Libertarianism rising in Latin America

Latin America's economic conditions are ripe for radical change — and U.S.-backed libertarian influence networks see an opportunity.

Illustration courtesy The Intercept.

Why Libertarianism Is Rising in Latin America | Foreign Policy | Juan P. Villasmil:

November 16, 2023 - "National populism is increasingly defining right-wing electoral politics in the United States and Europe. But Latin America has chosen a different path — emerging as a bastion of libertarianism on the global stage. "This year alone, 

• a self-described anarcho-capitalist has become the new face of Argentina’s opposition. Javier Milei earned the most votes in the country’s August presidential primaries and then eliminated center-right candidate Patricia Bullrich in the first round of presidential elections on Oct. 22. Milei is set to face off with Economy Minister Sergio Massa, of the governing Peronist movement, in a Nov. 19 runoff.... Massa finished first in the Oct. 22 election, but ... [t]he right-of-center vote was split between Bullrich and Milei, and Bullrich has since endorsed Milei. So has former conservative President Mauricio Macri. Polling is inconsistent, but Milei leads six national polls in a survey of 10 polls assessed by El Observador.... [Milei won - gd]
• On the same day as Argentina’s first-round election, Venezuela’s María Corina Machado and her libertarian party humiliated the traditional opposition in primaries ahead of expected presidential elections next year. Machado, who has been compared to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is one of the lone voices in Venezuela’s opposition openly advocating for the privatization of the oil industry.... Her party has also organized seminars celebrating libertarian titan Milton Friedman. Machado herself has shown support for socially progressive causes such as gay marriage, distancing herself from both social conservatism and Keynesian economics.
• "In Uruguay, meanwhile, a libertarian party inspired by Milei officially registered with authorities on Sep. 29, saying it seeks to 'go beyond' right vs. left discourse and aims to respect 'everyone’s individual rights.' 
• In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa — the son of the country’s wealthiest man — recently defeated his socialist rival and is set to continue the pro-business legacy of his predecessor Guillermo Lasso. Noboa’s principles are the most confusing of any of the aforementioned politicians. He defines himself as center-left while citing free enterprise as his priority. In 2021, his predecessor — and now supporter — Lasso earned an endorsement from Ecuador’s Libertarian Movement.

"The political economy of Latin America helps explain why it has become the perfect breeding ground for libertarianism. The rapid growth of the movement, though, should be attributed to a network of libertarian think tanks, leaders, and activists who have long peddled influence — and are starting to see it pay off....

"From 1970 to 1982, Latin America’s total debt levels increased by more than 1,000 percent (from $29 to $327 billion). The lost decade, as scholars now call it, angered millions of Latin Americans... It was then, as popular discontent soared, that the Soviet Union found the perfect conditions to further challenge the United States in its hemisphere, which in turn only reinvigorated U.S. interventionism. Both countries aided Latin American dictatorships that killed hundreds in their respective quests to expand socialist and capitalist economic models. Most notably, the United States backed Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Argentina’s Jorge Videla while the Soviets supported Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. The politically motivated decisions of this era accelerated Latin American dysfunction, fostering a reactionary loop of capitalism begetting socialism and vice versa.

"Latin America was then — and remains today—the most unequal region in the world.... [E]ight out of the 20 most economically unequal countries on the planet are located in the region. It is there where socialists found the perfect terrain to spread their ideas, and after they governed, the inflation-ridden and capital-fleeing states they left behind became cannon fodder for the pro-business political class.... But when inequality remained, socialists once again reaped the ideal conditions for their movement to flourish.... Over the past few years, ... Chile and Colombia, which previously resisted the so-called 'Pink Tide,' have elected socialists, while in Argentina and Brazil, conservative presidents failed to win reelection.

"As the left’s grasp over the region increased, libertarians were organizing. Dissatisfied with both socialism and what they viewed as a weak conservative opposition, social media-savvy public intellectuals such as Milei became icons. He was not alone: Less famous members of this cohort include Guatemala’s Gloria Álvarez (who announced that she would run for president even though she didn’t meet the age limit) and Chile’s Axel Kaiser (who founded the libertarian think tank Foundation for Progress)....

"Wealthy Americans, such as the Koch brothers, have played a role funding not only libertarian think tanks in the United States, including the Cato Institute, but have also founded networks with a vast presence in Latin America. The Atlas Network, for instance — which describes itself as a 'think tank that creates think tanks' — has around 500 partners around the world, and its friends include Machado, Colombian presidential-candidate-in-the-making María Fernanda Cabal, and Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2018, the network created a Center for Latin America ... and at the time included more than 80 affiliate civil society organizations. Two notable members are Chile’s Fundación Piensa and Argentina’s Libertad y Progreso. The Argentinian think tank also partners with the Cato Institute, the Acton Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.

"Similarly, under the banner of free-market economics, regional alliances have also been strengthened. The Liberal Network for Latin America (RELIAL) was established in 2004. It is the regional organization of Liberal International, which was founded in Oxford, England, in 1947, and has since become the preeminent global liberal organization, with dozens of member political parties throughout the world. RELIAL now includes 42 institutions from 17 Latin American countries, such as research institutes and foundations. Machado’s party is a member.... According to a 2009 Aporrea report by Eva Golinger, the American journalist-turned-Chávez advisor, CEDICE has received direct financial support and strategic advice from the U.S. government since 2001. Golinger, known for using Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover U.S. involvement in Venezuela, has drawn connections between the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and CEDICE.... Golinger’s report also points out how the Cato Institute has worked alongside CEDICE, such as via the ElCato-CEDICE University in Caracas, as well as directly with Venezuela’s opposition. Cato granted the Milton Friedman Prize to Venezuelan politician Yon Goicoechea in 2008....

"Russian American writer Ayn Rand has become an ideological sweetheart among Latin America’s right-of-center activists. Groups such as the Ayn Rand Latin America Center have held Ayn Rand conventions in Argentina and Brazil, and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged has flooded Latin American bookshelves following the publication of a translation in 2019. Milei has even called for an “Atlas rebellion.” Venezuelan libertarian activists based in the United States—including Univision’s Linea de Fuego talk show host Franklin Camargo and the Young America’s Foundation’s Daniel Di Martino—showcase the growing influence of those who love Rand’s ideas.... 

"Latin American libertarians have taken organizing seriously. As new elections approach, don’t be surprised by their success."

Read more: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/11/16/argentina-election-milei-venezuela-machado-libertarianism-economics-us-influence/

This year's anti-libertarian book worth the read

"What sets Andrew Koppelman’s book apart from most critiques of libertarianism,"  says reviewer Marco den Ouden, "is that he actually knows what he’s talking about."

Libertarian Limitations | Quillete | Marco den Ouden:

A review of Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed by Andrew Koppelman, 320 pages, Macmillan (Oct 2022)

September 12, 2023 - "Andrew Koppelman ... is a Professor of Law and of Political Science at Northwestern University, a civil libertarian, and the author of books on antidiscrimination law, gay rights, same-sex marriage, healthcare reform, and religious liberty. He declares himself to be 'a pro-capitalist leftist' and acknowledges that his 'embrace of that position here will make many of my friends on the left feel betrayed.' The thing that turns Koppelman’s crank is what he regards as a heartless, narrow, and blinkered understanding of liberty on the part of many libertarians.... 

"What sets Koppelman’s book apart from most critiques of libertarianism is that he actually knows what he’s talking about. He’s clearly read and researched libertarianism in considerable detail. And while he is sometimes harsh in his criticism, he clearly sees the value in many libertarian positions. His background in law and political science, as well as his writing on civil liberties, allows him to bring some fascinating insights to bear in his analysis. And he sometimes turns libertarian ideas on their head, using libertarian ideas to argue against what he sees as a perversion of libertarian ideas in the works of Rothbard, Nozick, and Rand. 'You ought to be a libertarian—of a certain kind, and only up to a point,' he writes. 'This book is not only a critical description of libertarianism. It aims to marry what is best about libertarianism with the agenda of the left'....

"Koppelman notes that the modern political Left is often more concerned with identity politics than with alleviating poverty. 'A right to be different,' he continues, 'pushes toward localization of power and away from central planning.' The people on the Left, who continue to malign capitalism, 'don’t grasp the anti-socialist logic of their present views.' And because Hayek was not a doctrinaire absolutist in his opposition to a role for the state in the economy, he 'thought redistribution to provide basic needs was an appropriate supplement to a free market. Such a supplement was not central planning, because it left the recipients free to make their own decisions'.... Ronald Reagan, Koppelman suggests, 'succeeded in shifting American politics—and American understandings of liberty—in a Hayekian direction.' Bill Clinton’s Democrats adopted these views and implemented some of the things Reagan could not.... 

"But while Democrats since Clinton have adopted a Hayekian approach to markets and regulation, Republicans have moved steadily in a more radical and fundamentalist libertarian direction, distilled from the later views of Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand. Before considering those views, Koppelman digresses with a chapter on the Lockean theory of natural rights. Hayek was lukewarm at best on rights theory, but it is the centerpiece of the Rothbard/Nozick/Rand approach. And of course, it holds a key place in the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The fundamentalist view of property rights holds that people work and the fruits of their labor is their property. They have a right to it. Such rights are absolute. And, as per the Declaration of Independence, 'to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' This does not give government carte blanche to do what it wants.... 'You must not spend money that’s not yours.' But, Koppelman notes, if this view is correct, 'it straightaway entails that most of what government does is illegitimate.' This, he continues, 'is the moral core of much modern libertarianism'.... 

"Koppelman identifies Rothbard’s 'core moral principle' as nonaggression, as expressed in For a New Liberty: 'No man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else.' Koppelman says that Rothbard adopts this principle because 'each man may only live and prosper as he exercises his natural freedom of choice,' thus 'if someone aggresses against him to change his freely-selected course, this violates his nature; it violates the way he must function.' Koppelman agrees that this 'axiom entails anarchism'. So how will justice be administered in an anarchist world? By private contractors—“multiple private police forces, with no central authority over them.” Koppelman compares this to a society of warlords, each trying to gain dominance. 'What actually emerges from networks of protective associations, all over the world, is some variety of hereditary aristocracy.' In other words, feudalism.... .  

"Koppelman brushes Nozick off in a few paragraphs and moves on to consider the influence of Ayn Rand.... Koppelman seems to have mixed feelings about Rand. He clearly admires some of her writing and philosophy, and he appreciates her support for charity as expressed in her essay 'The Ethics of Emergencies'.... Elsewhere, he writes that, 'the most attractive aspiration in Rand is the independence of judgment, and faith in oneself, displayed by Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead. The book has surely helped many young people with its message that they should pursue their own deepest aspirations, and not care about impressing others'.... But in Atlas Shrugged, Rand 'offers a far cruder picture.' She argued that under capitalism, 'it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward.'This leads to the view that 'markets give people exactly what they deserve and any redistribution is unjust'.... 

"In Rand’s opposition to any relief by the state, she shared Rothbard’s position. But while she did argue in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal that 'without property rights, no other rights are possible,” Koppelman suggests that “at Rand’s core is, not a theory of property rights, but an ideal of reciprocity. That ideal is attractive. It is, I suspect, the source of her rhetorical power.” According to the Oxford dictionary, reciprocity is 'the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit'.... 'She has in fact captured an important ethical ideal,' Koppelman continues, 'the value of interpersonal respect between "men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value"'.... 

"Koppelman concludes with chapters on paternalism, discrimination, and how the lack of appropriate regulation has led to the aggrandizement of modern day moochers and looters....  

|I was a doctrinaire libertarian/Objectivist from 1969 to 2000, and I came to my libertarianism through Ayn Rand. The first libertarian book I ever read was Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I was hooked and read everything Rand ever published during her lifetime and much of what was published posthumously. My drift away from orthodox libertarianism accelerated after I retired in 2014, started blogging, and returned to university. I became an admirer of Isaiah Berlin's value-pluralism—the view that genuine values can conflict, which is anathema to libertarians. Although I have read very little of Hayek, Koppelman's book makes me want to explore his thought in more detail. Koppelman presents a good case for taking the Hayekian approach with a work that is rich in detail and full of thought-provoking ideas. It is well worth the read, whether you ultimately agree with him or not."

Read more: https://quillette.com/2023/09/12/libertarian-limitations/

Are libertarians greedy and delusional? A Soho Forum debate [Andrew Koppelman vs. Gene Eptein] | ReasonTV | May 22, 2023:

New book on libertarianism's founding mothers

Timothy Sandofur's new book on the founding mothers of libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand.

The Founding Mothers of Libertarianism | Reason magazine - Marcus Witcher: 

Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, by Timothy Sandefur, Cato Institute, 500 pages, $19.95

March 2023 - "With Freedom's Furies, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as the founders of modern American libertarianism, Sandefur treads new ground by exploring their relationships with each other and by tracing the evolution of their thought. All three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty, and their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today.

"Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, begins with the trio's literary influences, particularly the novelist Sinclair Lewis. All three, he writes, appreciated how Lewis' books 'expressed the way modern mass culture penalized originality and integrity, and rewarded obedience and cravenness.' Each joined Lewis in rejecting conformity, but they resisted his dismissal of all bourgeois virtue—and Rand also rejected his pessimism.

"The New Deal and World War II had a tremendous influence on the three thinkers. Sandefur describes the historical context well, with particular attention to the authoritarian side of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Indeed, professors looking for a book to assign classes studying American history from 1920 to 1950 should seriously consider Freedom's Furies. It masterfully details the causes of the Great Depression, the federal government's overreach during the New Deal, and the wartime attacks on political, economic, and civil liberties. Not only was individual freedom under assault, Sandefur notes, but it was 'almost impossible to find any published material that made a strong, intellectual case for free markets.' The furies realized they would have to produce their own.

"And so Paterson's The God of the Machine (a philosophical treatise), Lane's The Discovery of Freedom (a pop history crossed with a manifesto), and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (a didactic novel) were published in 1943. All three writers believed that the morality of self-sacrifice should be rejected. Rand and Paterson both argued for a form of ethical egoism, and they would long debate who influenced whom. But the two differed greatly in their style: Rand was deeply influenced by 19th-century Romanticism while Paterson was committed to naturalism. For her part, Lane argued that human energy produced human flourishing and that 'every human being, by his nature, is free.' Humanity simply needed to discover this truth; hence her book's title.

"All three authors independently developed some of the most important insights of classical liberal academics. Paterson's criticism of the New Deal, for instance, included the argument that central planning was impossible because bureaucrats 'would have to know "absolutely all the factors of present and past out of which the future must proceed, and to anticipate inerrantly all the possible new discoveries which may be made."' These arguments capture some of the insights of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, who were not well-known in the U.S. at the time. Likewise, The God of the Machine anticipated Karl Popper's critique of 'the arrested society,' which he wrote two years later. Paterson recognized that all utopias 'are final…they are static societies'; as such, she suggested, they could not adapt, because 'creative processes do not function to order.' In short, 'To live, people must think, and to think, they must be free.'

"Lane anticipated Hayek's critique of government planning in a short 1936 book titled Give Me Liberty. She argued, in Sandefur's words, that 'to truly organize an economy…government bureaucrats would, in principle, need infinite knowledge.' Lane also hit on some important insights later associated with the economics of public choice. The idea that bureaucrats could better manage the economy than individuals was, she wrote, the 'dominant fallacy' of the 1930s. Instead, Lane insisted that 'there was no reason to think government officials would be exempt from the shortsightedness, corruption, or ignorance that plagued the decisions of private citizens.'

"Sandefur also details the trio's views on religion and how those related to their defense of liberty. While all three believed that natural rights existed independently of government, they arrived at this conclusion in different ways. Lane and Paterson both argued that the existence of a deity was necessary. Rand, an atheist, disagreed; she believed that human beings could reason our way to a justification of natural rights.

"Lane irritated the other two women with her insistence that Christian ethics could be reconciled with a robust defense of individual liberty. Her argument that people have a moral sense that leads us, by nature, to care for our neighbor annoyed Rand and Paterson, who felt that man should look after his own happiness and had no moral obligation to others. Paterson took umbrage at the vagueness of Lane's 'all men are brothers' thesis and retorted, 'Stalin is no brother of mine.' This helped end Lane and Paterson's friendship. Lane's religious views and Rand's atheism likewise made any deep friendship between the two women difficult, and they met in person just once....

"Although this is an exceptional book, it is not flawless. The most striking shortcoming is the lack of attention to the ways the furies applied their individualism to minorities. Sandefur does note that 'on matters of race relations, freedom of speech, and sexual autonomy, they were decades ahead of their time in embracing views later classified as "liberal"' [but] ... it is frustrating that the book doesn't delve into that point in more detail. Sandefur mentions, for instance, that Lane was hired by the Pittsburgh Courier (one of the largest black newspapers in the country) in 1942, but he doesn't detail any of the arguments she made in her essays there.... For more than two years at the Courier, Lane applied the ideals of individual liberty and her unique conception of human energy to black Americans and their struggle....

"Still, this book's flaws are small compared to its contributions. Freedom's Furies offers hope to a new generation of classical liberals and libertarians living through the threat of authoritarianism abroad and illiberalism at home. Compared with the domestic overreach of the 1930s and '40s and the rise of fascism and communism abroad, our own troubles don't seem quite as bad.... Individual liberty and self-reliance are still the keystones, and the furies' successors will surely continue to promote liberty in the face of the darkness today.'

Read more: https://reason.com/2023/02/11/the-founding-mothers-of-libertarianism/

Timothy Sandofur on Freedom’s Furies: Three Women Who Sparked a Revolution, Goldwater Institute, March 9, 2023:

Order Freedom's Furies at Amazon.com.

Natural immunity outperfoms 3 Covid shots

Natural Immunity Offered More Protection Against Omicron Than 3 Vaccine Doses, New England Journal of Medicine Study Finds | Foundation for Economic Education - Jon Miltimore:

July 18, 2022 - News reports say the Biden administration is currently weighing a plan that would allow all adults to receive a second Covid-19 booster, citing concerns from White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci about the spike in hospitalizations 'fueled by the extremely contagious omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5.' Currently second booster shots are only offered to individuals over the age of 50. Meanwhile, discussion of a potential fifth shot is already underway.... 

The discussions highlight certain realities of Covid immunization. 'Immunity wanes,' Fauci said during a White House briefing on Tuesday, 'whether that’s immunity following infection or immunity following vaccine.' 

While it’s true that immunization wanes, new scientific research from The New England Journal of Medicine suggests natural immunity lasts longer than immunity acquired from vaccines.

The study, a case–control analysis based on data from Qatar collected from December 23, 2021 through February 21, 2022, involved millions of people, including 1,306,862 who received at least two doses of the Pfizer vaccine (BNT162b2) and 893,671 people who received at least two doses of the Moderna vaccine (mRNA-1273), as well unvaccinated individuals. The results of the study are a mixed bag for the vaccines.

The best news is that 'any form of previous immunity, whether induced by previous infection or vaccination, is associated with strong and durable protection against Covid-19–related hospitalization and death'.... Also good news is that both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines 'enhanced protection among persons who had had a previous infection.... The combination of prior, full vaccination and prior infection was maximally protective,' researchers said in a summary of the study’s findings released last month by the Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom. 'Individuals with prior infection and three doses of either mRNA vaccine were, overall, nearly 80 percent protected from symptomatic infection during the omicron wave.'

But the study also found that two doses of vaccines offered 'negligible' protection against Omicron infection. 'A key finding was that a history of vaccination with the standard two doses of either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine, but no history of prior infection, brought no significant protection against symptomatic omicron infection,' researchers said.

In regards to the Pfizer vaccine, three shots offered considerably more protection. But the protection was still lower than natural immunity, which offered stronger and more sustained protection from infection than vaccination. (Researchers noted that 'people with a prior-variant infection were moderately protected from omicron with little decline in protection even a year after their prior infection.')

The findings are not unlike those out of Israel published last year, which found that natural immunity offered more robust protection against the Delta variant than vaccines. 'The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine,' Science reported in August 2021 in a piece exploring the Israel findings.

More than a dozen other studies [have] also found that natural immunity offered powerful protection against Covid, equal to or stronger than vaccination. Even absent these findings, vaccine mandates were dubious from the beginning. The morality of violating bodily autonomy through government coercion is a serious and dangerous matter. In light of these findings, however, vaccine mandates also appear nonsensical.

While many institutions now consider Covid infection a form of immunization — including the NCAA, which in January changed its policy to accommodate athletes who’d had Covid — many have not. Thousands of soldiers have been discharged because of their vaccination status. Healthcare workers continue to face vaccination mandates in many places.

It’s time for all institutions — especially governments—to recognize vaccination choices should remain with individuals. The idea that freedom over one’s own body is the most basic and essential freedom is one embraced not just by libertarians like Ron Paul but by international leaders like Natalia Kanem, a physician who leads the United Nations Population Fund. 'Bodily autonomy is the foundation on which all rights exist,' Kanem bluntly states.

All efforts to compel people to get vaccinated (or else) are coercive, and therefore wrong. But when the government, in particular, violates bodily autonomy for an alleged greater good, it betrays its very reason for being. 'The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights,' the philosopher Ayn Rand noted.

As more studies like the research published by The New England Journal of Medicine come out, it becomes more and more clear that vaccine mandates were not just immoral. They were senseless. Fortunately, many are beginning to realize just that.

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/natural-immunity-offered-more-protection-against-omicron-than-3-vaccine-doses-new-england-journal-of-medicine-study-finds/

Read study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2203965

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Covid-19 pandemic is a crisis of democracy

A Crisis of Democracy

by George J. Dance

Image courtesy U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

It is no exaggeration to call the coronavirus pandemic a crisis. While the virus itself has turned out to be less dangerous than Covid Cultists believe – not one country has experienced the millions of deaths they have been prophesying since March – governments' responses to it throughout the democratic world have spawned numerous other crises, from mass unemployment to civil unrest, that have been progressively tearing away at the social fabric. The very idea of a democratic state, as a viable form of government, is being called into serious question. 

"Democracy" (rule by all the people) has always been not one concept, but a bundle of coexisting ones. Two of those concepts of democracy have always been in conflict. The coronavirus crisis has exposed those hidden conflicts as never before.   

One vision of democracy, which we can call liberal or libertarian democracy, was summed up by economist (and armchair sociologist) Ludwig von Mises this way:

For the sake of domestic peace liberalism aims at democratic government. Democracy is therefore not a revolutionary institution. On the contrary; it is the very means of preventing revolutions and civil wars. It provides a method for the peaceful adjustment of government to the will of the majority. When the men in office and their policies no longer please the majority of the nation, they will – in the next election – be eliminated and replaced by other men espousing different policies. 

Democracy, in other words, served a libertarian end: as a means of eliminating force from politics, it was a major step toward the libertarian ideal of eliminating force from social relations. So it was good in itself. As well, as many libertarian ideas do, it brought other significant benefits. 

One benefit was to instantiate what sociologist Vilfredo Pareto called the "circulation of elites". Every human society of record has been divided into an elite, which lives the good life and calls the shots, and the riffraff underneath; perhaps, given how humans live in groups, that division is a necessary part of society. In precapitalist societies, that division was fixed: if you were born a lord you could expect to be a lord all your life; if you were born a peasant, you could expect to always be a peasant. The rise of capitalism, though, abolished that fixed order, making it possible for individuals to move into and out of the elite; the lowest floor sweeper in a factory could theoretically become a factory owner, and vice versa. Democracy extended the 'circulation' principle into government: in America any native-born child could grow up to be President. 

As a further benefit of adopting the 'circulation' principle, members of the governing elite now had to consider the point of view of the non-elite as well. A Prime Minister might be able to pile high taxes on the private citizens; but now he had to face the real possibility of becoming a private citizen and having to pay those taxes himself. That brought about a common interest, on the part of governors and citizens alike, in limiting what government could do to its citizens. Thus democracy led to the idea of limiting government power constitutionally, through formal checks and balances that restricted how governments could make law – the Rule of Law not men – and through bills of human rights, which limited what governments were allowed to make laws about. 

To libertarians, then, democracy was seen as a good because it was a means to achieving good ends. However, there were other democratic thinkers, to whom "pleas[ing] the majority of the nation" was not a means to an end, but the very end itself. In their view, a democratic government was the expression and will of the people – achieving the will of the people was the supreme political good –and therefore whatever a democratic government did (unless, of course, it were taken over by bad people) was always good. It followed that restrictions on government like bills of rights were bad things, encumbrances that prevented governments from doing as much good as possible.  

This second view can be called the totalitarian view of democracy. The word 'totalitarian' is no stretch; at the limit, it implies that government may do whatever it wants to any individual it wants, so long as a majority wants it to; in short, it contradicts the very idea of human rights. Novelist (and armchair philosopher) Ayn Rand called it:

a social system in which one’s work, one’s property, one’s mind, and one’s life are at the mercy of any gang that may muster the vote of a majority at any moment for any purpose.... 

If we discard morality and substitute for it the Collectivist doctrine of unlimited majority rule [Rand also wrote], if we accept the idea that a majority may do anything it pleases, and that anything done by a majority is right because it’s done by a majority (this being the only standard of right and wrong) – how are men to apply this in practice to their actual lives? Who is the majority? In relation to each particular man, all other men are potential members of that majority which may destroy him at its pleasure at any moment. Then each man and all men become enemies; each has to fear and suspect all; each must try to rob and murder first, before he is robbed and murdered.

Those two visions of democracy have always co-existed in precarious balance in democratic states; but the Covid pandemic has utterly destroyed that balance. 

Democratic governments' interventions in the pandemic have been paradigm examples of totalitarian democracy. Contrary to what some may believe, lockdowns (and their component  measures) are enormously popular. The Covid Cult that swept the world convinced millions that they were going to die of this new plague, and that only governments could save them. Since then, massive majorities throughout the world have been demanding that their governments save them, rewarding those who acted quickly to close down society, and punishing those who held back. It is wrong for libertarians to call the result 'tyranny,' for it is the very opposite: it is the government carrying out the popular will.

Meanwhile, the rights of the people are being trampled. People have seen their livelihoods taken away. They are routinely arrested, and even roughed up, by the police, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are being arrested for their social media posts. They are being shot for breaking curfew. Life under lockdown is becoming a human rights nightmare. 

Even the Rule of Law has vanished; for this Covid totalitarianism has been happening, for the most part without any opposition, as if the constitution and the normal laws do not exist. Those have not been amended but are simply ignored, with the executive branch of government dictating whatever it wants done by executive order. Opposition parties, with their eyes on the same polls the government is reading, simply play along. A few courts have stood up for the Rule of Law by striking down some government actions; but those too have been demonized by the Covid Cult as "endanger[ing] thousands of lives," and in some cases their decisions have been ignored and the laws they struck down have still been enforced.  

In short, totalitarian democracy has become the official program of most democratic nations, while libertarian democracy has been discarded. This is an example of 'spontaneous order': No one planned for their country to become totalitarian; democratic governments have simply stumbled into totalitarianism, or been pushed into it by their citizens.

The silver lining to that cloud is that, while democratic majorities still support Covid totalitarianism, they have never approved of totalitarian democracy. As they gain experience of life in a totalitarian state, they cannot be counted on to support its continuance. Its tenets are being challenged by a growing number of scientists, philosophers, thinkers and even politicians. Official protests against Covid totalitarianism, though small and sporadic, are each week growing in number; while noncompliance (euphemistically referred to by governments as 'pandemic fatigue') is soaring, as the soaring case rates of Covid in America and Europe make clear. The liberal or libertarian ideal of people running their own lives, including assessing their own risks, may be down but it is certainly not out.  

I believe that in a straightforward conflict between totalitarian democracy versus liberal or libertarian democracy, the latter would win. However, that can and will happen only if enough people understand the nature of the underlying conflict.   

Ayn Rand Institute took Payroll Protection money

In sign of the times, Ayn Rand Institute approved for PPP loan | Reuters - Helen Coster:

July 6, 2020 - "The institute promoting the 'laissez-faire capitalism' of writer Ayn Rand, who in the novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead introduced her philosophy of 'objectivism' to millions of readers, was approved for a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan of up to $1 million, according to data released Monday by the Trump administration. The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism in Santa Ana, California, sought to preserve 35 jobs with the PPP funding, according to the data.

"The institute advocates the Russian-American writer’s philosophy and 'applies its principles to many issues and events, including ones Rand herself never discussed,' according to its website....

The institute referred Reuters to a May 15 article, in which board member Harry Binswanger and senior fellow Onkar Ghate wrote that the organization would take any relief money offered from the CARES Act. 'We will take it unapologetically, because the principle here is: justice,' they wrote, adding that 'the government has no wealth of its own…. It can only redistribute the wealth of others.'

"In Rand’s novels and works of nonfiction — which included The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal — she expressed her belief in 'rational self-interest' and the goal of pursuing happiness as a person’s highest moral aim. 

"In a 1962 essay, Rand wrote of seventeenth century French businessmen: 'They knew that government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution, and that the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.'"

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ppp-ayn-rand/in-sign-of-the-times-ayn-rand-institute-approved-for-ppp-loan-idUSKBN248026

The ethics of social distancing

The Ethics of Social Distancing: A Libertarian Perspective | UNZ Review - Ilana Mercer:

April 23, 2020 - 'Having lived in both the developed and underdeveloped world, I have always associated social distancing with civility and civilization. Cultures that honor personal boundaries have always seemed better than cultures which don’t — more genteel, refined and respectful. Ditto people who keep a respectful distance: They have more merit than those who get in your face....

"In the absence of clinical therapies or a vaccine for coronavirus, the successful return to work rests, very plainly, on the willingness of the citizenry to cover up, keep clean and keep a distance. Why would anyone wish to infringe on another’s personal space, when the stakes are clearly so high? Insisting on unfettered freedom to come and go as one pleases, sans protection, comes at a grave cost to others — it could constitute aggression against innocent others.

"[T]he shuttering of private property by the State is an incontrovertible violation of private property rights. 'Without property rights,' wrote Ayn Rand, 'no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life.'

"Even more fundamental, however, is that without dominion over one’s self — self-ownership — there can be no property rights. Rights to the avails of your labor originate in the right of self-ownership. If you don’t own yourself, you cannot own anything else, or produce anything, the avails of your labor and the products of your mind included. And if you are DEAD, DYING or INCAPACITATED — you own nothing....

"In libertarian theory, private property rights originate in that most important of all titles: The title in one’s own body. That body, that fount of life whence all rights originate, is the legitimate object of government protection in a pandemic. For, as I noted years ago, 'Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others — intentionally or unintentionally — falls perfectly within the purview of the night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory'....

"Against this background, the natural rights of economically stricken individuals to reopen their businesses are righteous; they stem not from a state-created right or regulation. Rather, the right of ownership is the very extension of the right to life. In order to survive, man must — and it is in his nature to — transform the resources around him by mixing his labor with them and making them his own. Man’s labor and property are extensions of himself. So, my countrymen are correct to protest the shuttering of their privately owned property, also their sole means of sustaining their lives.

"All the same, there is another, equally compelling side to the ethics of this emergency situation.... Each and every individual is or could be, inadvertently, harboring a weapon of mass destruction. Yes, a WMD — for how many men and women have died and will still die because of the inadvertent actions of the coronavirus-carrying Index Patients, during the 'seeding events'? Each one of us could be firing off deadly virus into a defenseless population, bereft of immunity. Each one of us could become armed and dangerous, or be felled by someone who is. In this case, individuals who willfully violate social distancing strictures can be viewed as willful aggressors against innocent others."

Read more: https://www.unz.com/imercer/the-ethics-of-social-distancing-a-libertarian-perspective/

Atlas Shrugged and the literary critics

Who Is Ayn Rand?: - Lisa Duggan, Jacobin magasine:
The following is an excerpt from Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan (University of California Press, 2019).

August 23, 2019 - ""When Atlas Shrugged made its incendiary appearance in 1957, it cracked open the apparent political consensus in favor of the welfare state to reveal intensely warring camps. The mainstream press, leading academics, and prominent literary figures didn’t just dismiss the tome; they abhorred it. [Author Ayn] Rand herself predicted to Nathaniel Branden that her novel was 'going to be the most controversial book of this century; I’m going to be hated, vilified, lied about, smeared in every possible way.' Her characteristic grandiosity notwithstanding, she was prescient.

"Atlas Shrugged was described as 'execrable claptrap,' 'grotesque eccentricity,' and a 'shrill diatribe' comparable in its godless, heartless overwrought cruelty to Nietzschean-inflected fascism. Ex-Communist ... literary critic Granville Hicks opined in the New York Times, 'It howls in the reader’s ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention. And then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.'

"But the most notoriously devastating review came from William Buckley’s National Review. Echoing the views of many religious conservatives, ... ex-Communist ... Whittaker Chambers wrote that Atlas Shrugged substitutes 'the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross,' presenting the 'Randian Man' who, like 'Marxian Man,' is at 'the center of a godless world.' Chambers continued: 'Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.... From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"'

"These over-the-top negative reviews combined bitter rejection of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, from the Right as well as the Left, with attacks on ... the writing style and on the tone or sheer meanness of the novel. They were met with a much smaller number of equally over-the-top positive reviews and private evaluations, deeming Atlas Shrugged 'vibrant and powerful' and Rand a writer of 'dazzling virtuosity.'

"Economist Ruth Alexander, Rand’s friend, predicted that 'Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history as the outstanding novelist and most profound philosopher of the twentieth century.' A private note to the author from famed right-wing economist Ludwig von Mises praised the book as a political achievement:

Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel.... It is also – or may I say: first of all – a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled “intellectuals” and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by our governments and political parties.....

"Despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews in the mainstream press, Atlas Shrugged quickly became a word-of-mouth best seller, generating thousands of fan letters from gushing enthusiasts. Though never regarded as serious by cultural gatekeepers, the novel nonetheless became undeniably socially and politically important, sometimes compared to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone with the Wind, and 1984."

Read more: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/mean-girl-ayn-rand-culture-of-greed-lisa-duggan-excerpt
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Farewell to rock's greatest drummer

Remembering Rush Drummer Neil Peart: Rock's Greatest Drummer (and Randian) | National Review - Kyle Smith:

January 10, 2020 - "Neil Peart, the Canadian drummer and leader of the Seventies hard-rock band Rush, has died. Peart had battled brain cancer for three years.

"Fan polls routinely agreed he was the greatest rock drummer of his time (or indeed of all time, I would argue, though some would go with Keith Moon). I’m not sure any rock track boasts drumming that can match Peart’s breathtaking work on the 1981 song “Tom Sawyer”.... Peart also wrote the big majority of his band’s lyrics, which were among the most ambitious ever attempted in the hard-rock space.... Peart was a genius at tapping into the restless alienation of late-teen boys who think they’re smarter than everyone around them.... Peart told Rolling Stone four years ago, 'I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. A compromise is what I can never accept'....

"He also labeled himself a libertarian and in youth dabbled in Ayn Randism, naming Rush’s 1975 song 'Anthem' for her 1937 novel Anthem, which was among George Orwell’s influences for 1984, and crediting Rand in the liner notes for her influence on the 1976 Rush album 2112. What teen boy didn’t also flirt with Rand? To persist with a Rand fixation is not the mark of a healthy mind, though. When asked in 2012 (again in Rolling Stone) if Rand’s words still spoke to him, he said, 'Oh, no. That was 40 years ago.' Peart did retain his libertarianism, after a fashion. He explained:

In that 2112 album, again, I was in my early twenties. I was a kid. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist. Paul Theroux’s definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also – I’ve just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into  ... a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.

"Peart died in Santa Monica on January 7. R.I.P."

Read more: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/remembering-rush-drummer-neil-peart-rocks-greatest-drummer-and-randian/
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Libertarians have shifted the Overton Window

How David Koch’s 1980 Fantasy Became America’s Current Reality | The New Republic - Adam Eichen:

August 27, 2019 - "Billionaire fossil fuel mogul David Koch ... will rightfully be remembered for his role in the destruction of the earth [by whom? - ed.].... Ronald Reagan may have uttered the famous words 'Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem' back in 1981 — but it was David Koch, along with his elder brother Charles and a cabal of other ultrarich individuals, who truly reframed the popular view of government. Once [seen  as] a democratic tool used to shape the country’s future, government became seen as something intrusive and inefficient — indeed, something to be feared.

"David Koch was particularly instrumental in legitimizing anti-government ideology — one the GOP now holds as gospel. In 1980, the younger Koch ran as the vice-presidential nominee for the nascent Libertarian Party. And ... Koch personally donated more than $2 million to the party — an astounding amount for the time — to promote the Ed Clark–David Koch ticket.... In fact, according to [Lisa] Graves, 'The Koch-funded Libertarian Party helped spur on Ronald Reagan’s anti-government, free-market-solves-all agenda as president.'

"Even by contemporary standards, the 1980 Libertarian Party platform was extreme. It called for the abolition of a wide swath of federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Election Commission, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Federal Trade Commission, and 'all government agencies concerned with transportation.' It railed against campaign finance and consumer protection laws, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, any regulations of the firearm industry (including tear gas), and government intervention in labor negotiations. And the platform demanded the repeal of all taxation, and sought amnesty for those convicted of tax 'resistance.'

"Koch and his libertarian allies moreover advocated for the repeal of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social programs. They wanted to abolish federally mandated speed limits. They opposed occupational licensure, antitrust laws, labor laws protecting women and children, and 'all controls on wages, prices, rents, profits, production, and interest rates.' And in true libertarian fashion, the platform urged the privatization of all schools (with an end to compulsory education laws), the railroad system, public roads and the national highway system, inland waterways, water distribution systems, public lands, and dam sites.

"The Libertarian Party never made much of a splash in the election — though it did garner almost 12 percent of the vote in Alaska — but doing so was never the point. Rather, the Kochs were engaged in a long-term effort to normalize the aforementioned ideas and mainstream them into American politics. Building off the Libertarian campaign, Graves explained, 'David and Charles then used their front groups to pull the Reagan Administration further to the right with their push to privatize across the board.' With their army of think tanks, front groups, lobbyists, and media ties, this multimillion dollar effort to shift the Overton Window grew for nearly four decades, culminating in the takeover of many core political institutions, federally and in key states. The duo additionally capitalized on the anti-government Tea Party movement, which they greatly helped along by bankrolling the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.

"The Koch’s Ayn Rand–inspired hellscape has yet to completely come to fruition, but the ideas the duo promoted are now part of the regular discourse — and have been for a while."

Read more: https://newrepublic.com/article/154849/david-koch-1980-fantasy
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See also: Understanding the Overton Window

Keith Komar declares for Ontario LP leader

Longtime Libertarian Party of Canada activist, and (full disclosure) occasional GDPA columnist, Keith Komar has declared his candidacy for the position of Ontario Libertarian Party leader, up for election this November. Komar, currently running for the LPC in Bradford in the 2020 federal election, supplied GDPA with a biography, which reads in part: 

"Keith is a single father of 2 originally from Cranbrook B.C.... He is an activist for many causes and has supported marriage equality since the early 1990s.... Keith’s activism for the Cannabis industry began in 2015.... Keith is a staunch supporter of property rights and freedom of speech.

"Keith was first introduced to Libertarianism in 2008 while following the U.S. election. He was immediately captivated by Dr. Paul and his unapologetic stances on property rights and personal freedoms. Keith is well-read on many topics, has read all of Ayn Rand's books, and is a follower of Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek.

"In September 2015 Keith found Tim Moen and the Libertarian Party of Canada and supported the local candidate in Grand Prairie for the 2015 election.  In 2016, Keith became involved with the BC Libertarian Party and helped grow its membership and candidate numbers for the 2017 provincial election. Keith himself garnered the 2nd highest percentage of votes for the party in that election (2.5%) and the 3rd highest vote total (410).

"In 2018 Keith moved back to Ontario and became involved with the Ontario Libertarian Party.... Keith represented the Libertarian Party of Canada in the York-Simcoe riding in Bradford during the 2019 federal by-election, and will run there again in October for the general election."

Film shows horror of gov't population control

One Child Nation 2019: Documentary Review - David Edelstein, Vulture:

August 12, 2019 - "You can’t fault China for worrying about the impact of overpopulation ... but the horror that its government unleashed in the name of protecting natural resources and ensuring the health of its people beggars belief. What the country’s 'one-child law' ushered in — with cheerful, propagandistic songs and posters and Chinese 'operas'  — was an ongoing totalitarian nightmare, the scale of which is rarely appreciated outside the so-called People’s Republic. That scale is chronicled by Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s first-person documentary One Child Nation in infuriating, tragic, grisly detail. The policy ended in 2015 but the trauma still ripples through China and the world. It’s a devastating film, almost too terrible to contemplate.

"Wang begins with the story of her own family, which barely got away with having two children ... her father ... had to talk the village chief out of sterilizing her mother after Nanfu’s birth. The father wanted another child — a boy, of course ... and her parents admit — on camera, wincing but firm — that if he’d been female, he’d have been put in a basket and left at an outdoor market to be picked up. Or to die. The story of Nanfu’s female cousin — who was left in the market — will haunt my dreams forever....

"The uncle who left his daughter to die in the open air is interviewed. He is being eaten alive, metaphorically.... But moral judgments tend to curdle in this context. What, says the village chief, now 74, was he to do? It was policy handed down from on high.... A woman who oversaw that policy still believes that the country would have 'perished' without it, and that the well-being of the collective must always always supersede personal feelings. In contrast, a local midwife who performed 20 sterilizations a day — the women sometimes carried in kicking and screaming on poles, 'like pigs' — ... knows that, 'There’ll be retribution for me. The state gave the orders, but I carried them out'....

"How do we judge so-called 'human traffickers' who sold female babies to orphanages and made a tidy profit? Those girls were given up by families who didn’t want them. Many would have otherwise been killed at birth. It’s easier to condemn the village officials who — after China legalized international adoption, in 1992 — outright abducted babies and sold them to orphanages....

"One useful thing about One Child Nation is that it puts the work of someone like Ayn Rand in perspective. The little Jewish girl who grew up in the Soviet Union had a fierce, undying rage at collectivist repression and the corruption that followed in its wake. You can almost forgive her for going the opposite way and insisting on a society built on unbridled selfishness. Maybe you can. The movie ends on a note of bitter irony. Having lost a large percentage of its young thanks to its one-child policy, the Chinese government is now a two-child nation: 'One is too few, two is just right.'

"Ask the government if the one-child policy was wrong and they will likely respond, What one-child policy?"

Read more: https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/one-child-nation-2019-documentary-review.html
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US Libertarian chair moves to Free State

There's a new Porcupine in town: Libertarian National Committee chair moves to Manchester from Arizona | Manchester Ink Link:

August 26, 2019 - "Nicholas Sarwark, Libertarian National Committee Chair, moved to the Queen City from Arizona this week with his wife and four young children. He says coming to New Hampshire has been the goal for a while.

“'When I first signed up for the Free State Project in 2002, I knew I wanted to live in the most libertarian state in the country. It’s a great place to raise a family and it’s closer to Washington DC and the Libertarian Party National Headquarters'....

"Nationally, the Libertarian presidential ticket of New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and his running mate former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld – now running for the Republican nomination – received more than 4 million votes or 3.28 percent of the total vote. NH State Rep. Max Abramson is among those seeking the Libertarian presidential nomination in 2020....

"As chair, Sarwark has played a prominent role spreading the ideas of Libertarianism, with his appearances in Reason magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Slate, Salon, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as on “Kennedy” and “Stossel” on Fox Business, “Stossel on Reason,” the “Glenn Beck Program,” MSNBC, RT TV, NPR, and many more....

"The Sarwarks are also participants in the Free State Project (FSP), a non-partisan, non-profit organization that encourages liberty leaning people of all stripes to come to NH to grow and strengthen the liberty community in the state. Some equate it to creating a real-life 'Galt’s Gulch,' a reference from fiction author Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, including  Rachel Goldsmith, Interim Executive Director of the Free State Project.

“'The FSP is thrilled to welcome the Sarwark family to the growing community of liberty activists in New Hampshire.  We wish Nick and Valerie the best as they settle into their new home and, we look forward to their flavor of "Liberty in our Lifetime,”' Goldsmith said....

"The Free State Project is a non-profit organization, educating the public about the benefits of limited government, and community in New Hampshire. The hope is that the 'liberty movement' finds fertile ground in NH and spreads across the country. For more information see FSP.org."

Read more: https://manchesterinklink.com/theres-a-new-porcupine-in-town-libertarian-national-committee-chair-moves-manchester-from-arizona/

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5 books to boost your knowledge of liberty

Five Books to Jumpstart Your Knowledge of Libertarianism - Remso Martinez, Advocates for Self-Government:

June 5, 2019 - "So, you want to learn more about libertarianism? Check out these books and don’t forget to take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz.

Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto by Matt Kibbe
"Written by the organizer behind the Tea Party revolution that ... armed us with a new generation of pro-liberty leaders in Congress and across the country, ... this is the perfect primer for anyone [who is] liberty curious and wants to lift the veil and peek into a world where it’s not cool to hurt people and take their stuff.

Anthem by Ayn Rand
"This short novella by Russian writer and philosopher Ayn Rand was dystopian before dystopian novels were cool.... Anthem puts you in the mind of a character who lives in a world where 'I' isn’t a word and free will is punishable by death....

Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
"Dedicated to the socialists in all parties who refused to observe the mistakes of our past ... Hayek shows the reader how the desire for collective action leads to the enslavement of freedom itself. This book exposes the reader to the mindset of those who cry for more regulation and central control, and how their desire for order simply means more chains on the society they imagine they are freeing from the perils of an unjust world.

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
"Milton Friedman took the world of politics and economics by storm simply by stating loud and proud that society thrives when people are left to make their own decisions.... Friedman shows how deregulation, free markets, and individual choice takes people from victimhood to empowerment when government gets out of the way....

Stay Away From the Libertarians! by Remso W. Martinez
"A shameless plug.... I take you through a brief history of the modern libertarian movement from 2012 through 2016 and show you how libertarians have changed the way millions view the relationship between themselves and the state.... [Y]ou’ll learn once and for all why lazy academics, the fake news, and statist politicians in both parties fear libertarians."

Read more: https://www.theadvocates.org/2019/06/five-books-to-jumpstart-your-knowledge-of-libertarianism/

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Prometheus Foundation promotes Objectivism

Prometheus Foundation for Advancing Objectivism: Founder’s Intent - The Objective Standard - Craig Biddle:

March 19, 2019 - "[T]he Prometheus Foundation (PF) [is], a nonprofit organization established by Carl Barney to provide funding for ventures that advance Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, scholarships for students who are pursuing careers that advance these ideas, and grants for proven Objectivist intellectuals to boost their productive output.

"I am honored to serve on the board of directors of PF, along with Carl Barney, Jim Brown, Lenny Esmond, David Hardy, Rony Miller, and C. Bradley Thompson. If you think that you or anyone you know might qualify for funding, visit Prometheus Foundation’s website for details and application guidelines....

"Here’s to Ayn Rand for developing a philosophy for living on earth! And here’s to Carl Barney for funding its advancement! —Craig Biddle

"Money is a great power because ... it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility.―Ayn Rand....

"The Prometheus Foundation (PF), in essence, is a store of 'productive energy.' It is money that the Founder/Donor accumulated during his working life and now wishes to use to help make the world a better place for people to flourish. The only substantive, enduring way to do this is by advancing rational philosophy and rational psychology. This means advancing Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and any psychology that integrates with it; such psychology would integrate with Objectivism, with Ayn Rand’s theory of emotions, and her work on epistemology and psycho-epistemology. PF exists solely for this purpose.

"Advancing Objectivism includes promoting Ayn Rand’s novels and nonfiction works, promoting Leonard Peikoff’s books and courses, creating courses on Objectivism, and creating organizations or undertaking projects that explicitly advance the philosophy.

"Every day, in many small ways, Objectivism is slowly changing the world. It is a long game. This is why, through the Objectivist Venture Fund (OVF), we want to invest in infrastructure (rather than one-off programs) that will endure. As of March 2019, examples of worthy recipients include the Ayn Rand Center in Europe, ARC Israel, the Ayn Rand Centre UK and centers in other countries, the Balkan Objectivist Center, the John Galt School, and The Objective Standard.... Carl B. Barney, Founder/Donor"

Read more: https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/2019/03/prometheus-foundation-for-advancing-objectivism-founders-intent/
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ARI begins outreach to student libertarian groups

What Defenders of Liberty Need to Know - Tom Bowden, New Ideal:

January 21, 2019 - "In recent years, there has been a resurgence of libertarian student organizations both in the US and around the world. Many of the students involved in those organizations are interested in Ayn Rand, and it’s for this audience that philosophers Onkar Ghate and Gregory Salmieri presented a seven-part lecture series called “What Is Liberty?”"

"'It’s exciting to see that there are so many students around the world interested in promoting liberty,' Salmieri says. 'That’s a project that requires philosophy, and most of these students are still at the early stages in the process of thinking through what liberty is and what’s needed to defend it. We prepared these lectures as a summary for this audience of Rand’s political philosophy....

”The relationship between Objectivism and the libertarian movement has been fraught since the libertarian movement coalesced in the late 1960s, Salmieri observes. 'Early libertarian leaders all cited Rand as an influence, but most of them had embraced anarchism, a view that Rand considered to be deeply incompatible with capitalism — and, indeed, with the requirements of human life. She held the libertarian movement in contempt for this reason, and also because she regarded it as unphilosophical — as an attempt to pursue ‘liberty’ as a vaguely defined political goal without first doing the thinking needed to understand what liberty is or what it requires.'

"In some ways, Salmieri notes, today’s liberty movement is a lot better than the movement Rand denounced in the early 1970s, but her central criticisms of the movement remain valid. 'Anarchism may not be as dominant as it once was,' he explains, 'but it exerts an outsized influence on how almost all self-professed libertarians think about freedom. And, if one looks at the full range of positions endorsed by all the people who claim to be united ‘for liberty,’ they’re too disparate for them to count as all fighting for the same thing. Some of them are fighting for something I can recognize as freedom, but others are fighting against it.'

"This confusion presents a real problem for the future, Salmieri contends, because at one time or another all of the most oppressive social systems in history — socialism, fascism, anarchism — have been hailed as 'pro-liberty' and championed by young people who thought they were on the side of freedom....

"All seven sessions, filmed at the 2017 Ayn Rand Student Conference, are available on this YouTube playlist in the order presented."

Read more: https://newideal.aynrand.org/what-defenders-of-liberty-need-to-know/

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Ayn Rand's literary roots

Ayn Rand, the Russian-American Victor Hugo - Econlib - Bryan Caplan:

February 3, 2005 - "Ayn Rand’s novels blend two distinct genres. She fits squarely into the tradition of the Russian philosophical novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. But she is also a plot-rich Romantic in the tradition of Victor Hugo. Some standard features of the Russian approach:

1. Characters embody philosophical positions.
2. The plot explores the implications of these philosophies on the characters’ lives.
3. The conclusion of the novel vindicates the current philosophical position of the author....

"In The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, Ivan embodies idealistic atheism, Alyosha earnest Orthodox Christianity, Dmitri unreflective pragmatism, and Smerdyakov nihilism. The murder of the sons’ father tests their convictions. And (spoiler!) the revelation that Smerdyakov is the murderer ultimately discredits not only his nihilism, but Ivan’s idealistic atheism, for the latter paves the way for the former.

"If she had written only We the Living, Rand would probably now be hailed as one of the lesser 20th-century descendants of Dostoyevsky. Its characters embody idealistic Communism, cynical Communism, defiant individualism, and despairing individualism. But then she up and wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged which are, by the standards of the Russian philosophical tradition, far better. The characters' philosophies are more interesting, the plot pits them against each other more effectively, and the concluding epiphanies are more compelling (especially in Atlas)....

"When you measure Rand’s against her Russian peer group, she is among the masters. But this understates her artistic achievement because she simultaneously works in another tradition: 19th-century Romanticism exemplified by Victor Hugo. Some standard features of the Romantic approach:

1. The characters are larger-than-life.
2. The plots are imaginative.
3. The plots are carefully crafted puzzles, unpredictable in advance, but cleanly logical in hindsight....

"I love Victor Hugo, and even if he’s not for you, it’s hard not to admire the craftsmanship. Dramatic situations and dramatic characters stitched seamlessly together – it’s not easy....

"When you put Ayn Rand beside Victor Hugo, however, the student is the master. Rand out-Hugos Hugo. For starters, her characters are more colorful.... The plot of Atlas Shrugged is likewise more imaginative than anything Hugo cooked up.... Her craftsmanship is better too. Hugo is full of improbable coincidences. Rand studiously avoids them....

"If you hate Rand’s style, I probably can’t talk you into enjoyment. But I suspect that the main reason many thinkers I respect don’t enjoy Rand’s fiction is that – even though they like one or both of the genres she exemplifies – they can’t bring themselves to judge her by the standards of those genres. If they did, the worst they could say about her would be 'Pretty damn good.'"

Read more: http://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/02/ayn_rand_the_ru.html
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Hip-hop star Cardi B gives libertarians a shoutout

Cardi B....for president? How the Hip-Hop artist became a Libertarian Icon - Zoe Zorka, The Source:

April 3 - "As the hype for Cardi B‘s upcoming album, Invasion of Privacy, builds up, the mega-hit rapper has gained a large following with the nation’s fastest-growing political group, the Libertarian Party, as members cheer on her socially liberal, fiscally conservative, voice of reason and independence.

"Cardi piqued the interest of Reason, a major Libertarian publication, with an Instagram post in which she noted that she is 'paying a 40 percent tax rate and not getting much for it. She asks for accountability, noting that "when you donate to a kid from a foreign country, they give you updates of what they doing with your donation." By contrast, B has no idea what Uncle Sam is doing with her "fucking tax money."' This drew the applause of numerous Libertarians ... in an hours-long Twitter storm.

"From there, it didn’t take long for newfound Libertarian fans to praise her existing and upcoming work and point out how it aligns with their ideals.

"According to their official platform, in addition to limiting wasteful government spending, Libertarians 'want all members of society to have abundant opportunities to achieve economic success. A free and competitive market allocates resources in the most efficient manner.' Sounds pretty much like 'making money moves.'

Party members also 'advocate individual privacy and government transparency' and 'are committed to ending government’s practice of spying on everyone.' With an album that is literally titled Invasion of Privacy, Cardi might as well be Ayn Rand reincarnated.

"As the Washington Examiner points out  ... 'Cardi B might not get into the weeds about liberty or how we need to protect our privacy from big government on her album. But the themes are there, and her millions of fans will begin to recognize these important issues sooner rather than later.'”

Read more: http://thesource.com/2018/04/03/cardi-b-for-president-how-the-hip-hop-artist-became-a-libertarian-icon/

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Publisher redoes Atlas Shrugged for kids

There's now a kids' version of Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged" for your libertarian third grader — Quartzy - Oliver Staley:

November 30, 2017 - "If you feel fiction for middle schoolers is altogether lacking in its celebration of free-market principles, there’s a solution: a kid’s version of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s monumental novel of Objectivist philosophy.

"In The Tuttle Twins and the Search for Atlas, a frustrated strong man leaves a circus beset by socialism, and the plucky Tuttle twins learn important lessons about production and consumption. The antagonist is a lazy clown named Kroogie, named for liberal economist Paul Krugman.

"If it sounds a bit heavy handed, its publisher, the Utah-based Libertas Institute think tank, makes no apologies about its intent to produce ideologically suitable content for kids. 'Each year, hundreds of millions of children are spoon-fed false history, bad economics, and logical fallacies. Your child is not immune,' according to the book’s website.

"The Search for Atlas was written by Connor Boyack, Libertas’s founder, and a home-schooling father of two, who says on the site he was frustrated by his inability to find material 'that teaches young children about the principles of freedom. There was nothing!' (Boyack is fan of  italics). Boyack has written six other similarly themed Tuttle Twin books, including The Road to Surfdom, a surfing-inspired riff on The Road to Serfdom, by Austrian economist F.A. Hayek."

Read more: https://quartzy.qz.com/1143704/theres-now-a-kids-version-of-ayn-rands-atlas-shrugged-for-your-libertarian-third-grader/
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Order here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B072LWG7WG 

Seven management secrets of Atlas Shrugged

7 Management Secrets From 'Atlas Shrugged' That Beat Misinterpretations - Robert Tracinski, The Federalist Society:

July 25, 2017 - "Business and management is not the subject or theme of Atlas Shrugged, but it is the setting. As one of the few novelists to make a serious and sympathetic attempt to portray people who run businesses, she frequently sets up her characterization and plot points by showing us how the heroes and villains operate in the business world, how they make important decisions, and how they treat their employees. We can look at that and derive a few basic rules for how an Ayn Rand hero does business. Call it 'The Management Secrets of ‘Atlas Shrugged'....

1. Know the business from the ground up. Many of Ayn Rand’s business heroes ... worked their way up from the bottom.... Hank Rearden rose up out of the iron mines before becoming a mine owner.... The same goes for Ken Danagger, who is described as having started work in the coal mines at age 12.... At age 16, railroad heiress Dagny Taggart starts a summer job as the night operator at a rural train station. Francisco D’Anconia, heir to a vast copper fortune, spends his college years working at a dilapidated copper foundry.... This is why the heroes in Atlas Shrugged are able to start up again in Galt’s Gulch..... They can readily downshift into the roles of foremen and mechanics, and they have no compunction about walking to work swinging a lunchbox....

2. Earn respect.... Rand’s heroes are clearly inspirational leaders, but it’s not because they jet off to Davos or give TED talks about 'thinking outside the box'.... It’s because they earn the respect of their employees and business partners.... Rand’s heroes inspire their employees because they lead from the front. They never demand that anyone give more, in terms of knowledge, work, or devotion, than they give themselves....

3. Always take responsibility.... This is one of the reasons why the business heroes in Atlas Shrugged all have their businesses named after them — Rearden Steel, D’Anconia Copper, Wyatt Oil, Taggart Transcontinental — while the villains run companies with vaguely collective names like Associated Steel. Part of the point Rand was making is that behind every productive organization there is a person who created it and keeps it going. But from the characters’ perspective, they name their businesses after themselves as a way of stressing their responsibility, the idea that everything their company does is literally done in their name.... The whole method of the business villains in Atlas Shrugged is to evade responsibility, constantly whining that 'it wasn’t my fault,' or 'I can’t be blamed.' We can see this most clearly in the Taggart Tunnel disaster, which happens because, with Dagny briefly gone, a whole chain of Taggart executives from Jim on down pass the buck....

4. Deal with the best talent. If Ayn Rand’s heroes expect a lot out of themselves, they look for the same qualities in the people they hire and do business with. At the beginning of the novel, the basic plot idea is introduced to us in the form of Dagny’s struggle to find and retain talent.... Later, in Galt’s Gulch, Dagny realizes that the foreman at Andrew Stockton’s foundry is the disappeared coal tycoon Ken Danagger.... 'She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. "Aren’t you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?" "That’s the only sort of men I like to hire…. Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong"'....

5. Set an innovative vision. Rand’s business heroes ... are visionaries who are looking for revolutionary new machines and the kind of innovations we would describe nowadays as 'disruptive.' There are two such disruptive innovations that embody this idea. Roughly the first third of the novel’s plot is driven by Hank Rearden’s invention of a revolutionary metal alloy that is strong[er], lighter, cheaper, and longer-lasting than steel.... By the end of Part One ... Rearden Metal is now regarded as a proven technology [and] it is time for our innovators to move on to the next big thing, ... the revolutionary motor they find abandoned at the Twentieth Century Motor Company.... The search for the motor drives the plot up through the end of Part Two and brings us into Part Three.... So the business leader’s search for innovation is at the heart of the novel and is the key driver of the plot.

6. Make every deal win-win. This is a point that very few of the casual mainstream commentators get.... If you actually read Atlas Shrugged, you notice that her heroes are very insistent on making mutually beneficial deals and never trying to get something for nothing out of their customers or business partners. They expect the other guy to pull his weight in any business deal — and they expect that they will have to provide a lot of value in return.... It is the government officials and the altruistic 'humanitarians' who keep trying to set up deals in which one side gets all the benefits and the other side takes all the losses.... Rand makes a specific point to show why these one-sided altruist set-ups have to fail. If you create a deal in which one side takes all the burdens and all the losses, you are ensuring that one of the parties to the deal will eventually be unable to fulfill its obligations and the whole thing will collapse.

7. Don’t prop up the Jim Taggarts.... This is shown in Atlas Shrugged, not by the positive example of her main protagonists, but by their biggest error. In taking heroic action intended to save the railroad and the economy, Dagny actually ends up bailing out her worthless brother, time and time again.... This isn’t about claiming credit or public glory. This is about not accepting a role as the person who always bails his boss, colleagues, or business partners out of their own mistakes, putting them in the position to make more mistakes that need more bailing out in the future ... In the current therapeutic terminology, the person who always bails a chronic drunk out of trouble is 'codependent' or an 'enabler'....

"So Rand did have a few things to say about management, after all.... Ayn Rand uses the business decisions of her heroes as a way of moving forward the plot and characterization and of expressing her big philosophical themes.... Observers of the business world can debate how well these management ideas work and which companies and CEOs truly implement them."

Read more: http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/25/7-real-management-secrets-atlas-shrugged/
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