Man's Rights Without God's Existence

If God does not exist, then where do the "rights of man" come from? Glenn Beck, a good man with good intentions, said that without God man's rights would not exist because God gave them to us.

But the American Founders believed in something called "individual sovereignty" and that concept has as much validity with or without God. Natural rights are those said to belong to every human being by virtue of his rationality. This is because no man can have the right to decide another man's use of his will, and it is free will that is always at the center of the concept of "individualism".

It was Aristotle who termed man "the rational animal." Reason was a natural virtue, given by nature to every man and woman of normal mental capacity. Some people have better than normal, some people have less than normal and must be cared for. But virtues came in two varieties, according to Aristotle: mental, such as perception, abstraction, analytics, conceptualization, etc.

The second kind of virtue he termed "habitualized." This is virtue of character. This virtue is habitualized because only by acting on one's moral beliefs and practicing the principles in all our affairs can we gain what we call our "character" and our "integrity."

"Character" is the specific manner in which we practice the principles of our virtues, which by the way, is the practice of morals. Practicing principles of virtues is the practice of morality.

"Integrity" is the virtue itself of being consistent in the practice of one's morals. If we are seen to be relativists, doing one thing this time, another thing another time, and we cannot be counted on to be the same person each and every time, if we cannot be counted on for consistency in our means and objectives, if we cannot be predictible in the sense that our character can be known, then we have no integrity.

The life of habitualized virtues as the "central issue for Aristotle is the question of character or personality — what does it take for an individual human being to be a good person?" Character and integrity "must essentially involve the entire proper function of human life." Britannica

"One leading commentator says you could easily think of Aristotle as a supercilious prig. Aristotle purports to set out for us how we should live. I suppose this is consistent with his being a prig. But it is also what a lot of people think philosophy should be providing. Not logic chopping, not playing with bizarre ideas which bear very little relation to the world we have to live in, but offering wisdom, serious, considered, guidance on what life is all about and how we should deal with it." Aristotle's Ethics

How does this correspond with "natural rights" as "sovereignty" which pertains to what the law can and ought to guarantee, when the proposition is made that God did not provide us with these rights?

Let me reverse the question and ask: Why are natural rights with the attendent sovereignty of the individual only possible when given by God?

These two questions can be reconciled with the premise that "rights from God" and "natural rights" come from the same place; and, that one camp says if we don't accept rights as a gift from God we have nothing to be responsible toward, while the other camp says it is individual men to whom we must be responsible because if one wishes one's own sovereignty to be respected one must then respect the same sovereignty as it applies to another and all individuals.

Ayn Rand Predicted Today's World

Atlas Shrugged Tops Amazon's Bestseller List --Earlier this year Ayn Rand'sprophetic novel Atlas Shrugged was selling at triple the rate it soldat in the beginning of 2008. Now the novel is soaring to even greaterheights, and its trade paperback edition is currently in first place in the Classics category on Amazon.com's best-seller list forsales in the United States. The 50th anniversary mass-market paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged ranks as #2 and the trade paperback Centennial edition ranks as #3. For several weeks Atlas Shrugged has been holding steady in the top 10 best-sellers in the broader United States Literature and Fiction category, and as of the writing of this release, different editions of the novel stand at #3, #5 and #6 in Amazon'sranking. http://www.aynrand.org/site/R?i=JlsV9sK8abvp7QWvpCXtNg..http://www.aynrand.org/site/R?i=dqrrXDpVYiPsqpgXhwAlCg..

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Looters, Strikers, and Economic Systems

The strikers will be only those with ethics because they are the ones with the most to lose. They are at the top of the economic food chain.

In an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D., PRI senior fellow in Business and Economic Studies, argues [in a report] that vast government spending is not a cure for the U.S. recession. Dr. Murphy explains that the true purpose of an economic system isn’t to “create jobs” or channel a particular number of green pieces of paper into everyone’s wallet on payday, but that workers are employed productively, so that they take scarce resources and transform them into goods and services that consumers value.

“The price of limiting economic freedom is real, but not always apparent or easily understood by [ ] by lawmakers,” said Lawrence J. McQuillan, Ph.D., co-author of the report and director of Business and Economic Studies at PRI." PRI

It is not easily understood by business itself, apparently. After taking government money that essentially made government an invested stockholder, the bonus-paying, romper-room, jet-buying antics of those businesses have forced government to cap the pay of future recipients.

"Many of us who know [Ayn] Rand's work," wrote Stephen Moore in an op-ed, "have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that Atlas Shrugged parodied in 1957, when this 1,000+ page novel was first published and became an instant hit." [emphasis added]

"For the uninitiated," Moore continues, "the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises -- that in most cases they themselves created -- by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism."

Not only did the politicians, using the code phrases "for the public good," "the redistribution of wealth," and others, create a downward spiral, the very spiral we are on now, but they created two new classes of Americans: the looters and the strikers.

The looters were those who, like the corporations who are now taking government money, took government money. Looters were also people as individuals who fed off this constant stream of government handouts to the needy. The government itself was the prime looter, because it took from those who produced the wealth in order to give to those who sucked the life out the productive workers.

The strikers were those who refused to play the game any longer. At first they were only the top executives of major companies, and only those who had ethics. Those who had no ethics, like the bank execs we have now who take multi-million dollar bonuses after wrecking their companys, had no reason to go on strike. If they played the game right, they would still eventually get their money.

In Atlas Shrugged, the main visable protaganist is a woman who runs the nation's major railroad, at a time in our history when railroads played a much larger role in the economy. The train could be said to be a metaphor for what happens in the plot, because the looters' train is out of control running downhill with no breaks.

The strikers are only those with ethics because they are the ones with the most to lose. The are at the top of the economic food chain. Everyone below them feeds off them. When they begin to strike, disappearing apparently from the face of the earth, untraceable, unreachable, then the execs without ethics are stuck at the top of the economic food chain.

No one has yet become a striker that I know of. But its going to happen. It happened in the great "Brain Drain"* from England in the 1960's, when the brains moved to freer nations. "The term was coined by the Royal Society to describe the emigration of "scientists and technologists" to North America from post-war Europe." [* see [1] [2] [3]]

But in Atlas Shrugged, some of the "brains" the keep the economy afloat are literally invited to strike, and are given a safe haven. Some, who don't know of this safe haven, strike on their own by retiring without explanation.

The moral of this blog is to point out that what is about to happen to this country and to the world, as long and as far as this bail-out is continued, will cause everything in the novel to come to fruition.

The only means of rescuing the world from the abomination of spending-stimulus packages, especially those filled with "social" programs, is to take the advice of the 200+ economists who disagree with President Obama and with the force behind the strike in the novel: "Get Out Of Our Way!"

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The Inescapable Necessity of Choice

The inescapable necessity of choice is the hand that nature dealt to mankind.

"Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice." *

That sounds like determinism. Is it?

Determinism is a form of reductionism, "a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.[1] This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings." [see [1]]

"Reductionists are those who take one theory or phenomenon to be reducible to some other theory or phenomenon. [ ] The type of reductionism that is currently of most interest in metaphysics and philosophy of mind involves the claim that all sciences are reducible to physics. This is usually taken to entail that all phenomena (including mental phenomena like consciousness) are identical to physical phenomena." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Our bodies and minds are shaped in their entirety by conditions that precede us and surround us," writes Tom Clark, using those reductionist metaphysics.

While I would say that "conditions that preced us and surround us" do indeed eliminate our "power to escape the necessity of choice," I would disagree with Clark's following conclusion that because of that necessity of having to choose, "we can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do."

Men and women used to take that credit or blame, in other times, when the morals of humans seemed to be greater in personal importance. People were never heard to whine, "It wasn't my fault," except for those who were subsequently sneered at or even ostracized by society for such remarks.

The idea that man has no power to escape the necessity of choice creates the responsibility for any decisions he then chooses to make, and there is nowhere for them to be placed except squarely on the moral shoulders of the decision-maker. Certainly the blame cannot be placed on the inescapable necessity of choice.

It is the inescapable necessity of choice that gives meaning to life. Without choice, life--if it could exist--would exist as a stagnant, unthinking, unknowing blob of protoplasm that could not even act with biological necessity; after all, even biological necessity is created by inescapable evolutionary ends. Evolutionary ends are the "choices" nature makes in the life-and-death attempt to keep a species adaptably alive.

The inescapable necessity of choice is the hand that nature dealt to mankind. That makes the inescapability of moral choice metaphysically natural. It also draws the line between being human animals and a non-human animals. The inescapablility of moral choice is a metaphorical shining crown on man's head when he chooses to take "ultimate responsibility and blame" for his actions.

It defines the desire to mitigate blame and to diminish credit for proper choices as the epistemology of whining.

* from John Galt's Speech; Atlas Shrugged; Ayn Rand

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Naturalist Economics: Bernanke vs. Ayn Rand

Natural economics do not require the coercion and the gun-in-hand tactics of collectivism, nor is it up to the government to "allow" naturalism, but only to prevent unnatural economic acts.

Many times over the course of the lifespan of this blog, I have written about capitalism as the rational economics of metaphysical naturalism.

Ben Bernanke, former Chairman of the Fed, co-authored a syllabus called Principles of Economics, while teaching at Princeton. The authors do not describe "economic naturalism" as that which would apply to the nature of man if man was uncoerced by any policy other than the free, natural market.

They describe it, instead as "the ability to see economic principles in the everyday details of life as well as national and international events." Why does the small business woman in Minnesota who operates as though she were in a truly free marketplace need to see international "events" as part of her naturalistic view of business?

It was my understanding that all economists who are not concerned merely with the "big macro-economic picture" will understand that that "big picture" is made up of "principles in the everyday details of life." Any economist who only looks at the macro-economics of "international events" is a fool.

But what details of what life? As it has been said that we are already a socialist nation, the "details of life" are going to be those of a civilization living under the rules of socialism.

That, in short, has nothing to do with "naturalism" in economics. Natural economics do not require the coercion and the gun-in-hand tactics of collectivism. This may be the reason that former Treasury Secretarys Henry Paulson and Bernanke, and President Bush, put forward on September 18, 2008, a brief, three-page proposal without details about how the program would be overseen.

Bernanke, and obviously Paulson, are of that school of economics that does not recognize a natural market, not even after Bernanke defined what it means to him; in that three page proposal there were no "details of life." There were no details at all.

He and Paulson spent days in front of Congress conceding problems with the plan while at the same championing it as the solution to the nation's current financial problems. It has not been the solution. We are now looking at a boondogle spending bill of well over $800 billion.

"Try acting as a laissez-faire capitalist," I wrote here. "It will get you a prison sentence for ignoring all the laws that prevent it."

Acting as though the laws did not exist is not coercive. It twists no one's arm to keep your prices low.

It is, however, proper to make laws about capitalism that prevent such things as lowering prices below costs to put competitors out of business, or about the taking of public bail-out money then spending it on bonuses for the very people who took the bail-out. Legislating what are improper ethics is not the reverse position of allowing sound business practices that some people with certaain ideologies don't like. The government has no business and no right to allow that which is non-coercive because it is, instead, the right of the people to do anything they please that is not coercive, i.e., that does not require a gun, whether it be a literal or a virtual gun.

It is not up to the the government to allow anything. It is up to the government only to prevent that which is unlawful, and it is not up to the government to make unlawful those things which are not coercive. Naturalistic economics as would exist without any government interference is naturalistic economics and is therefore non-coercive.

Economic naturalism is the state of any economy that is not controlled by the governement, nor by any means of coercion--or worse--used by businesses or individuals in that economy.

Today, Americans are walking with eyes wide open into the kinds of scenarios that could have come right out of "Atlas Shrugged". As I speak, a pay cap is being legislated for businesses who take government bail-outs that never should have been paid in the first place but which will continue to be standard practice for many years to come. This will cause the best of our business leaders to get out.

The Governor of my state, Michigan, has vowed to cap the prices of health care costs. This will only drive doctors out of the state. Then the only way to prevent that is to make it illegal for doctors to leave the state because they have taken government money in the form of Medicaid or Medicare or some other plan.

Take WalMart as the biggest literal example of a business that every local government tries to control in some way, in the belief that WalMart is the big bad economic wolf who sets out to destroy local small businesses, that will cause traffic problems, and look like an eyesore. Sam Walton could have written these words, and if he had, and if he was alive today, he might become one of the "deserters" of the world of "Atlas Shrugged":

"I do not want my attitude to be misunderstood. I shall be glad to state it for the record...I work for nothing but my own profit--which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. It do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; --and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sellit at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever stnadards you hold. These are mine." Hank Reardon, industrialist in Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, at his trial for ignoring laws that prevented doing business as his standard told him he ought to. [condensed]

That is "naturalist economics."

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Yaron Brook on Newsweek.com

Various Subjects Worthy of Noting

An interview with Dr. Yaron Brook titled "Who Is To Blame?" has been published on Newsweek's Web site. Newsweek accepts comments from readers. It ends with this classic Rand-fan fantasy exchange:

Newsweek: With free markets now in disrepute, what's going to happen to the popularity of Ayn Rand's most famous book, "Atlas Shrugged"?

Brook: I think it's going to go up dramatically. I think it already has. [People] are saying, "We're heading toward socialism, we're heading toward more regulation." "Atlas Shrugged" is coming true. How do we get out? How do we escape? Unfortunately, there is no escape. Businessmen are panicking, and I think they should be panicking. Many of them understand that this was not a crisis of free markets. There was no free market to fail. What we have is a regulated market, and the regulated market has failed.

Brook also takes down Greenspan! I love it!

Then, Brook and Don Watkins talk about The High Cost of Washington's Price Manipulation Policy. "Want to eliminate the glut of homes? Don't give the government more power--open the borders to immigration."

On To Other Subjects

On Wednesday, December 10, Rev. Robert Sirico posted, in part, this entry on the Acton Institute Power Blog:

"It is with a sense of great pride and joy that I join with thousands around the nation in congratulating Chuck Colson on his reception of the Presidential Citizen’s Medal presented to Chuck at the Oval Office today by President Bush.

"It is important to remember that the ministry that Chuck founded some 35 years ago is noteworthy not only because it has assisted in countless men and women to transform their lives through the power of a right relationship with Christ, or that this ministry is staff by a veritable army of volunteers who visit prisons and in other ways help to mend broken families with God’s love.What is most noteworthy is that all of this came from one man’s surrender to the call of Christ to turn from his sins and accept the Gospel of redemption.

"Here’s some of what Chuck had to say on the Prison Fellowship site:
'Whatever good I may have done is because God saw fit to reach into the depths of Watergate and convert a broken sinner,” said Colson. “Everything that has been accomplished these past 35 years has been by God’s grace and sovereign design.'"

This is the same Chuck Colson who, it was reported just yesterday, said of Mormons: "Mormonism either affirms historic Christianity, or it doesn't. Since it doesn't, it can't call itself Christianity -- a fact that all the good will and public relations in Utah can't change."

Remember, President George H. Bush is the first Moral Majority President* to be elected, and I thank his God that he will probably be the last. It is deplorable that such an honor should be bestowed--by a President, no less--upon a man with such a distorted view of another religion. The Coptic sect of Christianity does not affirm the historic Christianity, either, since from its inception it was not part of the Holy Roman Church. Would Colson say the same about the Coptics?

Wikipedia has this to say about the Coptic Church: "The Church belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family of churches, which has been a distinct church body since the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, when it took a different position over Christological theology from that of the Eastern Orthodox and Western churches, then still in union. The precise differences in theology that caused the split are still disputed, highly technical and mainly concerned with the Nature of Christ. The foundational roots of the Church are based in Egypt but it has a worldwide following."

*The Moral Majority rose to power on the coat tails of Ronald Reagan; Reagan was not connected to the MM in any way other than that of having its support. But for a different--and opposing--view of the strength and power of evangelical American, see this article in "Mother Jones".

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