by Michael S. Berliner

America’s cities and towns will soon fill with parades, fireworks, and barbecues, in celebration of the Fourth of July, the 232nd birthday of America. But one hopes that the speeches will contain fewer bromides and more attention to exactly what is being celebrated. The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but America’s leaders and intellectuals have been trying to move us further and further away from the meaning of Independence Day, away from the philosophy that created this country.

What we hear from politicians, intellectuals, and the media is that independence is passé, that we’ve reached a new age of “interdependence.” We hear demands for mandatory “volunteering” to serve others, for sacrifice to the nation. We hear demands from trust-busters that successful companies be punished for being “greedy” and not serving society. But this is not the message of America. It is the direct opposite of why America became a beacon of hope for the truly oppressed throughout the world. They have come here to escape poverty and dictatorship; they have come here to live their own lives, where they aren’t owned by the state, the community, or the tribe.

“Independence Day” is a critically important title. It signifies the fundamental meaning of this nation, not just of the holiday. The American Revolution remains unique in human history: a revolution–and a nation–founded on a moral principle, the principle of individual rights. Jefferson at Philadelphia, and Washington at Valley Forge, pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.” For what? Not for mere separation from England, not—like most rebels—for the “freedom” to set up their own tyranny. In fact, Britain’s tyranny over the colonists was mild compared to what most current governments do to their citizens.

Jefferson and Washington fought a war for the principle of independence, meaning the moral right of an individual to live his own life as he sees fit. Independence was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence as the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” What are these rights? The right to life means that every individual has a right to his own independent life, that one’s life belongs to oneself, not to others to use as they see fit.

The right to liberty means the right to freedom of action, to act on one’s own judgment, the right not to have a gun pointed at one’s head and be forced to do what someone else commands. And the right to the pursuit of happiness means that an individual may properly pursue his own happiness, e.g., his own career, friends, hobbies, and not exist as a mere tool to serve the goals of others. The Founding Fathers did not proclaim a right to the attainment of happiness, knowing full well that such a policy would carry with it the obligation of others to make one happy and result in the enslavement of all to all. The Declaration of Independence was a declaration against servitude, not just servitude to the Crown but servitude to anyone. (That some signers still owned slaves does not negate the fact that they established the philosophy that doomed slavery.)

Political independence is not a primary. It rests on a more fundamental type of independence: the independence of the human mind. It is the ability of a human being to think for himself and guide his own life that makes political independence possible and necessary. The government as envisaged by the Founding Fathers existed to protect the freedom to think and to act on one’s thinking. If human beings were unable to reason, to think for themselves, there would be no autonomy or independence for a government to protect. It is this independence that defines the American Revolution and the American spirit.

To the Founding Fathers, there was no authority higher than the individual mind, not King George, not God, not society. Reason, wrote Ethan Allen, is “the only oracle of man,” and Thomas Jefferson advised us to “fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God.” That is the meaning of independence: trust in your own judgment, in reason; do not sacrifice your mind to the state, the church, the race, the nation, or your neighbors.

Independence is the foundation of America. Independence is what should be celebrated on Independence Day. That is the legacy our Founding Fathers left us. It is a legacy we should keep, not because it is a legacy, but because it is right and just. It has made America the freest and most prosperous country in history.

To see a video version of this op-ed click this: INDEPENDENCE

Michael S. Berliner is co-chairman of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand—author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

Copyright © 2008 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Gus Van Horn has written a nice piece about the Australian governments plans to further meddle in the lives of its citizens to curb what it sees as an obesity problem.

It leads with the recent finding that, on the whole, Australians are more likely to be obese than Americans and then notes the “necessity” of the government taking action to combat this “problem”.

Why am I placing the term “problem” in quotes? Even if being overweight always doomed someone to poor health, what difference would it make to me, in a society where the government does not force me to pay for someone else’s carelessness (through socialized medicine in this case) whether someone else is overweight? It would be that person’s problem and not mine.

But under a mixed economy such as Australia’s, the opposite is true.

This integration depicts a cornerstone of the destructive spirit of collectivist governments. As I’ve mentioned before, true problems are (and can only be) created by government. Examine what threats to success and happiness currently loom in your mind. High gas prices, soaring health care costs, crappy schools churning out idiots, religious barbarians killing Americans, tax accounting, that toilet that always clogs, inflation - all issues enabled or severely amplified by illegitimate or improper government meddling. All would be completely non-existent if our government acted within and were restricted to its proper role.

Void of statism, the just laws of economics and physics would limit the potential destruction of virtually any level of stupidity to only affect the stupid individual. Of course those closely related to or dependent on the idiot may be impacted, but they’d typically be the extent of the range of impact. If an individual ignores the obvious risks of obesity, he trades the quality and duration of his life. The smoker, the drinker, the lazy, the addict - all capable of destroying themselves and those around them, but the scope of destruction is acutely restrained.

If I want a toilet with 50 gallon capacity, I pay the water bill. If I want to drive a massive 4WD vehicle, I pay for the gas. If I attempt to live beyond my financial means I pay the price. Conversely, If I don’t see it necessary to work in order to provide for myself or my family, I suffer the fate. If I don’t consider my future when managing my financing, I will be the one with no savings to retire on. If I don’t acknowledge the risk of wearing my seat belt, I am the one who could die. In a rational society, all individuals hold their success or peril with the gloves of freedom and justice.

Instead, a bloated government acting outside of its proper scope amplifies and spreads the detriment of what would typically be limited to self abatement. Like a lense filter which distorts and mangles anything which passes through it, improper government empowers the vices attributed to any scenario. When the institutional mindset sees individuals as merely means to the ends of others, one mans problems whether self-inflicted or not become thorns in the side of all. With this crutch in place, why not get fat, drunk, relaxed or high. Why not placate my passive urges and indulge on whatever whim comes to mind? Why restrict my egalitarianism views to mere fantasies, when I can force those edicts on all? Why limit my altruistic notions to only my destruction, when I can force them on others? The filter can amplify any vice into a nation crumbling mandate.

Not only does the filter amplify, it creates. Consider all the violence, theft and murder surrounding the drug culture. None of which would exist if individuals right to ingest what they please weren’t violated by government. The black market, and its inherently dangerous aura wouldn’t exist. Instead, you’d have economic opportunity for a huge market supplying consumers with a product there’s obviously a demand for. Consider our high gas prices, which are solely the result of environmental regulations and taxation. Consider our rising health care costs, the result of political tampering in the insurance market, a subjective legal system, and the market imbalances imparted by medicaid and medicare funded consumption and their phony economics. All courtesy of the GovCo. filter.

The filter has deformed our economy into massive and mandatory, all encompassing insurance policy - one with no acceptance criteria and virtually full coverage for anyone who happens into the state of need. Additionally, the individual products of the filter are mostly ones bred for dependence and offer unlimited opportunity for human stupidity. As long as one mans burden is another mans responsibility we’ll continue to chatter in an reciprocal loop of destruction which will lead to the end of America.

The phrase is extremely crude and I’m hesitant to use it, but its fitting - we are in a self-inflicted, recursive orgy of economic and philosophical destruction. The only avenue to freedom, happiness and prosperity is to discard the poisonous notion that men exist to serve others, and to fully accept the truth that individuals are sovereign entities with unwavering rights to life, liberty and property, and who’s purpose is their own happiness.

- 06.21.08 9:44PM : edited to replace über-curseword with standard vulgarity.

Courtesy of Noodlefood.

This makes me giggle ==> hope-change-future

I guess it’s because I retain just a sliver of hope (or naivety one) that my worst fears are just paranoia. Here are the juicy quotes, one of which could have been lifted verbatim from Atlas.

We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.

Wow. And exactly why would they be more qualified or competent than the legitimate leaders of these companies? Do they have some secret bureaucrat tactic for crude oil refinery that would increase supply? No. Of course not. But, they do have the illigitimate power to redistribute wealth. What they could do is offset a decrease in the price at the pump with revenue from their their favorite weapon - taxes.

They’ll raise taxes, which basically redistributes the cost of gas amongst their tax victims. Considering the typical levels of incompetency, negligence and economic inefficiency that are hallmarks of government run entities, we’ll then be paying more per capita for a gallon of gas than we were back in the days of privatization. Imagine a man with a widget factory who can make 100 widgets/year at a cost of $100. He then sells the widgets for $2 dollar each. Let’s say the man is overtaken by another man who then funds the widget production by stealing pennies from people. He can boldly proclaim that he sells widgets for 50¢. What he wouldn’t disclose is that he’s not the best businessman, therefore it took 200 stolen pennies to make each widget - twice the cost of the original owner. Sure, people are paying half as much for widgets, but their right to property was violated, plus the total cost for everyone is higher. That extra cost represents the economic waste and destruction of government meddling.

Even though the pump might say $2/gallon, the additional cost would come from taxation, which is much easier for them to sweep under the rug. For those oblivious to reality, Government will appear to have saved the day, but really they will have not only raised the cost of gas due to their inherent overhead, but trampled the rights of millions of individuals in the process. This is symptomatic of a crumbling nation, and is exactly what they would do with a nationalized system.

What we do has to be in the interest of the American people. Not major corporations.

What can I say? These collectivist thugs see an individual (the business owner) not as a sovereign being, but as a blank entity subject to whatever trampling that’s needed as a means to their ends. Keep in mind these are not flagrant Hollywood leftists, agenda driven pundits or silly activists talking, but powerful government officials whispering notions of socializing a major industry.

A brilliantly written piece by Yaron Brook which points out the positive and negative impacts of embracing capitalism.

For all of capitalism’s astounding accomplishments, the intellectual underpinning sufficient to deflect its critics has never been fully identified or understood. Capitalism and the profit motive continue to be viewed with suspicion.

After all, even in America, we live in a culture that lauds self-sacrifice, community service and “giving back” as its moral ideals. Businessmen who selfishly pursue profits, in contradiction to those ideals, are consigned to a moral dungeon from which they can only hope to escape on evenings and weekends. This is why Barack Obama can get away with belittling the “money culture,” his wife can smugly counsel youth to shun “corporate America” and John McCain can brag about working “out of patriotism, not for profit.” [bold added]

I especially like this line…

Capitalism will remain the world’s punching bag until such time as the profit motive is rescued from moral oblivion. Ideas shape history–and therefore political reform requires active, fundamental intellectual change, not passive reliance on favorable trends.

In other words, we must learn to explicitly identity and proclaim the moral foundations of Capitalism. Most of our media today bickers about political fluff with nary a mention of the virtually abandoned ideal of our nations economy. Until such fundamentals - our natural right to live freely while pursuing and retaining values - are more widely accepted, the system will merely sputter along subject to varying degrees of destructive statist intervention.

Yet another mindless antitrust crusade. I’ll be sure not to consider any AMD products for purchase from now on.

You should read the article, but this about sums it up:

In particular, the FTC wants more information on Intel’s practice of offering favorable pricing on chips to certain customers.

Sounds like smart business to me.

Leia’s tactical deceit was perfectly justified given the fact that she was deeply involved in an epic battle to rule the universe, but it also qualified her as wholly unreliable with regards to whether or not Alderaan really was peaceful and defenseless. Boeing enabled other options for the Alderaanians despite their supposed peaceful nature and lack of weapons.

A high-power solid-state laser will damage, disable or destroy targets at the speed of light, with little to no collateral damage, supporting missions on the battlefield and in urban operations.

George Reisman obliterates the elected gang we call congress and their pandering petroleum witch hunt. These thugs are so consistently ignorant and evil, George simply re-posted his views from two years ago.

Our government’s policy of preventing the increase in the supply of oil, atomic power, coal, and natural gas, is what is responsible for the high prices of oil and gasoline that we must now pay. Let it just get out of the way, and the supply of all these forms of energy will dramatically increase and the price of oil and gasoline will fall, even more dramatically.
Every senator who votes to place obstacles in the way of U.S. energy production, who helps to harass U.S. energy producers, is voting to hamper OPEC’s most important competitors and to allow OPEC to go on obtaining high prices. Such senators are the ones who bear responsibility for the high price of oil and gasoline. They are senators serving OPEC not the American people. They are the ones who deserve to be interrogated, in order to learn how they could be so blind, so stupid, and so destructive.

A great read.

I recently got this email from a friend. I’ve not verified any of the numbers, but the figures are staggering, and would still make the point with even with a substantial margin of error. The mystical reference (item B) is harmless, as it only serves as a chronological metric. I also found it noteworthy to see most of our taxes listed together, although I’m sure there are many more.

How many zeros in a billion? This is too true to be funny.

The next time you hear a politician use the word ‘billion’ in a casual manner, think about whether you want the ‘politicians’ spending YOUR tax money. A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of it’s releases.

A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.

B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.

D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet.

E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let’s take a look at New Orleans. It’s amazing what you can learn with some simple division.

Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking Congress for 250 BILLION DOLLARS to rebuild New Orleans. Interesting number… what does it mean?

A. Well… if you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, and child), you each get $516,528.

B. Or… if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.

C. Or… if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.

Washington, D. C < HELLO! > Are all your calculators broken??

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL License Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Federal Income Tax Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Luxury Tax
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Service charge taxes
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Tax (Truckers)
Sales Taxes
Recreational Vehicle Tax
School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone Federal Excise Tax
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax
Telephone State and Local Tax
Telephone Usage Charge Tax
Utility Tax
Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft Registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago… and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt… We had the largest middle class in the world… and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What happened? Can you spell ‘politicians!’

And I still have to press “1″ for English.

I hope this goes around the USA at least 100 times

What the heck happened?????

Altruism is what happened. Government is merely an official embodiment of its citizens. When the dominant philosophical stew is a lack of reverence for individual rights, and a sense of duty to serve others - what else could we expect? This is exactly why explicit moral premises based on reason, and an unyielding loyalty to their adherence are the only way to reverse the established trend of this nation. Until our population learns to proudly assert the sovereignty of the individual instead of the collective, that man’s purpose is to maintain his own survival and happiness, and that reason, not faith is the only reliable means to build one’s moral code upon - the trend of destruction will continue.

Even if the altruistic tendencies remained, a sound respect for individual rights to life, liberty and property would garner massive rehabilitation. If our legal code were gutted of subjective laws - leaving only those which preclude or punish the violation of such fundamental rights - people’s altruistic tendencies would be left with only the potential to destroy the single entity of which they have to right to destroy - themselves. It’s the disrespect for individual rights in general, and a legal system built upon such in particular, that enables altruism to enhance from merely a self-mutilating fancy into a destroyer of nations.

In my experience, people are more easily persuaded to accept the sanctity of individual rights than they are to disavow the altruistic duty to serve others. Most people don’t have explicit premises regarding each, just the vague notions battered into their head by their upbringing and our culture. The notion of individual rights appeals to our nature as rational beings, and is hard to refuse or refute by even the most obnoxious altruist. Conversely, the notion of selfishness is so plagued by social stigma that most will shy away. Obviously, a total philosophical revolution spearheaded by reason and rational selfishness would change our course, but in the meantime, promoting and enforcing mans inalienable rights could serve to neuter the potency of altruism.