In a region in Florida where a newspaper for which I write columns is published we can witness a rather direct confrontation between some citizens and the nanny state. The case reportedly involves the “owners of two local escort services — Destin’s Angels and Florida Dream Girls—[who] are facing possible prison time on charges they used escorting as a front for other crimes,” the State Attorney’s Office says. “These escort agencies were fronts for prostitution,” Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Michele Nicholson told reporters. Story here.

The details are not important here, although matters are complicated by the fact that in addition to the escort services being offered, a raid on some of the establishments also yielded illegal drugs. But even that is beside the point since the drugs were not injuring anyone apart perhaps from those who used them. So the bottom line is that the local authorities were flexing their muscles by going after a bunch of criminals without any victims.Of course this kind of case is legion in America and has been for decades. The supposed leader of the free world, to which people come from all corners of the globe to escape oppression and harassment, is itself, in fact, engaged in plenty of oppression and harassment. America’s crime rate is embarrassingly high precisely because its criminals include thousands and thousands of men and women who have done nothing more vile than to sell, buy, and consume substances that are no more dangerous than ordinary alcohol and have engaged in sexual liaisons that leave a lot to be desired from the point of view of romance and family values.

OK, it should really not be argued that prostitution is nice or that people ought to enjoy themselves by means of drug abuse. What is worth pointing out, however, is how utterly sad it is that our lawmakers and law enforcers place so little trust in citizens who are facing the temptation to do such things and who think they have the moral authority to interfere.

Let’s face it—there are always temptations awaiting us all to get involved in immoral, wrongheaded, imprudent, self-destructive or salacious undertakings. But in a free society people are expected to deal with these without some dictator, tyrant or even well-meaning nanny ordering them to desist.

Sure, there is a long tradition in most places around the globe to ban acting on such temptations, to lock up those who provide the temptation and those who yield to it. This is because, sadly, too many people throughout human history haven’t become convinced that personal responsibility is better than paternalism when it comes to dealing with adult human beings.

The plain fact is, however, that in a truly free country resistance to temptation would come from the individual, his or her family, friends, service organizations, churches, etc., not the law (the task of which is to secure our rights, not to run our lives). That even Americans can dispute this just shows how far we all are from fulfilling the true meaning of the revolution that created their country, one that rests on the idea that everyone has the unalienable rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, among others. A serious appreciation for what that means would inform us that however morally objectionable some conduct is, free men and women may not be stopped from engaging in it other than by advice, urging, ostracism and other peaceful means. Only if conduct violates rights, may it rise to the level of a crime!

Yes, this is not the greatest incursion on our liberties we find in our country but it is nonetheless one that needs to be stopped. And if it cannot be stopped because of the stubbornness of all those who just have to meddle in other people’s lives by means of coercive laws and regulations, at least some of us need to point out just how contrary to the sprit and letter of freedom such policies are. Then, perhaps, after the full implication of the principles of freedom become more widely appreciated, public opinion and policies may develop that do not treat people as wards of government, infants in need of nannies to run their lives.

In other words, then, perhaps, freedom will truly reign.

Well, the grouches didn’t ruin it for us, did they? You get it from all sides around this time of the year—”Xmas has become too commercial, too materialistic, lost its spirituality, blah, blah, blah.” At the same time,of course, we also hear a lot of people urging us to be generous, give of ourselves, give to those who are in need, etc.
As the old sage Aristotle taught, however, there is no way to be generous unless one owns stuff, unless one refuses to do what governments like to do, namely first steal from people and then turn a bit of it over to some other people. Not a pretty picture! So in order to be generous, to give of ourselves, first we must go out and buy or otherwise honestly obtain things. That’s where shopping comes in. And not only does shopping provide us with what we can purchase and then give away out of our generosity but it provides those from whom we do the shopping with enough wealth to enable them to be generous and to give of themselves. Quite the
pretty merry-go-round, don’t you think?

So what’s supposed to be so bad about all this? Clearly it is very satisfying to find just the right gift for those whom we wish to benefit, people we love or like a lot. We need to learn a bit about them, we need to know what it is that will please them. Each time of gift-giving faces us with the challenge of finding something that will in fact please the recipient of our gifts. And the reward is the joy in their voices and eyes when they open a thoughtful gift. My own children are masters of this craft, having for years been very attentive to what it is that pleases me and coming up with truly apt presents ones that not only please me but prompt me to see them in a renewed light, as rather ingenious gift finders.

Commerce is not a necessary evil sideshow here but of the essence, what with the market place’s enormous variety of offerings so all the millions of diverse needs and wants can in principle be satisfied (provided we do put in some care about what we set out to find for those to whom we give gifts). But of course the market-haters don’t care about this. They jump at the chance of besmirching markets even as they are a vital, necessary part of generous giving and receiving. Even those who do not give a hoot about Christmas, who ordinarily scoff at religious holidays, will exploit the opportunity to belittle the way the holiday is in part being celebrated, namely, through the exchange of gifts that commerce facilitates so well.

Who can deny that anything can be corrupted, and there are those who look upon the whole thing in a way that renders it but some routine undertaking, even a chore. But that’s not the way to judge the occasion, by how the lazy people carry on about it. Those who give gifts from mere habit, put no mind to the task, write cards to a list on which are names they cannot even recall. However, to focus on such folks is to reveal one’s basic cynicism. They bring their own misery upon themselves and need not be bothered with, I believe

I do not think it is an accident that so many major religious have managed to locate some big holidays around Xmas time. I see this as motivated mainly from the desire to celebrate together, to take part in a common feeling that has extended over billions across the world, the feeling that generosity toward those for whom we care is wonderful and it is also wonderful to know how many other human beings recognize this fact. That there are commercial elements to it, that generate the ability of more and more people to take part in the celebration and joy, that’s all to the good.

So, go away you nay-sayers who want to ruin it for the rest of us by working so hard to induce guilt in us all with all this finger wagging about our commercialism and materialism. There is nothing at all wrong with giving and obtaining material goods, generating all this giving and getting among our family and friends, provided these goods are thoughtfully chosen and bring their providers and recipients pleasure. Moreover, if you think but for a moment you will realize that all those material goods have, in fact, a great deal of human spirit giving them a great variety of shapes and forms, so the fact of their being “material” hardly comes to mind. All those gifts are not only designed with intelligence and ingenuity but come from vital and often profound feelings people have for one another.

The more the merrier—and let’s also celebrate the commercial element that makes it all possible.

The exact date escapes my memory but many will know it. Ludwig von Mises was to be the featured scholar at the Future of Freedom Conference at Long Beach State University. He would be introduced by Dirk Pearson, then going by the name Sky Deorious or something.

The way I got to meet von Mises is that I came to be the designated driver to pick him up at, I believe, the Long Beach Airport. During the time walking from the plane to my car, I had a chance to chat with him briefly.

What I recall from this was notable for me, though perhaps not unusual. For one, we spoke in German, a language I knew since childhood—Hungarian and German were both spoken in my mother’s home and I was raised bilingual. Von Mises seemed rather delighted with the fact that I spoke German and thus he spoke rather freely. I had mentioned to him that I was born and lived in my early years in Budapest, Hungary, and this, too, seemed to energize him a bit. He told me that he remembered when Franz Josef was emperor of the Austro-Hungary, the last few years of the empire, if I recall right him pointing this out to me. And he added, most memorably, that there was a period of significant liberalism under this monarchy, something he found important to mention and recalled with a measure of nostalgia.

The conversation was brief but very memorable for me. We drove to Long Beach State University (now called California State University at Long Beach), where von Mises would deliver, while sitting next to a little table, a very memorable speech on the nature of money. I believe that speech went down in history as an important one.

But for me what was important is that I had my own private minutes with Ludwig von Mises, the great leader of the Austrian School of economics, minutes during which we spoke about something remotely but still significantly uniting us in a personal, not scholarly, way.

Alexis de Tocqueville, born 200 years ago in Paris, traveled in America and wrote about the country in his famous book, Democracy in America. He is widely recognized as a most astute observer of American democracy. It is worth considering one of his points at this particular time because it seems to have been overly pessimistic. He wrote that,

… As each class gradually approaches others and mingles with them [in a free, democratic society], its members become undifferentiated and lose their class identity for each other. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it.

As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellows, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. (Democracy in America, vol. 2 [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945], pages 98-99.)

Was de Tocqueville right? Do citizens of a democracy—by which he meant a free society in which individualism is much prized—fail to develop public spiritedness? Do they see themselves as lacking any responsibility toward others in their community?

It seems this is not so and de Tocqueville was mistaken. His mistake can be seen in just how readily so many Americans rose to help out those who were the causalities, way on the other side of the globe, of last year’s tsunami; he is once again proven wrong by how eagerly Americans seem to wish to help those left in ruin by Katrina.

But why did de Tocqueville make his mistake?

Many like him, who came from an “aristocratic” background—actually, a background of en entrenched, not earned, aristocracy—held a pessimistic view of human nature, especially when it comes to those who aren’t members of their class. This has to do with their widely held belief that at the core human beings are sinful and anti-social, so much so that they need to be nudged along by the wellborn to cultivate any public concerns.

If one identifies “public life” with government, then, yes, many people in a free and democratic country do not show public spiritedness. But is that identification correct? Can one express one’s interest in one’s fellows in a society only via politics?

Americans have proven over and over again that they are generous, sometimes to a fault, especially in times of crises when most of those who suffer evidently do not deserve it. In the main, Americans do not take kindly to indiscriminate welfare-statism but there is evidence from way back in the country’s history that natural disasters are met with alertness and kindness, not xenophobia, as de Tocqueville had feared.

This is probably because in a largely free society it is clear to many people that whether others will be helped in their need is not something to be left to their government—whose job, after all, is “to secure our rights”—but is, instead, a task to be taken up voluntarily, of one’s own initiative.

Such “public” spiritedness is, in fact, a more hopeful approach to coping in times of crisis then is marshaling the coercive forces of the state. It comes from the widespread realization among largely self-reliant people that human beings share many risks in life and in a civilized society they must abstain from resorting to the force of law to cope with such risks. Instead, they need to lend their hand at such times, from their knowledge that that is indeed the most promising way to recover from disasters.

A free market, capitalist, exchange, political, economic system is far more environmentally friendly than any statist system, including the welfare state, socialism (whether democratic or centrally planned), or fascism. To demonstrate this, I engage in some conjectural history, that is, to imagine how the world might be different had government never intervened to protect the environment but rather left all matters to property owners to sort out. FULL ARTICLE

The US Supreme Court ruled, on Monday, May 23rd, 2005, that to compel people to support its propaganda with which they disagree does not violate the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the one about everyone having the right to freedom of speech. Yes, the court acknowledge, no one may be coerced into funding some private party’s advertisements or related speech. But when the government or some part of it decides it will proselytize for something, it can make us all fund it.
Justice Scalia, writing for the majority in the 6 to 3 decision, explained: “Compelled funding of government speech does not alone raise First Amendment concerns.” He added: “Citizens may challenge compelled support of private speech, but have no First Amendment right not to fund government speech.”

Of course, since government has come to be legally authorized by courts after courts to take money from people for whatever the government’s agents want to fund, why would it not then extend this same legal authority to fund propaganda? After all, government supports National Public Radio, PBS, Voice of America and umpteen public service messages, many of them contrary to what millions of American citizens want supported. And, of course, thousands of government projects are funded with which millions of Americans disagree.

In short, this is nothing very new. But it is a case that makes it very clear and unambiguous that we aren’t free to spend our resources for our purposes and that government may rob us to fund theirs. Why? Well, the theory is, the government is us. Once the election is over, the administration and its hooligans may all spend away at their hearts’ content since this isn’t a free country but a tyranny of the majority.

In a free country, in contrast, there would be nothing aside the protection of our individual rights that government would be authorized to have us all fund. That, as the US Declaration stated with no ambiguity at all, is why governments are instituted among us: “To secure these rights (those listed in the Declaration, ones we all have and need protected).” Because that is the only true public interest, the legal authorities of a free society would be justified in spending funds on advancing it. That is what we all would be paying the government to do, freely, by being citizens of the country.

Supporting various special interest projects, such as promoting beef eating, has absolutely no relationship to such a bona fide, genuine public interest. But, because the original idea of what government is supposed to do has been totally corrupted by now, and because one of the main force of this corruption has been the US Supreme Court, it is hardly any wonder why this same court reaffirmed government’s legal authority to loot us all of our resources so as to promote yet another pet project the government’s agents have cooked up.

As reported in The New York Times, “Justice Scalia’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Clarence Thomas and Stephen G. Breyer,” while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concurred separately, saying that she viewed the assessments in all the marketing cases as ‘permissible economic regulation’.” Notice how chummy all these otherwise quarrelling justice have become when it concerns government spending the resources of the citizenry on matters having absolutely nothing to do with the true public interest but with some cockamamie project of its hirelings. Of course, they themselves are part of this gang, so why would you expect it otherwise?

As an aside, this bit about how such spending amounts to “permissible economic regulation” is poppycock. The commerce clause, of Article 1, Section 8, which empowers Congress “to regulate commerce … among the several states” meant nothing like this mess of government intervention the court has been rationalizing for decades now. It meant “to regularize commerce,” which had been irregular because the different colonies didn’t share a common free market. The whole point was only to eliminate barriers to the free flow of commerce, not to empower Congress to act like some fascist or socialist economic planning agency.

Alas, if there were any integrity left to the US Supreme Court, we could perhaps hope for some liberty in our future from that corner but that hope has been squelched a long time ago.

The same people who regret cell phones and blogs have warned about every improvement in people’s lives, beginning with the hand-held mirror. Contrary to the warning about the grave effects of blogs and cell phones, good and evil are not embedded in objects themselves. It all depends on how we use them. Cell phones are popular because they are useful for people in their daily lives. That seems like a good enough reason to recommend them. The same is true of blogs. Technology improves our lives which is why it succeeds in the marketplace. What’s to regret? [Full Article]

Dear President Harter:

As a teacher of business ethics at Chapman University, I am truly revolted at the idea that Professor Hans Hoppe’s generalizations, which simply serve as illustrations of statistically valid economic principles as applying to the behavior of different people with different beliefs and attitudes, should serve as grounds for any kind of academic reprimand. I, as a Hungarian born American, often make references to how Hungarians tend to behave in order to illustrate various points, and these generalizations are perfectly proper for their purposes. (For example, Hungarians will, in the main, chase a street car to catch it even at great risk, whereas Danish people will immediately look for the next car, once one has begun to move away from the station.) That people without children tend to save less avidly than those with children is a simple generalization that no rational person can dispute. Homosexuals tend not to have children as frequently as heterosexuals, so the generalization applies to them.
I, who am a vocal supporter of gay marriages and other civil liberties, urge you to stop harassing Professor Hoppe.

Sincerely,

Tibor R. Machan

Obesity may be an individual problem. It may be a problem that afflicts many individuals. Or maybe it is not a problem at all, since it is perfectly consistent with the idea of freedom that people are entitled to eat well, get fat, and die young. But one thing we can know for sure: obesity is not a social problem in the sense that this phrase is usually employed. [Full Article]

Readers might be interested in my new Working Paper: “Two Philosophers Skeptical of Liberty”. I discuss the views of Sen and Nussbaum.

Also, from my new book (A Man Without a Hobby, Hamilton, 2004), I offer this passage that discusses Austrian Economics and the Mises Institute:

I do have reservations about some aspects of Austrianism. I do not think that praxeology is a strictly successful conception of human action, mainly because of what I take to be its debts to Immanuel Kant’s a priori method of reasoning about the world. More particularly, I am concerned about the idea, advanced by von Mises—one that does not jibe easily with his endorsement of entrepreneurship—that human action is driven by “uneasiness.”

Such an approach seems to imply a measure of determinism I cannot happily associate with human life. Still, I was able to make hay out of the view that action is motivated by felt dissatisfaction in a 1988 paper, “A Neglected Argument Against Theism,” for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

I am perhaps the only academic philosopher who has published in a journal of philosophy on the theological ideas of Ludwig von Mises. My article reported that, according to Mises, God could not have created the world since no perfect being would have any reason for acting, having no need to improve on itself at all. “An acting being is discontented and therefore not almighty,” Mises wrote. “If he were contented, he would not act, and if he were almighty, he would have long since radically removed his discontent. For an all-powerful being there is no pressure to choose between various states of uneasiness….The paradoxes are insoluble.”

Such was his praxeological disproof of the existence of God (an omnipotent God, anyway) as proffered in the early pages of Human Action. Perhaps not the most famous argument in this area but a notable one nonetheless.

Another sticking point pertains to the view held by both the neoclassicists and the Misesians that we always act rationally, a claim that doesn’t mesh well with my own philosophical conclusions. (Mises actually says this in one place but takes it back at another.) But perhaps my most important reservations have to do with the subjective theory of value. As I eventually came to understand it, this theory isn’t quite the same as ethical subjectivism in the field of philosophy, although students of Austrian economics often speak as if it were.

For example, in an issue of Austrian Economics Newsletter, Don Balente says that the Austrian approach “is most distinct from mainstream economics in its thorough emphasis on the individual decision maker as the focus of scientific analysis. Yet with the values and motives of individuals being entirely subjective it is impossible for an analyst to pass judgment on the optimality of the individual’s chosen actions.”

This is surely tantamount to ethical or moral subjectivism that if consistently applied would, in my view, thoroughly undermine the decidedly normative claims in favor of individual liberty, as well as any other moral judgments. My 1990 book, Capitalism and Individualism: Reframing the Argument for the Free Society, was an attempt to reconcile natural-law ethics and free-market economics. Following leads from Ayn Rand, Eric Mack and others, I conceived of a less confusing way to understand values than what seemed to be the Austrian one—a resolution that would work both for economists and for philosophers who believe in the possibility of objective value judgments.

My solution hinged on the nature of individual—what I learned was being called agent-relative—values. This position holds that when people try to figure out what is right for them (what to wear, what to aim for in life, how to deal with others, etc.), they can come up with correct or incorrect answers and many possibilities in between. Not just anything will do; i.e., it is not possible for a person, as subject, to create the right answer for himself ex nihilo. The answer must be discovered in relation to our human individuality and the world. So, yes, for different individuals, the right answers might vary greatly—but there are still right and wrong answers for any particular individual in a particular situation.

It is a bit like medicine: some general principles must be observed by everyone, but specific therapies and cures may vary in their utility from person to person, and sometimes drastically so. Values need to “fit” the person for whom they are of value. This is completely consistent with the fact that there are facts: objectively knowable aspects of reality that must be taken into account in each case.

I suspect that the subjective theory is motivated in part by the seemingly reasonable assumption that if what’s right for someone to do is entirely subjective, others cannot know what that right thing is—and therefore cannot pretend to be competent to force them to do that right thing. Subjectivism thus appears to be a bulwark against authoritarianism and tyranny.

Alas, if no one can judge what is right, no one can judge what is wrong, either! No one can say that it is wrong to push other people around without any justification! From a subjectivist stance nothing whatever can be said against it. All a person could say is, “Well, I subjectively find your brutalizing of that innocent person to be appalling, but of course, on your own subjective values it may be perfectly acceptable.” It’s the subject’s call, so to speak. I once debated this question with Milton Friedman, who said that if anyone could know what is right, that would authorize him to coerce others to follow suit. Some Popperian and existentialist classical liberals also claim this.

I believe the answer is that in order to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, one must do it voluntarily. No moral credit can come to someone who is coerced into doing the right thing, nor blame to someone who is coerced to do what is wrong. As Kant put it, “ ‘Ought’ implies ‘can.’ “ But even aside from the question of moral credit or blame, there is the question of whether values are even truly attainable when they are imposed from without by force. Rand argued that an “attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes.”

If you force someone to marry the “right” woman, will he be as happy with that woman as he would have had he chosen her on his own? If you force someone to pursue the “right” career against his wishes, will he pursue it with the same gusto and dedication had he chosen it on his own? Such “best” outcomes are possible only if the original act of coercion is followed by volun-tary acceptance and choosing of the alleged good, as opposed to bitter and resentful submission. If the person is never free to choose “the good” at any point—good by his own judgment and choice—but has it constantly thrust upon him, his moral and reasoning capacity is essentially ripped away. Yet for human beings this capacity is the means of survival and flourishing.

It isn’t that what is good for another person cannot be known, at least sometimes. It’s that imposing it by force can easily cause harm to the person being forced—precisely because the actual re-quirements of human well-being are thereby treated as irrelevant. Coercion is destructive because it violates our ability to be moral, choosing, rational agents—the very ability that enables us to attain values to begin with.

Compelling others to do one’s bidding thus makes sense only when one is dealing with persons who have not yet achieved much capacity for moral choice—for example, very young children. And even in the case of children, it’s best to foster their independent decision-making as much as possible so that they may develop the moral skills needed to flourish as self-responsible adults.

On this view, it is certainly possible to justify freedom for individual decision-making even if an outsider might reasonably judge that such-and-such decision (e.g., being drunk all the time) is wrong, while another (e.g., showing up on time for a job interview at a company you want to work for) is right. An individualism grounded in a theory of objective values thus supplies us with most of what we need to fend of authoritarianism, whereas the theory of subjective values can all too easily pave the way for the bad guys.

Some might ask: What about those who kill or assault other persons? Are we supposed to refrain from stopping such things on the grounds that if we intrude, we are thwarting the free choice of the culprits? But opposing such conduct is justified not because the conduct is wrong (or not solely because it is wrong) but because it violates the rights of others, and because the victims or their agents are justified in putting up a defense.

Moreover, violations of rights are not wrong in the same way that failure to do the morally right thing is wrong. To violate rights is to undermine the preconditions of choosing to act morally at all within a human community. They are, to use the term of Doug Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl, meta-normatively wrong. While all this seems reasonable enough to me, the writing of Capitalism and Individualism landed me in trouble with one of the Mises Institute’s favorite people, Professor Leland Yeager.

In a review for Liberty magazine he concluded that the book was, in fact, a threat to human liberty. Alas, one cannot please everyone, but that was a bit harsh—and fortunately, it is an assessment that seems to be unique among libertarians who have considered my work. (The same work elicited a very favorable review from David Gordon, not known for critical charity, in the Mises Review.)

That blip aside, my reflections have often been welcome among scholars of the Institute; and so I find myself returning again and again to the Scholars Conferences to present and test the ideas I have found intellectually compelling. These conferences have been the setting of some of my most fruitful encounters with people also interested in topics of concern to me, and I am forever thankful to the Mises Institute for making it possible…..

Most of the “laws” we follow day to day are not enforced by government at all, writes Tibor Machan. These are the rules that govern our workplaces, the bylaws of our clubs and associations and subdivisions, the standards enforced by the places we shop and the places we eat. What, then, do classical liberals mean when they speak of the rule of law? [Full article]

The famous yet not sufficiently rewarded economist—leader of the Austrian School to which Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek belonged—Ludwig von Mises once noted that “Every advance first comes into being as the luxury of a few rich people, only to become, after a time, the indispensable necessity taken for granted by everyone. Luxury consumption provides industry with the stimulus to discover and introduce new things.”

I noticed, when I recently watched the original Sabrina—with Humphrey Bogart, William Holden and, of course, the incomparable Audrey Hepburn—that the rich and nice guy played by Bogart had a car phone in his chauffeur driven limo. That was back in the mid-60s. Today what Mises noted is nearly absolutely true: Car phones have become an indispensable necessity for everyone. The same with warm water, the automobile itself, nice vacations, computers, television sets—you name it and at first the rich alone would have it but in time nearly all of us do, at least in the relatively free market economy such as that of the USA.

Ah, but I will be told with righteous indignation, that this is just what is wrong with free market capitalism—it requires that there be some kind of incentive for people to create neat stuff. How sad, even degrading that is: “What should in fact happen, and would in a really good society, is that all these ambitions would come from everyone’s love for everyone else. Shame on anyone who is willing to settle for the idea that obtaining what one wants is a strong motivation for doing something others want.”

The critic is a silly and dangerous dreamer, actually. Adam Smith had the answer to this good and hard:

In civilized society [a human being] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons….Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them….

The so called ideal—for me a nightmare, actually—of us all loving everyone equally assumes that we could in fact have everyone in the world as our friend and relative. Can you imagine? Everyone who dies would deserve our deepest sorrow and extended mourning, while everyone who is born would deserve our most sublime delight and celebration, all at once. Given the multitudes in each group, how on earth could this happen?

Intimacy for human beings must of necessity remain selective and small in numbers. Otherwise shallowness sets in. With a communist society one aims for the impossible and that is why such societies must degenerate into something perverse, unnatural, anti-human.

Yet, we hear endless complaints from intellectuals and their followers about how evil it its to love oneself and those close to one—it’s selfish, greedy, mean. Unlike some economists, I do not deny that people can try to be and even succeed at being selfless, in certain regions of their lives, although even here generosity, different from altruism, is better, even more helpful. But acting so as to further one’s well being, to thrive in life, is a good thing and capitalism rests largely on that idea.

But what about all that damage that capitalism has caused all over the world, including in the history of the USA, damage from which countries recovered with the aid of extensive government intervention, especially Franklin Delaware Roosevelt’s New Deal in America? That is exactly what erudite University of Chicago legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein maintains in this The Second Bill of Rights, FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and why We Need it More than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

Well, I am not going to attempt to refute such works—my only reply here is that freedom is generally much better for people than regimentation. For the details, though, one should consult a very fine book by Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: Crown Forum, 2004).

So, then, please heed the notion that the “perfect” is the enemy of the good—the pursuit of the dream of a society wherein everyone loves everyone else defeats the real possibility for a just, free, and prosperous community.

That venerable magazine, Publishers Weekly, ran a review of my book, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). It is a mean-minded short little thing that looks to me was meant to bury the book, especially since Amazon.com published it in full next to where the work is described.Here is what Publishes Weekly said:

“This cranky manifesto opposes the excesses of animal-rights ideologues with an equally doctrinaire libertarianism. Countering animal-rights stalwarts like Tom Regan and Peter Singer, philosophy professor Machan contends that, as the only beings with the capacity for moral choice, only humans can have rights; ‘wondrous humanity’ should therefore stop worrying about ‘speciesism’ and enjoy guilt-free dominion. Machan scores some points on the concept of animal rights (what framework, he wonders, can encompass the rights of both zebras and the lions who feed on them?), but the link to his laissez-faire politics is murky, and his ‘private property rights approach to managing environmental problems’ seems highly inadequate. Shrugging that he is ‘not sure’ about anti-cruelty laws, he hardly mentions industrial livestock rearing or the other institutionalized abuses of animals that have fueled the animal-rights movement. Larger problems like pollution and ecological degradation are a ‘tragedy of the commons’ best handled by privatization of the public realm and perhaps lots of litigation; private landowners, he assumes, will be faithful stewards of their earth, while polluters will answer in court to those whose property or bodies have been damaged by them. Since Machan doesn’t explain how to privatize the upper atmosphere, he allows that there may be a problem with ozone depletion, but he’s satisfied to wait for more research. In Machan’s exuberant call for individuals to do as they please with their animals, their land and their SUVs, the rights of property seem to overshadow those of humans, let alone animals.”

OK, so what is cranky about the book? Beats me—that is just a bit of gratuitous slam, unrelated to the work itself. Indeed, the book is written in a charitable tone as it addresses animal rights-liberation activists and environmentalists. Yes, it is critical but hardly “irritable, grouchy, touchy, cross, peevish, or cantankerous.”

Is the book “doctrinaire” libertarian? If by this we are to understand that the book contains a principled position favoring individual rights as the central guide to public policy, especially when it comes to the environment, yes, that’s so. Why is that “doctrinaire”?

My dictionary states this means “determined to use a particular theory or method and refusing to accept that there might be a better approach.” By that interpretation what I write in the book is anything but doctrinaire since I never, ever deny that “there might be a better approach” to libertarianism. Of course there might be—the real question is, of course, whether there is. And I do not believe there is. But neither does the reviewer believe there is a “better approach” to reviewing my book, so it seems, then, that the review is doctrinaire—and so must be anything anyone ever says about anything.

The silliest part of this “review” comes where we are told that “In Machan’s exuberant call for individuals to do as they please with their animals, their land and their SUVs, the rights of property seem to overshadow those of humans, let alone animals.” First, I do not “call for individuals to do as they please with their animals,” quite the contrary—I oppose wanton cruelty to animals and state that I would even trespass to prevent someone from practicing such cruelty. Second, there is no such thing as “the rights of property.” Property has no rights, individual human beings do. Yes, the property rights of people should “overshadow”—meaning trump—public policies that violate them, and nothing in the review suggests there is anything amiss with that idea.

Ordinarily one should reply to reviews in a scholarly forum, but what PW and Amazon.com offer is mainly an attack without any chance of anyone else saying anything else about the book on a very influential site. So, I am making a small effort to counter the likely impact and hope readers will look at the work rather than take such a slapdash “review” to heart.