If someone wants to destroy his own life, the state has no business stopping him. This intervention by police and their use of tasers to take an old man down is outrageous. What’s next, people being arrested because they don’t go in for their yearly check-up?

The Tea Party movement represents the best hope of halting the federal Leviathan. We have written many words on the subject. In fact, several of us have participated in events for the first time in our lives. However, the whole affair elicits trepidation and pause. While a lot of the slogans, statements, and views are refreshing and spot on, a popular movement attracts those who would get out in front of it and use it to achieve real power.

Its decentralized nature is a blessing and a curse. The lack of central leadership means that no one person or group controls the message; its fractious nature engenders distrust of anyone who would try to do so. In a way, this makes the tea party a marketplace of ideas: the best ones garner the support and crackpots get shunted to the periphery. But with this dispersion comes the risk of a tent too open, unprincipled and unable to advance its ends effectively. The tea party movement rallied in support of Scott Brown’s election to the Senate to replace the late Ted Kennedy. He scared the dickens out of the Administration because he could play a pivotal role in blocking their agenda. But he’s already playing politics as usual, and displaying his superficial support for limited government. These sorts of hollow victories will continue to plague the tea party movement until and unless it firms up its core set of principles.

There are those who would co-opt the movement. Sarah Palin, for one, desperately wants to be the face of the Tea Party. She certainly stands the best chance of doing so with her outside-the-Beltway pedigree, down-home style, and incessant demagoguery. Others seek to steer it towards anti-abortion and anti-immigrant stances. The Republican Party certainly wants to assimilate its members back into the fold—practically taking for granted that the GOP is the movement’s natural home.

DIck Armey’s book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, recognizes all of this. It’s a clear, delimited outline of how the movement should proceed. If DIck Armey, a former economics professor and one of the principal authors of the 1994 Contract with America, and this book take hold of the movement, then we’re in better shape than I had feared.

In Chapter 4 “What We Stand For,” Armey writes:

You’ll notice this is a short chapter, and that is intentional. It just doesn’t take a lot of words to say that we just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others. We are endowed with certain unalienable rights and delegate only some of our power to the government to protect those rights. Defenders of limited government understand that the U.S. Constitution lists the specific powers it delegates. If it’s not mentioned, we retain that power.

He gets it. When he says that “Tea Partiers value equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes” and “America is different because we are all about the individual over the collective” (by way of introducing a quote from The Fountainhead), this is the sentiment and direction the Tea Party needs to go if it is to fulfill the legacy inherent in its moniker. A return to the individualism of the past will go a long way towards righting the wrongs of modern America.

Give Us Liberty has no philosophical flaws, mostly because it confines itself to defending liberty and freedom in the vein of the Founding Fathers. Stylistically, it is a bit ham fisted about its FreedomWorks connection. The two authors are the think tank’s chairman and president, and it sometimes reads like FreedomWorks’ new employee orientation manual. The organization has done great work guiding and fomenting the movement, so I can overlook the institutional cheerleading.

Obviously, historical America, while freer than today, contained the seeds of the modern welfare state. In failing to properly delineate the limits of government and to mount a thorough defense of individual rights, our ancestors left far too much unsaid and uncodified. The moral code of self-sacrifice and the collective over the individual opened a door to the statist twentieth century—the ostensible defenders of capitalism (the conservatives), deprived of a moral ground by sharing the collectivists premises, could only point to the utilitarian benefits of freedom. Such a meek defense quickly fell and led to the federal overreach we have today.

A proper defense of capitalism and freedom requires an explicit commitment to individual rights. The challenge, then as now, is to mount a defense of property rights. Life and liberty are fairly easy to protect: people generally like to live and don’t cotton to people telling them what to do. But standing up for property rights is difficult under a morality of altruism and self-sacrifice. Arguing that Wal-Mart can build a super center wherever it wants—providing it can acquire the land—or that a single mother has no claim on your income runs afoul of the conventional view that the collective trumps the individual or that you are your brother’s keeper.

But property rights are the most fundamental of the individual rights because we cannot sustain our life or liberty without being able to produce. Unless the Tea Party movement can elaborate a capable defense of property, it will fail at shoring up our freedom. That defense must necessarily be based on Ayn Rand’s ethical system of egoism, which offers a consistent, principled justification in opposition to the conventional morality of altruism. Armey’s book is not that defense.

Without this concomitant cultural change, any political success will be short-lived. A movement that espouses individual rights yet allows that man has a duty to his fellow man has accepted a contradiction that will tear it apart at the first conflict. But the way things are heading today, electing a crop of politicians that at least pay lip service to limited government and economic freedom might give us the time needed to effect such a culture swing. At the very least, it will delay the dictatorship that is inevitable down the statist path.

Now, when I write “fighting back,” what do you think this means? Does it mean assembling air-tight philosophical, political and economic arguments grounded in empirical facts? Or does it mean name calling and smearing the other side?

Yes, you guessed it. Josh Marshall explains it for you:

The institutional Republican party has fully (though with some notable and honorable exceptions) hoisted its sail to xenophobia and religious hatred. And as Halperin notes, at least for motivating their own voters, it’s simply good politics. This is not something anybody happened into.

Well, there you go. Those creeps on the right are appealing to xenophobia and religious hatred because that works with the stupid American people. Marshall’s argument is classic leftist thought: forget any subtleties of the issue, just cut to what is important — how the immoral GOP manipulates the American masses with their lies.

Eugene Robinson argues along the same lines:

Lies, distortions, jingoism, xenophobia — another day, another campaign issue that Republicans can use to bash President Obama and the Democrats. First it was illegal immigration. Now it’s the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” which is not at all what its opponents claim.

As for Obama’s Friday statement, which invigorated the left on the Ground Zero Mosque — at least until the President flip-flopped on Saturday and then explained that he did not flip-flop — James Taranto recaps.

Peter Kirsanow gets to an important point:

President Obama’s statements regarding the proposed Ground Zero mosque are the latest in a series of indicators that we are at a very peculiar pass: We have a president who doesn’t get America. For the first time in history we have a president whose default setting is in opposition to the general sensibilities of the American people. His behavior too frequently suggests that he’s playing a cosmic joke on Americans’ essential decency, considered patriotism, and belief in American exceptionalism.

Obama is in opposition to what Ayn Rand called the American sense of life. This sense of life is the legacy of America’s 18th and 19th century freedom and culture of individualism.

I think Obama’s response is interesting for two reasons. First, it demonstrates better than anything in the last nine years why we are losing the war against totalitarian Islam. In the months following 9/11 I was gloomy. I realized that we did not have the will to win this war, and we would not find the will to fight until things went much worse for us. We lost what we had in WWII. The rise of the New Left had disarmed America, and the primary ideology disarming us is multiculturalism. When all cultures are equal, by what right do we use force to defend Western Civilization?

No, it was clear to me that the left had set us on a course of national and cultural suicide.

In 2008 we elected the worst possible man to lead America: a man of the left, whose soul is one with the New Leftist ideologies. Obama’s speech on Friday at the iftar dinner with Muslim ambassadors was steeped in multiculturalism:

In my inaugural address I said that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and every culture, drawn from every end of this Earth. And that diversity can bring difficult debates. This is not unique to our time. Past eras have seen controversies about the construction of synagogues or Catholic churches. But time and again, the American people have demonstrated that we can work through these issues, and stay true to our core values, and emerge stronger for it. So it must be — and will be — today.

In a free nation that protects individual rights, none of this is very important. The controversies between various religions are barely noticed because every individual is equal before the law.

But when a nation throws out individual rights and embraces collectivism — the only thing Obama understands — then groups are of primary importance, for governance becomes a matter of pressure group warfare. A controversy such as the Ground Zero Mosque turns into this group against that group.

Obama’s biggest evasion is that the issue is not first about religion, but politics and war. Islam, in addition to being a religion, is a political ideology — a totalitarian ideology that is waging war as it attempts to conquer the world. The Ground Zero Mosque would be a symbol of Islam’s victory in a battle in its war for world domination. Religion and multiculturalism are used to obscure the essential issue and weaken America in its fight against this totalitarian enemy.

The second interesting thing about Obama’s response is that it does oppose the 68% majority of Americans who want the mosque built somewhere else. The majority of Americans are right. Still. They understand that this is about war, not religious rights, and they are still willing to stand up for our national self-defense. They have not entirely let go of their individualist sense of life that Ayn Rand wrote about almost 40 years ago. This is the only good news here, and the American sense of life, tattered and torn as it may be, remains our only hope.

Claude Sandroff sees this book putting the anthropogenic global warming idea in the grave — if people listen to Dr. Spencer, and with MSM serving as the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party, that’s a big if.

At the end of Spencer’s careful analysis, a simple picture emerges. The PDO is a long-lived ocean-to-atmosphere heat transfer process (similar to the better-known El Niño and La Niña) but of much longer duration. Cloud cover decreases significantly during the positive PDO phase, allowing more sunlight to reach the earth’s surface. In the ocean, this extra energy is stored as heat. In its negative phase, the PDO acts in reverse and cools the atmosphere. And all of this occurs in roughly thirty-year cycles. While this mechanism is operating, mankind is dumping a small, vanishing amount of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Big deal.

It’s outrageous that buffoons like Al Gore have led this nation to the brink of Cap and Trade legislation that would devastate the economy in the name of a fantasy.

Pakistan is playing a double game with the US, taking its money and aiding the Taliban. We give $1.5 billion in foreign aid to Pakistan annually. Now, imagine you are President Musharraf. You know you can skim off 5% of this money, $75 million,  put it in a Swiss bank account, and no one will notice. Those who do notice, if they are so unwise as to speak out, you can have assassinated. What do you do? Do you put a little away for yourself or, because you are a noble idealist who wants to help the poor, do you pass it all on to your welfare state bureaucracy, which is so riddled with corruption that much of the money will never reach the poor?

American taxpayers, you suckers, you’re busting your ass from 9 to 5 so that dictators around the world can send their children on gambling vacations to Monaco.

Ever since Obama became a serious presidential candidate in 2008 I’ve written a series of blog posts trying to figure the guy out. He’s a strange bird, both leftist ideologue and Peter Keating-like second hander. He’s a politician beloved by many Americans, especially African-Americans, but he is also so distant and cool that one wonders if he is even paying attention to the daily crisis.

Mark McKinnon sees parallels between Obama and LBJ.

Christopher Hitchens talks about God as he is “battling” cancer. Most disappointing. I had always thought he was a hardcore atheist, but it turns out he’s a squishy agnostic. It looks like Hitchens and Martin Amis in this clip get hung up on epistemology. Since man is not omniscient, there’s a possibility that God exists. Once again, only Objectivists with their doctrine of the arbitrary get it right.

Paul Krugman gives up.

What causes the Great Stagnation? I’m no economist, but I would guess it has something to do with increasing size of government and increasing regulation, which decrease productivity. That and inflation end up keeping the little guy little. I’m certain it is not because the greedy rich refuse to spread the wealth around.

“(1) All sovereign power belongs to the people of Kenya and shall be
exercised only in accordance with this Constitution.
(2) The people may exercise their sovereign power either directly or
through their democratically elected representatives.
(3) Sovereign power under this Constitution is delegated to the
following State organs, which shall perform their functions in
accordance with this Constitution”

Thus sovereignty is placed in a collective context. I do like the idea that power is delegated to the state and not surrendered.

As an example of a contradiction, chapter two article 4 sections 1 and 2 state

“4. (1) Kenya is a sovereign Republic.
(2) The Republic of Kenya shall be a multi-party democratic State
founded on the national values and principles of governance
referred to in Article 10.”

It’s either or: a democracy or a republic. Had they said elections would be held democratically, that would be different which they do in chapter one. And the national values and principles of governance are a mixed bag. Some of these are:

“(a) patriotism, national unity, sharing and devolution of
power, the rule of law, democracy and participation of
the people;
(b) human dignity, equity, social justice, inclusiveness,
equality, human rights, non-discrimination and
protection of the marginalised;
(c) good governance, integrity, transparency and
accountability; and
(d) sustainable development.”

Of course ‘social justice’ is collectivism all the way and ‘sustainable development’ is free reign to interfere in the market place.

Their Constitution does have a bill of rights but which is also a seriously mixed bag. But I was happy to see this:

“(3) The rights and fundamental freedoms in the Bill of Rights—
(a) belong to each individual and are not granted by the
State;”

A major league improvement in thinking suggesting–but only suggesting–the proper source of rights. While the concept individual rights is not mentioned in any thing I’ve read so far, notice the words ‘each individual’ above. Also the words ‘every person’ and ‘a person’ are used often in the document.

After explaining how rights are to be limited only by just cause, article 25 then lists rights that are not to be limited. These are:

“(a) freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment;
(b) freedom from slavery or servitude;
(c) the right to a fair trial; and
(d) the right to an order of habeas corpus.”

Good ideas all.

Under Article 26 which lists rights it declares “Every person has the right to life” it also says that life begins at conception!! While there are more contradictions and bad ideas, I want to touch on one more before closing pointing out that although there is much likable language about the protection of rights, it is all thrown out the window under Economic and Social Rights:

“43. (1) Every person has the right—
(a) to the highest attainable standard of health, which
includes the right to health care services, including
reproductive health care;
(b) to accessible and adequate housing, and to reasonable
standards of sanitation;
(c) to be free from hunger, and to have adequate food of
acceptable quality;
(d) to clean and safe water in adequate quantities;
(e) to social security; and
(f) to education.
(2) A person shall not be denied emergency medical treatment.
(3) The State shall provide appropriate social security to persons
who are unable to support themselves and their dependants.”

It’s almost like they’re trying to take abstract ideals from capitalism, like ‘rights’-because they seem to work-and combine them with concrete ideals from socialism.

Our constitution has survived this long because the contradictions written into it were few. But this document has many and will not provide Kenyans with either prosperity or justice. But I wish them luck.

“Although Sen. Levin has never been a friend of the free market system in the past, he has suddenly developed a concern for law abiding business owners who lose out when more sizable corporate operations exploit tax shelters, a July report informs readers.”

In other words, because Smith has a way to protect some of his wealth and Jones doesn’t, fairness-not justice-requires that we take more of Smith’s wealth away from him-instead of providing Jones with similar protection.

A tyrant’s greed for power has no end. Like the savage who wants to seize the goods produced by others, Levin sees the profits of offshore corporations and wants to seize them too. Unfortunately, Senator Levin still has 4 years left on his current term. Woe is Michigan, and the Nation for that matter.

A chill ran up my spine when I read that. Several questions came to mind:

1) What gives the federal government the right to dictate that all health care providers look at an ID?

2) Why would the federal government think this law was needed?

3) Why is it for my protection? If someone gets medical care under my name, that’s the clinic’s problem, not mine, is it not?

Statists of all parties will be thinking as they read this post, “Oh, come on! Don’t be such a paranoid right-wing extremist. They’re just checking ID. Who can object to that?”

Well, for two centuries checking ID was not a problem in medical care. Now for some reason it is mandatory. A doctor should be able to treat whomever he wants without following some goddamn bureaucrat’s order that he check ID.

I take this new regulation as a sign of what is to come with the federal government taking over health care. This new policy, as innocuous as it seems to statists, will have costs — and those costs were not incurred when health care was not controlled by the state.

Worse than the cost, this little dictation is symbolic of the greater dictation in health care we will all suffer. When the state controls medicine, it controls our lives.

100 years ago Americans would not have stood for this ridiculous dictation from Washington, D.C. Today? Hey, they just want to see some ID.

This sign is a little reminder that we are losing our freedom as the state gains power and marches toward the abyss of dictatorship.

I will start out by saying that I agree in principle with the Standard Objectivist Position On Immigration. The central solution to most current problems is to reform immigration law and abolish quotas so that the black market is removed, much like the whole war on drugs mess.

However.

I think that the way I most often see this position presented is, at best inaccurate or oversimplified and at worst naive or suicidal. I will call this presentation, “Open Immigration” because that is what its presenters call it and also because that name highlights the key point of what is wrong with it.

First of all, many fail to make the very much necessary distinction between legal residence and citizenship. Most readers will take the position of “Open Immigration” to be “Open Citizenship,” and while, yes, you could say that’s their problem, I think it’s counterproductive to do anything but cut that thing off at the pass. This is a good example of many of the right approaches to not only this point, but of how to frame the case in general. Or a good start, at least.

With that out of the way, comes a few questions which I believe are the best way for me to lay bare what my issue is with the policy name and proposed policy of so-called “Open Immigration.”

1) Is your proposed policy that anyone professing or admitting to the Moslem faith is de facto an enemy of the US government, its citizens, and its constitution and therefore may be barred entry?

If so, how can you accurately characterize your position as “Open Immigration?” If not, then we may indeed have deeper disagreements and I believe your proposal may amount to not only a misunderstanding of the principles involved, but also a suicidal self-sacrifice on the part of America.

(As a follow up to that question, what is your position on That Mosque, and if you agree it should be demolished but don’t agree with the above point, how do you square those two things?)

2) Would your proposed immigration policy bar members of Mexican drug gangs, Chinese Communists, and other assorted members of murderous organizations and open enemies of the U.S.?

If not, again, that is suicide as above. If so, again whence the term “Open.” But perhaps more importantly:

3) Do you not realize that most of the countries which currently represent immigration problems exist under a near or total breakdown of law and order such that it would in most cases be relatively impossible to determine whether entrants were in fact in the above categories? That records from such countries are often either nonexistent, notoriously unreliable, or maliciously deceptive? And furthermore that this is before one even beings to consider the fact that such entrants would be lost in a deluge of millions, such that we would go bankrupt in any attempt to employ enough investigators to determine so many cases?

And that in turn leads to my final question,

5) Given that it is impossible in the case of many countries to determine the danger or harmlessness of applicants, do you believe that the burden of proof in such cases are that the non-citizen applicant is responsible for proving his harmlessness to the citizens and government of America or that the burden of proof rests on America such that if we cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that an entrant is malicious that we must By Right let him into our midst?

I would answer that the duty of our government is to protect the rights of its citizens first, and the rights of foreigners as a second. And I have yet to hear a convincing (or even non-tautological) argument as to why entry to a governmental jurisdiction for a non-citizen (who, by definition, does not own any claim to such territory) is, as such, a right.

So yes, I suppose one could, in a very technical sense, characterize the proper position on immigration as “Open,” given that, absent any of the aforementioned factors, yes we should let anyone who wants it, in.

But at this point, the whole characterization is just inaccurate. And if they’re using it as a stand on principle, I’d fear that we’re dealing with a wrong or misunderstood principle, or at the very least a poorly-worded position that makes us look bad in front of non-philosophical people who have the good sense to know how impracticable anything with the title “Open Immigration” is in today’s context – i.e. just the sort of people we’re trying to get this message out to.

Perhaps worst of all, it allows the conservatives, of all people, to gain ground on us with those same people. Conservatives. I’ll just let that last one sink in for a bit.

-Inspector

“If you go to business conferences, you know that at lunch it is definitely better to be seated next to a prince than a grind. Princes, who can be male or female, are senior executives at major corporations.
They are almost always charming, smart and impressive. They’ve read interesting books. They’ve got well-rehearsed takes on the global situation. They can drop impressive names as they tell you about their visits to the White House, Moscow or Beijing. If you’re having lunch or dinner with a prince, you’re going to have a good time.
Grinds, on the other hand, tend to have started their own company or their own hedge fund. They’re often too awkward to work in a large organization and too intense to work for anybody but themselves.
Over lunch, they can be socially inert. You try to draw them out by probing for one or two subjects of interest to them. But as often as not, you find yourself playing conversational pingpong with a master of the monosyllabic response.”

So CEOs, COOs and CFOs are fun people to be around even though they don’t accomplish much worth talking about and the grinds who go from rags to riches by their own effort are dull, boring and culturally brain dead. But:

“Since the princes are nicer and more impressive,[speak for yourself brother-MN] it is easy to be seduced into the belief that they also are more trustworthy.
This is false.
During the past few years, for example, the princes at Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers behaved with incredible stupidity while the hedge fund loners often behaved with impressive restraint.
As Sebastian Mallaby shows in his superb book, “More Money Than God,” the smooth operators at the big banks were playing with other people’s money, so they borrowed up to 30 times their investors’ capital. The hedge fund guys usually had their own money in their fund, so they typically borrowed only one or two times their capital.
The social butterflies at the banks got swept up in the popular enthusiasms.[Created by whom?-MN) The contrarians at the hedge funds made money betting against them. The well-connected [to what?-MN] bankers knew they’d get bailed out if anything went wrong. The solitary hedge fund guys knew they were on their own and regarded their trades with paranoid anxiety.”

There are lots of equivocations and evasions in the above not the least of which is the notion that successful hedge fund ‘guys’ are driven not by knowledge, expertise, or experience but by “paranoid anxiety.” This article reveals an enormous lack of understanding of capitalism and economics.

Mr. Brooks treats most things as the given as if they were causeless. What are grinds? What causes them to come into existence? What are their requirements for survival? What conditions create princes?

Mr. Brooks’ choice of the image of ‘prince’ for CEOs is premised on the notion that CEOs don’t earn their fortunes just like princes don’t. Princes are born into their station in life and serve at the pleasure of the king. It is true that some CEOs of today would not survive in a laissez-faire economy. These are of course the James Taggerts and Orrin Boyles of business and it is their image that Mr. Brooks is attaching to all CEOs. In fact, he has all the facts he needs to infer that mixed economies don’t work and should be abolished but he won’t infer it:

“The princes can thrive while the government intervenes in the private sector. They’ve got the lobbyists and the connections. The grinds, needless to say, don’t.
Over the past decade, professionals — lawyers, regulators and legislators — have inserted themselves into more and more economic realms. The princes are perfectly at home amid these tax breaks, low-interest loans and public-private partnerships. The grinds try to stay far away and regard the interlocking network of corporate-government schmoozing with undisguised contempt.”

So why don’t you regard it with contempt and call for the end of such networks Mr. Brooks?

Alas, no matter how much evidence he sees and provides to us, it won’t penetrate this mindset:

“Princes can thrive in a period of slow, steady growth, but grinds need a certain sort of psychological atmosphere. They need a wide-open economy with plenty of creative destruction.[!!) They need an atmosphere of general confidence, so bankers will feel(?) secure enough to lend them money, so big companies will feel(?) brave enough to acquire their startups, so they themselves will feel(?) the time is ripe to take on their world and show their brilliance to all of humanity."

This is plain contempt for the human mind. A 'certain sort of psychological atmosphere' is the knowledge that one is free to think and act on one's thoughts. 'Creative destruction' is a snarky way to refer to invention. That all these grinds and their bankers engage in feelings instead of thought, reason and logic, is a direct slap at intelligence as such. Lastly, that producers produce in order to 'show their brilliance to all of humanity' is a smear of producers as such. It projects an image of an egomaniac gloating over his invention which will show the world how great he is.

In closing, Mr. Brooks offers no suggestions on how to 'nurture' grinds, just pessimism:

"It's just that very few grinds are bringing new ideas to scale and hiring workers to enact their us-against-the-world schemes.[notice the adversarial context and productive effort as 'schemes'-MN]
For jobs to recover, the grinds have to recover(!), but it’s hard to see how that will happen so long as households are still so leveraged, government debt is still so unnerving and the business climate is still so terrible for entrepreneurs.”

Translation: “Atlases, you’ll just have to heal your selves.”

The children running the lemonade stand in question were giving away their product for free to all comers. Savage, flush with indignation, contradicts her companion’s statement that this represented the “spirit of giving”:

“No!” I exclaimed from the back seat. “That’s not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They’re giving away their parents’ things—the lemonade, cups, candy. It’s not theirs to give.”

She then relates the children and their parents to society and the government. People, she contends, act like money and things from the government have no cost. They enact social programs and balloon the deficit because the costs are diffuse and sunk—enabling them to get away with spending that they’d never agree to if they bore the full costs.

I agree with her as far as she goes, but it’s not nearly enough. The real source of our troubles isn’t that some kids are treating their parents’ presumably hard-earned income as a blank check to slake the thirst of strangers. It’s that people like Savage have bought into the idea that capitalism is nothing beyond the money-grubbing mechanics of running a business.

Her objection wasn’t that the children were seemingly ashamed of charging a price, but that they may have been treating themselves to their parents’ goods. If she had discovered that they bought all the raw materials with their own allowances or had otherwise scrimped and saved to put together the stand, she would have applauded their “spirit of giving.”

Capitalism is more than operating a lemonade stand. It’s about recognizing that you have the right to run a lemonade stand and to charge whatever you want. It’s about seeing the honor of trade. It’s about taking risks and taking responsibility for taking those risks. It’s about independence, not just financial but spiritual.

And it’s completely lost on Savage and her ilk. They don’t see the morality of capitalism because they can’t see morality in capitalism. Their moral standards allow for you to “charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money” but look askance at charging a lot more. Their morality makes little children balk at charging anything when people might need refreshment on a hot summer day.

Their morality sees business as a charity run for the benefit of others with a living meekly carved out for oneself. And that’s the savage truth.

Most recently, he told {via} a charter school trade conference that they represented “the only place innovation will come from.” They are certainly a source of innovative techniques—no one can dispute that. But to say that they are the sole hope for education and that the future depends on “great public education” is absolutely repugnant from a man who amassed his entire fortune in one of the freest sectors of our economy and graduated from a prestigious private school that had purchased an expensive minicomputer at a time when they weren’t widely available outside of universities.

Charter schools are a bastardization, a measure to introduce some elements of competition to the calcified public school system. It is widely held that the public school system has failed—charter schools represent the way out for those who cannot conceive of an alternative. And there certainly have been some innovative charter schools that have thrived from the limited freedom that this hybrid institution allows. But like the limited market-based experiments in the Soviet Union and other communist economies, charter schools are a sop to the free market—an effort to keep the public content by giving the appearance of choice and competition. They hinge on the uncontested notion that government has a responsibility to educate children.

Practically, they crowd out private schools more than public schools did. Parents fed up with their local school or district had no other choice but to pay private school tuition. Now, they can shop around for a charter school—or, worse yet, move their children from charter school to charter school as they try to find a good fit—and never pay a dime in tuition. More importantly, those who were in private schools may find a charter school that is close enough in quality to their current school and withdraw the student. This can easily devastate an otherwise sound private school.

But the choice charter schools offer is illusory. True choice comes from businesses having to satisfy market needs without public subsidy or protection. Private schools must of necessity be responsive to the concerns of parents: if they don’t offer a quality education at a reasonable price, there are other providers to choose from. Charter schools, in divorcing this financial relationship, are naturally less susceptible to parental concerns: most charter schools have significant waiting lists and the government pays the same per-pupil fee whether a parent has one child enrolled or four.

Charter schools stifle innovation by sucking the wind out of private education’s sails. Long term, they represent the greatest threat to the privatization of schooling in America because they don’t challenge the central premise that government has any place in educating the young. The true source of innovation in education is a free market, just like the one that existed in operating systems and word processing software. Even Bill Gates, committed altruist enamored of government, can recognize that parallel.

I wish to note that there are in fact, two huge issues at play for me in this discussion.

The first is the issue itself, which is the debate over whether we should support the immediate use of certain innately arbitrary legal powers (zoning laws) by government in order to stop the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero.  I will discuss this issue here.

The second issue, is how Objectivists handle disagreements like this.  That’s of greater long-range interest to me, and I will address it at some point; however, that will have to wait until I have gathered all the data and the discussion has more-or-less played out.

The very quick summary, to set the initial direction, is this:  I am in agreement for now with Paul and Diana Hsieh, in their posts here and here, and the reader may wish to also note my comments there.

For the Record:  I remain open to being convinced that the construction of the mosque represents a sufficiently immediate and pronounced danger to our liberty and country, that it should be stopped by *any* available means.

As yet, I have not yet seen the countervailing argument that meets the necessary conditions: to wit, that demonstrates a grasp of the opposing argument.  I have chosen to respond to this post by New Clarion co-blogger Embedded I to illustrate and clarify my position.

Writes Embedded I:

Against all of the above, cries to protect American property rights will be as a tea cup in a tornado. Those rights are so woozy now, it is better to stop the insidious horde at every turn, perhaps through well defined, vigorously enforced, peacetime anti-sedition laws.

This is the point I have raised elsewhere: when the principled response to the islamic threat — declaration of war and decisive action by our government — is off the table, decisions like this become tactical in nature: tactical decisions, by nature, are very pragmatic, and principled only in the most basic sense: life or death.

As I have noted elsewhere, decisions like these are analogous to deciding which of two assailants in a street fight to focus on at any given moment: the nearer one with the knife, or the accomplice some distance away who is loading a shotgun.  The *only* relevant guiding principle is immediate survival.

In this case, since the government is defaulting on its proper role (the safeguarding of a civilized order, where such things as property rights hold sway), we are placed in the position of considering the lesser of two choices, both of which are rotten when seen in the light of derivative principles, but nonetheless necessary.  Choices like this are of an emergency nature, like medical triage, and involve tradeoffs (NOT “sacrifices”) that morally we should never be asked to make.

In this case, the alternative we face is the following: permitting the enemy a symbolic success as Embedded I describes here, versus interdicting that symbol at the cost of emboldening the statists, our enemies in *this* country — and of further sanctioning the accelerating expansion of an out-of-control State.

Doing the latter vis-a-vis Islam bothers me a hell of a lot, for this reason:

“The dissolution of parties, the prohibition of public speeches — these were strangely violent measures of the state in defense of freedom. ‘The freest constitution in the world’ did not officially provide or allow for such brutal intervention of police power. But Hitler and his like had for years filled the country with violence murder and destruction, and the state has not found the strength to suppress them with the cold majesty of law; and now, having unjustly spared them, the state could no longer defend itself except by injustice. Where Hitler began to speak, murder could be expected as a result. Hitler forced the state to stretch the laws in a rather arbitrary way — this in itself was a success. When he attacked, a few drops of his own poisonous spirit dripped on the enemy and infected him. In all points of his career, in the most insignificant and the most important situations, this was his most dangerous power, though unfortunately least understood: that he lured or forced his opponent to imitate him, to use similar methods and even adopt the qualities which he really wanted to combat in Hitler.”

–Konrad Heiden, “Der Fuehrer”, 1944 Houghton-Mifflin edition, p261-262.  Emphasis mine.

That is my concern, which has not been addressed to my satisfaction anywhere, though it has at least been acknowledged as existing.

On the issue of the danger posed by Islam:  I am already sold on that point.  But that is only half of an argument.  Assuming a priori that my disagreement follows from my ignorance or failure to appreciate the Islamic threat, is not the other half.

I need to know that those who wish to stop the mosque are cognizant of the problems attendant upon squashing the mosque, that they too are fully informed.

For one thing, no one has addressed the egregious legal problems and precedents brought about by permitting war powers to a government that has not declared war — not the least of which is the consequent legal indeterminacy of when such powers are to end. How long is this to last?  Should we put out this fire at the risk of laying down tinder for who knows how many Reichstag fires in the future?

After all, the never-ending war against an indeterminate enemy is a known hallmark of tyranny, as dramatized in Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and as seen in the propagandas of tyrannies both long gone and current.

There is ample demonstration from history of how an external enemy can be used by internal forces aspiring to destroy liberty.  Much as Hitler exploited the threat of Communist tyranny to enact his own version thereof, those statist elements in America — of which there are no shortage — are perfectly happy to use arbitrary State power to stop the mosque, thereby setting the precedent for them to use later against enemies of their choice.

After all, would that not be a rather powerful symbol itself?   Look, the Americans are so scared of Islamists that it is willing to contradict its own supposed principles,  to use similar methods and even adopt the qualities which he really wanted to combat in [Islam]!

Who do you think would be emboldened by that symbolism?

Note this line from Ed Cline:

We are living in an unprecedented time, when this country is under attack by secular jihadists in the White House, and religious ones from Mecca and Medina, both sides demanding unquestioning obedience from Americans, and no one is doing much about it. This is the larger picture — an aerial photograph of the battlefield, if you will — that must be grasped. It is and it is not about “property rights.”

I need to know why Ed considers Faisal Rauf to be objectively more dangerous than actual jihadists in the White House (!)

And again: I have read the words of our own Myrhaf, Embedded I, Amy Peikoff (twice) and , and their words are persuasive.  They have made their case on the nature and threat of Islam.  But without their comparative evaluation of the dangers of the alternative — of the “Weimar threat” as I have explained here — their argument is incomplete, and I cannot as yet accept their conclusions.

As Ed Matthews writes in a comment on yet another excellent post on this topic by Amy Peikoff:

I have no problem using nonobjective laws to shut down the mosque, on the grounds that it is a greater evil and more immediate threat than that posed by a US government even more capricious in violating our rights than it is at present…

Okay.  I understand and accept this.  Make that case, then, please.  Why is the mosque “a greater evil and more immediate threat than that posed by a US government even more capricious in violating our rights than it is at present“?

Lies, Damn Lies, & Muslim Lies: The Muslim, and especially Islamic, ethics fully endorses the use of dishonesty to non-Muslims.   An article at the Middle East Forum site, makes this point very clear, explaining how the same Imam speaking in English says very benign things and then, in purportedly the same context in Arabic, is jihadist.   When the former explanation ends, The Mainstream Media end thinking.  See, The Two Faces of the Ground Zero Mosque.

Particularly notable about this mosque is that

• few Muslims live in reasonable traveling distance of it, yet it is being constructed to hold thousands;
• it is an Islamic tradition to build mosques over the most significant icons of vanquished enemies;
• it is just another building to us, but to them it is proof of Allah’s will, & of Islam’s supremacy;  finally
• its imam lied when denying non-American (Arabic)  funding for this mosque.

Were certain American communists, during the 1940s, given a pass when it became known they being funded and guided by Russia?  No, some were brought before an, unfortunately inept, HUAC  investigation, where Ayn Rand offered a vehement and factual testimony.  The communist problem collapsed on itself.  Islamism will not.

Losing World Freedom: see Geert Wilders on the Islamization of Europe. Is the U.S. Next? Wilders is passionate, and I see no reason to think he is scaremongering.  He describes the very frightening situation in Europe.  Already honor killings, efforts to impose Sharia Law (if only at a ‘community’ level), wife beatings, multiple wives and so forth are becoming more common in N. America.  Around the world, stonings, amputations (for the most menial of ‘crimes’), honor killings,  female genital mutilation, murderous fatwa‘s, etc. continue with no concern for the outcry of the non-Muslim & truly moderate Muslim world.

How large is ‘the problem’: Polls often speak in percentages, but when dealing with the Muslim world, 1% constitutes an enormous number of people.  In round numbers there are 1.5 – 1.9 billion Muslims.  According to a PEW poll prior to 2007, some 6% of Muslims support suicide bombings.  That is, 102,876,651 Muslims Approve of Suicide Bombing.  A hundred million!  That does not mean they would do it themselves, but as the article points out, if only 0.1% of those did act, that would constitute ~ 103,000 suicide bombers.

Islamist First Column: Infiltration of the enemy used to be seen as a ‘fifth column‘ an attacker could use.   Islam is using infiltration as a 1st column.  It is the new guerrilla strategy…  The British Redcoats formed neat rows of men, who took turns firing their muzzle loaders at the equally organized enemy, until one side surrendered.  They had no idea how to oppose the guerrilla tactics of America’s early settlers (who had learned from the Indians), and were roundly beaten.  Raise this British confusion to a new level.  How does one oppose a very definite enemy that is openly working within the best political framework of any nation, to destroy that framework?   How the Infiltration develops, see Islamization of Europe and Policies to Prevent It,  can be seen to involve distinct stages, suggesting solutions may be found in the early stages. [The suggested solutions in the article seem pragmatic, and rather short on just how they would be achieved, but Individual Rights are considered necessary.]

Simply making a special case that overrides Property Rights has all the flaws its Objectivist opponents fear.  But what is possible  in America’s present political state of affairs?   What would enable quick and decisive action to eliminate myriad plots for inciting public disorder &/or treason, and No Go Zones, such as are now occurring in Europe?

Against all of the above,  cries to protect American property rights will be as a tea cup in a tornado.  Those rights are so woozy now, it is better to stop the insidious horde at every turn, perhaps through well defined, vigorously enforced, peacetime anti-sedition laws.

America is not even the major focus for Muslim infiltration —presently that focus is Europe.  There are only about 2.35 million U.S. Muslims. When the World’s Islamists fully turn to America —and find they have her in much the same position as Spain, France or Holland— U.S. citizens, including moderate American Muslims, will have much more immediate fears than property right concerns.  At present, Islamists here are mainly in pursuit of symbolic and legal victories that undermine America.  The leaders hope, when the numbers are right, that an Islamist war can be sprung in America as if it were a  no-county-is-safe, civil war.  They already think they are winning.  They must not gain the symbolic victory of a Ground Zero mosque.

Update: corrected last link

Being an American is not a matter of blood or birth, it’s a matter of faith.

J.E. Dyer observes,

In pairing “faith” and Americanness, Obama made a vague, impressionistic association that tells us much about him; and one of the chief things is that he simply doesn’t think like an American.  Naturally, there are American nationals who posit the kind of association he implies here, but when they do so they are not expressing the quintessentially American idea.  They are speaking theoretically and proposing analyses for further consideration.

This is common in academia, where the link Obama suggests – of Americanness with the concept of “faith” – is implied through an analytical progression:  Americans are religious; they believe strongly in their religions; they believe strongly in their national identity; therefore, their national identification is essentially a sort of religious belief.  It has been a long time since an academic could wander through this syllogistic sequence without implying that it represents irrationality on the part of Americans – and once that premise is sneaked in, the syllogist is off the hook for making his own case rationally.  The whole discussion becomes a sticky goo of impressions and vague associations, so that you can wind up saying “Being American is a matter of faith,” and your auditors can all go off and interpret that however they want.

The “sticky goo of impressions and vague associations” is right on the mark. Obama expects Americans not to think in focus about his words, but to accept the hazy emotional connotations of his words, well, on faith.

In another sense, I think Obama means exactly what he says. He wants Americans to have faith in the state. He wants Americans to turn their lives over to the state the way religious people turn their lives over to the metaphysical fantasy of God. Don’t think, don’t question, just have faith in the philosopher-kings such as Barack Obama. They will run our lives better than we benighted masses motivated by self-interest ever could.

Dyer also observes,

…there is something a bit creepy about saying “being American is a matter of faith” – something that evokes the national-religious aspects of Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, Soviet Stalinism, and Maoism.  It is extremely informative about Obama, and presumably his speechwriting staff, that their ears didn’t catch this off-kilter resonance.  I think Obama thought these words would resonate with traditional Americans.  In the end, that merely reinforces the perception that he knows such Americans only through the rarefied prism of academic interpretations by third parties.

It’s not exaggeration to notice that Obama’s concept of Americanism has more in common with the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century than with the ideas of the Founding Fathers. In the Declaration of Independence are the words,

…let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Thomas Jefferson expected no one to take his words on faith. He laid out the facts supporting the case of independence and expected a candid world to evaluate those facts with reason.

The essence of America is individual rights. Freedom made America great, and restrictions of freedom are now destroying America. Freedom does not depend on anyone’s faith. It depends on respect for the rule of law — from the people and from the politicians they send to Washington, D.C.

From day one of his presidency Obama has done nothing but destroy liberty in America — from the creation of various czars dictating every aspect of our lives to quadrupling the deficit to dictating how much CEO’s can get paid to nationalizing health care to wanting draconian regulations on carbon emissions to bowing to dictators and appeasing our enemies abroad. Of course he wants Americans to stop thinking, to stop judging and to accept the state’s order on faith. If nothing else, it would make his job easier if being an American were a matter of faith.

The argument is complicated and certainly not self-evident. It’s a matter on which good people can disagree. I see in the various comment threads people I respect on both sides.

What would be worse for the rule of law in America, our government violating property rights of those who would build a mosque or giving the enemy in a time of war an enormous morale boost by seeing a mosque built where militant Islam scored its greatest victory?

This strikes me as the kind of argument one finds in a mixed economy. Our government is bad and getting worse. It intervenes now in so many areas that it seldom does anything significant that is limited to the scope envisioned by the writers of the Constitution. Good is packaged with bad, and sorting out what is fundamental or most important can be maddening.

Speaking for no one but myself, I believe the government should prevent the building of the mosque. I will be surprised if it does. A government that can’t bring itself to use the word terrorist is unlikely to do anything so politically incorrect. Our government would rather sacrifice our men on the battlefield than fight the war properly and risk the censure of world opinion. The lives of our soldiers and Marines are less important to the current administration than the preventing the sneers of sophisticated Europeans.

We must win the war against totalitarian Islam. To those who think we could never be defeated by a ragtag bunch living in caves, I would note that the Romans thought Rome would stand forever. Alaric and the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 a.d., shattering the confidence of the ancient world. Augustine wrote City of God in response, which you could call the constitution of the dark ages.

I know there is plenty of difference between modern America and ancient Rome. But what impact would the explosion of a nuclear device on Wall Street have on Western Civilization? It’s too depressing to consider for long.

The enemy has not struck us on American soil since 2001, but will it in five years? 10? 20?

In war it is important to convince the enemy that there is no hope of victory. Building a mosque at Ground Zero would  give the enemy hope.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

Doesn’t this sound like a leftist attempt to turn children into little collectivists? Selfish individuals, you see, find friends they value. But modern education since Dewey seeks to socialize children. Don’t be “possessive” about friends, just relax and be friends with everyone.

Who know? Maybe American educators will succeed where the Russians failed in creating homo sovieticus.

Devastating our economy and making us economically uncompetitive is a feature, not a bug. The whole “global warming” scam has been about throttling the industrialized world, especially the US, by restricting use of energy. It was never really about saving the world climate, it was always about trying to bring about international equality. You could tell that because the Kyoto accord restricted use of energy by rich nations, but permitted poor ones to increase their use of energy.

It important to remember that the left’s goal is egalitarianism. To make us all equal requires destruction, not prosperity. Obama’s presidency is a radical departure from what we knew before. I think many Americans are afraid to see this truth in all its horror.

(I’m sorry that I have not been blogging much of late. I’ve been acting a lot. I just finished doing Bottom in Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Capulet in Romeo and Juliet and the Ghost and Claudius in Hamlet. Awesome roles! At the moment I’m doing another great role, Shylock in Merchant of Venice. How could I resist playing a guy who wants to cut a pound of flesh from a Christian? [Come on, now -- that was a joke.] I’m busy this summer, but I have not given up blogging, and I expect to get back to it later, especially when we get into election season. Oh, yeah — you know we’ll have plenty to say then.)

• “Plaintiffs’ assertion of a new ‘fundamental right’ to produce, obtain, and consume unpasteurized milk lacks any support in law.” [p. 4]

• “It is within HHS’s authority . . . to institute an intrastate ban [on unpasteurized milk] as well.” [p. 6]

• “Plaintiffs’ assertion of a new ‘fundamental right’ under substantive due process to produce, obtain, and consume unpasteurized milk lacks any support in law.” [p.17]

• “There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food.” [p. 25]

• “There is no ‘deeply rooted’ historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds.” [p. 26]

• “Plaintiffs’ assertion of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.” [p. 26]

• FDA’s brief goes on to state that “even if such a right did exist, it would not render FDA’s regulations unconstitutional because prohibiting the interstate sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk promotes bodily and physical health.” [p. 27]

• “There is no fundamental right to freedom of contract.” [p. 2 7]

This is the Food and Drug Administration, cavalierly tossing aside the entire concept of liberty and individual rights.  Not piecemeal, and not under cover of professed fealty to the principle even as they slit its throat… it’s as explicit as it gets.

The right of contract underlies the principles of free association — specifically, by asserting every individual’s right to set terms by which he will or will not associate with others.  The rest of us are free to accept or reject that person’s terms, and to propose our own.

This is easily recognizable as the basis of contract, but it goes deeper than that; in one form or another, all human relationships operate in this manner. The right to set one’s terms, to negotiate them and to accept or reject those of another, are the bedrock of freedom, and the essence of individual moral sovereignty.

This is the basic principle that was bludgeoned by the overreach of the Civil rights act — and here we reap the fruits of what was sown in 1964.

This legal brief just gainsays all of that as irrelevant — and to a level of brazenness that is truly disturbing. This isn’t yet another assault upon abstract principles that require explanations like the above: we are dealing with a blade to our esophagus that anyone can see.  Any idiot can grasp that  these fascists are taking over our food.

Notice how these passages are shot through with rationalizations and memes originating with both the Left and conservatism; as the two wings of anti-Americanism, they both bear culpability for creating this monster.  Let’s pick out a few of them in just the material quoted above:

The “finding a new fundamental right” locution comes straight from the same source as the “penumbras and emanations” attack on Griswold v. Connecticut: “strict constructionist” conservatives.

“unfettered access”… Mainstreamers sure do have a fetter fetish, don’t they?  “Unfettered” as a perjorative is a big ‘tell’ on the part of Leftists and conservatives alike.

“promotes bodily and physical health.”  That’s the “we know best/for your own good” premise.  Again — Leftists and conservatives alike are guilty of this one, though the Leftists get the lion’s share of late.

Last, but certainly not least, is that all the rights the FDA denies are covered by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments…  but that doesn’t concern the FDA at all, thanks to the work by the conservative/Leftist tag team, effectively reducing them to a dead letter.

As I sip my glass of raw milk tonight, I raise it in this hearty toast:

F the FDA.

(H/T Campaign for Liberty, via Billy Beck.)

Italicized Quotes are Cramer’s.

Especially in the South, state governments did not simply allow businesses to discriminate — they often required discrimination.
This is a key point that needs to be brought up over and over again: the main factor sustaining racism coming into the 1960′s, was government intervention.  By its nature, government discrimination flatly contradicts the principle of equality before the law, and in this respect, legal action was the proper (and overdue) solution (“states rights” be damned).

The real topic raised by Rand Paul, however, is racism on the part of private individuals.  That is the part of the CRA64 that advocates of liberty question, and for good reason.  Racism on the part of individuals is a cultural, not legal phenomenon — not unlike stupidity, or being left wing — and is a completely different beast.

In a free society, governments act by permission; the individual is sovereign, and acts by right.  The government may only act where positively given the privilege, by law; individuals may act as they choose *except* where forbidden by law (ideally, only where such action infringes upon the liberty of another.)

IMO no commentary that fails to acknowledge this key distinction in addressing Rand Paul’s comments is even on topic, let alone credible.

Would free markets have been enough to break this long history of governmental force in support of racism?

No.  The two are incommensurable; it is not the job of free markets to write laws.  That requires legislative action, based on free market, pro-individualist ideology.  That is what was needed, and long overdue — and notwithstanding its flaws, the CRA achieved this goal.

Free markets operate in the private domain, among individuals.  What they DO discourage is private, cultural racism, by various mechanisms, only one of which (“my money is just as green as the next guy’s”) is cited by Cramer.  It is not the only one, nor the most powerful.  Free market liberalism include the marketplace of ideas, in intellectual discourse and particularly in education.  These are the forces which drive culture — not laws (to the eternal chagrin of authoritarians everywhere).  It is this process which is impeded by government actions (e.g. in the form of socialized education, as well as the more obvious Jim Crow laws), both before and after the CRA — and has since been reversed by the Left.

And now we come to Cramer’s fatal weakness:  as sound as many of his points are, they remain undercut by the epistemological and moral pragmatism of the article’s conservative author:

On the one hand, there is a very persuasive theoretical argument that free markets will punish irrational discrimination.

Notwithstanding the evidence provided right there in the article that clearly establishes this “theory” as eminently practical and valid, Cramer cites its theoretical, “abstract” aspect as a disqualifier in and of itself.  This is the hallmark of the epistemological primitive who, not comprehending where ideas come from, automatically distrusts them — or takes them on faith — as his pre-existing biases (what conservatives term “prejudice”) — dictate.  As to where those come from, well, Cramer’s reference to Scriptural grounds for condeming racism is a big, if utterly predictable, clue.  Without religion, the is/ought dichotomy paralyzes conservatism in the face of normative claims.

…but I also know that the libertarian solution requires a population of rational actors prepared to look out for their own economic interests.  You let me know when you find a species that fits that model.

Humanity.  *tada*

Of course, Cramer is not referring to the Objectivist theory of free markets, but to a well-known, invalid theory of free markets which operates from the assumption of “a population of [100%] rational actors” (I add the 100% figure, as it’s a fundamental trait of the “rational actor” premise).

That is a basic assumption of a certain view of free markets, a highly rationalistic one which does not and cannot account for free will.   Cramer is freezing the abstraction, by citing an invalid theory to stand for *all* “abstract” theory, which he then regards as suspect in toto.

Put this together with his carefully sloppy conflation of the legal versus the moral aspects of racism, and where do you think Cramer ends up?

In the same sin bin where all pragmatists end up:

Sensible libertarians acknowledge that a free market is not enough to end all racial discrimination — and that a certain amount of it is the price we pay for living in a free society.  This is a fine argument to make as an abstract principle – but it isn’t a path to political victory.

…. dismissing moral principle in favor of  range-of-the-moment political expediency, of course.  Never mind the morality, he just wants his side in power.

How like a Leftist that is.

(Minor edit I: changed “break” to “discourage” in “What free markets DO break is private, cultural racism”.  Markets do not fix stupid, they only punish it.)

(Minor edit 2: changed “conservatives” to “Conservatism” in “paralyzes conservatives in the face of normative claims”, to reflect the fact that individual conservatives can and do stray from conservatism from time to time — much more than individual Leftists do, to conservatives’ credit.  See Stephen Green, for example.)