Determinism, Government, and Social Justice

"Dictatorship and determinism," wrote Ayn Rand, "are reciprocally reinforcing corollaries: if one seeks to enslave men, one has to destroy their reliance on the validity of their own judgments and choices—if one believes that reason and volition are impotent, one has to accept the rule of force.
“Representation Without Authorization,” The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 21, 1

Today, we see the spectacle of a federal government nearing totalitarian power over society. It seeks to re-create the nation in its own image--green, "socially just", ignoring the power of the individual and his right, both Constitutional and natural, to empower his own will; and it is doing so by giving us cause to relinquish our reliance on the validity of our own judgments and choices.

It is telling us that General Motors and Chrysler no longer know how to manage their own companies, because in a world where they naturally lost their share of the market to competition, they also lost money when a disaster struck the economy after government interference in that economy.

Of course, the government has interfered in the capitalist economy almost from the beginning of our nation's founding. But once it became large enough to be a real force, then the concept of capitalism was replaced by the concept of the "mixed" economy. But no one calls it that.

They still call it capitalism, and so when this mixed economy fails because the capitalists have lost control over their own capital, lost it to bureaucrats who were not seeking to protect capital but rather to protect special interests from the capitalists, then the bureaucrats could claim the capitalists were incompetent of maintaining a healthy economy. It isn't "socially just" to allow a few incompetent money mongers to destroy everything for everyone.

The real capitalists knew better, but the majority of people alive today believe that the government has proved "capitalism" is the special interest who must be shackled and told how to manage its own affairs; when the fact is, it has been shackled for so long it no longer knows how to do what it is supposed to do.

It is supposed to say no to government interference, relying on the validity of its own choices based on objective market values. No such values can exist when a mixed economy by definition is subjective.

And since the government can now make the claim that "health care" is inefficient and have that backed up by the health care industry climbing naked into bed with it, "the people" are beginning to believe that reason is impotent---when it is not governed.

When a new piece of electronics hits the market, it is always expensive at first. Look at the price of the IPhone, which now has dropped by more than 60%. The first real laptop computer for under $200 is being advertised heavily on TV by a major wireless internet carrier who sells that laptop.

So when a new piece of medical equipment, or new medicines, hit the market, they are always expensive. The difference is, there are not hundreds of thousands of hospitals rushing out to buy the new equipment, and the meds are not immediately prescribed to millions of people, so there is no reason for the price to come down.

Yet, everyone who gets sick and can be helped by the new equipment want it used on them, and they then complain about the cost of health care, and they equate it with health care itself. There is nothing wrong with health care. There is something wrong with everyone wanting the best and the most expensive procedures used on them, while complaining about the costs.

"Social justice" is a form of alleviating the effects of determinism, but it's all smoke and mirrors. Determinism doesn't exist, but if the philosophers can get you to believe it does, then they have power over everything and everyone, including government policy, because it is they who taught the policy wonks everything they know.

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Determinsm, Free Will, and Experience

If neither an "act of God" nor the hand of another man ends your life, then it is true that you always play the only role in shaping your fate, when "fate" is defined as the end you meet when you meet it.

Determinists say that because we are what the events of our lives have caused us to be, that our fate is out of our hands for the most part. If an auto accident took your leg, free will could not bring it back, nor change it.

But these determinists forget that what you are requires experience. It requires the existence of things that happen to you, for you, and by you. These things are the very stuff of life. Without empirical existence and the things it causes you to deal with, there would be no you.

So it is up to you to consider the events of existence as the "natural resources" of your consciousness, because without them you would have no consciousness. And if they are your natural resources, then only you can use them to your advantage.

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Obama's Ban of Lobbyists May Lead to More Totaliarianism

Note: Last month I suspended publication of this blog on a daily basis because of time constraints generated by my other activities. Today, I begin the blog again, on a once-a-week basis. I'm glad to be back. CEC

The field of lobbyists is growing even as President Obama attempts to keep them at bay from the doors of the White House. But there are at least two important considerations aside from the prevention of lobbying Obama's staff.

First, the President's memo requires any written communications with the White House to be published online. This alone could cause the ranks of lobbyists, unregistered and unregulated, to begin all-out efforts to back the registered lobbyists; and because the ban on lobbying only applies to communications with government officials, lobbys could play the game of going directly to Senators and Congressmen and women, making their work that much more difficult.

According to Parade Magazine, Sheila Krunholz of the Center for Responsive Politics, a watch-dog group, "says that it is virtually impossible to keep special interests out of the stimulus-funding equation."

There is no reason lobbying should stop at the stimulus package. There are many more trillions of dollars manufactured out of thin air by the Federal Reserve that must be spent. That brings us to our second consideration: the Obama administration has an agenda that encompasses social, infrastructure, and capital reorganization, and will stop at nothing nothing, short of outright illegalities, to get what it wants. It has no need to go to illegal activities because it has the history of American political progressivism behind it. So by banning lobbyists from direct contact with administration officials, it simply doesn't have to listen to them.

Lobbyists could not exist if the Federal government did not overstep its boundaries of operating within the parameters of the Constitution including abiding by the 10 Amendment. This means recognition that under the 10th Amendment it must leave to the States and the People those powers not specified in the Constitution as belonging to it, that it was intituted by the States for the benefit of the States, not the other way around. Federal mandates on States to follow Federal guidlines on issues from the environment to civil rights to spending money it forces the States to accept, are all contrary to the American form of Federalism and republican democracy.

As an example of the social and capital engineering this administration want to dictatorially impose on the nation, we need only to look in one place, though there are dozens more. The place to look is in the field of energy.

From The Motley Fool comes this: "Setting a new tone for the Environmental Protection Agency, administrator Lisa Jackson directed the agency to review 150 to 200 permits for new or expanded surface mines. In letters to the Corps, she voiced particular concern with three proposals -- involving miners like Massey Energy (NYSE: MEE) and Patriot Coal (NYSE: PCX)...

"With virtually all production from underground mines, conversely, CONSOL Energy (NYSE: CNX) appears poised to benefit from the higher prices for Appalachian coal which could result from ongoing permitting delays up on the surface."

The Treehugger only adds to the controversy, reporting that "you may not be aware of the behind the scenes lobbying activity and campaign contributions [by] the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity." On April 23 of this year, The Treehugger reported the contributions made by the ACCE in it's efforts to lobby against surface mining. The two largest reciepients of their funds? Sen. John McCain at $302,4742 and President Barack Obama at $241,870 (all from ACCCE employees).

Demand for electricity is expected to grow by 26% over the next 20 years, according to the Energy Information Administration, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, overseeing electrical-grid operations is predicting shortages if the economy rebounds.

Yet, according to the administration itself, it intends to "Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future."

"Catalyzing" efforts that may not pan out, especially in giant wind farms that only work when the wind blows, is not the same as getting off the backs of those who are currently producing the energy we will need in the immediate future. What do we do when the economy rebounds, the coal industry is either partially shut down, costs the American public enormously larger amounts of money, or both?

These "new jobs" are worthless make-work if they don't pan out soon enough, and the "catalyzing" efforts of spending that much of the taxpayer money to force green policy where capitalists see no profit is criminal. If T. Boone Pickens is so all-fired up about wind-farms, why isn't he putting his own millions where his mouth is? According to Winningreen, Pickens is out to pick your pockets clean.

Again according to the administration website, Obama plans to "Put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars -- cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon -- on the road by 2015, cars that we will work to make sure are built here in America.' Where will those cars get the necessary cheap electricity if the coal mines are shut down?

And again, the administration will "Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025." How does an administration "ensure" such a thing? It cannot. It can hope for it. It can unilatterally put the public's money where capitalists fear to tread, but only because the progressive nature of Obama's socialism goes so far beyond the bounds of the Constitution that it has become a runaway train going down the mountain side.

And we are only a little more than 100 days into his administration. Obama's intentions are to perform the same sort of progressive socialist magic on the health care industry. In order to get what he wants in the auto industry he refused to allow GM and Chrysler to go backrupt, forced them to beg for money, then fired the Chair of GM and allowed his "auto oversight board" to dictate how things were going to be run.

What happens when the administration does the same thing in health care?

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