Politics – Dean Cook

The Biden Administration’s “Friendly Censorship”

Murthy v. Missouri is a case that was recently argued before the United States Supreme Court. It involves the allegation that the Biden administration in 2021 coerced social media companies such as Facebook into removing content that concerned COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccine, election integrity, and other matters considered important to the Biden Administration.

The factual findings of the trial court in the case are disturbing, if true:

“For the last few years—at least since the 2020 presidential transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officials—hailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agencies—urged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials. That went on through the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 congressional election, and continues to this day. “ (5^th Circuit Opinion, Case: 23-30445, Document: 00516889176 , Date Filed: 09/08/2023, Pg. 2) (https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca5/23-30445/23-30445-2023-09-08.html)

The Biden Administration and its defenders seem to have responded to these allegations by saying that the factual findings of the trial court are simply mistaken. They claim that the trial court took things out of context, or just outright misrepresented facts:

“While the legal questions presented are legitimate, a substantial amount of the underlying evidence now before the Court in this case is problematic or factually incorrect. Snippets of various communications between the government, social media executives, and other parties appear to be stitched together – nay, manufactured – more to support a culture war conspiracy theory than to create a credible factual record” (https://www.justsecurity.org/93487/a-conspiracy-theory-goes-to-the-supreme-court-how-did-murthy-v-missouri-get-this-far/)

The government says it was merely engaging in its own speech to combat what it viewed as “bad speech”, and that it did not coerce social media companies into taking down social media posts it disagreed with:

“Brian Fletcher, the principal deputy solicitor general of the United States, argued that the government was legally using its bully pulpit to protect the American public.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/18/supreme-court-social-media-biden-missouri/)

Whether the Biden administration was merely engaged in its own speech or whether it intentionally used the threat of force to coerce social media companies into censoring the posts of their users will be determined through the court process.

Even if the government was simply using its own speech to counter what it viewed as “bad speech”, without any intentional threat of coercion, given the reach of government when it comes to regulating the economy, I think companies and businessmen must, of necessity, take into account what a President and his administration say.

In 1962, Ayn Rand wrote an article titled “Have Gun, Will Nudge” in which she discussed the efforts of then head of the FCC, Newton N. Minow, to “encourage” broadcasters to air certain types of “educational programs”. She noted that the arbitrary power held by the FCC in the form of its licensing of broadcasters meant that it didn’t have to engage in explicit censorship. Broadcasters would attempt to discern through their contacts and back-channels with Washington what the FCC officials would like to see on the airwaves, and then provide it:

“No, a federal commissioner may never utter a single word for or against any program. But what do you suppose will happen if and when, with or without his knowledge, a third-assistant or a second cousin or just a nameless friend from Washington whispers to a television executive that the commissioner does not like producer X or does not approve of writer Y or takes a great interest in the career of starlet Z or is anxious to advance the cause of the United Nations?” (Ayn Rand, “Have Gun, Will Nudge” https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/regulations/pov-have-gun-will-nudge/ )

For the people running a television station, or, today, a social media company, not listening to what the President wants them to post or not post would be almost suicidal. The President has enormous power to bring any company to its knees through executive orders and arbitrary regulations. It doesn’t even matter if the President and his administration intends to engage in censorship. The massive and arbitrary power that the President, and the government in general, holds over any company through economic regulation means any broadcaster or social media company has to take into account what the government wants, just as a matter of self-preservation. If Facebook or Google believes that keeping up certain social media posts might have even a one percent chance of getting them slapped with an antitrust suit, the cost of keeping up the post just isn’t worth the benefits. That’s why true freedom of speech likely isn’t even possible today. As Ayn Rand noted:

“The right to life is the source of all rights — and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”(“Man’s Rights”, Ayn Rand https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/individual-rights/ )

A Comparison and Contrast of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard On Warfare

Ayn Rand on Warfare

As far as I can tell, Ayn Rand did not write much about when a nation has a right to use organized physical force, on a mass-level, against other nations or other armed groups.

Her essay, “The Roots of War” discusses how Statism is the fundamental source of war in modern times. In that essay, she does not explicitly deal with when, and to what extent, a free or semi-free nation may use its military force. She does make it clear that a free nation should have a military, and that sometimes it should be used:

“Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service-which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man’s right to his own life. There is no contradiction between the moral and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient army, as many military authorities have testified. A free country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a foreign aggressor. But not many men would volunteer for such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies, the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would not be possible.” (“The Roots of War”, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

Determining when an individual can use force in self-defense can be quite difficult by itself. It becomes even more complicated when the issue is “scaled up” to a nation-wide or world-wide level.

Since I cannot find anything from Rand’s explicit writings on the conditions under which a country can use military force, I want to start by looking at her writing on when an individual can use physical force.

One passage that I have found helpful in making the distinction between the use of physical force in an improper way verses the use of physical force in a moral manner comes from her essay “The Objectivist Ethics”. In that essay, she discusses what is the difference between the use of physical force “in retaliation” and the use of physical force as an “initiation”:

“The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand)

For Rand, whether force is “retaliatory”, which is moral, or an “initiation”, and therefore immoral, turns on her view of values, and who is entitled to those values. For Rand, a value is that which one acts to gain and or keep, with the ultimate value being “man’s life”:

“The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value- and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand)

So, one must hold “man’s life” as the standard, and the purpose of holding that standard for each individual man is his own life. Values are those things which one must have in order to live. Thanks to their rational faculty, human beings can create these values in much greater quantities than they would exist in nature. (For instance, agricultural technology creates much more food per acre of land than would typically be found growing in a similarly sized area of natural land.)

If each man holds his own life as his ethical purpose, then the values he creates, are for himself and for maintaining his own life. In the case of using physical force, whether that force takes the form of a punch, a bullet, or a bomb, it is an “initiation of physical force”, if one is attempting to obtain the values which others have created for their own sustenance. It is “retaliatory force” if one is merely attempting to keep what one has created for oneself.

Something that is not quite captured by the quote from Rand above is the case of someone not trying to gain the values of others, like a bank robber. Some people are simply trying to destroy the values of others, such as a terrorist who kills for some obscure political reason, or a “serial murderer”, who may kill not because they gain any particular value, in any rational sense, from it, but to satisfy some psychological craving. In that case, I think she would still consider this to be an initiation of physical force because they seek to deprive others of their values. So, I think you could expand the concept of an initiation of physical force to include both the use of physical force to gain the values of others, and also to destroy the values of others.

At any rate, Rand’s point is clear. It is not the physical act, the use of physical force, that makes something an “initiation of physical force” versus “retaliatory force”. The action itself may look the same, and the context in which it occurs will determine whether it is “initiation” or “retaliation”. For instance, you cannot merely see a man shoot another man and conclude with certainty that the man who fired the bullet has initiated physical force. You would need to know something about the conditions under which that occurred. For instance, if it was revealed that the person who was shot was wearing a vest of explosives under his jacket, and had just expressed an intention to go detonate it in a crowded movie theater, the shooter is quite probably acting in retaliation against an initiation of physical force. In that case, the man wearing the hidden explosive vest has taken affirmative steps to kill a large number of people by putting together the explosive vest, putting it on, walking towards the movie theater, and expressing an intent to use the bomb. He has initiated the use of physical force. (Although the act is not completed yet.) He has started the use of physical force, and that physical force is directed at the destruction of other people’s values, in this case, their very lives.

For Rand, a nation or a society is nothing but a number of individuals:

“A nation, like any other group, is only a number of individuals and can have no rights other than the rights of its individual citizens.” (“Collectivized ‘Rights’” Ayn Rand, http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-ideas/collectivized-rights.html )

Therefore, a nation and its military has no greater rights than the rights of its individual citizens. What would be an initiation of physical force for an individual would be an initiation for a nation. Similarly, retaliatory force for a nation is physical force that is not aimed at gaining the values of others or depriving others of their values, but at protecting the values of the nation’s citizens.

Murray Rothbard on Warfare

Murray Rothbard seems to hold similar views to those of Rand when it comes to the state as nothing but a collection of individuals.

Additionally, he would hold that all states, insofar as they hold the exclusive right to the use of retaliatory physical force in a given geographic area, are illegitimate, but I am not looking to address his advocacy of “anarcho-capitalism” here. I am instead considering his views on warfare, within the existing framework of nations, as he does in Chapter 25 of his book, The Ethics of Liberty.

For instance, early in Chapter 25 of his book, Rothbard says:

“To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, Jones has the right to repel him and try to catch him; but Jones has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal aggressor as Smith is.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190)

But, what if Smith deliberately hides in a crowd of people, and fires his gun at Jones? Can Jones fire back? Whose fault is it if Jones accidentally hits a bystander during the course of returning fire on Smith, when Smith deliberately used other people as cover? Rothbard does not address the issue.

Rothbard then “scales up” his individual scenario to a group of individuals:

“The same criteria hold if Smith and Jones each have men on his side, i.e. if ‘war’ breaks out between Smith and his henchmen and Jones and his bodyguards. If Smith and a group of henchmen aggress against Jones, and Jones and his bodyguards pursue the Smith gang to their lair, we may cheer Jones on in his endeavor; and we, and others in society interested in repelling aggression, may contribute financially or personally to Jones’s cause. But Jones and his men have no right, any more than does Smith, to aggress against anyone else in the course of their “just war”: to steal others’ property in order to finance their pursuit, to conscript others into their posse by use of violence, or to kill others in the course of their struggle to capture the Smith forces. If Jones and his men should do any of these things, they become criminals as fully as Smith, and they too become subject to whatever sanctions are meted out against criminality. In fact, if Smith’s crime was theft, and Jones should use conscription to catch him, or should kill innocent people in the pursuit, then Jones becomes more of a criminal than Smith, for such crimes against another person as enslavement and murder are surely far worse than theft.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190)

Rothbard never seems to want to address, in Chapter 25 of “The Ethics of Liberty”, to what degree, if at all, you can risk the lives of innocent people in defending yourself. If you cannot risk the lives of others at all, then there are very few cases where even clear-cut acts of self-defense are justified. A bullet could always go astray and hit an innocent bystander.

For Rothbard, exactly who has violated rights, if you are forced to defend yourself, shoot an attacker, and, for instance, the bullet goes through your attacker and hits someone behind him? Common law legal systems would likely limit culpability to what is ‘foreseeable’, or some other similar concept. This is the idea that whether you commit a rights violation has something to do with your intent, and/or what you could have expected to be the reasonable probable result of your actions. So, if a bullet goes through your attacker, makes a weird series of ricochets, and hits someone you didn’t even know was behind your attacker, you are probably going to be excused from any sort of legal culpability. (It should go, almost without saying, that nothing I say here should be construed as legal advice.)

My point is, your intentions, your state of mind, to some extent, matters when you use force. Why does your state of mind matter? I think Ayn Rand would say it’s because it points to your purpose in using force. If your purpose in using force is to protect your values, that is different from using force to destroy another person’s values, or to gain another person’s values:

“The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.” (The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

Accidentally shooting a bystander while defending yourself from a robber is not an attempt to obtain values. This is not to say that all such accidental shootings of bystanders should be completely excused by the legal system. Maybe some particularly reckless acts in self-defense should cause some level of criminal liability, but the level of culpability is probably not the same.

When you shoot a hold up man in self-defense, and accidentally shoot someone else, your level of culpability is lesser (although possibly not completely excused). Why? because you were not seeking ‘to gain a value’. You were seeking to protect a value. Your intentions when using force matter.

What does this all have to do with warfare? It gives us guidance on how to look at uses of force by certain countries. If a country is attempting to kill enemy soldiers and accidentally kills civilians in the process, this is not the same level of culpability as intentionally targeting civilians, because the country is not seeking to destroy values. Furthermore, it may even completely excuse the unintentional killing of civilians, in some circumstances.

Go back to the individual level for a moment. Imagine if a criminal shoots at you with a baby strapped to his chest. You have no ability to take cover, and you cannot safely run away without getting shot, so you shoot back and kill the baby in the process of shooting the robber. Have you violated the baby’s rights? I think the answer is very circumstantial, but I can see a set of circumstances where you would have no other choice. (It’s an extreme, ‘lifeboat scenario’, admittedly.) In that case, the fault lies with the person who strapped a baby to his chest and then tried to kill you, leaving you with no other choice but to die, or shoot back.

More fundamentally, how is the risk that you might hit an innocent bystander in an act of self-defense different from the possibility that, for instance, your car might suffer a mechanical breakdown while you’re driving it, go out of control, and hit a pedestrian? Both are actions aimed at enhancing or promoting your life. Both could have unintentional and even unforeseeable, deadly consequences for innocent third parties. I do not think that others have a right to be 100% risk-free from your actions. If that were the case, then things like airplanes would have to be illegal. It’s always possible an airplane will malfunction, fall from the sky, and kill a family in their home. Airline companies, to a certain extent, put us all at risk of death from crashing airplanes.

All other people have a right to is that you will not: (a) intentionally use force to deprive them of values, nor will you: (b) use force in such a way that it would be reasonably foreseeable that the force would deprive them of their values. (Examples of such unreasonable uses of force would be things such as: driving a car at 80 mph through a neighborhood street where children are about, target shooting with your gun in a field that children are playing in, etc.)

Expand the situation of the criminal using a baby strapped to his chest as a human shield to the national level. If an organization of terrorists hides behind civilians, and then fires rockets at your country, can your army shoot back with rockets? Again, it’s going to be very circumstantial. Sometimes, the army might be able to stop the attacks in some other way, such as an anti-missile system. But, sometimes, the army may have to fire missiles back, and, in the process, unintentionally kill civilians. In that case, the fault lies with the terrorists, not with the army. The terrorists are no different than the criminal who tries to murder you while using another person as a human shield. The responsibility for the death of any innocents lies with the terrorists. For Rand, I believe the initiation of physical force, the rights violation, lies with the person who used other people as cover while committing acts of violence.

Rothbard, on the other hand, does not seem to agree with this. For instance, he considers all nuclear weapons to be illegitimate:

“…a particularly libertarian reply is that while the bow and arrow, and even the rifle, can be pinpointed, if the will be there, against actual criminals, that modern nuclear weapons cannot. Here is a crucial difference in kind. Of course, the bow and arrow could be used for aggressive purposes, but it could also be pinpointed to use only against aggressors. Nuclear weapons, even ‘conventional’ aerial bombs, cannot be. These weapons are ipso facto engines of indiscriminate mass destruction. (The only exception would be the extremely rare case where a mass of people who were all criminals inhabited a vast geographical area.) We must, therefore, conclude that the use of nuclear or similar weapons, or the threat thereof, is a crime against humanity for which there can be no justification.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 190, emphasis added.)

First, it must be noted that this seems like a suicidal viewpoint. In a world where countries like China and Russia have nuclear weapons, to say nothing of North Korea and Iran, Rothbard’s apparent call for unilateral nuclear disarmament by freer Western nations would mean we’d be subject to nuclear annihilation at the whim of some dictator. But, more fundamentally, who has initiated physical force here? Is it the United States for threatening to obliterate North Korea should that totalitarian dictatorship attempt to harm our citizens, or is it the madmen (and women) in charge of that country? Does the United States gain a value in destroying North Korea’s ability to wage war against us, or does the United States merely preserve the values of its people -that is their lives, liberty and property?

(As an aside, I think Rothbard also forgets about a use of nuclear weapons that would not involve the death of innocent civilians. Imagine an island nation, in say, the East China Sea, that was being invaded by a much larger nation from the mainland. That invasion force would come in the form of a floating armada of ships. What if the island nation were to use nuclear weapons to obliterate the invasion force while it was still in the water? No civilians would be harmed, and the possession of nuclear weapons by that island nation would serve as a deterrent to invasion.)

Rothbard is also fairly explicit that all modern warfare is illegitimate:

“All State wars, therefore, involve increased aggression against the State’s own taxpayers, and almost all State wars (all, in modern warfare) involve the maximum aggression (murder) against the innocent civilians ruled by the enemy State.” (The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard, Chapter 25, Pg 193)

At root, I think the difference between Rothbard and Rand on the legitimacy of certain acts of warfare by freer nations comes down to Rothbard either misunderstanding, or explicitly rejecting, the fact that the distinction between an “initiation of physical force” and “retaliatory physical force” lies in what values are, and what ultimate purpose they serve. I think Rothbard desired to create a “libertarian” view of Rand’s non-initiation of physical force principle that is severed from Rand’s underlying view of values, and the standard of “man’s life”. I started reading Rothbard’s book, “The Ethics of Liberty” prior to October 7, 2023, but those events caused me to want to write something about his views on warfare in particular. In the future, I will turn back to a comparison and contrast of other features of his book to the ideas of Ayn Rand.

White Collar Crime and Race

On at least two occasions, I’ve heard the following reply to my pointing out that a disproportionate amount of the violent crimes, such as murder, robbery and rape are committed by non-whites in the United States. (In other words, even though blacks make up about 14 percent of the population, in some years, about half of all murder and non-negligent manslaughter is committed by someone categorized racially as black.)

The retort I’ve heard, at least twice, is: “White people commit more white-collar crimes.”

I didn’t consider this to be a particularly great response because: (a) I was only talking about violent crime, so this is dropping the context of the discussion, and (b) I don’t consider “white collar” crime to be a major problem. That’s just money. I do consider people loosing their lives to violence to be a bigger problem.

I had always assumed that this assertion was correct. Now, I am not so sure. Looking at FBI crime statistics broken down by race for 2011, we can see the number of people arrested by race for various crimes. This includes rows for “Forgery and counterfeiting”, “Fraud”, and “Embezzlement”. All three of these I would characterize as “white collar crimes”. For Fraud, the percentage of whites arrested for fraud is 66.5 percent, while the percentage of blacks arrested for fraud is 31.8 percent. The percentage break-downs for forgery and counterfeiting and embezzlement are about the same. Again, since blacks only make up about 14 percent of the population, the percentage of total crime that this racial group “should” be committing is about 14 percent. The fact that it is running around 31 percent, means its about twice as high as what it would be if each racial group was committing the amount of crime “representative” of its portion of the population. (At least, this is how I see it, but I am not great at math.)

Now, maybe there are studies that define “white collar crime” differently, such that it is limited to a particular subset of fraud and embezzlement, where whites do in fact commit more “white collar crime”. I have a hypothesis on this that I’d like to see tested. I suspect this is more about access than inclination of blacks versus whites to commit such crime. When we think “white collar crime”, we think of people who are in positions of financial, legal, or corporate responsibility at a business. White collar criminals are probably more educated and have worked their way up the corporate ladder sufficiently to be in a position to commit a white collar crime. For instance, an accountant at a corporation is in a position to “cook the books” and embezzle money more easily than, say, a janitor. What racial group are most accountants? They are mostly white, with Asians probably in a close second. In fact, according to this article, fewer than one percent of all CPA’s employed by firms are black. If you gave all people, of all races, the same amount of opportunity to commit “white collar crime”, what would the results be?

I also think it’s entirely possible that a black person who has worked hard enough to become sufficiently educated to be a CPA is actually less likely than a white CPA to commit a crime. I could see the black CPA’s reasoning as follows:

“I’ve seen all the criminals and thugs around me as I’ve been growing up. I didn’t work this hard and put up with all those criminals through the inner-city schools to be like them. So, I will always be very honest and law-abiding.”

In other words, the black, educated professional may have more desire to separate himself from the disproportionate levels of violent crime, and, apparently, fraud, forgery, and embezzlement, that are being committed by other black people. This would be an interesting thing to see an honest study about. But, since most academics in the social sciences have a Marxist-mindset, with a left-wing ideological axe to grind, we may never know.

Murder of Tech Company Founder Bob Lee in San Francisco

This is an awful story that is getting almost no coverage. He was stabbed in an apparent robbery, and died after bystanders refused to help him.

A beautiful city has become a playground for criminals and insane people to prey on the law-abiding. San Francisco, until recent court decisions, was a city you could not get a permit to carry a pistol in. Respectable people in the Bay Area should obtain a pistol permit and learn how to use a gun.

“Money Shot: The Pornhub Story” – Review

An interesting look into the modern pornography industry and how the Internet changed how pornography is distributed and monetized.

The documentary also spends time addressing the dangers around modern internet pornography, specifically nonconsensual sexually explicit imagery that is making its way onto sites like porn hub. (When I say ‘nonconsensual’, I mean people under 18, or people being forced to produce such material.)

These issues are looked at in a fair-minded manner. While I am 100% in favor of freedom of speech and the rights of consenting adults to produce and consume sexually explicit material, it is also clear to me that there needs to be policing and enforcement by government to effectively prevent nonconsensual sexual material from being presented for profit on sites such as porn hub.

https://www.netflix.com/title/81406118

City of Dallas Attempts to Shut Down Poker Clubs

This article discusses efforts by the City of Dallas to shut down poker clubs.

This seems like an opportunity for the city to take a ‘harm reduction’ approach to an issue.

Instead of shutting down poker clubs, focus on working with these businesses to ensure the bad secondary consequences associated with them, such as robberies and gun fights, are reduced. Ensure there is sufficient police and security patrolling the area, enforce laws against public intoxication for drunk gamblers, etc.

I doubt that people are worried about the poker. It’s the crime around it.

This is how alcohol is approached. We focus on stopping drunk driving, rather than trying to stop people from drinking alcohol, which is an impossible task.

Election Day Angst For An Advocate of Freedom

November 8, 2022 is election day in the United States, and I must again make decisions that are like choosing between death by drowning and death by falling. At the Federal level, this election is particularly difficult. There are two major factors that would motivate me to vote in mutually contradictory ways. My level of ambivalence is so high that I am paralyzed by indecision at this point.

The first important issue is the Roe v. Wade overrule by the US Supreme Court. This decision effectively eliminated any Federal court protection of abortion freedom, leaving the issue up to the Federal Congress, state legislatures, and state courts to decide. This decision does not just return the issue to the state level. If it did, I’d be far less concerned about it. Furthermore, the theocratic base of the Republican Party, that is the wing of the Republican party that is driven primarily by a religious dogma they want to impose on the rest of the nation by force, will not be satisfied with leaving the issue up to the states to decide.

Former Vice President Mike Pence speaks for the theocratic wing of the Republican party on this issue:

“‘I welcome any and all efforts to advance the cause of life in state capitals or in the nation’s capital,’ Pence said of federal legislation to institute a national abortion ban.” https://www.yahoo.com/video/mike-pence-says-passing-abortion-141514707.html

Mike Pence, and his fellow theocratic Republicans will not rest until there is a nationwide-abortion ban, enforced by the FBI and other Federal law enforcement authorities.

Senator Lindsey Grahm, another major player within the theocratic branch of the Republican party also does not want to leave the issue up to the states. He has already introduced a bill in Congress to ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. I’m sure that in time, 15 weeks would be whittled down by subsequent Republican legislation.

If the Republicans ever gain sufficient control of both Houses of Congress and the White House, I believe they will move to enact Federal legislation banning abortion. I would be perfectly happy to let abortion be fought out on the state level. Some states would always have legalized abortion, and over time, I think we could educate the people of the more conservative states, and convince them to liberalize their abortion laws. But, the hardcore religious base of the Republican Party will never be satisfied with this, as revealed by Mike Pence and Lindsey Grahm.

I believe the right to abortion is a fundamental right. Until a Constitutional Amendment is passed guaranteeing that Congress will not interfere with state law when it comes to abortion, this issue has moved to the top of my priorities when I vote. I will be very hesitant to vote Republican at the Federal level if I think it will give them control of Congress and the Presidency at the same time.

If abortion were the only issue, my decision would be clear, but it is not the only issue. Inflation has come roaring back to life for the first time since the early 1980’s driven by profligate Federal government spending, and, most importantly, by extremely reckless monetary policy at the Federal Reserve. https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/peter-schiff-nowhere-near-peak-inflation

However, general, across the board, rising prices is primarily a monetary phenomena, largely controlled by the Federal Reserve’s policies. Biden and the Democrats are somewhat to blame for this by re-nominating Jerome Powell to the Federal Reserve Chairmanship, but I doubt Trump and the Republicans would have done any better.

Biden and the Democrats are not helping the situation with increased government spending, such as stimulus checks and student loan forgiveness, which is just, implicitly, more stimulus checks. Again, I don’t know that a Republican President and Congress would have done much different, though.

The one thing that a Republican Congress would do right now is act as a check on Biden. I concede that Republicans tend to forget about fiscal restraint when there is a Republican in the White House, but they do suddenly remember their principles when the President is a Democrat.

A Republican House and Senate will be very dangerous two to three years from now, however. Joe Biden’s age concerns me a great deal. I do not think Biden will have a second term as President. I think he will decline to run again based on his age, or he will simply die of natural causes between now and 2024. This means there will be no incumbent Democrat the Republicans have to run against in the 2024 Presidential elections. If Mike Pence, or someone like him, were to become President, and we had a Republican Congress going into the 2024 to 2026 legislative cycle, we could very well see a nationwide abortion ban by, say, 2025.

Based on these considerations, I am likely not going to vote at the Federal level in these midterm elections. I will not vote for people who will quite probably be involved in instituting a nationwide abortion ban a few years from now. Furthermore, when 2024 rolls around, if there is in fact a Republican majority in Congress, I will probably have to make some very hard decisions. That means voting for a Democratic presidential candidate. Even if that means I have to vote for Kamala Harris or (shudder) Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren.

Excellent Article Connecting Rising Prices to Government Regulation

This Business Insider article is a terrific piece of journalism linking rising prices to governmental interference in the economy.

The article notes that babysitters are in high demand. In some areas of the country they are making as much as $35 per hour. (To put this in perspective, I’ve seen temporary jobs for attorneys paying less than that.)

The problem? Government shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. These shutdowns included daycare centers, many of which closed for good.

The government shutdown of businesses in 2020, combined with the inflation of the money supply by the Federal Reserve, has resulted in the greatest increase in the Consumer Price Index in over 40 years.

It is good to see journalists who seem to get it, and are recognizing the cause of these price increases.

What Is The Right to Life?

There are two philosophical/political groups in contemporary society that I know of who seem to speak of a “right to life”, more than anyone. The first group are the so-called “conservatives” when they talk about the issue of abortion. They hold themselves out as being proponents of the “right to life”. The other group are those who admire or ascribe to the fundamentals of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, such as myself. How is the conservative position on the “right to life” different from Ayn Rand’s position on the right to life, specifically when it comes to the issue of abortion? What do conservatives mean when they speak of a “right to life”, and is that different from how Ayn Rand speaks of a right to life?

I will explore this issue below. My goal here is to contrast, not to refute, the conservative position with that of Ayn Rand. I am not primarily engaging in a polemical argument here for purposes of debate. This does not mean I am neutral on this topic. My position on this subject will probably be apparent. I have also expressed some of my views regarding this matter before.

Ayn Rand on the Right to Life

“A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)” (“Man’s Rights”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand) http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/life,_right_to.html

Some essential features of the Randian view on the right to life include:

(1) Life is self-sustaining and self-generated action

In other words, individuals are required, by the nature of reality, to take action to produce the values necessary for their survival. The values needed to live, like food, clothing and shelter, do not generally exist in nature. They must be produced by someone.

(2) Rights are about freedom of action in a social context. What is meant by a “social context”?

Some dictionary definitions of “society” are:

“…companionship or association with one’s fellows : friendly or intimate intercourse…”

“…a voluntary association of individuals for common ends especially : an organized group working together or periodically meeting because of common interests, beliefs, or profession…”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/society

So, “society” is a group of individuals interacting with each other. For Rand, social interaction is about the gain derived from doing so, for each individual. Society is not an end in itself. “Society” has no existence apart from the individuals that comprise it. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/society.html

For Rand, “freedom of action in a social context” means the individual ability to act without certain types of force being used, either directly or through threats, to stop that action, by others in society.

What kinds action must individuals be free to take in a social context? They must be free to “…engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action…”

(3) Can some people have the right deprive others of their lives, in order to sustain their own existence?

Since each human being must be free to take the actions necessary to sustain his own life, and it is his right to do so, there can be no “welfare rights”. In other words, there can be no right for others to provide food, clothing, shelter, or the other necessities of life.

“The right to life means that a man has the right to support his life by his own work (on any economic level, as high as his ability will carry him); it does not mean that others must provide him with the necessities of life.” (“Man’s Rights”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.) http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/life,_right_to.html

The “Conservative” Position on the “Right to Life”

There is a certain amount of difficulty in understanding and explaining the conservative position on this issue. There is no single “conservative voice” that speaks for everyone calling their self a conservative on this or any other issue. I will therefore highlight three different positions, taken by individuals or institutions, that I think will be widely regarded as representative. These are: Ronald Reagan, the Catholic Church, and Billy Graham.

(1) Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan spoke of the fetal “right to life” in a Presidential Proclamation in 1988:

“One of those unalienable rights, as the Declaration of Independence affirms so eloquently, is the right to life. In the 15 years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, however, America’s unborn have been denied their right to life. Among the tragic and unspeakable results in the past decade and a half have been the loss of life of 22 million infants before birth; the pressure and anguish of countless women and girls who are driven to abortion; and a cheapening of our respect for the human person and the sanctity of human life.” (Proclamation 5761 — National Sanctity of Human Life Day, 1988) https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/proclamation-5761-national-sanctity-human-life-day-1988

Reagan references the Declaration of Independence, which says:

“…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” (Declaration of Independence)

Rand’s position is similar to that of the Founding Fathers: “The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand) http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government.html

Since Reagan believes that a fetus has the same “right to life” as a biologically distinct human being, he must have believed that government must take action to protect that right. (The contradiction will become apparent when we discuss what a “fetal right to life” would have to entail, below.)

(2) The Catholic Church

The Catholic church, and various Popes, have spoken on the issue of abortion many times. The Catholic church’s positions on issues like abortion is often very philosophical, and well thought-out. As such, their pronouncements are often very revealing of the institution’s fundamental philosophy and governing principles.

For instance, Pope John Paul II wrote the following on the subject of abortion:

“Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God. The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase…. At the same time, it is precisely this supernatural calling which highlights the relative character of each individual’s earthly life. After all, life on earth is not an ‘ultimate’ but a ‘penultimate’ reality…” (IOANNES PAULUS PP. II, EVANGELIUM VITAE “To the Bishops Priests and Deacons Men and Women religious lay Faithful and all People of Good Will on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life”) https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html

Here, the Pope said that human life is not primarily its “temporal phase”, i.e., our actual biological existence, and the sum-total of our experiences, emotions, thoughts, goals, desires, and happiness. In fact, so says the Pope, our “life on earth” is not an “ultimate” but a “penultimate” reality. In other words, the life that you actually live is nothing but a mere means to the end of your “spiritual life” after you die. (Who determines what is best for that “spiritual life”? The Pope, of course.)

It is rare to see such an express contrast to Ayn Rand’s philosophy laid bare like this. Rand said:

“Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.” (“The Objectivist Ethics”, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.) http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/standard_of_value.html

By way of contrast, the Pope is saying that this life is “penultimate”, which means “…last but one in a series of things; second last…”. In other words, your actual life that you are living is merely a means to the end of your “spiritual life”, which is the “ultimate value” according to the Catholic church. The Pope says you are to sacrifice this life for a (non-existent) afterlife.

Pope John Paul II went on to say that the “threat” of abortion is the same as the threat of things like poverty, hunger, and disease:

“Today this proclamation is especially pressing because of the extraordinary increase and gravity of threats to the life of individuals and peoples, especially where life is weak and defenceless. In addition to the ancient scourges of poverty, hunger, endemic diseases, violence and war, new threats are emerging on an alarmingly vast scale.” (IOANNES PAULUS PP. II, EVANGELIUM VITAE “To the Bishops Priests and Deacons Men and Women religious lay Faithful and all People of Good Will on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life”) https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html

An earlier Pope said that the right to life comes not from the fetus’s parent’s but directly from God:

“Besides, every human being, even the child in the womb, has the right to life directly from God and not from his parents, not from any society or human authority. Therefore, there is no man, no human authority, no science, no ‘indication’ at all—whether it be medical, eugenic, social, economic, or moral—that may offer or give a valid judicial title for a direct deliberate disposal of an innocent human life, that is, a disposal which aims at its destruction, whether as an end in itself or as a means to achieve the end, perhaps in no way at all illicit. Thus, for example, to save the life of the mother is a very noble act; but the direct killing of the child as a means to such an end is illicit.” (Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession Pope Pius XII – 1951) https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12midwives.htm

No “human authority” has the right to sanction abortion, which means the Pope has the right to impose his will over that of any democratically elected government. (So much for governments being instituted among Men.)

Given this authoritarian premise, it is no wonder that some Catholic Bishops are seeking to influence the American political system by denying communion to prominent pro-choice Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/article261652522.html )

(3) Billy Graham

Protestant Evangelicals tend to follow a similar line of reasoning as the Pope and the Catholic church:

“Q: Where in the Bible does it say that abortion is wrong, even murder? A: From the writings of the Rev. Billy Graham Abortion has divided our nation like no other issue in recent times. The Bible places the highest value on human life. It is sacred and of inestimable worth to God, who created it ‘in His own image.’ The Bible recognizes the unborn as being fully human…. We must never think that we can solve one moral crisis by condoning another, especially the crime of murder, for unrestrained abortion is nothing less than that…. The issue of abortion is not whether people have the right to terminate the life of a child; the real issue is whether or not people will insist on running their own lives according to worldly standards that oppose God’s law.” https://billygraham.org/answer/where-in-the-bible-does-it-say-that-abortion-is-wrong-even-murder/

The only likely difference from the Catholics is that Protestants believe the information can all be obtained from the Bible. One doesn’t need an “intermediary” with god, like the Pope, to explain what God wants -you’re supposed to waste your life on nothing all by yourself.

Billy Graham believed that abortion was murder, and that the primary issue is not whether people have the right to an abortion, but whether or not people will insist on running their own lives according to “…worldly standards that oppose God’s law”.

Just as Pope John Paul II indicated, our lives, for Protestant Evangelicals, are not of ultimate importance. Our lives serve some “spiritual life” that we have after we die. We are to live not for our own sake, but for when we die. In practice, this means we are supposed to listen to people like the Pope and Billy Graham, and renounce our happiness in the here and now to the extent they say it is necessary to keep from “opposing God’s law”.

A Common Theme Amongst Conservative Voices On This Issue

All three of these conservative positions rely on the following assumption: The mere fact that a fetus is reflexively and biologically attached to the mother’s uterus, means that the mother has an obligation to allow the fetus to remain biologically attached to her uterus for nine months. The conservative position on the right to life is not just that a fetus has a right to exist on its own, like an actual person, since it cannot. It has a right to be provided with nutrition, sustenance and biological protection from the elements while it develops.

It is undoubtable that even if the fetus could somehow be medically removed from the mother’s uterus surgically without damaging it, this would still be considered murder by the “conservative right to lifers”. (Since a very undeveloped fetus outside the uterus, say within the first few months of development, would die within seconds or minutes.)

To illustrate the conservative position with a more extreme example, if a woman told her doctor to surgically remove her uterus, along with the fetus inside, this would certainly be considered no different than an abortion by the conservative institutions and individuals listed above. They would consider it murder, even though the woman is in no way damaging the fetus itself. (She has simply withdrawn biological sustenance from the fetus.)

This is why the most consistent and philosophical of the three “groups” of conservatives above, the Catholic Church, see their view of the “right to life” as no different than the supposed “right” of poor people to receive free food, medical care, and other welfare benefits from the state:

“”Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where people are treated as mere instruments of gain rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others like them are infamies indeed.” https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html

Here, the Pope is saying that not only is abortion a sin, but so is free market capitalism. Employers and employees don’t set the terms of working conditions in accordance with their own self-interest. Furthermore, it is an “infamy” to let people live in “subhuman living conditions”, implying that the poor must be provided with housing even if they have chosen not to work to earn the money necessary to obtain shelter.

Later in the same article, the Pope makes his desire to redistribute wealth more explicit. The Catholic church is often criticized for causing hardship amongst poor Catholics by discouraging birth control. As a result, traditional Catholic families are often too large in the poorer countries of Latin America, resulting in real hardship, and even starvation, for those large families. The Pope’s solution to this problem? Don’t blame the Church’s birth control policies. Blame capitalism and the failure to redistribute wealth from wealthy countries to poor countries:

“In the face of over- population in the poorer countries, instead of forms of global intervention at the international level-serious family and social policies, programmes of cultural development and of fair production and distribution of resources-anti-birth policies continue to be enacted.” https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html

The Conservative “Right to Life” Position Is Really A “Right To Receive Welfare Benefits Provided By Others” Stance

Unlike the Randian position, which says each individual is free to take action to sustain his or her own life, the conservative position on the “right to life” is the “right” of a fetus to receive biological sustenance for nine months, just like the “workers” supposedly have a right to a “fair wage”, that is not set by free competition and freedom of contract in a free market. The fetus has the same “right to life” as is claimed by socialists when it comes to providing cradle to the grave welfare benefits to those who did not produce anything. It has the same internal contradiction, too. It ignores the question: Provided by whom?

“If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.” (“Man’s Rights” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.) There can be no such thing as the right to enslave, i.e., the right to destroy rights.” http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/welfare_state.html

At least with the socialists’ “worker’s rights” we are referring to actual, biologically distinct, human beings. In the case of the “rights of the unborn”, we’re talking about enslaving women to imaginary people.

How The Media and the Left Will Spin The Colleyville Synagogue Hostage Event To Look Like “Domestic Terrorism”

Yesterday, in Colleyville, a city next to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, a man named Malik Faisal Akram, a British citizen of likely Pakistani, Muslim origin, took hostages at Congregation Beth Israel, a Synagogue. From Google Maps, it looks like he basically flew in to DFW airport, and drove to the nearest synagogue.

[Edit, 1/22/2022: Since I originally posted this, I learned that he flew into New York. I’m not sure if he flew into Dallas, or how he got here. Also, it appears the Synagogue was targeted because it was close to a Federal Prison housing Aafia Siddiqui. https://www.timesofisrael.com/colleyville-synagogue-hostage-taker-killed-by-multiple-gunshots-medical-examiner/ ]

He was demanding the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a woman incarcerated in Texas for what sounds like aggravated assault on US military personnel. We’ve all seen this before, so I won’t dwell on it too much. But, now I’ll tell you what will happen next.

The Left and the mainstream media will focus on the fact that this was an act of antisemitism, but will leave out who committed it, and why. The Democrats will gloss over the fact that members of their own party refer to Israel as an “apartheid state“. Politicians, like Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, are already making it sound like the situation was some sort of “homegrown” incident from someone with roots in Texas:

“Antisemitism is not acceptable. Not in Texas, here at home, or anywhere. While I’m relieved the hostages are now safe, the situation at Congregation Beth Israel is a reminder that each and every one of us must remain vigilant and work together to combat hatred in all its forms.” https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Note how he speaks of antisemitism not being acceptable, then says “Not in Texas, here at home…” He doesn’t mention Pakistan, where this person originated from (either directly, or through immigration to Britain). He doesn’t mention the group that is primarily pushing antisemitism at this point in history (Muslims). In time, all most Canadians will remember is that “someone” in Texas took a bunch of Jews hostage in Colleyville. It’ll become another example of supposed “white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism” that is a supposed problem, with a little anti-Texas attitude thrown in to boot.

The left and media doesn’t want any sort of integration or understanding of context when it comes to history and culture. All they want you to remember is that this is somehow another act of “hate”, but they do not want you to remember what group this animosity is mostly coming from.

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