fragmented, confused, contradictory, primitive, and hopelessly blind.

Whither the Left in all this?  Again, Derbyshire enlightens, in a manner he likely did not intend:

“Very approximately speaking, modern liberalism descends from the first and third of Fischer’s styles, modern conservatism from the second and fourth.”

“Very approximately” notwithstanding (more on that below), this is indeed an accurate summation of our predicament: modern “liberalism” (the Left) embraces one part tyranny (#1) and one part liberty (#3, and not much of it anymore), while conservatives are the complete opposite: they embrace one part tyranny (#2) and one part liberty (#4).

If I were to rewrite political terms of thought with the intention of confusing people about liberty, I could not have done better.

But consider this:  Derbyshire’s description, together with his connection of these fragments to the modern political “alternative” — is just as accurate a description *of our modern day* as it is of the pre-American milieu.  These aren’t just echoes; we apparently have completely regressed to a pre-American concept of liberty.

Oviously, somebody DID rewrite political terms of thought here.  How else could we have ended up here, in this 17th century intellectual cesspit again, *after* the concept of liberty had been integrated into a single whole by the Founders?  How did we reach such a pass that such anachronism could be introduced as seriously relevant to modern political discourse (as Derbyshire implies in posting this in response to Iain Murray’s implicit, yet correct assumption that liberty is unitary) without so much as a guffaw from the audience?

As far as the conservatives are concerned, they remain active and knowing participants in the crime, even if they weren’t the ones to blow the first hole in liberty’s defenses.  Errors of this size are not made innocently.  The history is too well established, and the Declaration of Independence is available for all to read — so there’s no “we didn’t know” excuse.  Rather, when we examine the peculiar version of “history” that conservatives have written for themselves — one where the first true expression of Leftism/the political Enlightenment (treated as identical) was 1793, while 1776 was actually “a conservative reaction, in the English political tradition, against royal innovation”(1) — removes any doubt about what those people are doing; this intellectual retrogression is something they wish to exploit.

So who did crack liberty open once more?  Conservatives historically have not had the intellectual capacity or the position to engage in the deep-level corruption we are dealing with here.  Here, as elsewhere, they are not the vanguard, but are instead pilot fish following the sharks.  As the ideological history reveals, the sharks turn out to be — wait for it — Marx and Engels, two of the first full-blown Leftists.

While liberty was implicitly seen as indivisible in early 19th century America, the glue that holds that integration together –  the principle of individual moral sovereignty, deriving from Derbyshire’s #4 — never really “took” in continental Europe, where self-determination was seen as belonging to nations, not individuals.  Against that backdrop, it was easy for Marx and Engels to break liberty apart again.  What had previously been implicitly understood as simply “the system of natural liberty” was renamed capitalism, a term which substitutes a mere economic characteristic — the ownership of capital — for liberty, in a classic definition-by-nonessentials subversion.

By intellectually excluding the right of property from the rest of liberty, the Left could attack and destroy this most poorly-defended aspect of liberty while still passing themselves off as friends of what would henceforth be seen as political liberty.  The ploy worked; by the time the Russian Revolution blew the lid off that lie, the Left was firmly in charge intellectually, the intellectual Enlightenment was gone, and the economic/political dichotomy was solidly entrenched (and still is to this day).

The religious conservatives in America did not really notice the opportunity opened up for them by the Left until after World War II, but once they had, they got busy.  They can brazenly characterize the difference between instances of  liberty and tyranny as “subtle”, with straight faces, expecting that there no longer exist in the mainstream those minds who can call them on it.

I hold both conservatives and the Left as responsible for the results:  modern-day Americans willingly trade away liberty for trinkets (only to lose those too — h/t Billy) while those few who properly sense that something is going wrong, find a rat’s nest of conceptual confusion designed to mislead, frustrate, and thereby neutralize them.   Compare the confusion that paralyzes mainstream thought about liberty and politics, to the radiant blast of clarity and insight that comes from minds that operate on the premise that “freedom is of a piece”.

There is no aspect of the American concept of liberty which says or implies that individual rights cease to apply in those chosen acivities deemed  “economic” (or otherwise).  Liberty does not have “disposable” parts.  The idea that liberty can be safely fragmented is the lie relied upon by those who insist that capitalism is “just an economic system” and that government involvement in the economy is compatible with liberty.

In fact, only under conditions of liberty can there be a true separation between systems of economic organization and systems of governance; this separation is one of liberty’s necessary consequences, and can only exist within the understanding that liberty is indivisible.

To compromise one aspect of liberty is to compromise (i.e. surrender) it all.

I will not surrender it.

(1) Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind,  seventh revised edition, p6

Ya think?  Tel me, Mr. Luskin, how it could possibly have been otherwise?

Via Billy at two–four.net, who puts it down succinctly:  “If you have to ask, then you’re not even in the game.”

It contains my argument on why it is contradictory for altruists to define themselves as “people that care”.  I am addressing a commenter “Laura”, who identifies herself as a Christian, but seems to embody a more individualistic version of such than I’ve ever encountered.

It’s one of the essays I’ve had bouncing around in my head for years that I planned to write on my own blog, not in someone else’s comments… but it came together well enough there that I’m going to call it done and post it here.

* * *

Hi Laura,

Regarding your last point: I can’t speak for Ayn Rand (and neither can she, since she’s dead), but speaking for myself, I don’t have a problem understanding the idea of caring about someone who is down on his luck, and hoping he can get his stuff together.

One of the most idiotic, persistent patterns among Rand’s critics (none in this thread, mercifully) is the assumption that to care about others is automatically an “unselfish” thing… to the point of considering that as the very definition of “unselfish”. This is, to put it mildly, poppycock.

To “care” about something or someone is to value that something or someone. In the latter case, to care about a person means that their interests become part of your interests. The more you care about a person, the higher the priority their interests are to you. I too would not “beggar myself” for the benefit of a stranger, but if I had to do that to save the life of my fiance or a member of my family, I would selfishly do it in a heartbeat.

By the proper definition of “selfishness” — concern with and pursuit of one’s own interests and values (notice that this contains no reference to “others” at all) — caring about other people is quite natural, and properly selfish in the Randian view. I think we can agree that human beings per se are a good thing, and that when we meet someone for the very first time, we ought to treat them with goodwill on that principle.

Where I suspect that you would differ from an Objectivist like myself, is that I don’t care indiscriminately. It is possible for someone to forfeit that goodwill; it is possible for a person to descend to a certain moral level where I become indifferent to their fate.

Regarding the meaning of altruism, I strongly suggest that you consider some of the words of that benighted doctrine’s leading thinkers.

From the penultimate apostle of “moral duty”, Immanuel Kant:

The principle of one’s own happiness, however, is the most objectionable, not merely because it is false and experience contradicts the pretense that well-being always proportions itself to good conduct, nor yet merely because it contributes nothing at all to the establishment of morality, since making someone happy is quite different from making him good. –Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals (1785)

“To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. … For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.

Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist were clouded by sorrow of his own extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others, and that while he still has the power to benefit others in distress, he is not touched by their trouble because he is absorbed with his own; and now suppose that he tears himself out of this dead insensibility, and performs the action without any inclination to it, but simply from duty, then first has his action its genuine moral worth.“ Ibid.

When Kant says “to act from inclination”, he most emphatically does NOT mean a mere emotionalistic “when one feels like it”; he specifically means to act from the pursuit of values, a.k.a. self-interest, what Ayn Rand calls selfishness.

Now a quote from the man who coined the term “Altruism”:

[The] social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service…. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. –Auguste Comte, Catechisme Positiviste (via Wikipedia)

These men mean it. Ayn Rand was not exaggerating. There can be no mistaking the meaning of altruism in the words of its advocates — and it is not benevolence or charity, or least of all “caring”. Altruism is about living for others, about placing others at the TOP of your priority list, trumping all personal values and concerns — including integrity, rationality, and your life itself.

Their idea of “true moral action” is not giving when you care, but giving when you don’t — but you have to.

So, Laura, in your last example: is it really true that when you bought a sandwich and a bottle of orange juice for someone, that it “didn’t do anything for you?” That is a declaration of indifference.

That flatly contradicts what you wrote earlier — that a part of charity is that you care about the recipient. If you do care about someone, their interests become part of your interests, to the extent that you care about them. Your lending assistance to them becomes an act from values, which I would call moral, but what Kant would deride as having “no moral import” because it was done from “inclination”.

The only way that buying that person breakfast could really do “nothing for you” would be if it made no difference to you whether that person ate or not — just like the miserable philanthropist in Kant’s example.

We already know this is wrong. By your own words earlier, it does make a difference. You do care.

What you did was not altruism. So say the acolytes of altruism.

Good for you, say I.

From the Examiner article Paul links:

The bill also summons up unsettling memories of World War II-era paramilitary groups by saying the new program should “combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service,” while establishing “campuses” that serve as “operational headquarters,” complete with “superintendents” and “uniforms” for all participants. It allows for the elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life. And it calls for creation of “a permanent cadre” in a “National Community Civilian Corps.“

Americorps, Peace Corps, and now more “corps”?

While the Examiner is correct about the WWII-era feel of this proposal, I myself am also reminded of a time period just a few years earlier, a place several thousand miles further east, and another word with similar quasi-military connotations:

“With the creation of the German Labor Front, co-ordination became an elemental force, drawing all Germans in its wake.  With sudden changes of name, the organizations of economic and cultural life co-ordinated themselves, and a country, which had always been rich in clubs and societies, was suddenly bristling with “fronts”.

–from “Der Fuehrer” by Konrad Heiden (1944 edition)

“So the collectivist and altruist elite become very touchy when the people for whom they are “doing good” for their own sake, even to the point of enacting coercive and felonious legislation, exhibit signs of intelligence, resistance and anger. How dare these yokels!

And nothing raises their hackles higher than any mention of Ayn Rand. “

Ed’s article says everything that I would say about the anti-Rand reaction in general.

There exists, however, another sort of anti-Rand reactionary, who is not a member of those elites but desperately wants to be.  This sort of person hates Ayn Rand and her ideas too, but instead of being threatened by her rising profile, see in it an opportunity for themselves — the same sort of opportunity that a brand new ship represents to young barnacles.

We are already familiar with many examples of such opportunists over the years: the prototypes Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, and David Kelley come to mind.  The current example that caught my attention this week is Huffington Post writer Lee Stranahan.

Normally, this sort of thing doesn’t warrant much attention on anyone’s part.  Stranahan is making things up, as is usual for Ayn Rand’s critics, and passing on the usual falsehoods about Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan, as so many other unremarkable pundits.

But there’s something different here.  For one thing, Stranahan is pimping himself — hard — as a former “insider”, whose “Ayn Rand cred” can stand up to anyone’s.  That claim is laughable on its face, of course, but it is clear that Stranahan is not talking to anyone who would care to know the truth;  he parrots the same populist poppycock as the run-of-the-mill critics do — the ones who slam Ayn Rand without having read a thing she wrote.  It is pretty clear from this, who he is writing for — and how credulous he expects that audience to be.

And sure enough, when we examine his likely motives, things get really interesting.

In his post, he kicks things off by declaring “I know my Ayn Rand” and then follows it up with a laundry list of things that he claims he has done, that purportedly grant him this mythical “insider” status:

1.  He says he attended Ayn Rand’s funeral (this was in 1982)
2.  He says he did the “audio taping” on a lecture course taught by Leonard Peikoff
3.  He was personally kicked off Neil Peart’s lawn.  (Neil Peart is the drummer/lyricist for the Canadian rock band “Rush”)
4.  He known how to pronounce “Ayn”
5.  He’s attended Objectivist conferences.
6.  He’s owned first edition copies of Atlas Shrugged.

This list of behaviours certainly does make him look like something… but it’s not what Stranahan wants us to believe.  Let’s look at them individually, and see what picture they paint.

1.  By his own confession in his October 24 Huffpo column, Stranahan “crashed” Ayn Rand’s funeral.

2.  What does “did the audio taping” mean, besides pressing “Record”?  That job is done by volunteers; anyone can do that, even Ayn Rand haters or ten year old kids.

3.  Neil Peart is on record as having distanced himself from Objectivism; “I am no one’s disciple”, he said.  So how does trespassing on his front lawn count towards  “Ayn Rand cred”?

4.  Anyone who does even a bit of due diligence knows how to pronounce “Ayn”.

5.  I too have attended Objectivist conferences.  Newsflash: they are open to everyone.

6.  And so is Ebay, where first editions of Ayn Rand’s books come up occasionally.

Apart from the fact that Objectivism is wide open to anyone, all of these things cited by Stranahan can be done by anyone who merely wants to follow Ayn Rand and Objectivists around.  There is no “inside” there.

In fact, “follow around” is pretty much what Stranahan is doing throughout his list — and as two of the items make clear, he was doing so where he was not wanted.  The picture that this list of behaviors paints is not that of an insider, but of a groupie, a wannabe that nobody wants to have around — someone like that kid Buddy Pine from “The Incredibles” who eventually becomes the bitter, vengeful “Syndrome”.

Like Syndrome,  perceiving himself as wrongfully spurned  (but in fact, properly ignored) by Objectivists, he is taking the path blazed before him by the likes of the Brandens — passing himself off as a wronged “insider”, dishing dirt about Ayn Rand, and telling his target audience what they expect to hear.

By beating his chest about getting kicked off Neil Peart’s lawn, he is trying to get back inside the Left’s good graces — which he likely fears he’s lost since getting booted off the Daily Kos front lawn by M. M. Zuniga himself.  Perhaps Stranahan imagines that sexing up his hatchet job with “whispered rumors” of a gay man’s suicide over “incompatibility” with homosexuality and Objectivism will improve his chances; his choice of subject for that particular fabrication leaves no doubt over who he is writing for.

As with all attacks of this sort, a significant element of projection on the part of the critic is a given  — in this case, his unelaborated references to Objectivism’s supposed “destructiveness” “at a personal, human level”.  In Stranahan’s case, however, I have my own direct evidence of this.  Stranahan used to be a LightWave artist, as I am now, and we have several mutual acquaintances.  I will only say that in the mid-90’s, I mistakenly thought that a lot of the hostility directed at Stranahan from former colleagues was merely because of his open advocacy of Ayn Rand’s ideas.  As I established my own career over the millenium and ended up meeting many of these folks, I learned otherwise.

But I know better than to go around claiming that I’m some sort of  Lee Stranahan “insider” — just as Lee Stranahan knows better than to believe that he is, or ever was, any sort of  Objectivist “insider”.

Only he went ahead and did it anyway… so much the worse for his readers.