TGIF: On Value and Freedom

To live is to act. To act is to choose. To choose is to prefer. To prefer is to pursue values—that is, to value. That's logic-guided observation. Ego sum, ergo aestimo: I am, therefore I value. (HT: Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises.)

Next: to think is to act. "[T]hinking itself [is] an action," Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action, "proceeding step by step from the less satisfactory state of insufficient cognizance to the more satisfactory state of better insight."

Shortcut: to think is to value. (James Ellias of Inductica calls this the "value axiom.") Like it or not, we're immersed in the world of "ought." To assert a proposition is to imply: "This is true, so you ought to pay heed." That's the case even if your proposition is something like, "'Ought' statements have no cognitive content." Hume and his fellow emotivists were and are wrong.

Aristotle noticed that human action in the pursuit of ends that are not sought for their own sake—but rather are sought as means to further ends—must aim at some ultimate end: the good life, happiness, contentment, call it what you will. Otherwise, you'd have an infinite series of means leading nowhere, which would make no sense. As he put it:

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.... [W]e call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.... Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for self and never for the sake of something else.... Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

Note the irony: morality is associated with choice and free will. But "[f]or Aristotle, this ultimate end or good is not chosen; it is implicit in every desire and every choice, and all our other ends are to be understood as subordinate to it. The end is, as it were, forced on us; and the task of practical reason is simply to identify it," Roderick T. Long writes in Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand. (Emphasis added.) The ultimate end, therefore, is not pre-moral. Since we are fallible, we need practical reason to make sure the means we select are suited to the ultimate end.

This brings us to political theory and the objective case for freedom. Spoiler alert: as acting, thinking, choosing, valuing beings, we need liberty. But each person needs more than liberty for himself. He needs it for everyone else. Why? Because value pursuers need facts, knowledge, and truth (oh that word), and no individual can acquire all the relevant information on his own. 

I'm drawing on Frank Van Dun's 1986 paper "Economics and the Limits of Value-Free Science." Van Dun points out that economics is value-free in the sense that economists' values should not shape how they observe market phenomena. For example, even someone who dislikes markets for moral or aesthetic reasons should be able, in principle, to see that tariffs raise prices and shrink supply. However, no science, including economics—no truth-seeking project—can be value-free in a broader sense: its practitioners must value truth seeking and conduct themselves accordingly.

The bridge from there to politics is the fact that all truth seeking, even the mundane, everyday sort we all engage in, is a social process. This is not to deny individualism. It's a recognition that individuals cannot truth-seek alone. We learn from what others say and do. The self-interested truth seeker needs others to check him, for it is too easy to slip into complacency without realizing it. As Van Dun puts it,

There is no way an individual can break out of the prison of "the evident," no way he can even identify, let alone begin to question, his prejudices, unless he has come to understand that what is evident to him may not be evident to another and that his point of view is not the only one. Science is a dialogical undertaking: it requires that we make public what we think and try to refute what we believe we ought not to accept, and try to prove what we believe we ought to believe — it requires that we give our reasons.

...A dialogue is an argumentative, not a persuasive, not a rhetorical exchange: the aim of participation is to understand others in order to make one oneself understood in order to allow others the opportunity to indicate just why their understanding of one's point of view does or does not appear to them sufficient reason to share it.

John Stuart Mill put it nicely in On Liberty: "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."

This suggests a self-interested "ethics of dialogue," which a truth seeker is committed to by his own search for truth. (This is in the spirit of Aristotle; see Roderick Long's paper linked to above.) It is a code, Van Dun writes, "to allow others to question one's most sincere convictions … to refrain from using rewards or punishments—promises or threats—as means for securing the agreement of others; to refuse to argue against one's better judgment; and to insist that others do likewise. But most of all: to respect the dialogical rights of others—their right to speak or not to speak, to listen or not to listen, to use their own judgment."

That we ought to respect these rights, recognized in the practice of science, follows from the fundamental norm that we ought to be reasonable—that one ought to respect rational nature, both in oneself and in others; that one ought to cultivate one's own reason and ought to allow others to do the same. This requirement of respect for the rational autonomy of every participant turns the dialogue into the primary political institution for preventing prejudice from establishing itself as an impregnable barrier against free and independent thought, and so for making science possible.

Fine, the critic might say, but what has this got to do with the rights of people who are not scientists and philosophers? Van Dun anticipates this objection: "[T]he requirement of reasonableness applies across-the-board to every human endeavor. It applies to action no less than speech. Human action always rests upon and involves judgment. Scientific or theoretical knowledge is not essentially or qualitatively different from 'ordinary' or practical knowledge."

He quotes Ludwig von Mises in this regard: Production "is not something physical, material, and external; it is a spiritual and intellectual phenomenon.... Man produces by dint of his reason...: the theories and poems, the cathedrals and the symphonies, the motor-cars and the airplane."

"There is, then," Van Dun adds, "a glaring inconsistency in the views of those who defend 'free speech' and 'the free market of ideas' but attack freedom of action and the free market in goods and services."

Respecting reason entails respecting persons. But respecting persons requires more than respecting their bodies. In pursuit of their projects in a finite world, people need to transform matter into means to their ends, endowing those things with purpose. They cannot pursue projects or respect others' pursuits if they cannot know what objects they may use by right, that is, without permission. "In order to respect others as rational agents we must know the distinction between 'mine' and 'thine,'" Van Dun writes. "…If we are to respect the person we ought to respect what is his, otherwise we would deny him the right to act on his own judgment, and thereby destroy the dialogical relationship."

This upends a common argument against private property, namely, that a land owner aggresses against others by excluding them; thus, it is said, nonaggression implies collective ownership. But this is wrong. The first to mix his labor with an unowned parcel transforms a mere thing into a means to an end. Further, the homesteader aggresses against no one in the process. If someone else interferes, he is the aggressor by withholding respect from the homesteader. This is not a matter of arbitrary definition. It is a fact—for if the first person to transform the parcel has no right to it, how can the second person to come along have a right? (This is not to deny that property law is complicated and that details would be shaped by local custom. But a coercive monopoly government is unqualified for that job. It takes a competitive market to get it right. See David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom for details.)

The appeal of Van Dun's argument is palpable. It might look like an additional case for freedom, but it seems more like another demonstration that freedom is an objective condition for the life of man qua rational being. (I commend Rand's case read in conjunction with Roderick Long's Reason and Value. By the way, Van Dun's case is not to be confused with dubious "argumentation ethics," which holds that the very act of making an argument logically commits one to the self-ownership rights of one's interlocutor. That's reality-detached rationalism.)

The upshot is that a truth seeker undercuts his own project when he advocates government interference with other truth seekers, aka everyone else. He thereby relinquishes his truth-seeker credentials.

(I first explored Van Dun's paper years ago at the Foundation for Economic Education website.)

TGIF: Limited Government's Bait and Switch

In a fundamental respect, libertarian minarchism (minimal, or limited, government) and market anarchism (or anarcho-capitalism) have something important in common: neither can guarantee individual rights.

But there's a big difference: unlike market anarchism, minarchism appears to offer a guarantee, which allegedly makes it preferable to market anarchism. Actually, it's a false guarantee, a bait-and-switch. So it's not preferable to market anarchism, at least on those grounds.

However, what market anarchism can do is show how everyday incentives will tend to protect liberty (and already do now). Minarchism can't credibly say the same thing because constitutionally limited representative democracy is riddled with well-known perverse political incentives. That makes market anarchism the better bet.

It's instructive to watch the recent Soho Forum debate on the proposition "Anarcho-capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity." Yaron Brook, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, took the affirmative, and Bryan Caplan, libertarian professor of economics at George Mason University, took the negative. I think Caplan demolished Brook's case, which isn't exclusive to Ayn Rand Objectivists. This was a debate between two people starting from similar premises in favor of individual freedom, rational self-interest, and competition.

While what follows may not convince anyone to advocate market anarchism, it should eliminate a big argument against it.

Most limited-government advocates think that only a monopoly government can produce the objective law and fair and peaceful adjudication/enforcement that human beings need to flourish. The problem, as indicated, is that minarchism is all talk. It can't deliver.

Remember the old joke in which a tourist asks a grumpy local how to get somewhere? The local responds, "You can't get there from here." That's the problem. Brook's theory of constitutionally limited government promises to get us to a place where we cannot go because it doesn't exist. Why not? As Dr. Seuss might say, because it's people all the way down. Limited-government advocates ignore this obvious fact.

Contrary to its fans, limited government is conceptually impossible. It, not anarchism, is a "floating abstraction." If this standard argument for limited government disappears, what's left?

Any advocate of liberty who knows even a little U.S. political history should see the problem for minarchism. In freedom-loving quarters, the American constitutional system wins kudos  -- the obvious serious contradictions such as slavery excepted. But what about the government's horrendous expansion since 1789? Isn't that a hint that something did not quite work?

Some Americans began complaining about the bigness of the national government at the turn of the 19th century! And let's not forget that the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, denied the national quasi-government the power to tax and regulate trade. Within a few years, that changed. Wasn't that a bad omen?

Anarcho-libertarian abolitionist and businessman Lysander Spooner's 1870 "The Constitution of No Authority" concluded, "But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain -- that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”

The Constitution has not guaranteed freedom. Brook himself called today's U.S. government a "gang." So what could have been different, minarchists? A nation full of perfect Objectivists? Good luck with that.

The Soho Forum debate, which I highly recommend, could have been over early when Caplan identified the impossible guarantee. Brook responded that his ideal government would "strive" to make that guarantee. Caplan pointed out that a striven-for guarantee is not a guarantee.

Undeterred, Brook resorted to the catechism "A proper government is the means by which we place retaliatory use of force under objective control and objectively defined laws ... for the purpose of protecting rights."

Caplan called this mere "tautological." You can define the term proper government as an objective and reliable rights-protector. But in the real world, how do you get there from anywhere? It sounds Platonic. It's more like a version of the ontological argument.

Brook also said that the banishment of force from society "doesn't just happen. That's not something you negotiate. That is just something that is." (My emphasis.)

"Just is"? What does that mean? How does it materialize -- immaculate conception? And how would it be maintained? Is the state an infallible Objectivist Mr. Spock? Or Gort, the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still? (The original movie costarred Patricia Neal, who ironically also played heroine Dominique Francon in the film version of Rand's The Fountainhead.)

Remember, it's people all the way down -- from the inception of the government to maintenance. People are fallible. They disagree. They change their minds. They ask for free stuff from politicians. Some will even be corrupt and dishonest when they run for office. And, as Public Choice shows, the ones in government are prone to bias in favor of their careers. No one can reasonably hope to keep a government limited, nonaggressive, and efficient -- a square circle indeed. Is a New Man required? (See my take on someone who long grappled with this question, Anthony de Jasy.)

Pro-market economist Harold Demsetz warned against the "Nirvana fallacy": positing an unachievable "ideal" as an alternative to anything that can be achieved. That's what we have here in limited government. If it isn't on the actual menu, we must determine the best actual alternative.

Caplan repeatedly challenged Brook with this basic objection, but Brook bobbed and weaved. (See the exchange starting here.) He seems not to have read anything but Rand's 1960s essay on the need for government, predicting routine widespread violence under market anarchism. But she was answered many times. Brook casually dismissed the voluminous market-anarchist historical, economic, and ethical scholarship as a mere intellectual exercise.

It was good to hear that Book supports free immigration. Among its many virtues, it would be a potential escape from tyranny. But why shouldn't people be free to "migrate" from one rights-protecting institution to another without changing location? Brook says a location (undefined) must have one law. But Western Europe doesn't have one law. Yet he agreed with Caplan that, unlike in previous eras, a war between, say, France and Germany or Norway and Sweden is unthinkable and will very likely remain so.

Caplan noted that what keeps the big governments in those countries from fighting (which would be made possible by taxation and conscription) is people's general expectation of peaceful dispute resolution. That would apply even more to accountable, reputable, and competitive businesses selling security to free customers.

War isn't impossible in Western Europe and elsewhere, just unlikely in our more pacific era. (See Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.) Yes, Russia and Ukraine are at war. But how many of the almost 200 countries in our anarchist world without a super-government would rather fight costly wars even for the winner than settle disputes diplomatically? (For an analogy, think of what two auto insurance companies routinely do when each has a client in a conflict. The companies already have contracts to deal with each other peacefully. They couldn't afford a Randian war of all against all.)

Well, why does market anarchism, unlike minarchism, inspire reasonable confidence about the chances of protecting liberty? That's a topic for another day, but suffice it to say that, as Caplan argues, rational self-interest, free competition, the need for a good reputation, and today's general expectation of peaceful conflict resolution provide our best chance. This doesn't mean pushing the "anarchist button," which doesn't exist anyway. It means showing people that major alternatives to the state already exist, including arbitration and private security firms.

It is said that freedom isn't free. Protection of freedom certainly isn't free. But we need not be forced to pay monopoly prices for inferior services and even rights violations in order to enjoy our freedom.

More reading

Roderick Long, "Market Anarchism as Constitutionalism."
Sheldon Richman, "The Constitution of Anarchy," in America's Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited.
David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism, 3d ed.

TGIF: Markets and the Pursuit of Happiness

For some time now I've thought that many people's antagonism to the market is motivated not by moral or economic objections but by aesthetic criteria. (I discuss this in What Social Animals Owe to Each Other and here.)

By that I mean they simply find market relations -- involving private property, contracts, profit, competition, and "impersonal forces" such as supply and demand -- unattractive, even ugly. They wish society had nothing to do with such relations, which they (mistakenly) believe have displaced the cozy cooperation and communalism that marked an earlier golden age. They long to return to the beautiful but lost Garden of Eden, where markets don't exist and people can be human again. They make just two errors. First, they misunderstand the market. For example, competition and cooperation go together. And second, the longed-for Eden never existed. Before human beings transformed the earth, nature was a cruel master. People weren't always so nice either.

The aesthetic rejection of markets could explain why we libertarians have made little progress in persuading people that crony capitalism is significantly different from the free market. The people who find markets ugly don't care whether businesses get favors from the government or not. That's not what matters to them.

Something underlies this revulsion at the market and the freedom it entails: self-interest, or what the critics would call selfishness. It's also been called the pursuit of happiness. (Of course, Ayn Rand, who held that the pursuit of self-interest is entirely proper embraced the word selfishness at least for the shock value. See her book The Virtue of Selfishness.) The aesthetic rejection of markets may rest on an aesthetic reaction to self-interest. The line between ethics and aesthetics can be blurry.

So we must ask, with Ayn Rand, what's wrong with self-interest? It is not a good answer to say that self-interest means exploiting other people, defrauding them, and even physically hurting them. But this assumes that self-interest is entirely subjective or actually requires the domination of others. That's nothing more than a confession. It's not proof. Because someone says something is good doesn't make it so. And why would self-interest require domination? (For Rand it emphatically did not.)

Like the boy in "The Emperor's New Clothes," we can ask in all innocence, What's wrong with self-interest? It doesn't seem a priori bad. On the contrary, you get only one life. Why not make the most of it in all sorts of ways? Put that way, most people would agree.

It will not help the critic's case to equate self-interest with greed, which is never defined. It's just a lazy slur.

Rand's Objectivism justified rational egoism and political economy from a metaphysics and an epistemology of reason. She did not think that people could be won over to freedom and free markets if they were hostile to reason and egoism, that is, the principle that one's own life is one's highest value, the value on which all others depend. That makes sense to me.

And that raises a question: if the pursuit of self-interest (happiness) were to lose its stigma, which it has at least part-time for many people, would opposition to the freedom and free market disappear? And if so, how can we remove the stigma?

It won't be enough to argue, as many market advocates do, that in markets people altruistically service one another. It's true that in voluntary transactions both parties. benefit But market opponents will scoff that since the motive for this "service" is self-interest, not self-sacrifice, it doesn't count.

Fortunately, we can try to destigmatize self-interest by invoking a pillar of Western civilization that for centuries was held in high esteem. I mean more than using Jefferson's great term in the Declaration of Independence the pursuit of happiness. I have mind the ethics of personal flourishing, or eudemonia, bequeathed by the ancient Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle. The work of Benedict Spinoza in the 1600s inherited many of its virtues.

For Aristotle, the path to happiness in the sense of the good life is to live according to one's nature as a rational/social being. Reason is in the driver's seat in individual and social matters. This suggests a society based on individualism, persuasion, and trade rather than collectivism, force, and domination. (The Greek philosophers' politics, however, left much to be desired.) The virtues we associate with the ancient Greeks -- such as justice, prudence, moderation, and courage -- described this way of living intelligently.

Reason and cooperation don't just get rational people what they want; those things are what rational people want because that's the human way of living. (I'm taking guidance here from philosopher Henry B. Veatch's Aristotle: A Contemporary Interpretation and Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics and from philosopher Roderick T. Long's Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand and "Economics and Its Ethical Assumptions.")

Here is a common-sense ethics of rational self-interest that most people could sign on to. It might erode the stigma of selfishness. It's worth noting that In his Nicomachean Ethics, book 9, chapter 8, Aristotle defended -- of all things -- "self-love." He wanted to show that, contrary to popular opinion, the person who most loves himself is the one who lives intelligently in pursuit of happiness, which Aristotle regards as noble. He wrote:

We blame, it is said, those who love themselves most, and apply the term self-loving to them as a term of reproach: and, again, he who is not good is thought to have regard to himself in everything that he does, and the more so the worse he is; and so we accuse him of doing nothing disinterestedly. The good man on the other hand, it is thought, takes what is noble as his motive, and the better he is the more is he guided by this motive, and by regard for his friend, neglecting his own interest.

But this theory disagrees with facts, nor is it surprising that it should. For it is allowed that we ought to love him most who is most truly a friend, and that he is most truly a friend who, in wishing well to another, wishes well to him for his (the other’s) sake, and even though no one should ever know. But all these characteristics, and all the others which go to make up the definition of a friend, are found in the highest degree in a man’s relations to himself; for we have already seen how it is from our relations to ourselves that all our friendly relations to others are derived....

Those who use self-loving as a term of reproach apply the name to those who take more than their due of money, and honour, and bodily pleasures; for the generality of men desire these things, and set their hearts upon them as the best things in the world, so that they are keenly competed for. Those, then, who grasp at more than their share of these things indulge their animal appetites and their passions generally—in a word, the irrational part of their nature. But this is the character of the generality of men; and hence the term self-loving has come to be used in this bad sense from the fact that the greater part of mankind are not good. It is with justice, then, that we reproach those who are self-loving in this sense.

That it really is to those who take more than their due of these things that the term is usually applied by the generality of men, may easily be shown; for if what a man always set his heart upon were that he, rather than another, should do what is just or temperate, or in any other way virtuous—if, in a word, he were always claiming the noble course of conduct, no one would call him self-loving and no one would reproach him.

And yet such a man would seem to be more truly self-loving. At least, he takes for himself that which is noblest and most truly good, and gratifies the ruling power in himself [reason], and in all things obeys it. But just as the ruling part in a state or in any other system seems, more than any other part, to be the state or the system, so also the ruling part of a man seems to be most truly the man’s self. He therefore who loves and gratifies this part of himself is most truly self-loving.

Again, we call a man continent or incontinent, according as his reason has or has not the mastery, implying that his reason is his self; and when a man has acted under the guidance of his reason he is thought, in the fullest sense, to have done the deed himself, and of his own will.

It is plain, then, that this part of us is our self, or is most truly our self, and that the good man more than any other loves this part of himself. He, then, more than any other, will be self-loving....

The good man, therefore, ought to be self-loving; for by doing what is noble he will at once benefit himself and assist others: but the bad man ought not; for he will injure both himself and his neighbours by following passions that are not good.

Note that Aristotle says that living rationally (nobly, egoistically) --  -- "assists others" as well as himself. Think about the producer and merchant who do so much good for others. But that obviously is not the reason to live that way. The reason is that it is the human way to live and therefore the way to flourish.

I'm not saying this will persuade anyone with an aesthetic aversion to the market. It certainly won't persuade one who lusts for power over others. But we've got to do something to remove the stigma from self-interest. Otherwise, we'll never see a truly free society.

The Impossibility of Altruism

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings.

--Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

An old joke has it that sadomasochist relationships are impossible because the masochist would beg his partner to hurt him and the sadist would refuse. 

By the same token, altruism (meaning the ethics of self-sacrifice, not merely niceness) is impossible. Theoretically, in an altruist world, no one could find anyone willing to accept his sacrifices because that would be selfish. But altruism requires other people to do so or else virtue is impossible. The way out is hypocrisy: people who preach self-sacrifice but who nevertheless stand ready to receive.

Rand would go on to say -- and I'm inclined to agree -- that the hypocrites shouldn't be called egoists, though many observers would do so. She'd say that people who relate to others not as traders but rather as parasites love themselves too little, not too much. Aristotle would agree. In contrast to altruism, rational egoism, or "selfishness," is an ethics that everyone can live by simultaneously without contradiction.

Ten Favorite Books

Keith Knight, host of the Don't Tread on Anyone podcast, interviewed me about ten of my favorite books. 

Things-in-Something Else?

My newest least-favorite phrase in the English language is things-in-themselves. Oh the fallacies packed into that innocuous-looking phrase. There is no such thing as things-in-something else, and it cannot be that to have a specific method of perceiving reality ipso facto means one cannot perceive reality. (See two posts by Roderick Long here and here).

Trump and JFK's "Fascist New Frontier"

In his speech at Fayetteville, NC, yesterday Donald Trump said:

Our men and women in uniform represent the absolute best of us. We must follow their example working in unison toward a shared goal across every social, racial and economic line. They understand that to accomplish the mission we must all be pulling in the same direction. We have to get together.

Read that carefully and let it sink it. I'm reminded of Ayn Rand's debunking of JFK and what she called the "Fascist New Frontier." (See George Smith's "Ayn Rand on Fascism.")

TGIF: Another Silly Jab at Libertarianism

The problem with responding to Alan Wolfe’s feeble attempt to critique libertarianism is that one might appear to be defending the particular people he targets: namely, Rand Paul and Ayn Rand. (Rand Paul was not named after Ayn Rand. At least Wolfe avoided that error.) I want to defend the libertarian philosophy without defending Rand Paul or Ayn Rand because:

TGIF: "And the Pursuit of Happiness": Nathaniel Branden, RIP

The binding together of “perfection” (virtue, or excellence, in the Greek sense) and liberty (internal and external) with the pursuit of happiness is noteworthy.

Which brings me to Nathaniel Branden.

Read it here.

Nathaniel Branden, 1930-2014

Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand's original partner in the Objectivist movement, died December 3. Branden was a complicated man, a big mixture of virtue and vice. I may write more about him later but for now, I will just say that I am thankful that I did not discover Objectivism until just after the Rand-Branden split occurred in 1968.

Here's Brian Doherty's obituary for Branden.

In 2006 I published "Szasz and Rand" in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (unfortunately not online), a review essay of Szasz's Faith in Freedom, which contains critical chapters on Rand and Branden.

TGIF: What Social Animals Owe to Each Other

If I were compelled to summarize the libertarian philosophy’s distinguishing feature while standing on one foot, I’d say the following: Every person owes it to all other persons not to aggress them. This is known as the nonaggression principle, or NAP.

What is the nature of this obligation?

Read more.

Ayn Rand at Her Worst

Obamacare, Contraception, and Ayn Rand

It will be little comfort to the advocates of state-mandated “free” contraception that Ayn Rand, who would have abhorred Obamacare and all its mandates, was as staunch an advocate of birth control and women’s right to abortion as one can imagine. Writing about the anti-contraception papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” Rand wrote in “Of Living Death” (1968):

Try to hold an image of horror spread across space and time—across the entire globe and through all the centuries—the image of parents chained, like beasts of burden, to the physical needs of a growing brood of children—young parents aging prematurely while fighting a losing battle against starvation—the skeletal hordes of unwanted children born without a chance to live—the unwed mothers slaughtered in the unsanitary dens of incompetent abortionists—the silent terror hanging, for every couple, over every moment of love. If one holds this image while hearing that this nightmare is not to be stopped, the first question one will ask is: Why? . . .

 The passive obedience and helpless surrender to the physical functions of one’s body, the necessity to let procreation be the inevitable result of the sexual act, is the natural fate of animals, not of men. In spite of its concern with man’s higher aspirations, with his soul, and with the sanctity of married love—it is to the level of animals that the encyclical seeks to reduce man’s sex life, in fact, in reality, on earth.

The "Pro-Capitalist" Mentality

You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.

--Ludwig von Mises to Ayn Rand (pdf)
regarding Atlas Shrugged

These two people have been big influences on me, and both have made important contributions to the cause of freedom. Nevertheless, I believe that "capitalism" can engender the attitude shown here. Often it is implicit in writing about capitalism, but it is there and people we might win over to libertarianism are alienated by it.

Farrah and Ayn

Call me a sentimental fool, but I like this story about the contact between Farrah Fawcette and Ayn Rand.

Hat tip: Brian Doherty.