More about unions vs freedoms

A previous article was a brief critique of an Ottawa Citizen article, written as a letter to the editor.  Here is a more detailed look at the errors of the writer, Janice Kennedy.  I will begin each paragraph with a quote from Kennedy and then critique her essential idea.

"In these anti-labour times, the latest salvo comes from Ontario's Liberal government, attacking both teachers and collective bargaining."  To say we are in anti-labour times suggests there is a major cultural opposition to working people, when what they are against is the force being used against them to enrich those involved in the union enforced violation of individual rights.  They may not be able to state it explicitly, but people sense the injustice of being forced to pay higher than rational wages, rich packages of benefits and vast pension shortfalls to unionized employees of the state while they are struggling to earn a living and pay their excessive taxes. For decades, government have caved in to union lobbying and created laws that entrench the power of unions over individuals - both employees and employers.  The Ontario McGuinty government has given away the bank to civil service unions in order to get and stay elected.  It is only now that Ontario's fiscal ship is scraping along the shoal and gradually shredding the financial future of Ontarians that small concessions are being suggested by the government.  Naturally, the unions scream at the least reversal of the trend that has fed them tens of billions of taxpayer debt dollars over the last decade.


"...well compensated teachers providing good public education are a sound social investment."  This phrase is wrong from start to finish. Teachers are not just well compensated, they are well overcompensated.  I know many teachers who earn $80,000 or more per calendar year, and when you include the benefit costs their total compensation is $100,000 or so.  Sure, they have a university degree, but so do many people whose incomes are confiscated through taxation to pay the teachers, people who work a full year, do not have summers off, do not get two weeks off at Christmas and a week of spring break and whose employers have recognized that defined benefit pension plans can bankrupt them.  Further, what we are getting is not a good public education since our students are much less educated than in many countries in areas like literacy, math, science and history.  Many high school graduates have poor critical thinking skills and have been well prepared only to accept government control of their lives and collectivism as a healthy state of society.  In most cases, teachers have never had a job in the real world and are ill-suited to teach students since the entire educational system is controlled by government from cradle to university graduation.  I believe that if you quizzed most grade twelve students with basic questions about Canada's history, geography, politics, economics and finances they would be incapable of answering most basic questions. Since there is no such thing as a social investment, we seem to be getting an equally poor return on our money.

"The truth is, unions are necessary.  They're essential for societal self-interest, and they play a critical role in our fundamental humanity."  Sure, unions are extremely self-serving - they feather-bed jobs where rational employers would not keep them, forcing positions to be so specialized that more workers than necessary must be used.  How often do we see a road repair crew with one or two people actually working and six more standing to supervise or wait their turn.  One guy holds a flag, one a shovel, one a rake, one a tamper, one a clipboard, one to make sure no does anyone else's work, etc.  I know of government departments where people are paid to produce studies and reports that have no productive value and are then simply filed away as people move on to the next useless study.  If a union existed to advocate for employees and supported an open communication with management and did not actively violate the rights of business management and owners, then that would harm no one, but when a union can strike and prevent a company from hiring other people who are totally willing to work for the offered compensation, use violence that goes unpunished by the government that is charged with protecting citizens and all the while cries that the rights of workers are being violated, unions don't play a critical role, they play a fundamentally harmful role.  Since they rely on a constant violation of the rights of both employers and employees for their very existence, they certainly are not part of my definition of fundamental humanity.  My definition is based on government protection of individual rights, not their arbitrary abrogation.

"That's because unions protect workers. (A good thing, too, because who else would protect them?  Government?  It can't scramble a back-to-work legislation fast enough.  Corporations? They'd lay off Mother Teresa if it meant boosting the profit margin. Workers themselves?  No, sadly because no matter how competent they are, the corporation's bottom line invariably trumps their very existence. In the economic wars, employees are cannon fodder.) Government certainly can protect them - that is protect them if their individual freedom to act in their self-interest are violated. This does not mean they have a right to a job, an income, or anything else that must be provided by someone else - they are free to act but not free to obtain results by any means other than voluntary exchange. This is in fact the sole reason for government to exist - to secure individual rights in society. Since government has already acted in thousands of ways to violate the rights of all citizens, it must continuously place groups of citizens in opposition to each other through the lobby-state, the nanny-state, the big-brother-state and all the other versions of statism in which we are enmeshed.

There is a moral role here for corporations to protect workers too. The individual who own and manage corporations can uphold rights by acting in an honest, forthright and transparent manner in their dealings with employees.  They can respond within reason to safety concerns of employees and try to create work environments that attract and retain productive people.  To do this and remain competitive, they must also constantly adapt the business structure, adapt, move or close facilities, find innovative means of production and innovative employees, hire and fire people in positions that are not as productive as they must be.  A corporation does not fire employees who are highly productive unless they think they need to and if they are wrong then competition will eventually correct their mistakes.

Workers are the best positioned to protect themselves, by not working in a position for which they are unsuited, untrained, unproductive or even unhappy.  In a free society they are free to offer their services to any willing employer, and form a contract with the employer for mutual benefit.  If they are not satisfied, they are free to leave for another employer, subject to their voluntary contractual obligations. If government actually protects rights, then the contract is enforceable by employees and employers alike in case of dispute. That is a proper role of government - objective interpretation of objective law in case of dispute between citizens. So Kennedy is wrong on all counts - she dismisses the ability of government, employers and employees to protect employees and suggest unions as the only rights protector. Such a perverse outcome is only possible in a society where government evades its responsibility, corporations are forced by law into horribly distorted positions and employees have no understanding that rights are rights to actions - not results.

"Romney's belief in corporations and corporatism is a logical corollary to the Randism of his running mate, Paul Ryan.  The "rugged individualism" preached by Rand (the "Ayn," as she apparently used to say, pronounced like "swine") is nothing more than me-first selfishness and, well, piggism." The fact that Romney supports corporations indicates he supports the right of individuals to cooperate through a corporate structure. Corporations are nothing more than vehicles for economic and investment cooperation and therefore have a fundamentally good nature. Corporatism, on the other hand, is what is also known as crony capitalism, which is not capitalism at all but a mixed economy- a mix of freedom and state controls.  In a society where government can and does violate rights on a massive scale, creating levers of power that can be controlled by the few against the many, the many against the few or any group against another group, many corporations will naturally lobby for favors to protect their interests or shackle their competitors.  In a free society, government does not interfere int he economy and so there are no levers of power to grab and no need for lobbying and cronyism is prevented.

One thing that is certain, because he has explicitly said so, is that Paul Ryan is definitely not a follower of Ayn Rand. Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, holds that an objective reality exists whereas Ryan is religious and believes in the existence of an all-powerful and omniscient creator and an after-life in some undefinable dimension beyond the ability of human perception. Objectivism holds that reason is the faculty by which man learns about reality and his mind is his only tool of survival whereas Ryan believes in divine inspiration, the word of an undefined super-being as divine and infallible though all our senses and logic oppose it.  Objectivism holds that man's nature requires a morality that consists of acting in one's rational and long-term self-interest whereas Ryan believes in a morality of other-ism where it is man's duty to sacrifice himself and his life to his neighbors to fulfill the wishes of a deity. Objectivism holds that the proper political system for a rational being is one of individual freedom, also known as capitalism, whereas Ryan believes in a system of government controls of human lives - just a little less than Obama's current destructive path. Ryan's association with Rand's philosophy is a remote one and appears to be his only redeeming quality.  He is better defined by his distance from Objectivism than his similarities.

Kennedy refers to Rand's philosophy as mere me-first selfishness.  Her implication is that the focus of people's lives should be altruism, the sacrifice of one's own life to benefit others.  This philosophy is called altruism and since it is a perpetual cycle of sacrificing the good to anything else, it leads quickly to complete destruction if fully practiced. Consider what would happen if every parent sacrificed the interests of their children for the sake of other children. To the degree they were successful, so would their children perish, and with all parents doing likewise, humanity would perish. Ayn Rand identified that it is moral for individuals to make their own survival and their own thriving the highest priority.  This does not prevent acts of cooperation since cooperation is necessary for man to thrive - it in fact encourages it.  It does not forbid acts of kindness as providing assistance to others is good so long as it is voluntary and non-sacrificial.  Rand identified two types of sacrifice that act as destroyers of life - asking others to sacrifice themselves for you (welfare, criminals, government cronies) and asking for you to be sacrificed for the sake of others (through unearned guilt, the will of deities, collectivism, socialism, etc.).  If your own life does not have intrinsic value and is not the standard of your morality, then you are obliged to sacrifice yourself to anyone who lays claim to your life.  Kennedy sneers at the idea of an independent minded, self-sufficient, rugged individual and dismisses it as "piggism". 

The right to work and the right to employ

The Ontario PC's made news this week when they announced that if elected they would pursue a "right to work" legislation similar to that enacted by many US states.  While they are to be applauded for moving slightly in the direction of a free economy, the contradictions inherent in their position mean that it is a weak policy for them that will land them in hot water in many other areas.

  Consider the language that they use to talk about the issue.  Deputy PC leader Christine Elliott said "What we really need to do is develop a very nimble workforce and that's what the right to work legislation is intended to do, so that businesses when they need to adapt to changing conditions in the workplace, they have the flexibility to be able to do that".  Implicit in her statement is the assumption that government is properly responsible for developing anything related to "the workforce", anything related to business and in fact anything economic at all. Consider that the only obstacles that exist to prevent businesses from being as dynamic, productive and flexible as possible are obstacles created by the use of government power against employees and employers alike.  A full realization and declaration of this is far removed from the platform of the PCs, Liberals and certainly the NDP.

The only proper role of government is to protect citizens from actual and threatened physical harm.  Unless you are causing physical harm to others, as soon as government starts to use its power to force you to act against your free will in any area, government inverts its moral position and becomes the worst violator of rights: the entity to which you delegate the right to initiate force is turned against you, leaving you with no protector and at the mercy of any looter.  In your capacity as a producer/employee, government currently initiates all manner of coercion, forcing you to join employment insurance, Canada Pension Plan, workman's compensation, unions, pensions, taxes etc., even if you determine such actions are not in your best interest.  If you are an employer, laws force on you such things as minimum wages, vacation pay, EI, CPP, workmans compensation, workplace safety, building codes, business hours, work week restrictions, zoning, taxes and a host of other restrictions on your right to exercise your own best judgement. With so many reason-negating laws, many businesses never begin or are destroyed before they have a chance at success.

By right derived from your nature as a reasoning human being you have the right to work in support of your life: to decide what occupation you will pursue every day, what hours you are willing to work, what compensation you will accept, what risks you will take and every other aspect of your productive effort. Every employer has the same right with respect to what products to create, how to price them who to sell to, what employees to hire, how to compensate them, when to fire them and every other aspect of the productive process.  The only possible way an employer can succeed in business over time is to be rational, to run a business that attracts you and other employees and that enables workers to meet their goals and provides value to customers.  A mean employer who pays lower wages than you can earn elsewhere or who has high risks at work or does not provide value to enough customers will quickly be run into bankruptcy by better competitors.  

Ontario Labour Minister Linda Jeffrey (Liberal) reveals economic illiteracy in her comment "It just doesn't reflect Canadian values... I believe it would mean lower wages and reduced buying power".  First of all, forcing you to join unions against your will cannot properly be considered a value by anyone, let alone a country with a system of laws based on individual freedom. Violating your human rights can never be a moral or economic value, only a destroyer of value. Second, to claim that increasing your freedom to choose in wage negotiations would lead to lower wages implies that you are too stupid to decide for yourself what organizations to join and instead must be forced to join an employees union that in turn will force higher wages on employers. She implies that the effect of forced unionization is to raise productivity, since it is only by producing more that you, as an employee, can be paid more in the long term.  This would mean that all we need to do to raise wages and buying power is to unionize everyone or declare that they will be paid more (minimum wage laws). How can all people at the same time be paid more than they produce?  Of course it is impossible, since higher wages taken by unionized workers for the same amount of production must come at the expense of those who are not using the force of union law against their employer. Without an increase in production, where else will the wages come from? As has been shown many times over the last century by economists such as Ludwig von Mises, unions force lower income on the non-unionized.  Unions backed by laws are a weapon against all who are union "outsiders".

  Betraying her own economic illiteracy, NDP leader Andrea Horwath said "I don't see how the removal of people's ability to make a decent wage, have decent benefits, be able to retire with dignity, is somehow made more beneficial in a right-to-work state."  She deliberately ignores that fact that wages must be, by the nature of reality, tied to production ability and she cannot simply legislate production into existence with her whims and wishes. She ignores that so-called decent benefits can only be paid if they are first created.  She ignores the fact that what she calls a dignified retirement can only be achieved by a lifetime of production, savings and prudent investment and is not the rational product of government force. The type of intervention she favors requires the sacrifice of those who produce more than average to those who produce less than average or do not produce at all.  In a free economy, who is to stop you from earning every dollar your effort and ability permit, from saving every dollar you choose to and from investing every dollar you want to set aside for future consumption instead of spending now?  The only obstacles in your way are your ability to produce, criminals who would steal your assets and laws that would prevent you from acting according to your judgement. The government is supposed to stop and punish the criminals and not prevent you from acting to meet your life goals.

President Obama reveals once more his perverse version of government when he says "These so-called right-to-work laws, they don't have anything to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics".  In his world, where apparently citizens exist to serve the state and each other instead of to build their own lives, the subjects of politics and economics are apparently unrelated. In reality they are intricately and inextricably linked since politics is the study of how society is organized and economics is the study of society's most vial function: production.  The purpose of production is to allow man to survive and improve his life and any attempt to ignore how production is either enabled or destroyed by the proper or improper use of political power is life-destroying.  This is entirely consistent with Obama's nihilistic approach to philosophy and is unfortunately all too popular among the political elite, as illustrated by Ontario's political leaders quoted above.

What is required for a proper political structure in Ontario (and everywhere else) is a government whose sole and driving purpose is to protect the individual right of citizens to: a) security from external physical harm (life); b) pursue their lives so long as they do not cause or threaten to harm others (liberty); and c) keep the product of their efforts to use and dispose of as they choose (property). A government that protects individual rights will as a consequence enable the greatest wealth production, the most innovation and the highest standard of living in the world. Incomplete examples of this principle abound in the history of the last few hundred years, across the nations of the world and within the provinces of Canada. Wherever and whenever government acts to protect individual rights, human life thrives. When government uses coercion against its innocent citizens the standard of living is lowered to the degree coercion is used.  Examined objectively, this principle is not surprising, yet almost none of our political leaders could identify it. That is one measure of how far we have come from the ideal of a free society and of how much work needs to be done to establish such a society.

The most dangerous woman in America - Ayn Rand

In a full-page essay in the September 22, 2012 National Post, Terence Corcoran wrote at length about the growing influence of Ayn Rand's ideas.  Corcoran consciously chose not to actually talk about her ideas, but rather the fact that she and her ideas are increasingly vilified publicly by so many people, who I believe are reacting based on the fear of their ideology being exposed for the sacrificial and deadly thing it is.

 Before turning to her opponents, first I will provide an extremely brief summary of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, using the five primary branches of philosophy.  In metaphysics, she held that objective reality exists and that all further ideas must be derived from observable facts of reality and rejected the notion of other realities such as an after-life.  In epistemology, the division of philosophy dealing with the theory of knowledge, Objectivism holds that man's faculty of reason is his sole means of gaining knowledge about reality and it rejects all supposed forms of mystical or supernatural insight such as revelation, the word of gods or group consciousness.  In ethics Rand stated that, as is the case for all living things, man's standard of value is his own life and so his actions are properly guided by what reason tells him is in his long-term rational self-interest.  In politics, the philosophy of how man should properly live in a society, Objectivism holds that the system that protects the right of individuals to pursue his personal goals, so long as he does not initiate force against others is the only moral system, and it is best known by the term capitalism.  In aesthetics, the philosophy or art, Rand identified its purpose as the capturing of the heroic idea of man as he ought to be or could be, thus naming art projecting whim, chaos, evil, distortion, evasion or debasement as unworthy effort.  Rand's philosophy is a fully integrated and closed system, meaning all parts are connected consistently and evading one part is to evade all parts.  It is a philosophy without contradictions.

There are two types of people who hate Ayn Rand's ideas.  The first are the people Rand called "mystics of muscle".  These are people who believe it is right to force you to live as they wish because they think it will create a utopia here on Earth.  They have come in various forms and some of their best known advocates are Alexander, Genghis Khan,  Immanuel Kant, Adolf Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Stalin and Castro.  They are unified in their belief that humanity can be forced to live better at the point of a sword or a gun and consider masses of dead to be merely the price to pay for achieving eventual social perfection.  They are all socialist at root and perfect socialism requires an absolute dictator to direct society.  These days, lesser versions of these infamous names attempt to control your life through the creeping socialism of regulation and taxation.  Thus, all our municipal, provincial and national governments accept the fundamental idea that using force against innocent people is perfectly moral - for their own good.  When have you heard politicians questioning whether it is moral to force you to surrender a large part of your income for them to redistribute to others who did not earn it?  When have you heard them challenge the idea that you should be forced to pay taxes on the property you supposedly own in order to pay for services you may never use or even are opposed to?  And if you refuse to pay them, when have you heard them say it is immoral to send armed officials to seize your property and possibly arrest you?  This type of Rand hater is pervasive in today's society.

Rand called the second type "mystics of the mind".  These are the people who claim divine knowledge, assert that true virtue and happiness cannot be achieved here on Earth, but rather will be found in an after-life, an undefinable and eternal state of existence known only to those who believe not in the facts of reality, but assertions they willingly state are non-rational and unprovable.  These people claim the right to control your life by virtue of their denial of the value of life.  They are the exponents of various religions that deny objective reality, claim that reason is incapable of identifying it, claim that man's guide to action should be mystical proclamations and claim that society must be ruled by self-proclaimed followers of a supreme being.

Through most of recorded history mankind has been dominated by these mystical ideas and so progress has been stagnant, life has been miserable and short and knowledge has been limited.  The ancient Greeks, and in particular Aristotle, first identified reality and reason as a better way of life, but their ideas lacked a full moral foundation and so their ideas were lost for centuries before being rediscovered in the enlightenment and brought into the reality of human life by the industrial revolution.

Corcoran's essay concludes with "If Ayn Rand were truly making a comeback, nobody would be safe.  And everybody seems to know it."  By this he means that both the Liberals/Democrats (mystics of muscle) and Conservatives/Republicans (mystics of the mind) are legitimate targets of a philosophy that holds reality as objective instead of subjective, holds man's mind in the highest regard, holds man's life as the highest value, holds man's freedom as essential to the exercise of his mind and holds the image of heroic man as high art.  They are afraid and they should be, because when their ideas are correctly identified as anti-man and anti-life, they power over your life is removed.  Ayn Rand believed it was not too late to save the world from the mystics and I truly hope she was right because reality, reason, life and freedom are worth fighting for.

Politicians and the broken window fallacy

I regularly communicate with Tom Harris, Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition, an organization that promotes objectivity and the scientific method in relation to climate science.  He sent me an economics question prompted by a politician's comment. 

Here is what Senator Mitchell from Alberta said: 

“I would argue that, once we get started (on programs to stop climate change), we will find that doing it right will actually stimulate the economy in a way that we cannot even imagine, just like winning the Second World War stimulated the economy in ways we could not imagine. It created one of the strongest Western industrialized economies, which has kept us sustained in the kind of lifestyle that people around the world envy. It did not wreck our economy to win the Second World War; it fundamentally sustained and created one of the strongest economies that you could imagine in the history of the world. That is exactly what will happen if we begin to do something about climate change.”

I went to the full discussion on the Senate site. He is evidently an economic illiterate. He relies on the "broken window fallacy" that was easily proven false long ago and is discussed in Henry Hazlitt's 1946 book "Economics in One Lesson". That story is one of the baker whose front window is broken by a vandal. The glassmaker then has a job to do and must be paid for his work - according to Senator Mitchell this is a job creating strategy! But of course the baker must pay for this work out of money he would have used elsewhere, and so instead of having a window and wealth to spend, he has only a window. On balance, wealth has been destroyed because a product that added no value must be created to replace the one that had value. 

Of course, anyone with a brain does not have to think more than a second to realize that if destruction created wealth then we should destroy the world right away to improve everything. So blatant and nihilistic a philosophical and logical error is unforgivable for someone in a supposedly learned position but is unfortunately prevalent in our elected officials as they are mostly economically illiterate. Absent the destruction of thousands of lives and fantastic amounts of wealth, Canada would have had the wealth available to produce far more than we actually did. One of the effects of the war was to destroy some of our competitors, whose countries were all bombed to bits, so naturally we had an advantage in production for some time afterwards. Of course, it is sometimes necessary to wage a war in self-defence, but such a need destroys existing wealth and prevents the accumulation of more wealth.

Destroying wealth in a vain and futile attempt to stop climate change can only do harm and in no way can stimulate anyone's economy except the select few who enjoy government favors and who personally benefit from the destruction of others. The ideology of Senator Mitchell is one held by primitive societies prior to the industrial revolution, when wealth was largely static and was often accumulated by waging war against other peoples and stealing their physical assets. The enlightenment and consequent industrial revolution changed all that, however it is still held by many collectivists and primitive thinkers who ignore the lessons of the enlightenment and whose ideas have not risen above the level of tribalism. 

That such a man holds a position of prominence and political power over our lives and is paid by the producers of wealth to speak such ignorant vitriol is a testament to how low is our societal level of scientific, economic and philosophical knowledge.

We don't need unions, we need freedoms

In her August 31 column Janice Kennedy resurrects a litany of marxist fallacies and demonstrates her economic and philosophic illiteracy. Her ad-hominem attacks, animal references and other illogical language simply illustrates her inability to make a rational argument backed by sound moral principles.

I have nothing against unions so long as they do not use force against innocent people. In a free society all relationships are voluntary (on both sides) and that certainly includes all employer/employee, union/member buyer/seller relationships. If a job is a money loser for the company it is perfectly moral for the employer to terminate employees or else the owners of the business and all remaining employees will suffer until the final closure of the business. It is not the responsibility of an employer to protect a job if the position or the employee is not efficient enough to compete and it is certainly immoral of government to force employers to retain money-losing positions and act in a self-destructive manner.

The only moral role of government is to protect the freedom of individual citizens to act according to their choices, so long as they do not initiate force against others. That's it. Any other action of government necessarily violates the rights of some citizens for the possible benefit of others. In a free country the role of government is the protection, not control, of innocent citizens' lives from those at home and abroad who would violate them.

Over decades, governments have enacted legislation specifically forcing some citizens (employers are a common target) to act against their judgment to enrich others. Stripped of all legal defense, these victims of lobbying naturally seek all possible ways to remain in business and be competitive - as any rational person would, they seek less expensive production facilities, less punishing tax jurisdictions, legal systems that protect them instead of harming them and a workforce that is flexible instead of rigid.

It is the souls of the producers, employers, creators, builders and entrepreneurs that are attacked by union-biased laws. If Kennedy truly cared about rights, it is the rights of these most essential people in society that she would be speaking of protecting, instead of encouraging those attempting to shackle and milk them.

Invasion of the locavestors

Terence Corcoran wrote a good editorial in the September issue of the Financial Post Magazine.  He referred to recent public discussion of corporate transactions such as Rona, Cogeco and Maple Group.  I wrote this letter to him.

Your September 2012 editorial was on target. When government interferes with a corporate sale, the rights of everyone are violated. In a free market, transactions only take place with the mutually beneficial agreement of both the buyer and seller. Unless the price is high enough for you as a seller to judge you are getting full value, you do not sell. Unless it is low enough for you as a buyer to judge you are getting a bargain you do not buy. When governments protect individual rights neither buyers nor sellers are unhappy with their transactions. By forbidding the sale/purchase of certain shares the state is forcing some people to own them and forcing others not to own them. The rights of both sellers and buyers are violated by such initiation of force.

If you sell your shares, you will then have cash available to invest in other businesses, whether new or existing. No one can tell how many businesses have been prevented from existing or growing because of the use of force against shareholders. The right of all citizens to participate in a free market and benefit from its existence is violated.

Who is to decide which individual shareholder rights will be violated by blocking a sale? What objective principle decides which companies are strategic and overrides the opinions of others. Who decides what is of national interest when a nation is made up of individuals each having their own goals? The people best suited and the only people morally correct to decide these questions are the ones who have put their decision-making ability on the line and risked their own capital by investing in the company, the people who own or wish to own the shares. Who can say you will not make more money elsewhere and bring better "strategic value" to Canada by selling instead of holding, although the question itself shows the absence of a proper morality based on individual rights. 

 Even if someone else is proven correct with time, it is your life, your money and your right to choose how you use it. Those who would stop you are anti-rights, anti-freedom and anti-life.

RIO +20 Summit - an exercise in primitivism

As tens of thousands gather in Rio this week to "save the world", let's take a look at some of the actions organizers are advocating.

1. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says that abundant resources have allowed us to mine our way to growth and burn our way to prosperity and says this is a global suicide pact.  He claims we need a free market revolution for global sustainability.

These ideas are anti-life and economically ignorant.  All the natural resources used since the industrial revolution did not exist beforehand because they are all products of the human mind applying reason to the problem of survival.  They were simply varieties of dirt and rocks whose existence and usefulness was undefined and unknown to mankind.  The concepts of skyscrapers, electricity, internal combustion, atomic power and pipelines were unimagined because mysticism rather than reason had ruled mankind through most of history.  Ban Ki-moon and his ilk want to return us to the primitive existence before the enlightenment and industrial revolution.  They ignore the fact that the free-market revolution is what brought us longer life, comfort and prosperity beyond imagination.

2. Rio advocates say that burning coal, oil and gas is warming the planet so fast that in less than 100 years we will face a catastrophe.  They are caught up in false premises that are easily revealed by a variety of sciences.  The assumption that CO2 is what drives global climate has been shown false by simple statistics showing almost no relationship between CO2 and global temperature over short, medium, long and very long-term time scales.  The assumption that current temperature represents some kind of stable value is easily falsified by geologic records.  The notion that more warming will be dangerous is dis-proven by repeated past warming periods during which humans thrived.  Recent research has shown that the interaction between the cycles of the sun, the penetration of cosmic rays into our atmosphere and cloud formation account for almost all the historical variability in global temperature.

3. The Rio organizers praise Quebec and BC for imposing carbon taxes.  Given that the entire worry about carbon is unfounded, such measures and meaningless.  In fact, even the IPCC's own data shows that reducing CO2 will have a negligible effect on global temperature, but clearly they see such taxes as a way to attack industrial progress and control the economy.

4. A former UNEP executive wants to increase governmental control of corporations, saying they lobby for subsidies, use advertising to convert insecurities into wants and, sounding like a good communist, says corporations should be forced to act for the public good.  He evades the fact that corporations must lobby to protect themselves from government intrusions into the marketplace.  If government did not arrogate control of the economy, lobbying would have no impact.

There is no such thing as the public good since the public is merely a collection of individuals.  In a free market each individual decides what is good and right for himself in the choices he makes.  When some people violate his rights through the force of law we call it oppression by government not freedom.

The truth is that the Rio people are in essence advocating a global totalitarian state to protect the raw elements of nature from interference by humanity.  Since man survives by using reason to re-shape the raw materials of nature to his needs, their agenda is anti-man, anti-life and anti-reason.

Should we permit individuals who doubt dangerous man-made climate change to run for public office?

This opinion piece in today's Ottawa Citizen makes no reference to any established facts and does not argue on the basis of reason.  Instead, it is an argument made by a number of fallacious methods: attacking an individual's reputation, appeal to widespread belief, argument by dismissal, argument from false authority, argument from personal astonishment, argument by selective observation, argument by hypothesis contrary to fact, argument by misunderstanding the use of statistics to name a few. 

I have personally made a serious effort to read the work of scientists from a broad range of disciplines and have seen clear evidence disproving the popular theory of man-made, CO2-induced dangerous global warming.  It only takes one fact to disprove even the most accepted theory, and in this case there are facts from the disciplines of geology, physics, chemistry, archeology, statistics, astrophysics and other areas that clearly contradict the typical ideas about global warming.

Open your mind and see for yourself.

The proper role of the military

I attended a debate hosted by the MacDonald Laurier Institute that was also the kickoff for the 2011 Free Thinking Film Festival.  The basic debated statement was "The Canadian military should focus on peacekeeping efforts in the future".  Arguing for the assertion was Prof. Michael Byers and opposed was Prof. Jack Granatstein.

In the end they were not that far apart, both agreeing that Canada needs a strong military and should deploy the military when it is necessary for Canada's self-interest.  Granatstein said that the military should not have a separate "peacekeeping" unit since clear strength is needed to be credible at maintaining a peace and that with such a small military we need all the fully trained troops we can muster.

I would have liked to hear both of them express clearer statements on when it is proper to go to war and most particularly on the proper philosophy of war.  Neither spoke of acting purely in the interest of the citizens of Canada and with overwhelming and ruthless force so as to quickly defeat an enemy and discourage all supporters and then withdrawing, with a clear warning that we will return if there is another threat to Canadians.  Neither condemned the altruistic drivers of recent conflicts that have led to the discouragement, death and failure of Canadian missions.  There was not enough talk about the morality of war. 

Overall I favored Granatstein, who appears to have a clear idea of the proper role of the military and the ideological errors made in recent decades that have led to its decay and its failures in battle.

Atlas Shrugged premiere in Toronto

Peter Foster, writing in the National Post has a very mixed opinion of the movie Atlas Shrugged Part I, which is based on Ayn Rand's famous novel of the same name. First published over 50 years ago and recently enjoying its best sales ever as government interference in the economy wreaks havoc, it is both a mystery novel and an explanation of a proper philosophy for man's life on Earth.  Being generally an advocate for capitalism, I expected Peter Foster to celebrate the fact that such a movie has been made at all in the face of a film industry mired so deep in what Rand called the altruist/collectivist/mysticist philosophy that is awards Oscars to junk science pieces like "An Inconvenient Truth". 

During her life and still today, Rand was and is the strongest defender of individual rights (capitalism in economics) the world has ever seen.   Her philosophy, known as Objectivism, holds that man is an individual being whose LIFE depends on his unique faculty of reason and that to survive he must have LIBERTY to exercise his reasoning to produce the values he requires and to have complete ownership of the PROPERTY thus produced.  All the rest of her philosophy proceeds from the basic concepts of reason, individualism and freedom.

In Atlas Shrugged she wrote over a thousand pages to produce a story to project the ideals of human life and perfectly distilling such a detailed and deep story into a three-part movie is impossible.  The movie will necessarily reduce the story to illustrate its core concepts and provide the essence of the messages the novel has plenty of space to explore.  Any fan of Rand's novels and philosophy will recognize the impossibility of the movie equalling the novel and be satisfied to see that the movie was made at all, having taken over 50 years to reach the screen. 

Peter Foster closes his piece saying: "Ayn Rand's ideas about the iron laws of economics and the sleazy accommodations of politics, and why they make uneasy bedfellows, remain eternally relevant. Her books are still well worth reading. Whether this movie will attract new fans is another matter."  The economic mess of the last few years has led to amazing sales numbers for a novel published in the 50's and even if the movie is half as good as the novel it will certainly motivate many people to discover some of Ayn Rand's works and think about the world in a different way. 

In a time when society desperately needs to discover a philosophy of reason and try the ideal economic system that has been sampled but never given a fair chance, capitalism, every effort to spread the ideas of freedom should be celebrated.  My copy of the movie was ordered weeks ago.

"Occupy" protesters unaware of capitalism

It is clear to me that the "Occupy" protesters have no idea about the economic system of a free society, known as capitalism.  We most certainly do NOT have a free society in Canada - we have a mixed economy with about half of it controlled by government.  The logical outcome of such a system is that groups are encouraged or even required to lobby for government pull to achieve their ends.  Some of these groups will naturally be corporations led by people who choose to use the levers of government force to suppress competition. 

It is not freedom, competition or capitalism that is the problem we face, it is the intervention of government in the economy.  The solution is the separation of economy and state in the same way and for the same reasons as for separation of church and state.  If the ability of the state to use force against peaceful citizens and their corporations is removed, it would end what is known as corporatism or crony capitalism, which is really not capitalism at all but statism or collectivism.

Protester Nathalie Cote is quoted as saying "we need a revolution of the mind" and she is quite correct, but perhaps not in the way she intends.  Philosopher Ayn Rand stated long ago that what society needs do is have an intellectual revolution, to discover for the first time that capitalism (the system that protects individual rights) is the ideal system.  It has long been recognized as the system that creates the most wealth and well-being for society, but it has never been implemented and defended on moral grounds, and so it fell victim to collectivism and altruism.

I wrote an article about this at
http://www.orleansstar.ca/web-article/3495/Get-Politics-out-of-Corporations-and-Money

Audience question 8 from the debate

8. What will you do to improve economic and social development?

Paraphrasing the other candidates: I will spend more money and make smarter decisions than the other guys.

David McGruer: It is not the proper role of government to direct either economic or social development. These are the result of individual initiatives by people left free to choose their own path in life, so long as they do not initiate force against others. Government has no idea how to innovate or develop anything. All such information flows from the signals provided by a free market. All the examples across the world and over time demonstrate that to the degree government controls the economy, stagnation and regression are the rule. If government would withdraw from the economy, unemployment would be zero, since there is always work to be done at some price. Government regulations stifle innovation, prevent development and so lower the standard of living of all citizens. Social development follows economic development and is certainly not the proper function of government except as it supports individual freedom.

Audience question 7 from the debate

7. What will you do about workplace safety and workman's compensation?

Paraphrasing the other candidates: I am in favour of safety and if you vote for me I will make more and better rules than the other guys.

David McGruer: In a free society the role of government is to protect citizens from the initiation of force, and that is all. First of all, the rational response of a worker to a dangerous workplace is to leave the employer and find another that values safety more highly. If it can be determined that a workplace represents an objective danger to workers, such as in a case of negligence, then government may morally intervene to prevent immediate harm, but since life and all work involves risks of some kind, workers should generally be left free to decide if the compensation they receive for taking risks is suitable. For example, mining is probably more dangerous than gardening, so a worker would rationally expect to be paid more for mining. If he is not, then he should do other work. In addition, government does not interfere in the insurance market in a free society, but rather allows for all forms of insurance to exist and for market forces to drive supply and pricing. Every worker must make rational decisions about risk and insurance and neither employers nor other workers nor other citizens have the right to force any particular insurance or work upon him.

Audience question 6 from the debate

6. What will you do to address the shortage and growing need for home care?

Paraphrasing the other candidates: I am in favour of more home care. Vote for me and I will support more spending on home care.

David McGruer: In a free society home care could be provided in large quantities, limited only by the degree consumers value it, in many locations, limited only by people's evaluation of local service, and in many varieties, limited only by the degree people value such diversity. The fact is, we have many companies that already provide inexpensive, professional and very local services of all types, but in health care there are so many prohibitions, regulations and controls that few entrepreneurs are willing to enter the field. Look around you and imagine if home care was provided with the same efficiency as Tim Hortons serves its customers. And if Tim's does not serve them well, the customers leave in favour of another competitor who will do so. We do not have any shortage of Tim Hortons, and the very idea of a long term shortage of anything provided by a free market is preposterous, yet we somehow are supposed to think health care is an exception to the concept of free markets and can only be properly delivered by use of government force? As long as this idea is not challenged, we will have poor service and chronic shortages in health care.

Get government out of corporations and money

The front page of the Sunday, October 16 Ottawa Citizen featured a very interesting photograph by Greg Southam of Postmedia News. 

I found it noteworthy first because the screaming protester looks rather primitive and mindless, and thus is a good reflection of the ideology of the protest that is based in the primitive philosophy of collectivism.



Second, I noticed that the sign said "Get corporate money out of politics". While I am completely opposed to the principles of the protesters, I do agree with the goals of this particular sign - but not in the same way as the sign bearer would expect. 

In a free society the role of government is to protect the right of citizens to live their lives in the fashion they see fit, peacefully trading value for value with fellow citizens, so long as they do not initiate physical force against others.  When force is threatened or used, government is the institution to which we delegate a monopoly on retaliation.  Government MEANS the use of force.  That which can only be done by force must be delegated to government, except for an immediate threat that invokes the right to self-defense. 

Therefore, any intervention by government in the naturally free activities of citizens, especially in the area of economic activity, which is essential for life, uses force against innocent citizens and is thus improper and immoral.  What the protesters do not state and perhaps do not wish to realize is that corporate money is in politics because the political system of a mixed economy both permits and encourages it.  In some cases, it even requires it, as entrepreneurs must fight a political battle to defend their rights against interference by others.  When government interferes in the economy it shifts the playing field from one where only voluntary, cooperative transactions take place to one where whoever can pull the levers of political power can use coercion against competitors and consumers.  When such a mixed system is implemented, such anti-freedom outcomes are perfectly natural and predictable.

Rather than focusing on getting corporate money out of politics, the true solution to the problem lies in getting politics out of corporations and money.  The fact is that there is not a single business that is not heavily controlled by many government regulations, thus contorting the economy into all manner of unnatural outcomes that would not happen in a free economy.  Underlying all of this is the government monopoly on money, which they use to cause tremendous damage to all sectors of the economy. They print and push money towards vote-buying, in favour of pressure-groups and to implement all sorts of inept, immoral and inefficient economic plans that cause only harm.  If politicians would leave corporations alone, competition through cooperation would ensure a much better standard of living for citizens.  If politicians would leave money alone it would end inflation and all the pain it causes, especially to those on the lower end of the income scale. 

The protesters should embrace the very thing they decry, but which they do not even understand well enough to define: capitalism.  Capitalism is the economic system that protects individual rights.  It is not the system that allows corporations to buy political power - that is the system where government negates individual rights in favour of whatever group can control the apparatus of the state - socialism.  Maybe I will drop in on the protesters and find out if any of them can even give an accurate definition of capitalism, freedom and socialism...

Audience question 5 from the debate

5. What will you do to complete the family health center in Orleans?

Paraphrasing the other candidates: I support it and I will spend money on health care more wisely than the other guys.

David McGruer: None of the other candidates, nor their parties, nor any other group knows how to create and maintain a province-wide health industry. It is too complex for anyone to fully understand. In a free society such complexity is addressed by the equally complex combination of citizens freely choosing their professions and business structure and also choosing to buy health care from anyone they judge suitable for their needs. In this way, health care becomes a free, cooperative industry instead of one riddled with regulation, prohibition and government power. To save health care, we need to remove government intervention from the equation and allow people to creatively solve their own problems instead of having them band together into pressure groups and use the blunt weapon of government to force health care producers and consumers into defined boxes.

Audience question 4 from the debate

4. What will you do to improve road infrastructure?

Paraphrasing the other candidates: I will spend more and have a better plan than the other guys.

David McGruer: In a free society roads are built and maintained according to market demand and not by government force and pressure groups trying to use this force to build roads that suit them. In other transportation industries where government does not dominate, the rule is a steady increase in quality, a lowering of prices and fierce competition to best serve the customer. Does this sound like our road system today? Our roads and bridges are run like our transit system: competition is eliminated by law, prices only go up and pressure groups compete to use government force to achieve their ends. The possibility that free citizens would make cooperative arrangements to meet their goals is not considered viable.

Audience question 3 from the debate

3. What will you do to ensure French services in the LCBO and Beer store?

Paraphrasing the other candidates: You have a right to be served in French and I would punish the employee who insulted you by telling you to go to Quebec if you want to be served in French.

David McGruer: The government has no proper role in these businesses. In a free society the sale of alcohol is a private matter between the seller and the buyer. If the seller does not serve the buyer in a fashion suitable to the buyer, the buyer does not make the purchase and goes to another seller. This clear market signal means that if enough buyers want to be served in French, then competition will make it so. It is wrong to force sellers to offer service in any particular language. If I was the store owner I would have fired that employee, but the government does not have the right to make me fire him.

The protesters might have a point? Really?

In the October 13th Ottawa Citizen, editor Andrew Potter makes a fundamental error of logic as he goes about criticizing the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters.  While he correctly identifies the harmful philosophy of some of the world's socialist regimes, he suggests that the protesters should adopt mass social solidarity of they want to be relevant.

 

"There is a great deal of anger out there, and Wall Street is the right and proper target. The real problem for OWS isn't that the movement has no message or goals, it is that it does not have an adequate ideological language in which to express them."

In fact, it was not the virtuous aspects of Wall Street that have created the current economic problems, but the degree to which Washington has distorted the proper function of Wall Street.  By creating an absolute monopoly on currency and then printing money out of thin air to spend on pet projects, politicians have distorted the normal market price signals beyond recognition and left cvapital to flow into all manner of senseless areas, where it naturally dies and painful death, baiting and then destroying real citizens wealth along with it.  No rational businessman would have made the decisions that we have seen in recent years unless there were massive government pressures at work to encourage them.  If they did, then in the absence of government support, they would have swiftly lost all their money, been fired, and likely never given another chance to destroy wealth.

Potter says: "

But there is another vocabulary at hand: that of the French Revolution. If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has been exposed as a recipe for plutocracy, what about liberty, equality, fraternity? Fraternity - or more expansively, solidarity - is nothing more than the conviction that we are all in this together. Or if not all of us, at least the 99 per cent of the population that is coming to the growing realization that America is a rigged game."

 

He ignores that it is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that has led to the current situation, but rather the concepts of equality and fraternity as described by socialists.  In the name of providing every American with an equal share of housing, rules were made forcing lenders to provide mortgages to those who would not qualify in a rational marketplace.  When artificially low interest rate policy naturally persuaded Americans to borrow insane amounts of money and the natural consequence was financial ruin, the socialist cry is to borrow more, tax more and spend even more than the levels that created the ruin. 

 

The part of America that is a rigged game is the part that is dictated by a control, tax, spend and borrow ideology.  It is the fact that the levers of government power to interfere in the naturally free economy exist that allows and encourages pressure groups to compete for the ability to pull these levers.  The proper solution is not to wrest control from the other group, but to remove the controls entirely so economic outcomes are determined by the sum of individual choices instead of the latest pressure groups.  What is neede is to free people from the artibrary dictates of politicians and bureaucrats, not to co-opt the inheremtly flawed system of socialist economics.

Dedicated socialist Alex Munter appointed as CEO of CHEO

In the October 13 Ottawa Citizen editorial one of the fundamental negative consequences of socialized health care is mentioned but no discussion of its harmful nature is made.

"While Munter has no direct hospital management experience, his background as head of the Champlain Local Health Integration Network and former head of the Youth Services Bureau will serve him well.

In public health care, a knowledge of government and communications is arguably more important than the arcana of hospital administration. CHEO's future success depends on the provincial government meeting its financial needs and the public continuing to offer generous direct support."

How sad is it that a man whose recent successes are that he managed to get himself plum political appointments is now to head one of our large hospitals?  Can there be a clearer endictment of socialized health care than to state without condemnation that for the top executive of a hospital, knowledge of how to pull the levers of political power is more important than knowledge of medicine and business administration?

Implicit in the appointment is the idea that Munter will be able to persuade his socialist friends to fund his hospital more than it funds other hospitals.  The essence of success under socialism is not innovation, not achievement in science, not entrepreneurial genius, not a fiercely competitive business model, but political pull.  In socialism, gains of one group come at the expense of other groups and a battle over political power to control men's lives is waged until the last one dies, much as Greek socialists are now fighting for the right to tax, spend and borrow until the last victim is depleted of all wealth and the whole society dies together.  This is the course chosen by Soviet Russia, North Korea, National Socialist Germany, Cuba, Red China and others over the last century.  It is sickening to watch it happen to one of our most valuable industries - medicine.