The 6 Strangest Libertarian Ideas

  NEWS & POLITICS  

AlterNet / By Richard Eskow

 

The 6 Strangest Libertarian Ideas

We must challenge libertarians on the extreme nature of their ideology.

August 28, 2014  |  

 

 

It’s great to have allies like Rand Paul working alongside other Americans to defend our right to privacy, restrain the NSA and reduce the military/industrial complex’s grip on foreign policy. It’s possible to admire their political courage in these areas while at the same time recognize that we may not care for the environment they inhabit.Few movements in the United States today harbor stranger political ideas than the self-proclaimed libertarians. The Rand Paul school of libertarianism is at least as far outside the mainstream on the right as, say, a rather doctrinaire old-school form of Marxism/Leninism is on the left. The difference is this: The mainstream media isn’t telling us that we’re in the middle of a “Marxist/Leninist moment.” Leninist politicians aren’t being touted as serious presidential contenders. And all the media chatter we’re hearing about a “Libertarian moment” ignores the very harsh, extreme and sometimes downright ugly ideas that are being disseminated under that banner.

There’s another reason to challenge libertarians on the extreme nature of their ideology: A number of them seem determined to drive competing ideas out of the free market for ideas—which isn’t very libertarian of them. There has been a concerted effort to marginalize mainstream values and ideas about everything from workers’ rights to the role of government in national life. So by all means, let’s have an open debate. Let’s make sure that all ideas, no matter how unusual they may seem, are welcome for debate and consideration. But let’s not allow any political movement to become a Trojan horse, one which is allowed to have a “moment” without ever telling us what it really represents.

Obviously, not every self-proclaimed libertarian believes these ideas, but libertarianism is a space which nurtures them. Can the Republican Party really succeed by embracing this space? Why does the mainstream media treat libertarian ideas as somehow more legitimate than, say, the social welfare principles which guide Great Britain or Sweden?

Here are seven of modern libertarianism’s strangest and most extreme notions.

1. Parents should be allowed to let their children starve to death. We’re not making this up. From progressive writer Matt Bruenig (via Sean McElwee at Salon) comes this excerpt from libertarian economist Murray Rothbard:

“a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also … should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die.”

Note the repetitive use of the word “it” to describe the child. This linguistic dehumanization of helpless individuals is surprisingly common in libertarian literature. (See Ayn Rand and the young Alan Greenspan for further examples.)

Rothbard is a member of the so-called Austrian School of economics, cofounded the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and is widely admired among libertarians. He continues:

“The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive. (Again, whether or not a parent has a moral rather than a legally enforceable obligation to keep his child alive is a completely separate question.) This rule allows us to solve such vexing questions as: should a parent have the right to allow a deformed baby to die (e.g., by not feeding it)? The answer is of course yes, following a fortiori from the larger right to allow any baby, whether deformed or not, to die. (Though, as we shall see below, in a libertarian society the existence of a free baby market will bring such “neglect” down to a minimum.)”

In other words, society may have moral values, but it may not impose those values on anyone.

To his credit, Rothbard preaches a form of libertarianism which is internally consistent. That’s a virtue some of his peers in that community lack. But people should understand: this idea isn't an outlier in the libertarian world. It is, in fact, a logical outgrowth of the philosophy.

2. We must deregulate companies like Uber, even when they cheat. So-called ridesharing services like Lyft and Uber are actually taxi services using unlicensed contractors. They’re heavily promoted by libertarians who tout them as ideal examples of the free market as a counter to bureaucratized, more traditional taxicab services.

We now know that Uber is as ruthless in its anticompetitive tactics as it is hypocritical in its public statements. A recent report from the Verge shows that Uber employees frequently hire drivers from competitor Lyft for short, relatively unprofitable rides in an attempt to recruit them. Uber promised to “tone down” these tactics. Instead, in a related move, its employees made and then canceled 5,493 Lyft reservations, reducing the availability of Lyft drivers and hurting its drivers.

Yet here’s what Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had to say about taxis:

“The taxi industry [is] trying to protect a monopoly that has been granted them by local officials, so they're trying to slow down competition."

That sounds a lot like what Uber is doing. In a Twitter exchange this week, Kalanick insisted that Lyft drivers were welcome to sign with Uber while keeping their Lyft affiliation. But Uber lied to its own drivers about that recently in New York, when it sent out a text message falsely claiming that New York regulations barred them from signing with Lyft.

Have libertarians expressed their outrage with Uber for its dirty tricks, or for its assault on the idea of competition? Not at all. In fact, libertarian Nick Gillespie wrote in Time last March that, "Letting markets work to find new ways of delivering goods and services isn’t just better for customers in the short term, it’s the only way to unleash the innovation that ultimately propels long-term economic growth.”

Of course, “letting markets work” is precisely what Uber isn’t doing. Gillespie also expresses outrage that California has imposed regulations that include “mandatory criminal-background checks for drivers, licensing via public-utilities commissions, and driver-training programs.”

Which one of those things don’t you want to have in place when a driver comes to your house at four in the morning for an emergency drive to the hospital? But Gillespie equates regulators to “mobsters.”

(Update: Gillespie has been silent about these recent Uber revelations. For its part, Uber has hired former Obama aide David Plouffe, which means nothing politically but will help them leverage their market dominance and suppress competition even more. Expect further radio silence from the libertarian front.)

3. We should eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Libertarian/Republican icon Rand Paulholds with the libertarian faith in his steadfast opposition to both Medicare and Social Security. “The fundamental reason why Medicare is failing is why the Soviet Union failed,” says Paul. “Socialism doesn’t work.”

Except that Medicare isn’t failing. It provides healthcare at lower direct cost, lower administrative cost, and with lower cost inflation than equivalent private-sector insurance. Its biggest efficiency problem stems from the runaway profit motive in the delivery of healthcare. Medicare must purchase goods and services from for-profit medical corporations, hospital chains and pharmaceutical companies. (Conservatives have forbidden it from negotiating prices with Big Pharma.)

In other words: It’s the private sector, not government, which is causing our country’s healthcare problems.

Social Security is entirely self-funded through its own contributions. It has far lower costs than any equivalent private program. Medicare and Social Security annoy libertarians, not because they don’t work, but because they do, putting “free enterprise” in the dust.

4. Society doesn’t have the right to enforce basic justice in public places of business. From Rep. Ron Paul, Sen. Paul’s father:

“… the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.” 

This was Rep. Paul’s reasoning in voting against a resolution which praised the Civil Rights Act. The libertarian position, as articulated by the Paul family, appears to be this: a business owner’s rights, even in a public place of business, extend to the ability to discriminate solely on the basis of skin color.

That is a violation of the United States Constitution, and of federal law. The libertarian position is that some laws cannot be enforced on private property. But which ones? If the government can’t forbid discrimination, can it forbid theft? Assault? Murder?

As with so many libertarian positions, the reasoning seems murky and the differences appear arbitrary. After all, won’t the free market eventually make a murderer’s business unpopular and force a correction to the killer’s behavior?

5. Selflessness is vile. From libertarian avatar and prophet Ayn Rand: “The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.”

Aid workers. Doctors Without Borders. Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr. Mother Teresa. In this libertarian view, all of them are “parasites” who make parasites of those they serve—because, of course, the free market would eventually eliminate poverty. (Never mind the millions who would starve in the meantime.)

Not only are these good people “parasites” in this libertarian view, they are deliberately parasitical (“in motive”). They lack the nobility of character needed to act purely out of self-interest, like the murderer Ayn Rand so admired. As Mark Ames reported in 2012, Rand,

“became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burn... Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation... on him.”

Rand described the child-killer as a “genuinely beautiful soul.” But that aid worker sweating in the Darfur heat, spooning food into a skeletal child’s mouth? Despicable.

This is not fringe libertarianism. Ayn Rand is its heart and soul.

6. Democracy is unacceptable, especially since we began feeding poor people and allowing women to vote. This isn’t a fringe idea, but one that was proclaimed in a prominent libertarian outlet by one of the movement’s leading funders:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.

Translation: Things have gone to hell with all those black and brown poor people around, especially with all those weak-willed women feeling sorry for them and voting to feed them. This isn’t your lunatic uncle talking. These are the words of Peter Thiel, PayPal billionaire and leading libertarian, not spoken in a drunken rage at Thanksgiving dinner, but published in Cato Unbound, perhaps the nation’s leading libertarian outlet.

Thiel clearly felt the heat on this one, since he was forced to append a statement at the end saying, “It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us,” adding: “While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.”

Thiel’s prescription? “Escape” democracy by using technology to create spaces where the democratic process cannot go. His ideas include ocean colonization, or “seasteading"; outer space; and inevitably, “cyberspace.”

Unfortunately for the libertarian ethos, cyberspace is a government creation. The Internet, and the core technology which enables us to access it, were both created at government expense using government resources. But Thiel’s dream, the libertarian dream, is one in which publicly created tools, which should rightly be considered the modern “commons,” are usurped by a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals for their own undemocratic and noncompetitive purposes.

7. We can replace death with libertarianism.If they can’t bend us to their will in this lifetime, they’ll achieve the goal by other means. Thiel begins his Cato essay this way:

“I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.”

That’s right. The new libertarian ideology insists that private entrepreneurs will conquer death. Then they’ll force us to bend to their will in the new dominion of eternal life, whether in biochemically preserved flesh or as uploaded spirits in a digital netherworld. Either way, their freedom won’t be ours. Based on their past behavior, they’ll “monetize” our afterlife with advertising and by manipulating our artificial-life experiences.

Life extension has its merits, if handled humanely and justly. But an eternity of “curated content” governed by Silicon Valley billionaires? I’d rather die, thanks very much. And if the Republican Party accepts the “libertarian moment” as its new ideological covering, it apparently has a death wish too.

Richard (RJ) Eskow is a blogger and writer, a former Wall Street executive, a consultant, and a former musician.

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Why There Is No Cure for the GOP's Benghazi Fever

The latest outbreak of Benghazi-mania on the right shows the virus is only growing more resistant to reason.

—By David Corn

| Fri May. 2, 2014 11:51 AM PDT

Pete Marovich/ZUMA

The current outbreak of Benghazi Fever shows how strong the virus is—and that it is apparently immune to basic remedy.

On Friday, the Republicans went full Benghazi. House Speaker John Boehner announced he was setting up a special House committee to investigate the attack—that is, the Obama White House's response to it. Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chair of the House government oversight committee, subpoenaed Secretary of State John Kerry to testify before his committee on May 21 about the State Department's handling of GOP congressional inquiries about Benghazi. (Apparently, Issa is now probing a supposed cover-up of the original supposed cover-up.)

This week, Issa, Fox News, and other Benghazi-ists rushed to the ramparts once again, when a White House email was released showing that a top Obama aide had suggested that an administration spokeswoman defend the president's policy regarding the Arab Spring and the Muslim world following a series of anti-American attacks that included the September 11, 2012, assault on the US diplomatic facility in Benghazi. As part of the interagency effort then underway to prep then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice for appearances on several Sunday morning talk shows—the exercise that produced the Benghazi talking points Republicans have been howling about ever since—Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, wrote that one goal for Rice was to "underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy."

A-ha! cried the Benghazi truthers. Here's proof that the White House schemed to convince the public that the tragic attack—which claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans—was merely the result of protests spurred by an anti-Islam video made by some American wacko, not the doing of Al Qaeda or its allies. President Obama and his comrades, the Benghazi truthers insist, wanted to cover up the politically inconvenient fact that Al Qaeda-ish terrorism was responsible for the killing of four Americans, since acknowledgment of this would have tainted the counter-terrorism credentials of Obama, the Bin Laden slayer, and decreased his chances of reelection.

But as we know now, the CIA and the State Department took the lead in fashioning the talking points. A year ago, the release of internal White House emails about the drafting of the talking points clearly showed there had been no White House effort to shape the narrative in a devious manner. (It appeared the CIA and the State Department were more concerned about their own bureaucratic imperatives.) And the new email from Rhodes is pretty standard stuff, indicating a White House desire to justify its policy on the Arab Spring in the face of troubling events. Rhodes was encouraging Rice to present the case that the anti-video protests that had occurred in various places in the Muslim world were sort of a one-off event, not an indication that the overall Obama approach toward the region was misguided. Note that Rhodes referred to "protests," plural, when making this point. That week there had been violent anti-video uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, and Sudan, not just Libya. So all the fuss about the Rhodes email—which quickly passed through membrane between Fox News and the rest of the media, receiving airtime on CNN, ABC News, and elsewhere—is smoke, not fire.

Moreover, the Rhodes email is a reminder of how far off the rails the Benghazi-bashers have gone. At the bottom of the second page of his four-page memo is proposed language for discussing the Benghazi attack: "The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the [anti-video] protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US Consulate and subsequently its annex." According to the internal White House emails released last year, this was how the CIA had asked for the event to be described.

Rice stuck to this script when she went on the air days after the attack. Appearing on ABC, she noted,

Our current best assessment based on the information that we have at present is that, in fact, what this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated, response to what had transpired in Cairo. In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated. We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people, came to the embassy to—or to the consulate, rather—to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo. And then, as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons, weapons that, as you know, in the wake of the revolution in Libya, are quite common and accessible. And it then evolved from there.

Though some within the CIA and military have said it was their assessment from the get-go that the Benghazi assault was unrelated to the anti-Islam video, reports at the time and subsequent investigations have confirmed that the video and the protests in Cairo played a role in the attack. The new batch of released emails—the one containing the Rhodes note that has launched a thousand Fox News reports—includes an Al Jazeera report filed the night of the attack. It reads,

Witnesses say an armed mob has attacked the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi and set fire to the building in what they way was a protest at [sic] a film deemed offensive to Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

Just hours earlier on Tuesday, thousands of Egyptian demonstrators apparently angry over the same film—an amateur film produced by expatriate members of Egypt's Christian minority resident in the US—tore down the Stars and Stripes at the US embassy in Cairo and replaced it with an Islamic flag.

How odd that Fox News did not mention this report. Maybe those witnesses were wrong and in the heat of the moment assumed the Benghazi attack was spurred by similar action in Egypt. But this past December, the New York Times, after a comprehensive investigation, reached this conclusion:

Months of investigation...centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

The paper continued:

Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs...

The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.

A Senate intelligence committee report released in January said this: "Intelligence suggests that the attack was not a highly coordinated plot, but was opportunistic." This report noted,

It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attacks or whether extremist group leaders directed their members to participate. Some intelligence suggests the attacks were likely put together in short order, following that day’s violent protests in Cairo against an inflammatory video.

Compared to the on-the-ground reporting that night, the Times' investigation, and the Senate intelligence committee's finding, the original talking points presented by Rice hold up. At the least, this was a plausible explanation and, if these other accounts are accurate, not too far off the mark. The anti-Islam video and the protests in Cairo had been a factor.

The White House certainly has bungled part of its Benghazi reaction. It did not release the emails soon enough—and it has had a hard time explaining why the Rhodes email, as not-so-relevant as it is, was not part of the batch made public a year ago. The Obama White House not been able to pull off a release-the-birth-certificate moment to smother the Benghazi conspiracy theories.

But this should have been case closed, a long time back. Still, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Thursday accused the White House of running a "cover-up." And an angry Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said White House officials who lied about the attacks are "scumbags." On Wednesday, House majority leader Eric Cantor proclaimed that the Rhodes email proved the White House had "misled" Congress and the public. He claimed, "It is increasingly clear that this administration orchestrated an effort to deflect attention from their failed Libya policy and the resurgence of Al Qaeda and other terrorists."

Issa continues to hold hearings, as he did this week, putting on stage retired Brig. General Robert Lovell, who said the US forces "should have tried" to save Stevens and the others—seemingly backing the notion Issa has pushed that the Obama White House and the Hillary Clinton-run State Department were derelict in their duties that night. But Lovell, under questioning from a Democrat on Issa's government oversight committee, also said, "I did not say we did not try." (In a stunning rebuke to Issa and this witness, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, the California Republican who chairs the House armed services committee, declared afterward, "We have no evidence that Department of State officials delayed the decision to deploy what few resources the Defense Department had available to respond.")

Unbowed, Issa, on Friday morning, tweeted out a link to an editorial in his hometown newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, that asserted that Obama had mounted a "deception" by blaming the Benghazi attacks on the video. The evidence? At a speech at the United Nations two weeks after the attack, Obama had "suggested...that the Benghazi attacks were linked to the video." In that speech, Obama merely had observed that a "crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world." That was a true statement—and, as noted above, others have also pointed out the link between the video and the assault in Benghazi. But the editorialists, looking as if they were doing Issa's bidding, were pushing the false narrative the right cannot drop: there was no connection to the video and Obama's gang outright lied to get the president reelected.

For Obama's political foes, the Benghazi narrative—that is, their reality-challenged version of it—offers too much benefit to be abandoned. It serves three fundamental desires of the right. The get-Obama crusaders have long wanted to show that the president is just another weak-on-defense Democrat, to demonstrate that he is not a real American worthy of being president, and to uncover an explosive scandal that eviscerates Obama's presidency and provides cause for impeachment. Benghazi, in their feverish minds, has had the potential to do all of this. It is a candy store for many conservatives—no matter that the bins are empty. They will not—cannot—let it go. Nor can they simply focus on the real issues of what went wrong that dreadful night and what must be done to prevent another such disaster. They are love-sick for Benghazi. And for that, there is no cure.

DAVID CORN

Washington Bureau Chief

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. 

10 Things About Ayn Rand and the GOP/Republican Ethic

  NEWS & POLITICS

Alter Net / By Adam Lee

10 Things I Learned About the World from Ayn Rand's Insane "Atlas Shrugged'

If Rand were still alive she would probably say, "Thank you for smoking." 

Photo Credit: Justin Templer; Screenshot / YouTube.com

April 23, 2014  |  

Over the past year, I've been reading and reviewing Ayn Rand's massive paean to capitalism, Atlas Shrugged. If you're not familiar with the novel, it depicts a world where corporate CEOs and one-percenters are the selfless heroes upon which our society depends, and basically everyone else — journalists, legislators, government employees, the poor — are the villains trying to drag the rich down out of spite, when we should be kissing their rings in gratitude that they allow us to exist.

Rand's protagonists are Dagny Taggart, heir to a transcontinental railroad empire, and Hank Rearden, the head of a steel company who's invented a revolutionary new alloy which he's modestly named Rearden Metal. Together, they battle against evil government bureaucrats and parasitic socialists to hold civilization together, while all the while powerful industrialists are mysteriously disappearing, leaving behind only the cryptic phrase "Who is John Galt?"

Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, but as far as many prominent conservatives are concerned, it's sacred scripture. Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand's inner circle, and opposed regulation of financial markets because he believed her dictum that the greed of businessmen was always the public's best protection. Paul Ryan said that he required his campaign staffers to read the book, while Glenn Beck has announced grandiose plans to build his own real-life "Galt's Gulch," the hidden refuge where the book's capitalist heroes go to watch civilization collapse without them.

Reading Atlas Shrugged is like entering into a strange mirror universe where everything we thought we knew about economics and morality is turned upside down. I've already learned some valuable lessons from it.

1. All evil people are unattractive; all good and trustworthy people are handsome.

The first and most important we learn from Atlas Shrugged is that you can tell good and bad people apart at a glance. All the villains — the "looters," in Rand's terminology — are rotund, fleshy and sweaty, with receding hairlines, sagging jowls and floppy limbs, while her millionaire industrialist heroes are portraits of steely determination, with sharp chins and angular features like people in a Cubist painting. Nearly all of them are conspicuously Aryan. Here's a typical example, the steel magnate Hank Rearden:

The glare cut a moment's wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice — then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair — then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them; this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five.

2. The mark of a great businessman is that he sneers at the idea of public safety.

When we meet Dagny Taggart, Rand's heroic railroad baron, she's traveling on a cross-country train which gets stuck at a stoplight that may or may not be broken. When the crew frets that they should wait until they're sure it's safe, Dagny pulls rank and orders them to drive through the red light. This, in Rand's world, is the mark of a heroic and decisive capitalist, rather than the kind of person who in the real world would soon be the subject of headlines like "22 Dead in Train Collision Caused by Executive Who Didn't Want to Be Late For Meeting."

Dagny makes the decision to rebuild a critical line of the railroad using a new alloy, the aforementioned Rearden Metal, which has never been used in a major industrial project. You might think that before committing to build hundreds of miles of track through mountainous terrain, you'd want to have, say, pilot projects, or feasibility studies. But Dagny brushes those concerns aside; she just knows Rearden Metal is good because she feels it in her gut: "When I see things," she explains, "I see them."

And once that line is rebuilt, Dagny's plan for its maiden voyage involves driving the train at dangerously high speed through towns and populated areas:

"The first train will... run non-stop to Wyatt Junction, Colorado, traveling at an average speed of one hundred miles per hour." ...

"But shouldn't you cut the speed below normal rather than ... Miss Taggart, don't you have any consideration whatever for public opinion?"

"But I do. If it weren't for public opinion, an average speed of sixty-five miles per hour would have been quite sufficient."

The book points out that mayors and safety regulators have to be bribed or threatened to allow this, which is perfectly OK in Rand's morality. When a reporter asks Dagny what protection people will have if the line is no good, she snaps: "Don't ride on it." (Ask the people of Lac-Megantic how much good that did them.)

3. Bad guys get their way through democracy; good guys get their way through violence.

The way the villains of Atlas Shrugged accomplish their evil plan is ... voting for it. One of the major plot elements of part I is a law called the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, which forces large companies to break themselves up, similarly to the way AT&T was split into the Baby Bells. It's passed by a majority of Congress, and Rand never implies that there's anything improper in the vote or that any dirty tricks were pulled. But because it forces her wealthy capitalist heroes to spin off some of their businesses, it's self-evident that this is the worst thing in the world and could only have been conceived of by evil socialists who hate success.

Compare this to another of Rand's protagonists, Dagny Taggart's heroic ancestor Nathaniel Taggart. We're told that he built a transcontinental railroad system almost single-handedly, which is why Dagny all but venerates him. We're also told that he murdered a state legislator who was going to pass a law that would have stopped him from completing his track, and threw a government official down three flights of stairs for offering him a loan. In the world of Atlas Shrugged, these are noble and heroic acts.

Then there's another of Rand's heroes, the oil baron Ellis Wyatt. When the government passes new regulations on rail shipping that will harm his business, Wyatt retaliates by spitefully blowing up his oil fields, much like Saddam Hussein's retreating army did to Kuwait in the first Gulf War. In real life, that act of sabotage smothered much of the Middle East beneath clouds of choking, toxic black smoke for months, poisoning the air and water. But as far as Rand sees it, no vengeance is too harsh for people who commit the terrible crime of interfering with the right of the rich to make more money.

4. The government has never invented anything or done any good for anyone.

In Rand's world, all good things come from private industry. Everyone who works for the government or takes government money is either a bumbling incompetent or a leech who steals credit for the work of others. At one point, the villainous bureaucrats of the "State Science Institute" try to sabotage Rand's hero Hank Rearden by spreading malicious rumors about his new alloy:

"If you consider that for thirteen years this Institute has had a department of metallurgical research, which has cost over twenty million dollars and has produced nothing but a new silver polish and a new anti-corrosive preparation, which, I believe, is not so good as the old ones — you can imagine what the public reaction will be if some private individual comes out with a product that revolutionizes the entire science of metallurgy and proves to be sensationally successful!"

Of course, in the real world, only minor trifles, like radar, space flight, nuclear power, GPS, computers, and the Internet were brought about by government research.

5. Violent jealousy and degradation are signs of true love.

Dagny's first lover, the mining heir Francisco d'Anconia, treats her like a possession: he drags her around by an arm, and once, when she makes a joke he doesn't like, he slaps her so hard it bloodies her lip. The first time they have sex, he doesn't ask for consent, but throws her down and does what he wants: "She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his."

Later on, Dagny has an affair with Hank Rearden (who's married to someone else at the time, but this is the sort of minor consideration that doesn't hold back Randian supermen). The first time they sleep together, it leaves Dagny bruised and bloody, and the morning after, Hank rants at her that he holds her in contempt and thinks of her as no better than a whore. Almost as soon as their relationship begins, he demands to know how many other men she's slept with and who they were. When she won't answer, he seizes her and twists her arm, trying to hurt her enough to force her to tell him.

Believe it or not, none of this is meant to make us judge these characters negatively, because in Rand's world, violent jealousy is romantic and abuse is sexy. She believed that women were meant to be subservient to men — in fact, she says that "the most feminine of all aspects" is "the look of being chained" — and that a woman being the dominant partner in a relationship was "metaphysically inappropriate" and would warp and destroy her fragile lady-mind.

6. All natural resources are limitless.

If you pay close attention to Atlas Shrugged, you'll learn that there will always be more land to homestead, more trees to cut, more coal to mine, more fossil fuels to drill. There's never a need for conservation, recycling, or that dreaded word, "sustainability." All environmental laws, just like all safety regulations, are invented by government bureaucrats explicitly for the purpose of punishing and destroying successful businessmen.

One of the heroes of part I is the tycoon Ellis Wyatt, who's invented an unspecified new technology that allows him to reopen oil wells thought to be tapped out, unlocking what Rand calls an "unlimited supply" of oil. Obviously, accepting that natural resources are finite would force Rand's followers to confront hard questions about equitable distribution, which is why she waves the problem away with a sweep of her hand.

This trend reaches its climax near the end of part I, when Dagny and Hank find, in the ruins of an abandoned factory, the prototype of a new kind of motor that runs on "atmospheric static electricity" and can produce limitless energy for free. Rand sees nothing implausible about this, because in her philosophy, human ingenuity can overcome any problem, up to and including the laws of thermodynamics, if only the government would get out of the way and let them do it.

7. Pollution and advertisements are beautiful; pristine wilderness is ugly and useless.

Rand is enamored of fossil fuels, and at one point, she describes New York City as cradled in "sacred fires" from the smokestacks and heavy industrial plants that surround it. It never seems to occur to her that soot and smog cause anything other than pretty sunsets, and no one in Atlas Shrugged gets asthma, much less lung cancer.

By contrast, Rand informs us that pristine natural habitat is worthless unless it's plastered with ads, as we see in a scene where Hank and Dagny go on a road trip together:

Uncoiling from among the curves of Wisconsin's hills, the highway was the only evidence of human labor, a precarious bridge stretched across a sea of brush, weeds and trees. The sea rolled softly, in sprays of yellow and orange, with a few red jets shooting up on the hillsides, with pools of remnant green in the hollows, under a pure blue sky.

 ... "What I'd like to see," said Rearden, "is a billboard."

8. Crime doesn't exist, even in areas of extreme poverty.

In the world of Atlas Shrugged, the only kind of violence that anyone ever worries about is government thugs stealing the wealth of the heroic capitalists at gunpoint to redistribute it to the undeserving masses. There's no burglary, no muggings, no bread riots, no street crime of any kind. This is true even though the world is spiraling down a vortex of poverty and economic depression. And even though the wealthy, productive elite are mysteriously disappearing one by one, none of Rand's protagonists ever worry about their personal safety.

Apparently, in Rand's view, poor people will peacefully sit and starve when they lose their jobs. And that's a good thing for her, because accepting that crime exists might lead to dangerous, heretical ideas — like that maybe the government should pay for education and job training, because this might be cheaper and more beneficial in the long run than spending ever more money on police and prisons.

9. The only thing that matters in life is how good you are at making money.

In a scene from part I, the copper baron Francisco d'Anconia explains to Dagny why rich people are more valuable than poor people:

"Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life — except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard."

You'll note that this speech makes no exceptions for work whose product is actively harmful to others. If you burn coal that chokes neighboring cities in toxic smog, if you sell unhealthful food that increases obesity and diabetes, if you sell guns and fight every attempt to pass laws that would restrict who could buy them, if you paint houses with lead and insulate pipes in asbestos — relax, you're off the hook! None of this matters in the slightest in Rand's eyes. Are you good at your job? Do you make money from it? That's the only thing anyone should ever care about.

10. Smoking is good for you.

Almost all of Rand's heroes smoke, and not just for pleasure. In one minor scene, a cigarette vendor tells Dagny that smoking is heroic, even rationally obligatory:

"I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips ... When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind — and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

It's no coincidence that Atlas Shrugged expresses these views. Ayn Rand herself was a heavy smoker, and she often asserted that she was the most rational person alive; therefore, she believed, her preferences were the correct preferences which everyone else should emulate. Beginning from this premise, she worked backward to explain why everything she did was an inevitable consequence of her philosophy. As part of this, she decided that she smoked tobacco not because she'd become addicted to it, but because it's right for rational people to smoke while they think.

In case you were wondering, Rand did indeed contract lung cancer later in life, and had an operation to remove one lung. But even though she eventually came to accept the danger of smoking, she never communicated this to her followers or recanted her earlier support of it. As in other things, her attitude was that people deserve whatever they get.

Adam Lee is a writer and atheist activist living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter, or subscribe to his blog, Daylight Ath

SALON

TUESDAY, APR 22, 2014 02:30 PM EDT

GOP’s super-secret actual road map for winning more races (Hint: It’s not the one released to the public)

Remember that GOP "autopsy" that detailed how it would win more races? Forget that sham -- here's the real article

TIM DONOVAN

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TOPICS: GOP, REPUBLICAN PARTY, THE RIGHT, AUTOPSY, IMMIGRATION REFORM, DRUG WAR, MASS INCARCERATION, YOUNG PEOPLE, JAMES O'KEEFE, RAND PAUL, PAUL RYAN, AOL_ON, POLITICS NEWS

Ted Cruz, Reince Priebus, Rand Paul (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite/Chris Usher/Timothy D. Easley)

Despite the “Growth and Opportunity Project” report, a 73-page “autopsy,” released by the Republican National Committee shortly after the disastrous 2012 elections, it’s become increasingly clear in recent months that the party has abandoned even the report’s most anodyne proposals. Instead of outreach to women, immigrants and poor people (among other proposals), here’s what the Republican Party has opted to attempt instead.

It all starts, of course, with a strategy of voter disenfranchisement, where, despite representing a growing share of the populace, the number of minority voters would steadily shrink. In the hypothetical honest version of the GOP road map, the Republican Party admits it hopes to engineer an increasingly toxic political reality that inspires only certain Americans — mostly, old white ones — to register their votes. At the same time, major players in the modern GOP such as Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Rand Paul have bent over backward recently to effect a position of “concern” for the problems of the poor and downtrodden. Unfortunately, their actions speak louder than their words, as their party vigorously undertakes initiatives to diminish these same groups’ electoral power.

The GOP of 2014 maintains an embarrassing melange of nobly stated goals and cynically undertaken actions.

Perhaps there’s a certain method to this madness: Facing a “demographic death spiral,” the Republican Party of today would be foolish to risk losing the aging, conservative, rural, white, male voters who make up the lion’s share of their base. As just one example, while newfound support for immigration reform among Republicans would be unlikely to drive rural and suburban geriatrics to vote Democrat, it could plausibly keep them from heading to the polls entirely in 2014. And if, in the aftermath of reform, the Hispanic community credits the Democrats with delivering immigration anyway — as they likely would — what political value does this position hold for most Republicans?

It should come as no surprise, then, that rather than adapting their policy positions to a changing nation, Republicans have simply adopted cynical tactics that work to minimize the electoral power of these demographic groups at every turn. If the GOP can’t convince minorities and young people to vote against their own interests, perhaps they can prevent the poor, the young, and minorities from voting in the first place. After all, as conservative columnists have noted with some glee, an election using old antebellum rules, where only white men could vote, would have led to a landslide for Mitt Romney! (And white Christians are the only “real Americans,” so this exit-polling proves that Romney deserved to win or something.)

Let’s consider the GOP’s statements and its actions, and examine whether the former has any influence on the latter.

Compared with the current state of the Republican reform movement (which is basically nonexistent), there is much to be admired in the “Growth and Opportunity Project” report. The much-discussed “autopsy” offered some surprisingly clear-eyed assessments of the challenges facing the Republican Party going forward: For instance, the report notes that “[y]oung voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

Throughout the report, the RNC suggests policy goals that identify long-term problems, while the fact that none have been implemented reveals the report’s largest flaw. The report completely ignores the uncomfortable short-term political realities that the Republican Party must confront. Take immigration reform as just the most obvious example: Much of the supposed-demographic advantage that Democrats have held in recent elections is a function of the party’s enormous advantage among non-white voters. In this view, demographic groups like young people are disproportionately liberal for no greater reason than that they’re so ethnically diverse. (And comparing white millennials’ voting preferences to those of their older peers seems to largely bear this out.) The cynic might suggest that any immigration reform would only hasten the demographic decline of the modern GOP — and, lo and behold, substantive efforts from Republicans to tackle this issue have yet to materialize, with Marco Rubio (the modern party’s most willing champion of reform) publicly backing off before causing himself any permanent damage within the GOP’s old, primarily white base.

Other reforms that might help the GOP long-term have faced similar fates, while undemocratic tactics of dubious legality are enthusiastically undertaken.

Tea Party radicals have been bragging about modeling their strategy after avowed radical Saul Alinsky for years, but the Republican Party has also clearly learned a thing or two from Vladmir Lenin, who cheered the abuses of the Czarists as “the worse the better.” Basically, the more the Czarists oppressed the populace, the more the people would come to support the revolutionaries. Lenin was willing to see the pain of suffering of the people he ostensibly wanted to help if it meant achieving his larger goal of communist revolution. Similarly, in their crusade to paint Obama and the federal government as incompetent, the GOP has deliberately obstructed any measures he supports, no matter how small — or vital —  they might be. And the Republican leadership has been employing this nearly treasonous political strategy since election night in 2008, when Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan had their infamous dinner with other influential Republicans to craft a strategy centered on blocking any and all positions the president might support — this, at the height of the Great Recession, when millions of Americans desperately needed leaders concerned more with their duty to serve than their craven political machinations. Unfortunately, this strategy has proven successful: While Republicans are more hated than Democrats, both parties are seeing historically low polling figures, with an entire generation of young Americans — who might have otherwise worked vigilantly against Republicans –completely disillusioned and disgusted with national politics.

The GOP’s hypocrisy extends to the other parts of their stated platform, too.

America loves to hate criminals (unless they’re on TV or in movies; we can’t get enough of so-called antiheroes), and Republicans have been the party Americans trust on issues of law and order for at least 30 years, since the political assassination of Michael Dukakis by the visage of Willie Horton. According to their 2012 platform, “Liberals do not understand this simple axiom: criminals behind bars cannot harm the general public. To that end, we support mandatory prison sentencing for gang crimes, violent or sexual offenses against children, repeat drug dealers, rape, robbery and murder.”

What their platform doesn’t note is the relationship between high incarceration rates and the GOP’s long-term political success. It’s no surprise that we don’t see large numbers of Republican lawmakers supporting the intermittent lip service Rand Paul pays to reforming America’s deeply unjust drug laws: Our enormously high incarceration rate — the highest in the developed world — allows for the legal disenfranchisement of millions of young people who also just “happen” to be primarily young minorities. Adding insult to injury, most prisons are located in rural areas — come census time,  prisoners are counted as part of the local population for the purposes of establishing congressional districts, despite their lacking the right to vote while behind bars. Our prison culture is a shameful, odious continuation of the entrenched, systemic racism that has haunted this country since her inception — supporting it for any reason is shameful, but supporting a corporation’s high profits is a particularly disgusting reason to keep this immoral system humming uninterrupted. Yet that’s exactly what happens when private prison companies funnel eye-popping sums to conservative election campaigns, increasing these companies’ influence on our drug laws and creating dangerous incentives for rich Washingtonians to maintain a racist criminal justice system that needlessly incarcerates millions of low-level drug offenders every year.

While using our criminal justice system as a means of disenfranchising black and Hispanic voters is the most shameful aspect of the GOP’s real election strategy, it’s far from unique. When employed by the Republican Party, voter disenfranchisement takes on many forms: sowing apathy among struggling and disaffected young people; restricting the times and days of voting (and eliminating early voting and day-of-registration initiatives); and adding voter IDs and other hoops voters must jump through, a “tyranny of the majority” where citizens with the least money, time and access are most likely to lose their franchise. Any intellectually honest conservative tradition would find such tactics abhorrent, and laudably, some Republicans have come out publicly against this strategy, such as Wisconsin Republican legislator Dane Schultz:

It’s just, I think, sad when a political party — my political party — has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. [...] it ought to be abundantly clear to everybody in this state that there is no massive voter fraud. The only thing that we do have in this state is we have long lines of people who want to vote. And it seems to me that we should be doing everything we can to make it easier, to help these people get their votes counted. And that we should be pitching as political parties our ideas for improving things in the future, rather than mucking around in the mechanics and making it more confrontational at the voting sites and trying to suppress the vote.

Indeed, because Americans are so mindful of the rule of law, it can be really hard to find any clear examples of voter fraud – just ask “conservative prankster” James O’Keefe. This is a shame for the GOP, because the general public is considerably more economically liberal than the electorate, and therefore any excuse to make it harder for poor, young minorities to vote will have the benefit of making it significantly easier for Republicans to win elections without having to compromise their batshit-insane beliefs.

When voter suppression isn’t an option, nakedly political gerrymandering is always an effective substitute. When your base of voters is shrinking and you find the idea of appealing to a broader base of the population abhorrent (you might have to rub shoulders with the Poors, and have you smelled them lately?), it only makes sense to pack them into as few congressional districts as possible. Even if you can’t shrink the actual population (where’s a bloody foreign war with a national draft when you need one, amirite?), you can certainly shrink their representative size. Just look at how gerrymandering helped disenfranchise Democrats in 2012:

(Credit: Jaeah Lee/Mother Jones)

A thorough examination of the Republican Party’s recent electoral tactics reveals a strategy predicated on sowing voter disenfranchisement and disillusionment. Cursory public statements to the contrary notwithstanding, the GOP has no strategy or plan for the future that involves making changes to their stale platform. They’d much rather focus their efforts on shrinking and diminishing the inexorable demographic changes that are transforming this country. Even more damning to their long-term goals, they have become completely incapable of undertaking new ideas or supporting innovative policy solutions. As a number of liberal columnists have noted, Marco Rubio’s policy platform is exactly the same as Republicans in office 30 years ago. Indeed, the Growth and Opportunity Project report seems to understand the potential danger that this staleness represents:

“At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago — meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President. Our Party knows how to appeal to older voters, but we have lost our way with younger ones. We sound increasingly out of touch.”

When people are forced to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet, they hardly have the time to read about politics deeply — or the energy to care. It’s somewhat amazing that so many still manage to read the morning paper, watch cable news or listen to NPR or conservative talk radio on the way to work. Still, political ignorance of all shapes and sizes can be wielded as a cudgel, and Republicans have made the exploitation of ignorance into something of an art form. They have done this primarily by sowing dysfunction: Voters who don’t follow the news closely are deeply aware of the broken state of our national politics, and while polls consistently show that Americans blame Republicans more than Democrats for this state of affairs, that doesn’t mean Republicans haven’t still been successful. Some of the most influential members of the GOP bluntly acknowledge their goals of making government less effective: John Boehner, third in line to the presidency, candidly admitted on CBS’s “Face the Nation“ that he doesn’t see his role as a lawmaker as, you know, making laws. According to Boehner, Congress ”should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”

Republicans want to convince Americans that government is the problem, that only when government gets out of the way and allows the free market to operate without restriction will our economy improve. Incidentally, if you’re lucky enough to be a part of the richest 0.1 percent — arguably, the GOP’s core constituency — this viewpoint has been entirely accurate in recent years. And crucially, this disconnect — between the right’s real constituency and its base, between its calculated support of plutocracy and its claims toward championing “freedom” and “small businesses” — goes a long way to explaining the cavernous gap between the GOP’s reasonable statements and its reprehensible deeds.

Tim Donovan is a freelance author who blogs about Millennial issues at The Suffolk Resolves. Follow him @tadonovan.