Political philosophy draws a distinction between liberty and property. I submit the distinction is best drawn as follows:

• Liberty is control over ones self.
• Property is control over something other than oneself.

For the concept of “self-ownership” to have a logical meaning, it has to be assumedmake any sense, it is necessary to imply that you are made up of not one piece but two: you are made up of the “self” and something else that owns the self. That part – that mysterious owner – is not the body and it’s not any part of the body. Nobody considers a dead man’s brain to be the owner of his body, any more than they consider his liver to be the owner of his body. In practice, those who speak of “self-ownership” consciously or subconsciously assume that the owner is the mind; that the mind owns the body, or that which occurs in the material realm. Therefore, if one considers the concept “self-ownership” to be a valid concept; if one considers one to own ones self; it is necessarily the case that, consciously or subconsciously, one is drawing a dichotomy between the mind and the body.

To the person who believes that the mind and the body are separable, liberty becomes nothing more than a special case, or a synonym for, property – a special kind of property: property in ones self. Alternatively, if liberty is not a kind of property then it means that ones mind controls ones mind controls ones mind, etc., recursively, ad infinitum: a ridiculous, recursive meaning of the word “liberty”.

Now, consider the position of the person who does not draw a dichotomy between mind and body; between spirit and body; between soul and body. For such people, liberty refers to control over ones body, whereas property refers to control over things other than ones body.

To the person who regards mind and body as inseparable, it is “self-ownership” – not liberty – that has the ridiculous and infinitely recursive meaning: that the self owns the self owns the self etc.

Who, then, finds it necessary to use this concept of “self-ownership” in defence of freedom? Who is it that uses “self-ownership” as the reason to oppose laws against abortion, laws against the use of drugs, laws requiring organ donation? The answer is: those who, consciously or subconsciously, assume that the mind, the soul, and the spiritual are separate from the brain, the body, and the material.

“Self-ownership” is a concept compatible not with rational philosophy, but with any number of irrational ones. It serves not those who believe freedom is the logical consequence of a commitment to reality and reason, and a necessary condition for the prevalence of reality and reason, but those who want to treat freedom as somehow axiomatically virtuous; who want to render all metaphysical, epistemological and ethical arguments unnecessary and redundant, or interchangeable; who want to base freedom upon any number of different and conflicting metaphysical, epistemological or ethical beliefs; who want to believe that freedom can be the result of numerous different philosophies, whether rational or irrational; whether committed to reality, reason and self, or whether committed to god, obedience, and etc.

In practice, most succinctly, “self-ownership” is a concept used by conservatives and libertarians who are afraid of being divisive on the issues that are most fundamentally at the base of freedom – the justification of freedom: metaphysical beliefs, epistemological beliefs, and ethical beliefs. They want to side-track all of those aspects of philosophy. All of the under-pinning of political philosophy they want to shunt to the side, and instead replace them with these floating abstractions like “self-ownership” (a concept actually borrowed not even from politics but from law: something subsequent to political philosophy). All in an effort not to have to deal with, or to try to deny, or to try to pretend, that reality, reason and ethics have no important role – are not indispensable – in justifying freedom.

I will just conclude that, in the rational person’s lexicon, the term “self-ownership” really should not exist. In its place should be a single word: liberty.

Note: the above text is a transcript of Paul McKeever’s video of the same name

The lifeboat scenario.

The lifeboat scenario is one in which, usually, there are two people in a lifeboat with no food, no water, no means of sustaining their lives, out in the middle of an ocean or similar body of water, and no land nearby, no rescuers on the way, that they know of.

The typical question asked in the lifeboat scenario is: “Should person X murder and then eat person Y in order to survive?”. It’s important to consider the question itself and what it’s designed to do. By removing the possibility of production – by making it impossible for any of the life boaters to produce what they need to survive – the lifeboat scenario effectively says that rationality – man’s own mind – is of no use in this scenario. So it’s a sneaky attack, actually, on rationality or the role of rationality in man or in the definition of man. It effectively seeks to do the equivalent of saying: “If man were a mindless brute, then would it be ethical for man to murder and eat the other life boater?”. In other words, by changing the metaphysics or, at least, creating a highly artificial metaphysical situation – a situation in which production is not possible – the questioner hopes to have the same effect as though he were asking “If man were not man, then would it be ethical for man to do X?”.

Now consider the purpose of ethics. The purpose of ethics is to establish, or to discover, a “code of ethics” or a code of behaviour that will all man to survive on Earth, in this life. So, the first question is: “What is man? What is the nature of man?”. Well, man is the rational animal (as Aristotle would say). Man survives only because, and only through the use, of his rational faculty. In other words, to survive, man has to solve problems using logic and considering only the observable facts of reality (the things for which there are, ultimately, physical evidence). If he fails to do that – if he makes up the facts upon which he makes decisions, or if he fails to think logically about the evidence – then, ultimately, there is a higher likelihood that he will die.

In fact, if he consistently acts irrationally he certainly will die. He can only, at that point, be fed or put on life support. He cannot provide for himself. And ethics, at that point – at the point were a person is not providing for himself – is utterly irrelevant to him. He’s not making decisions of life or death. He exists only because someone has a tube in his throat or what have you.

Of course, you can choose not to be rational. And, when you choose not to be rational, you are choosing, ultimately, not to use the only tool you have that gives you control over your fate; that allows you to survive (without somebody putting you on some sort of life support). So, when we say “man”, we’re talking about the kind of human being who has decided to think; the kind of human being who has decided to apply his rational faculty to the available evidence around him. A person who does not do so is not, formally speaking, acting consistently with his nature. He is not man. He is human, but he is not man.

Man’s rational faculty allows him to produce the values that allow him to survive; the values upon which his survival and happiness depend. If he does not produce values, he will have no values to consume.

Cannibalism is not the production of values. It is a consumption of values and, of course, it is limited by the number of people who are available to murder and eat. So, in a typical life boat scenario, it is not the case that a person who has chosen not to think can survive by cannibalism. He will survive in the short term – he will extend his life for some amount of time – but eventually he will be right back in the same boat (of the person who has chosen not to think). He will die, because he will not have that life support available any more: there’s no tree of human beings from which he can pluck his food. Cannibalism, in other words, is not only irrational, but is short sighted. In fact, it is worse than short-range thinking, it is point-blank thinking: you are in the emergency; you are starving; you eat right then, right there; you are not thinking about the future; you are not thinking about how this is going to affect your future; you are thinking only about filling your stomach right then, right there. So, it is worse then thinking short-range. It is, as I say, point-blank thinking.

The rational person, on the other hand, needing to produce values, has to think long-range; lives long range; thinks about the effects of things done now on their happiness and survival in the longer term. Of course, in the life boat, there is no opportunity to produce, so that’s not possible. But it is not the case that, by turning to cannibalism, one is somehow thinking long-range, or even short-range, or that one is being rational. It is not a case of being rational at all. It is a case of abandoning rationality; abandoning long-term thinking (and even short-term thinking); thinking more or less as an animal would think; consuming, and not guaranteeing ones future at all.

We can break the schools of moral philosophy into three general groups: the subjectivist, the intrinsicist, and the Objectivist. Let us look at how each of those three would approach the life boat scenario.

The subjectivist effectively says any range of things along the lines of: “Well, you know, nature isn’t knowable; the facts of reality aren’t knowable; or they’re chaotic and unpredictable; or man’s senses are unable to detect what reality is really like”. So, the subjectivist effectively is saying that, if there is going to be a code according to which he or she guides his life, it certainly is not going to be founded upon the facts of reality. The subjectivist has given up on the possibility of knowing the facts of reality. So any system of ethics that he chooses to adopt is adopted arbitrarily; designed somewhat arbitrarily. Even if in some sense it is considered to be fair (e.g., “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”), it has nothing to do with reality. It does not concern itself with the facts of reality or with knowing the facts of reality, or with being determined by the facts of reality.

The subjectivist merely makes it up. So, for example, there is not reason for a subjectivist to reject this sort of philosophy: that, in a life boat, it is right for the lighter person to eat the heavier person – to kill and eat the heavier person – because, under that scenario, the lighter person will have food for a greater number of days than if the reverse were done. In other words, if the heavier person were to kill and eat the lighter person, the heavier person would have food for fewer days. So you can say that “Well, obviously, the correct solution is for the lighter person to kill the heavier person and eat the heavier person for a greater number of days, thereby increasing the likelihood that the lighter person will be found and rescued…”, etc. But that is completely arbitrary morality. There is no way to prove it. It is not connected in any way with the facts of reality in terms of right and wrong: the standard is completely arbitrary.

In fact, the moral subjectivist really has no way of distinguishing the life boat scenario from any other scenario. There is no way for the subjectivist objectively – or with reference to the facts of reality – to justify having a different response when in a lifeboat with no food than when being on the streets of New York. The subjectivist could not say that it is wrong to murder and eat someone in New York, but right to murder and eat someone in a life boat, except by arbitrary assertion. There is no principled way for the subjectivist to do it that is, in any way, connected with the facts of reality or that is, in any way, dictated by the facts of reality. Nor could the subjectivist say that the rules are different for hungry people versus for people who are not hungry (i.e., it would be completely arbitrary if they were to assert a difference).

So, that is the moral subjectivist in a lifeboat. He basically makes it up. There is no right or wrong. It is impossible for him, really, to prove anything he might assert about life boat scenarios.

Let us move on to the intrinsicists. The intrinsicists are those who say that “No, no, there is right and wrong, but it exists independently of what anyone thinks. In other words, for example, the intrinsicist might say “It’s right because god said so” (e.g., “he said so in a book”, somewhere). Or: “Red things are always good to eat”, period, “they’re always good for everyone to eat, regardless of their allergies; regardless of what they like to eat, etc.”.

The intrinsicist essentially says: “One rule fits all in all circumstances”. So, we have two people sitting in a life raft, and the intrinsicist is asked “Is it right for X to kill Y”. He might say “absolutely not”. Well, okay, but what if the intrinsicist says yes, that “It’s absolutely right for X to kill Y”. Well, then it is also logically right for Y to kill X. Why? Because the same rules apply to everybody, independently of any particular person’s mind. So, if it is right for X to kill Y, and it is right for Y to kill X, then it is also true that it is right for X to die, and it is right for Y to die. In other words, at the same time, in the same situation, and in the same place, it is both right for X to live and right for X to die. Or, to put it another way, it is both the case that X’s highest value is his own life and not the case that X’s highest value is his own life. In fact, it could be that his highest value is his own life and, simultaneously, that his highest value is his own death. Why? Because the rightness of X’s death is what morality dictates for Y, and the rightness of X’s life is what morality dictates for X.

So, the intrinsicist runs into contradictions. He cannot find a set of rules that are applicable consistently; that are not contradictory; and, therefore, he ends up with no answer; with an answer that cannot be demonstrated to be true.

Now, let us move on to the Objectivists. The Objectivist says: “What are the facts of reality? What is the nature of man”? The thinking animal; the rational animal; the animal that survives by thinking; by producing values. “What is man’s highest value”? His own life. “What is man’s purpose”? His own happiness. “What is the standard by which we determine something to be good or to be evil”? Human life; the needs of a human on this earth. “What is man’s highest virtue”? Rationality: the very tool that makes the production of values, and happiness, possible.

Now if you do some googling, you will undoubtedly see that there are some people who subscribe to Objectivism who claim that, under Objectivism, the right answer would be that, in a life boat scenario – in an emergency – ethics do not apply. So, on YouTube, for example, our own XOmniverse has said that ethics do not apply, such that it would not be wrong for you to murder and eat the other life boater:

“I think that, in this scenario, it is – although unfortunate – it would be ethical in order to kill and eat the other person. The reason I think this is, once again, we are outside the context of normal human conduct”. (Excerpt from “Lifeboat Scenarios and the Non-Aggression Principle)

My understanding is that XOmniverse believes that this is the logical consequence of Objectivist metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. I think he is utterly incorrect, as are the many other Objectivists I’ve seen on various discussion boards who say that “ethics do not apply in emergency situations” (see here, here, here). I do not think that is the correct interpretation of Rand’s Objectivism in the life boat situation. She certainly did say that if you are trying to discover morality, you do not take an artificial situation – one in which production is not possible; one in which rationality has no role – and then base your ethics upon that. She certainly said that, and that is why she rejected the life boat as the starting place for the development of a code of ethics. However, I do not think she said: “In the lifeboat, ethics does not apply, so go ahead be a cannibal”. She did not say – and I do not think it is a rational interpretation of what she did say – that it is right to pursue ones own happiness or to continue ones own survival by murdering someone else and eating them.

Consider some of the implications of the position that “ethics does not apply in a life boat and, therefore, it is right to murder and eat another life boater”. One applied assumption is that ones own life is ones highest value (I am talking about the Objectivists who assert this). They are assuming that ones own life is ones highest value; that it is right to live. That is an ethical assumption; it is an assertion of ethics. They are assuming that the purpose of a person’s life continues to be – in a life boat – the pursuit of ones own happiness. That, too, is an ethical assertion. So they are not really saying that ethics do not apply in a life boat. What they are saying is that virtue does not apply in a life boat.

If “ethics does not apply in a life boat” – if that is really what they mean – then life is not ones highest value in a life boat: there is no reason to prefer living over dying, or dying over living; there is no way to put a value on life; life could be worth nothing; death could be worth nothing; there are no values. In a life boat scenario, if “ethics do not apply”, then life has no purpose: happiness is not ones purpose; the pursuit of happiness is not ones purpose; neither is the pursuit of misery. There is no purpose…if “ethics do not apply in a lifeboat”. There is no reason, if “ethics does not apply”, not to assert that one should offer oneself up to be killed and eaten; that it is wrong to pursue ones own misery.

In fact, if “ethics do not apply in a life boat” at all, then not even non-Objectivist ethics apply. In other words, emotionalism does not apply: there is no reason to prefer following your whims – your emotionally-driven whims – over, for example, obedience to the will of Allah or anybody else; or obedience to the will of others sitting in the lifeboat. There is no way to say that it is right to do what you feel you should do, but it is wrong to obey what others told you to do in a life boat. There is no way to do that – no way to make that decision – if “ethics do not apply in a life boat scenario”.

The fact of the matter is that, when a person says “ethics do not apply in a life boat, therefore it is right to kill and eat the other life boater”, one is smuggling-in, implicitly, both ethical values and ethical purpose. They are sneaking it in the back door and then claiming that “ethics do not apply”. What they really want to do is reject virtue.

What is man’s highest virtue? Rationality. It subsumes the other virtues that are found in the Objectivist system, in fact. So when a person – an alleged Objectivist in particular – says “there are no ethics in a life boat, therefore you should kill and eat the other guy in order to guarantee your survival or to prolong your survival”, what they are really saying – by saying you should jettison rationality, man’s highest virtue – is “You should cease to choose to be man”, because man is the human who has chosen to think; who has refused not to be rational. So, what they are saying is: “When you are in a life boat, you need not be man. You can resort to being an animal; you can resort to being merely human but not man; in a life boat A is no longer A; man is no longer man”. Or, they are asserting that “Man is not the rational animal in a life boat. We redefine man, in a lifeboat, to be the brute, the mindless brute. And then, when he is rescued, he pops back into being the rational animal”. There is an identity violation going on (I am referring to the Axiom of Identity) in the thinking of a person who says that “In a life boat, ethics do not apply, therefore, murder and eat the other life boater”.

Now, keep in mind: situations do not change the nature of man. The fact that you are in a life boat does not mean that man is not the rational animal. The only thing that can change your nature is your choice. Man has free will, and only the exercise of that free will determines whether man ceases to be man or man continues to be man; whether human becomes man, or refrains from becoming man. The environment around oneself does not make one not-man. It is a choice. Another implication, therefore, of saying that “ethics do not apply in a life boat” is that metaphysics changes a person from being a man into a non-man; that man does not have free will.

An Objectivist would not murder and eat his fellow life boater. An Objectivist would not temporarily suspend being man. He would not temporarily resort to being not-thinking; to being a non-thinking brute; to refusing to use his rationality. Blanking out – ceasing to be rational while in the life boat – will only guarantee that person a life of guilt, shame and pain. That is all that will result, and the Objectivist knows it.

An Objectivist never chooses not to be man. An Objectivist never allows difficult situations – situations in which it is not possible to be productive; to produce values to prolong ones life and pursue ones happiness – to cause him to choose (i.e., he does not choose on the basis of those situations) to cease to be rational; to cease to be man. Tied to a torture rack and facing possible death, he does not choose not to think in order to survive. He knows that such is a choice between death (from thinking and being tortured to death) and death by not thinking. It is a false choice; a choice between death and death. An Objectivist knows that rationality is not a guarantee of his own survival, but the Objectivist also knows that there is nothing to be gained from ceasing to be rational; from ceasing to be man.

Yoshida says that first of the two allegedly flawed approaches is a libertarianism which advocates liberty without actually caring whether or not it is achieved. He is most certainly correct to suggest that there are many self-styled “libertarians” who like to talk about principles, integrity and freedom only to make themselves feel like lonely geniuses, but who believe a free society to be impossible. It is that misguided pessimism which explains why you can rarely find a “libertarian” willing to help out at election time. But, so defined, such lazy, excuse-making, libertarian paralysis is not an approach to the achievement of anything at all. Yoshida is far too generous in giving such despondency the status of an “approach” to “construct liberty”*, and his mention of such libertarianism adds nothing to his argument. Accordingly, I will add nothing further in respect of the first “approach”.

Yoshida labels his main target – the so-called second approach – “libertarian Bolshevism”: a movement of fellows who are “…to regular supporters of liberty what Communists are to Social Democrats – extreme in method, rhetoric, and ideal and, ultimately, harmful to the overall cause”. He offers up, as the alleged libertarian Bolshevik’s approach, the approach of the heroes and heroines in author/philosopher Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, which he describes as follows:

In Rand’s book a libertarian society is created when all of the great minds of the world voluntarily withdraw their services and then, following the inevitable collapse of civilization that follows, take over to run things. The society envisioned by Rand in the final pages of Atlas Shrugged could only be a dictatorship and, given the descriptions of all that preceded it, probably a brutally oppressive one at that.

Responding to commenters, he later makes more explicit his connection of the story of heroes in “Atlas Shrugged” to Bolshevism:

Re-read Atlas Shrugged and consider the implications of the last chapter. [Rand’s] small cadre, like the Bolsheviks, wins through the total collapse of society and afterwards could only rule in the fashion described (the men of the minds ruling by their own will alone) through an absolute dictatorship…what a Randian society…entails is a form of totalitarianism – a boot stamping on the human face forever that happens to be marked ‘Liberty’

Chambers 101: The Fine Art of Straw-Manning, Smearing, and Defaming

At least three things need to be said about Yoshida’s description and use of Atlas Shrugged and of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism. Obvious things first. “Bolshevik” is a term that refers not to a “small cadre”, but to “the majority” of a collectivist movement in Lenin’s Russia. Yoshida’s use of the term in conjunction with Rand, the arch anti-collectivist who escaped Russia (where her family was expropriated) to make her home in the freest country in the world, is utterly inapt and offensive. His is a shameful attempt to imply hypocrisy on Rand’s part, and it is a smear of the sort made routinely by society’s pathetic little liars on the left. That is not entirely surprising, however, given that, in response to comments to his article, Yoshida has explained:

My interpretation of [Atlas Shrugged] has a long history, going as far back as Whitaker Chambers who wrote that, from every page of the book a voice could be heard commanding, out of necessity, “you, to a gas chamber – go!”.

Either through ignorance or manipulation, Yoshida neglects to mention that Whitaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged was, famously, even more misrepresentative of the book’s content and meaning than Yoshida’s. It has been argued, in recent years, that Chambers’ own review is evidence that Chambers did not even read “Atlas Shrugged”. Yoshida neglects to mention that Chambers had himself been a communist spy working with Russia and, such being the case, he apparently considered Rand’s untainted defence of capitalism and the pursuit of happiness something he needed to combat. He neglects to mention that Chambers was writing his “Atlas Shrugged” book review for William F. Buckley’s National Review, and that Buckley was, throughout his life, trying to reconstitute and maintain conservativism in the USA in such a way as to exclude any person or group who had integrity; any person or group who did not accept the notion that everything – including the facts of reality and ethics – can be the subject of a compromise if some sort of gain can be achieved, or loss avoided, in the immediate term. National Review has re-printed the article a number of times (in 1990, 1999, and 2005) since its initial publication decades ago (1957), precisely for the purpose of trying to keep conservativism a short-sighted, pro-mystical, anti-individualist, pro-central-planning, non-Objectivist movement. The article was a smear designed to influence the nature and course of conservativism in the USA and, if Yoshida does not know it, he has not done the tiniest bit of research into the sources from which he chooses to “learn” about Ayn Rand’s philosophy and works.

Second, there is nothing about Atlas Shrugged which could lead any rational person to conclude that the heroes in “Atlas Shrugged” intended or would have to “rule” society as dictators. Quite the opposite is true. In Atlas Shrugged, the heroes do not attempt to win their freedom by means of coercive physical force: they win it passively, by refusing to produce that which cannot be produced without rational thought. The heroes refuse to think and produce for the rest of society. A dictatorial government attempts to use laws, threats and coercive physical force (including torture) to require the rational, productive people in society to continue thinking and producing. Toward the end of the book, the government straps the book’s hero to a torture machine in an effort to force him to agree to rule society:

“Get this straight,” said Dr. Ferris, addressing him for the first time.

“We want you to take full power over the economy of the country. We want you to become a dictator. We want you to rule. Understand?

We want you to give orders and to figure out the right orders to give.

What we want, we mean to get. Speeches, logic, arguments or passive obedience won’t save you now. We want ideas-or else. We won’t let you out of here until you tell us the exact measures you’ll take to save our system. Then we’ll have you tell it to the country over the radio.”

He raised his wrist, displaying a stop-watch. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to decide whether you want to start talking right now. If not, then we’ll start. Do you understand?”

Galt was looking straight at them, his face expressionless, as if he understood too much. He did not answer.

[...]

“Number three,” said Ferris, raising a finger in signal.

The mechanic pressed a button under one of the dials. A long shudder ran through Galt’s body; his left arm shook in jerking spasms, convulsed by the electric current that circled between his wrist and shoulder. His head fell back, his eyes closed, his lips drawn tight. He made no sound.

When the mechanic lifted his finger off the button, Galt’s arm stopped shaking. He did not move.

The dictatorial government’s attempt to make Rand’s hero assume the role of dictator fails because no rational person would want the job, and because every individual’s mind is sovereign: no amount or type of force can cause someone to think if they choose not to do so. In Atlas Shrugged, the dictatorial government – employing various taxes, wealth redistribution schemes, and outright slavery – finds its coercive efforts powerless to cause the novel’s heroes to produce anything. Coercion being no replacement for rational thought, the dictatorial government is powerless to save the economy, and it falls as the lights go out in New York City. In the last chapter of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s heroes and heroines return from their hideaway in Galt’s Gulch because the rest of society has – in their absence – learned that survival and happiness depend not upon government’s laws, threats and guns, but upon each person’s choice to produce and voluntarily to trade values by thinking and acting rationally. Contrary to what Yoshida says, in the last chapter of Atlas Shrugged, society has finally rejected totalitarianism and is ready voluntarily to embrace a system in which government and economics do not mix. For Yoshida to use “Atlas Shrugged” as a proof that Rand’s ideal society is one of necessity governed by totalitarian government is evidence either of his failure to have read and understood “Atlas Shrugged”, or of intellectual dishonesty in the Chambers tradition.

Third, Atlas Shrugged was a novel. The purpose of the novel was to portray the ideal man in a way that explained to the reader Rand’s metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and esthetics. It was not a proposal for how to achieve freedom in an unfree world. Ayn Rand did write about that subject explicitly in her non-fiction and she did not, in her non-fiction, advocate a repeat of John Galt’s plan. Nor have I ever heard any Objectivist or libertarian of note suggest that the path to freedom is a repeat of what the character John Galt did in Atlas Shrugged. Yoshida is straw-manning both Objectivists and libertarians.

“Man of Integrity” Does Not Imply “Revolutionary Dictator”

Having misrepresented Atlas Shrugged and its implications, Yoshida implicitly argues that an Objectivist approach for the achievement of a freer society:

…requires such a wrenching change – a jump from Tuesday to Friday – that it could never be achieved by any means compatible with freedom.

[...]

The Libertarian Bolshevik, on the other hand, doesn’t worry about [various problems associated with various proposals to eliminate oppressive laws] because they simply intend to sweep everything aside at once, using the magic which can only be accompanied by dictatorship.

In response, the Western Standard’s Peter Jaworski comments that:

I like to think of liberty as a “guiding star” of sorts. We ought, as best we can, to move in that direction, even if we already know that we can only get so far.

I have condemned Jaworski’s advocacy of libertarianism elsewhere, but he is more or less correct in this part of his response to Yoshida. As an Objectivist, as a proponent of freedom, and as leader of the pro-reason, pro-freedom Freedom Party of Ontario, I consider freedom – i.e., control over ones own life, actions, and property – a guiding star (one logically necessitated by the facts of reality, including the nature of man). For that reason, in 2005, I designed logos for Freedom Party International (see explanation and description here: http://www.freedomparty.org/about/about.the.logo.htm) and for the Freedom Party of Ontario (see explanation and description here: http://www.freedomparty.on.ca/about/about.the.logo.on.screen.pdf), each of which features Polaris in the asterism Ursa Minor (Polaris is the “north star” or “pole star” by which sailors, for centuries, determined their latitude and orientation). That year, I also wrote a forward to Freedom Party of Ontario’s party policies, in which I explained that the party’s policies:

“…do not and are not intended to represent an exhaustive or ultimate set of policy implications resulting from the party’s founding principle: they do not describe a final destination. Rather, they set out ports of call along the way to a freer, more personally responsible Ontario society. As such, they allow Freedom Party’s leadership to determine the right direction for the governance of Ontario, and to steer accordingly.

Nor are these policies exhaustive. Ethics, not law, is the foundation of political freedom. Laws designed to protect individual freedom are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of individual freedom and personal responsibility. Changes in governance do tend to influence the dominant code of ethics, though law’s influence is limited, especially where the law is not respected. And, because a change in ethics takes place only within the mind of an individual, change in the dominant ethical code of society inevitably is gradual. Freedom Party of Ontario, being a political party, must be satisfied with its role: to attempt the restoration of the necessary legal and political framework for an ethical, hence free, society. In fulfilling that role, Freedom Party must be cognizant of the fact that pro-freedom changes to the law are likely to be transient if they are made so quickly that ethics has no chance to catch up. The policies that follow have been chosen in light of the fact that just as the erosion of freedom has been gradual, so will the restoration of freedom take time, patience, ethical growth and, with respect to changes in governance, gradual steps.

Although these policies specify ports of call, they do not specify which ports of call should be approached first, how quickly they should be approached, or what course should be charted around obstacles to their approach. Such decisions must be made in light of current events, and with wisdom concerning what is politically feasible.

In short, it is utterly false for Yoshida to state or imply that those who – like myself – refuse to compromise their ethical commitments are, of necessity, people who would resort to coercion in a misguided effort to achieve freedom, or people who propose overnight, revolutionary change. A gradual restoration of freedom does not require one to compromise ones commitment to freedom, ones rational code of right and wrong, ones commitment to reason, or ones commitment to the facts of reality. To the contrary, freedom cannot be restored if such compromises are made.

Freedom versus Coercion, Not via Coercion

Perhaps most outrageous of all are Yoshida’s admissions, made in rebuttal to commenters:

…I’m not absolutely opposed to dictatorship, certainly not in the Roman fashion, where it is necessary. I’m a life-long fan of, for example, Augusto Pinochet. But what a Randian society…entails is a form of totalitarianism – a boot stamping on the human face forever that happens to be marked “Liberty”.

and that:

Moving towards liberty is going to require time and some degree of coercion – I think that we need to be realistic about that. No genuinely democratic government, for example, is ever going to be able to do away with Medicare.

I do not think it is unfair, or misrepresentative, to sum up these two statements as follows: Yoshida does not reject totalitarianism per se. He is opposed to “genuinely democratic government”, and believes that freedom can be achieved through – and only through – coercion. He nonetheless expects the reader to believe his claim that he loves freedom, to take his advice when it comes to the matter of how a freer society should be achieved, and to believe that his so-called “libertarian Bolsheviks” are the people who undermine the efforts of his Reactionary Libertarian ilk to achieve a freer society.

I submit that freedom means control over ones own life, liberty and property; it requires physical force to be used only to defend or restore that control; it requires the absence of coercion. Totalitarianism refers to a system in which everyone’s life, liberty and property can be or is controlled by the state; in which force is used, by the state, to obtain that control; in which government has unlimited jurisdiction to coerce the governed. Though I do not think “totalitarian” is the technically correct descriptor for an autocratic monarch whose main aim is to reduce the scope of government’s involvement in the economy, someone who does not oppose totalitarianism is not truly a lover of freedom. The opinion of such a person on matters of how to achieve a freer society is not merely worthless. It is poison that, in the end, serves only those who abhor freedom.

*NOTE: I reject the notion that liberty is something that one constructs, but that is an issue for another article.

About Reason’s Harvest

Reason’s Harvest is a holiday which I founded and first celebrated on November 23, 2007. My intention and hope is that it be celebrated by rational people world-wide, annually, on the first Friday following the U.S. Thanksgiving Thursday. In 2008, Reason’s Harvest will be celebrated on November 28, 2008.

Reason’s Harvest is celebrated by both earning as much as one can earn on that day by honest, rational activity and spending ones own earnings on things one rationally values more than the money paid in exchange. The purpose of the holiday is to celebrate reason (humankind’s sole means of obtaining knowledge of the facts of reality) and rationality. By focusing upon the production of material values, and upon trading them for things valued even more, each individual uses Reason’s Harvest not only to pursue his or her own happiness, but to do so conspicuously, as a demonstration to others both of the purpose of ones life (to pursue ones own happiness), and the virtue of rationality. In the process, productive creation by means of rational human thought and action is championed and rational producers/creators are admired.

The spirit of Reason’s Harvest is summed up in a holiday greeting I have created for Reason’s Harvest: “Go Thank Yourself!“. It is a greeting that recognizes that each person is responsible for his own happiness such that, if one achieves happiness, one has oneself to thank (and, usually, only oneself to thank).

About Reason’s Harvest in 2008

In the weeks and months leading up to the celebration of Reason’s Harvest in 2008, the newly-registered reasonsharvest.com web site will be developed into a more contemporarily-styled one, offering ideas and products to help you maximize your enjoyment of Reason’s Harvest this year and in all future years. As just one example, I hope to make available for purchase a Reason’s Harvest tee-shirt identical to the one I wore on the first celebration of Reason’s Harvest (November 23, 2007).

In the meantime, please bookmark reasonsharvest.com and forward the URL to all of the rational individuals you know. Your ideas, and theirs are welcome and encouraged. Let’s make Reason’s Harvest a great – and conspicuous – one in 2008.

Subtopics include:

• consensual trade and gold coins;
• how paper is turned into money;
• the nature of “legal tender”;
• legal tender and the role of government; and
• agreement vs. consent.

I strongly recommend to everyone – including economics majors – that they watch the series in order, starting with episode 1, rather than just jump directly into episode 5 (see episode descriptions below). The reason: my conceptions, descriptions and terminology may differ considerably from that which you have read in economics texts. This is not to suggest that the economic texts “have it wrong”, per se. However, it has been my observation that many works of economics betray an ignorance of the nature of money, of banking, and of the mechanics of basic financial transactions such as the making of a deposit, the borrowing of money, etc. Hopefully, these videos will provide some useful insights to non-economists and economists alike, whether amateur or professional.

For those who have already watched episodes 1 through 4, jump right in (note: the video will be available world-wide within a day or two, if you cannot access it yet in your area…youtube videos take a while to propagate around the globe):