A Compelling Argument for the Individual

As we say goodbye to 2009 and look ahead to 2010, I wanted to take a moment to reflect back on an essay written about the individual. I know that there have been many mentions of Ayn Rand in connection with many of the political and economic issues that we face today. I just received the January 1944 issue of Reader's Digest which includes an article entitled "The Only Path to Tomorrow ", written by Rand. After reading the article, I realized how well it applies to our situations today. I hope that you will read it and be inspired to renew your fight for your individual rights in this New Year.

The Only Path to Tomorrow

by Ayn Rand

The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.

Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group - whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called "the common good."

Throughout history no tyrant ever rose to power except on the claim of representing "the common good." Napoleon "served the common good" of France. Hitler is "serving the common good" of Germany. Horrors which no man would dare consider for his own selfish sake are perpetrated with a clear conscience by "altruists" who justify themselves by - the common good.

No tyrant has ever lasted long by force of arms alone. Men have been enslaved primarily by spiritual weapons. And the greatest of these is the collectivist doctrine that the supremacy of the state over the individual constitutes the common good. No dictator could rise if men held as a sacred faith the conviction that they have inalienable rights of which they cannot be deprived for any cause whatsoever, by any man whatsoever, neither by evildoer nor supposed benefactor.

This is the basic tenet of individualism, as opposed to collectivism. Individualism holds that man is an independent entity with an inalienable right to the pursuit of his own happiness in a society where men deal with one another as equals.

The American system is founded on individualism. If it is to survive, we must understand the principles of individualism and hold them as our standard in any public question, in every issue we face. We must have a positive credo, a clear, consistent faith.

We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that the common good is served by the abolition of individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation. The only happy society is one of happy individuals. One cannot have a healthy forest made up of rotten trees.

The power of society must always be limited by the basic, inalienable rights of the individual.

The right of liberty means man's right to individual action, individual choice, individual initiative, and individual property. Without the right to private property no independent action is possible.

The right to the pursuit of happiness means man's right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own, private, personal happiness and to work for its achievement. Each individual is the sole and final judge in this choice. A man's happiness cannot be prescribed to him by another man or by any number of other men.

These rights are the unconditional, personal, private, individual possession of every man, granted to him by the fact of his birth and requiring no other sanction. Such was the conception of the founders of our country, who placed individual rights above any and all collective claims. Society can be only a traffic policeman in the intercourse of men with one another.

From the beginning of history, two antagonists have stood face to face, two opposite types of men: the Active and the Passive. The Active Man is the producer, the creator, the originator, the individualist. His basic need is independence - in order to think and work. He heither needs no seeks power over other men - nor can he be made to work under any form of compulsion. Every type of good work - from laying bricks to writing a symphony - is done by the Active Man. Degrees of human ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence and initiative determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man.

The Passive Man is found on every level of society, in mansions and in slums, and his identification mark is his dread of independence. He is a parasite who expects to be taken care of by others, who wishes to be given directives, to obey, to submit, to be regulated, to be told. He welcomes collectivism, which eliminates any chance that he might have to think or act on his own initiatives.

When a society is based on the needs of the Passive Man it destroys the Active; but when the Active is destroyed, the Passive can no longer be cared for. When a society is based on the needs of the Active Man, he carries the Passive ones along on his energy and raises them as he rises, as the whole society rises. This has been the pattern of all human progress.

Some humanitarians demand a collective state because of their pity for the incompetent or Passive Man. For his sake they with to harness the Active. But the Active Man cannot function in harness. And once he is destroyed, the destruction of the Passive Man follows automatically. So if pity is the humanitarians' first consideration, then in the name of pity, if nothing else, they should leave the Active Man free to function, in order to help the Passive. There is no other way to help him in the long run.

The history of mankind is the history of the struggle between the Active Man and the Passive, between the individual and the Collective. The countries which have produced the happiest men, the highest standards of living and the greatest cultural advances have been the countries where the power of the collective - of the government, of the state - was limited and the individual was given freedom of independent action. As examples: The rise of Rome, with its conception of law based on a citizen's rights, over the collectivist barbarism of its time. The rise of England, with a system of government based on the Magna Carta, over collectivist, totalitarian Spain. The rise of the United States to a degree of achievement unequaled in history - by grace of the individual freedom and independence which our Constitution gave each citizen against the collective.

While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is ruled by the leaders of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

We are now facing a choice: to go forward or to go back.

Collectivism is not the "New Order of Tomorrow." It is the order of a very dark yesterday. But there is a New Order of Tomorrow. It belongs to Individual Man - the only reason of any tomorrows humanity has every been granted.

Fighting an Unwinnable and Unethical War

On December 25th a man from Nigeria and allegedly trained in Yemen attempted to set off a bomb on a Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The plot was ultimately foiled by passengers on the plane.

Many U.S. lawmakers, including Senator Joe Lieberman, are calling for a new front in the war on terror, this time in Yemen. The Yemeni government has spoken out against the U.S., stating that if the U.S. had intelligence on the bombing suspect before the incident, they should have shared it.

The problem with this entire scenario is that there has been a lot going on behind the scenes with Yemen that no one is talking about. Since the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, the Yemeni government has been buying massive amounts of weapons from the American government, where previously they had been banned from doing so. The local media in Yemen has reported numerous Al-Qaida training camps within or facilitated by the Yemeni military, and many of these terrorists receive military salaries.

The Yemeni government, who is endorsing terrorism in their country, stands to gain a substantial amount by pretending that they aren't. The U.S. offers foreign aid, weapons, and training to the militaries of countries who report Al-Qaida training camps on their soil. This would be nothing new for Yemen; the country has been receiving foreign aid from the U.S. for years based on the fact that one-third of the country lives in poverty. Sadly, the aid never reaches the people who need it - the government would lose their foreign aid entitlement if their people weren't poor. Rather than use the money to help those impoverished citizens, the Yemeni government uses the money to their own advantage, paying themselves massive salaries and using the money for corrupt purposes, such as buying weapons from the U.S.

So the United States has ensured, through the offering of aid and weapons to foreign countries, that the war on terror will be a never-ending war. What corrupt government wouldn't invite Al-Qaida into their country if it meant money from the U.S. government? These governments have already proven that they care nothing about the people of their country because they keep their countries in poverty in order to receive aid.

The perpetual cycle that the U.S. government has created will ensure many a loser and a handful of winners. The American taxpayers will lose because the money for the foreign aid ultimately comes from them. The men and women sent to fight this ongoing battle are American citizens who do not deserve to be put in harm's way because of some greedy governments. The impoverished people in the countries receiving foreign aid will constantly feel the heel of their government at their throat and will never be allowed to rise up and meet their potential as a productive society. But the winners, the governments that feel no shame when they hold down their country, the American weapons industry which makes millions of dollars selling weapons to the U.S. government, who in turn sells them to governments who invite terrorists...these are the real truths that should be talked about when we discuss the attempted bombing of the Northwest airling on December 25th.

Instead of talking about these truths, congressmen are talking about opening up a new front on the war on terror. It is time that they face the fact that their foreign policy is the reason why we are in this never-ending war.

Resources:

http://www.freedomainradio.com/BOARD/forums/t/23846.aspx

Why Did We Have Those Tea Parties Anyway: An Answer To The Left

On April 15th my boyfriend and I went to two Tax Day Tea Parties, one in Winston-Salem, NC and one in Raleigh, NC. I want to talk about my thoughts, not only about what happened during the protests, but what should happen after. I will be setting a few goals for myself and I want to encourage others to do the same.

We arrived at the location of Winston-Salem fairly early before the event, and were able to watch as the amphitheatre filled with people. My boyfriend had kept up with the event's website and stated that around three hundred people had signed up to attend. When we left the event we found out that there had been between 2000 and 3000 participants, which was shocking and very exciting. We also arrived early at the Raleigh Protest. There were probably between 3000 and 4000 people in attendance there. The speakers there were great, and the street protest brought a lot of agreeable honking from people riding by in their cars.

Maybe we shot ourselves in the foot by having the rallies on Tax Day. Maybe we should have called them something other than tea parties. The left seems intent to bash the protests on these two points. Anyone who watched the clip of the reporter hounding the participant in Chicago knows that one of their favorite arguments has been "What do these rallies have to do with your taxes?" Well, to me they have nothing to do with my taxes that I filed for 2008 and everything to do with the taxes that I and my children will be filing in the future. The enormous amount of spending done under the Bush and Obama administrations has to be paid back by someone, and we all know that our politicians aren't going to reach into their own pockets and pull out the trillions of dollars needed to pay back our deficit. Members of our current administration have had enough problems just remembering to file their own taxes.

The second point the left-wingers try to make is that the participants of the Boston Tea Party were protesting against taxation without representation, and that this has nothing to do with the state of things at the present time. Well, I argue that it has. Both of the senators from our state of North Carolina voted for the huge stimulus bill that was rammed through congress. I met a few people at the protests who told how they had e-mailed these politicians with no results. One woman stated that later, after the fact, the Republican senator sent her an e-mail saying that he had made a mistake in voting for the bill. The other one...

A twenty-one year old Duke University student spoke at the Raleigh tea party. She spoke of how she had called the office of our Democratic senator and asked the person answering the phone if the senator had read the bill before she had voted for it. The person answering the phone left for a few minutes, and when they came back they stated, "We do not have an answer for you at the present time."

The issue being protested against is not taxation without representation, but taxation with mis-representation. Our elected officials are not listening to the people that they are supposed to be representing, but instead are passing huge spending bills that we, the taxpayers, will eventually have to pay for. They aren't listening to us, the people providing their paycheck, but they are listening to an agenda that the taxpayers haven't asked for. For example, I know I didn't ask to own a piece of Bank of America, but I guess now I do. The amazing thing is, even as a part owner, I will see no benefits. But the government does see a benefit - it has a foothold of power in the banking industry.

The people coming together for these protests had many other issues that they were angry about, as do I. But these are the main issues that were represented during the protests. The question now becomes "what do we do to go forward?" I, for one, will be spending more time e-mailing my elected officials, as well as doing everything I can to educate myself and everyone around me about how we got into this mess and what we need to do to fix it. And I want everyone to know that we need to stop showing so much apathy. That is one of the reasons we have the problems that we have. The only way to fix this mess is to stand up and let ourselves be heard.

This is a call to action.

My Personal Battle: A Fight for Better Education Part 1

When my oldest daughter was in the fourth grade, she started a new school. I had been lucky enough to get her re-assigned to a school near where I worked, a halfway decent primary school where she excelled. But I wasn't working when she entered fourth grade due to the birth of my second daughter, so she entered a school district that I knew nothing about.

It was a bad fit from the start. My daughter ended up stapling papers and doing other busy work because she would finish her school work long before her classmates. She was forced to run laps during recess along with the rest of the class, who hadn't behaved properly.

My first attempt at change was to call the assignment office, but I was told that I couldn't change schools after the school year had started. After many calls and heated conversations with the head of the assignment office, I was told that the only way I could move my daughter out of her current school was to put her in a magnet school. I had three options, all of which I toured before putting in the application, which had to be approved before she could move.

During the waiting period, I had a shock. My daughter was in her room one night writing "valentines," one of which said something about someone having sex with someone else and liking it. Of course I was concerned and took those concerns to her teacher and her principle. I also asked the principle for help in moving her to a school that may be a better fit for her. While I was there I was told that my daughter had been writing notes in class stating something to the effect that she wanted to kill her sister, and counseling was recommended. I also found out that the note had been written two weeks prior and no one had informed me of it at the time. I left the school frustrated and in tears, completely fed up with the entire system.

Why did the school not tell me about something so important until I had said something about moving my daughter out of their school? Why did I have to fight for an entire quarter, a nine week period, to get my daughter moved to a school where she would actually be learning something? Why should I have to fight anyone at all? And is my daughter actually learning something where she is at now?

My frustration with our education system continues to grow and grow, and not just because of this incident. I entered college a little over a year ago to try to get a teaching license. I changed majors because I didn't believe in the philosophy of children that was being taught to me. The major I switched to, psychology, taught the exact same philosophy. At this point, the whole thing has me frustrated and enraged.

My personal battle now is to research our education system and discover and impliment a new way to teach our children. My research has already led me to several very scary facts about our current public education system that I will be sharing with you through several more posts. I hope that you pay attention. And I hope that any like-minded people will join me in finding a way to save the future of our children and bring the rights of the parents back to them and take those rights out of the hands of the government and its employees.

A Note About Universal Health Care

One of the platforms that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ran on during the past election was universal health care. While the name and the idea of universal health care sounds exciting and hopeful, people have many misconceptions about howit would actually work.

First, let's get past the name - Universal Health Care. That means that there would be health care for everyone. Well, the last time I checked, our nation already offered health care for everyone, as long as you can afford it. And this is where the politicians decide that they can go crazy. They have determined that it is the right of every American to have health care, whether they can afford it or not, so they are proposing a universal health insurance paid for by the American taxpayer. This means that even if you do not get sick or injured, you are helping to foot the bill for all of those people who do get sick or injured and those requiring medication.

The cost of such a program would be hard to determine, but there is only one way to fund such a huge undertaking by the government - raise taxes. And since there are a vast number of people who can't work because of their medical problems, this leads to a redistribution of income from the able-bodied working man to those who are unable to work.

Don't get me wrong here - I don't have a problem with helping someone in their time of need. What I have a problem with is being forced to do so. I work day after day to provide for myself and my children in the best way that I can; to have the government take money that I have earned and give it to people who haven't earned it is an injustice, in my mind.

We have established in an earlier blog posting that government has never run any program at a surplus. Just as insurance companies now reserve the right to refuse coverage, the government would also be able to refuse coverage for anyone for any reason. And with the government mis-managing so many programs, the likely cause for refusal of coverage would be the lack of money to fund the coverage of everything for everyone. So how do we decide who gets their health care? Do we create waiting lists? Are these waiting lists based on a first-come-first-serve, or based on need? Who determines who needs care the most? How is this determination made? How can they create a system where favoritism or bribery for services would not be a likely happenstance? Imagine for a moment that you have a life-threatening illness or injury, but you can't get surgery or treatment because there is a waiting list. Does universal health coveraget sound like a noble ideal in this case?

But most importantly, we should consider things from the perspective of the healthcare provider. These men and women would no longer be able to choose their patients, but would be subjected to the government telling them which patients they could take. They would also be subjected to many more rules and regulations that would likely raise the cose of services. Since the government would be paying the cost of healthcare, it is very likely that it would begin to set the pay for doctors.

"Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of
enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of
medicine, men discussed everything - except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should
have any right, desire, or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness...That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in
the stockyards - never occured to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy." (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand)

So here we have it. The government has proposed to provide everyone with health coverage, but what this plan basically amounts to is benefits for the few at the expense of everyone. I, for one, would not want to see something like this happen to our country.

A New Way to Think About Those Government Bailouts

http://townhall.com/columnists/MikeSAdams/2009/01/26/my_new_spread_the_wealth_grading_policy

Anyone who doesn't have even the vaguest misgivings about Obama's stimulus package or the recent bailouts needs to check out this article.

Wheels in our Heads

"The thought is my own only when I have no misgiving about bringing it in danger of death every moment, when I do not have to fear its loss as a loss for me, a loss of me."
-Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority

We Americans have wheels in our heads. Some of us suffer from this more than others, but the fact is that most people hold beliefs that they have either inherited from their parents or have been led to believe will make them better people. Most people don't take the time to test these beliefs in the fire of reason because the beliefs are comfortable. To question and test your own beliefs requires a great deal of separation; it requires the knowledge that although your beliefs are a part of you, you are not your beliefs.

I have had the experience of testing the wheels in my own head. Raised in a Christian home, I grew up believing that God was king of my life and Christian conservatism was the political way to go. The problem that I encountered was that I had a hard time trusting in the infallibility of the scriptures; I also had problems justifying the hypocrisy of the people around me, as well as my own hypocrisy. To be a Christian conservative meant that I wanted everyone around me to not only accept the beliefs that I held, but that I wanted to shove these beliefs as far into their lives as I could, whether they believed them or not. I did not feel comfortable with this approach because I know that I would not want someone else's beliefs and way of life imposed upon me.

It took a great deal of strength to examine my beliefs and realize that they did not stand up to reason. I was defined by my Christian beliefs - they were me. To separate myself from them took a great deal of personal honesty and courage; after breaking myself apart and examining the pieces, throwing out the ideas that hindered me and keeping the ones that helped, I came out a much stronger and more secure person.

The purpose of this blog is not to impose my personal beliefs on you, the reader. Rather, I hope that this blog will cause you to look at your own beliefs and figure out which ones are a part of you and which ones you are using to define yourself. Tearing down the wheels in your own head can cause a feeling of liberation because you know that your ideas and beliefs are your own and you know why you hold them. And above all, YOU hold THEM - THEY do not hold YOU.

Nationalization!?!

I was wading through this morning's news reports when I saw it: Obama's economic recovery team is considering nationalizing the banks in order to stop the current banking crisis. Granted, they understand the economic pros and cons of this move, but they are still considering it.

As a Libertarian and someone who has a deep respect for the principles that this country was founded on, the idea of nationalizing any business strikes fear in my heart. Not that I didn't expect it, though. I, along with the rest of the taxpayers in this nation are the largest shareholders of Bank of America and CitiGroup as a result of the government's bailout of both of these banking institutions. Now that the government has gotten a slight taste of bank ownership, what is to stop lawmakers from taking complete control of the banks?

Let us stop and consider what this would mean for our country. First of all, the men that worked hard to create their banking business would lose their ownership of what they had built, having it taken from them by politicians who, in the end, reap all of the benefits. Imagine if the government controlled how your moneyis held, who could receive a loan, or anything else that banks do.

I want to take you for a moment to a place where the government already has control: the public schools. Education of our nation's children is a top priority since they will be the ones leading and producing in the future. But on a worldwide scale our children are continually ranking lower and lower in education, leading one to wonder what they are gaining from our system. Parents have little or no choice about where they can send their child to school, and are subjected to being ordered to take their child to a different school in the name of "cultural or economic diversity." Teachers are subjected to so many rules and standards that their focus is shifted from giving students the best that they can to making sure that students meet the requirements of the government. And schools in every part of the country face so many budget problems that it is a wonder that they can even afford the supplies needed to teach our children.

What does this mean for our banks? Banks would not have to compete for customers, so imagine any perks that you get at your bank disappearing and customer service resembling that of the DMV. And imagine how much worse your banking fees would be. The government has never been able to run any program at a surplus and they have to get the money to run the banks from somewhere. Getting a loan would become almost impossible with all of the regulations and restrictions that would be imposed, especially since irresponsible lending is one of the things that got us into this mess in the first place.

Many people downplayed Obama's socialist background, but if the process of nationalizing the banks turns out to be easy, e.g., his administration doesn't face too much opposition, then what would stop them from nationalizing the automotive industry, another sector of the economy facing financial problems?

Americans stand to lose much more than we would gain from the nationalization of any industry in the country. We have already seen it in our school systems. I hope that the American people will not stand idly by while it happens to our banking industry as well.