No doubt abusive litigation in America has spun out of control. But why should select industries receive special protection that others don’t enjoy? Lawmakers should focus on crafting sensible liability rules that apply equally to everyone.

In his book The Right to Earn a Living, Timothy Sandefur (an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation) summarizes, “The abuse of tort law by mercenary lawyers poses a major threat to American businesses and therefore to the economic liberties of everyone.”

One major problem Sandefur cites is that courts often fail to recognize explicit contracts limiting liability. He offers the example of a 2005 case in which a New Jersey court refused to recognize the liability waiver a woman signed before her son used a skate park. (The son broke his leg, and the mother sued the park despite her signed waiver.)

Whether people want to skate in a park or fly into space, they should be able to decide what level of risk they are willing to accept. When courts fail to recognize freely negotiated agreements limiting liability, that drives abusive lawsuits, puts producers out of business, and limits the creation of new businesses.

Spaceflight companies deserve legal protection from abusive lawsuits. And so do the rest of us here on planet Earth.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to The Objective Standard and making objective journalism a regular part of your life.

Related:

• The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur
• Instrumentalism and the Disintegration of American Tort Law

Image: Wikipedia Commons

1. It enables me to effortlessly keep track of what I’ve done and thus how productive I have (or haven’t) been.

At the end of each day, iDoneThis sends me an email. “Hi there,” it says, “Take 30 seconds to write out what you got done today.” So I do—and that’s that. Keeping track of what I’ve done isn’t something I have to think much about; with iDoneThis it’s just a question in my inbox that I respond to in less than a minute.

2. It motivates me to get the right things done.

I have a handful of things I want to do each day and knowing that I’m going to report what I did sometimes gives me just enough added motivation to take action on the most important things when I otherwise would not.

For example, I normally treasure reading to my son. Sometimes, however, particularly when I’m tired, I waver between going upstairs to read to him and skipping it. Then I remember that I’ll be able to report the activity to iDoneThis by email—and just that much tips me to read. Shortly thereafter, I’ve read two or three short books to my son and strengthened not only an important habit but also a vital relationship—and I’m feeling more energetic to boot.

3. It keeps me honest about what I have actually done.

It can be easy to blame outside factors for not getting things done or not being happy. After all, other people and chance events can influence both of these things. But iDoneThis keeps a clear and definitive record of what I do each day, and when I look back on what I have done I can see the results of my decisions and actions.

For example, I can see that over the past month I read many more books for my own enjoyment than I had planned and, partly because of this, wrote much less. Without iDoneThis, it would be easy to tell myself that I was productive, having read so much, and leave it at that. But with the record that iDoneThis provides, I can see that my indulgence in reading, however productive on one level, precluded me from doing the writing that I wanted to do. This enables me to adjust my plan for the following days, weeks, and months.

There are other ways iDoneThis helps me boost my productivity, and other ways it can help you boost yours too. If you want to give it a try, you can sign up to use the app here. (It’s free.)

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to The Objective Standard and making objective journalism a regular part of your life.

That’s the stark challenge faced by the seven protagonists of the movie The Grey, starring Liam Neeson. An airplane carrying Alaskan oil field workers crashes during a storm, and they must battle harsh winter conditions and a pack of aggressive wolves while attempting to find their way back to civilization. In addition to spectacular cinematography and spellbinding action scenes, the movie demonstrates surprising philosophical depth in delivering its theme: “What does it really mean to fight for one’s life?”

The movie also dramatizes three related principles that are easy to forget during everyday life but that are made vividly clear in the context of the movie:

1) Man’s basic means of survival is his reasoning mind.

The wolves in The Grey survive using their claws, fangs, and instincts in accordance with their basic nature. Humans, however, cannot survive in this fashion. We lack the fur to keep us warm in subzero temperatures, claws and fangs to kill prey (or to protect ourselves against predators), and instincts to dictate our actions. To survive, we must use our minds, rearrange nature, and create the goods we need. Reason is our basic means of doing so.

2) Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Do you need to start a fire? Then you must identify the nature of the material at hand and proceed accordingly. Do you need to cross a violently rushing river? Then you must devise a method that holds the weight of a full-grown man; you must respect and apply the laws of physics. Wishful thinking, bluster, or drunkenness won’t make reality bend to your desires or make your problems go away. The only way to solve your problems or accomplish your goals is to face reality head-on, heed the facts, and act accordingly.

3) Modern man is extremely dependent on the benefits of technology.

Technology is an incredible enhancement to our lives. I would rather be typing a movie review on my MacBook Air in the comfort of my living room than shivering in a dark cave wondering whether I’ll be eaten by wolves tonight.

But it’s easy to take for granted the benefits of industrial civilization until we are reminded (in fiction or in real life) what life is like without those benefits. In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden hosts a fancy party during a storm. During the party, Francisco D’Anconia tells him:

“[Y]ou are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.”

The Grey reminded me how grateful I am for the many entrepreneurs, engineers, and businessmen who have created our modern industrial civilization. Without them, we wouldn’t enjoy the iPads, cell phones, automobiles, central heating, and electricity we so easily take for granted. Instead, we’d be like the protagonists of The Grey, struggling mightily against raw, untamed nature, hoping to survive another day.

For this reason, although The Grey is not a political movie, it also helped me better appreciate Ari Armstrong’s recent blog post, “Great Producers Deserve Our Gratitude, Not Obama’s Tax Hikes.”

In the hubbub of everyday life, it’s easy to forget some basic truths about man, nature, and the fundamental role of reason in our lives. A gripping tale of novel and dire circumstances, The Grey reminds us of what we must never forget if we want to live.

On this day, in 1903, about four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville got an answer to the question he often pondered: “If birds can glide for long periods of time, then . . . why can’t I?”

He could. But only after trying one design after another, gathering data from many experiments with his and his brother’s homemade wind tunnel, observing how birds fly, and adapting that to their own flyer and its ever-improving system of controls.

Orville’s first flight on this historic day was 120 feet; the second, 175; and the third, 200. The fourth flight that day, by Wilbur, was 852 feet. Two years later, after many iterations, Wilbur flew for 39 minutes, covering 24 miles.

For centuries, men had said that human flight was impossible. But these two brothers proved otherwise, thanks to their questioning, experimenting, and reasoning minds.

Related:

• The Curious Life of Richard Feynman

Image: Wikipedia Commons

David Harsanyi points out that Obama inadvertently said something true in his speech: “[T]he free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can.” In a free market, producers voluntarily trade value for value, while criminals who seize others’ wealth by force go to jail. In today’s world, Harsanyi writes, those “who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can” are “called Democrats.” Consider Obama’s tax-funded bailouts of politically favored banks, automobile companies, and unions. Unfortunately, Harsanyi misses the opportunity to point out that this criticism applies equally to Republicans. Recall that President Bush started the bailout frenzy and helped expand federal spending dramatically faster than Bill Clinton did.

Harsanyi joins economist Don Boudreaux in mocking Obama’s angst over technological advancement. Obama notes that “huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less”; he offers examples of automated steel mills, ATM machines, and the Internet. But, rather than focus on the expanded wealth creation or the high-tech and more-diverse jobs that accompany such advancements, Obama chooses to claim only that technology has caused “painful disruptions.” This is the same fallacy that Bastiat exploded in his 1850 essay on machines. To Harsanyi this suggests the motto, “Less productivity! More jobs!” Boudreaux calls Obama’s position the “Luddite lament.”

Channeling Occupy Wall Street, Obama pretends that the wealth creation of producers somehow hurts everyone else. Yet, as I pointed out in an October article, “Producers earn money by trading voluntarily with those who also benefit from the exchange.” That is always the case in a free market. On the other hand, some gain wealth at the expense of others precisely under the sorts of forced wealth transfer schemes that Obama supports. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler points out that Obama radically understates the level of taxes paid by “the rich.” But that point is superficial; the essential point is that people morally deserve to keep and use the wealth they earn, regardless of their level of productivity.

Regarding history, Obama claims that free markets led to economic blowups and miserable working conditions. The truth is the exact opposite: Political intervention in the economy led to economic turmoil; free markets lead to prosperity. As Andrew Bernstein demonstrates page after page in Capitalism Unbound, free markets have always led to advances in productivity and rising standards of living. (This book is an excellent short defense of the history and morality of capitalism. See my review.) In her book The Forgotton Man, Amity Shlaes explains how the hyperinterventionism of Republican Hoover and Democrat FDR set off and extended the Great Depression. (See my review of Shlaes’s book as well.) A new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity summarizes the work of Shlaes and others regarding the real causes of the Depression.

Regarding the modern mortgage meltdown, Thomas Sowell explains how that too resulted from government controls; for example, many of the same politicians who praised the market-skewing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the early years of the last decade later blamed the free market for the failures of their own rights-violating policies. (See my coauthored review of Sowell’s book, The Housing Boom and Bust.) The mortgage crisis from which Obama attempts to build his case resulted from the federal government’s easy-money policies in conjunction with mortgage mandates and subsidies.

What of Obama’s praise of Theodore Roosevelt, who busted up supposed “giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low?” Jim Powell points out in an article for Forbes that Obama’s claims derive from ideological muckrakers such as Ida Tarbell, who marshaled smears rather than facts. Powell notes that “in Theodore Roosevelt’s America, output was expanding, and prices were falling”; yet Roosevelt vindictively “demonized successful investors and entrepreneurs.” In his excellent history of Standard Oil, Alex Epstein shows that John D. Rockefeller, unjustly targeted by Roosevelt, in fact revolutionized his industry, in the process paying “higher than market wages to attract the best employees.”

In his December 7 radio broadcast, Peter Schiff covers much of the same ground, defending labor-saving devices, laying the blame for recessions and high unemployment at the feet of meddling politicians, and defending successful producers such as Steve Jobs. In response to Obama’s claims about capitalism’s allegedly unfair rules, Schiff notes, “Everybody used to play by the same rules, until the government rewrote them.… The rule of law was always here. Everybody played by the same rules, but we had a lot more freedom. We had a lot more individual entrepreneurship.” (Obviously early America failed to consistently uphold individual rights; most importantly, slavery was a huge moral blot on the nation. Capitalism demands the complete abolition of involuntary servitude in all forms.)

While Obama claims that the existence of the middle class depends on government intervention, Schiff points out that the middle class arose prior to Obama’s much-vaunted New Deal: “[T]he middle class was created… [in] the 19th Century, when all these Americans moved from the farms to the cities, when the standard of living of the typical American grew faster than anywhere in the world… when we invented all of the products that we have today—automobiles, telephones, washing machines… The reason that our people were so much wealthier is because we had less government than all the countries that American immigrants were fleeing.”

If we wish to expand our prosperity in the 21st Century, we should reject Obama’s plans for more forced wealth transfers and more economic shackles, and instead fight for liberty and its consequence: capitalism.

Related:

• Capitalism and the Moral High Ground
• The Justice of Income Inequality Under Capitalism

Image of President Barack Obama: Wikipedia Commons
Image of Lower Manhattan: Wikipedia Commons

Joshua Lipana: What is your background, and why did you start the Center for Industrial Progress?

Alex Epstein: I’ve always been interested in science in the broadest sense of the word: gaining a systematic, logical understanding of the world. As a kid, math and science were my favorite subjects, and I developed the conviction that all problems are solvable with scientific thinking. In high school, I was exposed to more and more controversy about political issues, and I decided that I would learn what the logical position on these was. When people told me that these issues were all subjective, I rejected that because I thought that all problems had an objective solution. So I started looking for thinkers in the humanities who focused on facts and logic—Thomas Sowell was a particular favorite of mine. As I read various books on politics, economics, and philosophy, my interest in the physical sciences gave way to a much stronger interest in the humanities, or, as I prefer to call it, the science of human action.

While I have been influenced by many thinkers, nothing compared to what I learned from reading Ayn Rand. I was completely blown away by Atlas Shrugged, which was the first work of hers that I read. I felt like she looked at the world with x-ray vision, and could understand the fundamental causes of problems—and solutions—when everyone else could just see symptoms. I’ve been studying her works intensely since I was 18, and the more I read the more I realize how profound and precise her insights are.

In college I studied a combination of philosophy and computer science. After coming out of college I knew I wanted two things; I wanted to be an intellectual for a living, but I did not want to go to grad school or work at a University. So I became a freelance writer right out of college and after a little over two years I accepted an offer from the Ayn Rand Institute to write full-time, applying philosophy to business issues. That was a great opportunity for me, since I got to do the kind of work I was interested with lots of intellectual support.

Somewhere about mid-way through my work at the Institute I got obsessed with the issue of energy. I studied the history of energy, particularly of oil, and I was struck by a) how much the entire economy depends on energy and b) how much energy production and policy depends on the right philosophy, particularly the right philosophy of industry and environment.

So much of what’s gone wrong in energy in the last 40 years is due to the idea that it’s somehow wrong or tainted for man to transform nature on a large scale. And so much of what has gone right in American industrial history is that this country used to have a philosophy that embraced the transformation of nature through energy and industry—that is, embraced industrial progress. The more I read and talked to experts in the field, the more I saw an opportunity to use my knowledge of philosophy, and in particular Ayn Rand’s philosophy, to change the way people think about energy, industry, and environment.

It was heartening and a little surprising to me how open people in energy policy have been to the idea of examining the philosophical issues in the field—or, as Dr. Robert Bradley calls it, “the debate behind the debate.” Another thing I’ve been heartened by is that people respond very positively to my enthusiasm for energy, which is definitely an outgrowth of my philosophy. I feel more excited about new developments in energy—say, the shale gas revolution—than I do about the latest iPhone. And I really love my iPhone.

The energy industry is producing the most amazing products and it should never be on the defensive about what it is doing. Producing oil, producing coal, producing gas, these are fundamentally things that have doubled the human life expectancy and we should be over the moon about what they have done for our lives.

The more I engaged with intellectuals in energy policy, and the more I engaged with the public on energy issues, the more I became convinced that this was an issue that would benefit from a dedicated, laser-focused think-tank. So I decided to start one. My number one conviction with the think-tank was that its essential focus had to be positive—it needed to offer a positive ideal that people can embrace in place of environmentalism. Thus, the Center for Industrial Progress was born.

My second conviction about CIP was that it should, as much as possible, mirror the practices of a competitive business. As a result, a major priority of mine has been researching best practices for making an impact. I spend a lot of time talking to CEOs, think-tank leaders, media leaders, etc about what works and what doesn’t. And as the Director of CIP, I try to measure the impact of everything we do, so we can get the best results possible.

JL: What are some of the highlights in industrial progress over the last 200 years?

AE: First of all, let’s be clear on what industrial progress is. Industrial progress is the progressive transformation of nature through energy, industry, and technology. It encompasses drilling for oil or creating an iPod. Its most prominent impact is to reshape the world around us to something that’s completely unrecognizable from what it used to be.

Unfortunately, our educational system teaches people that “the environment” is this separate, intrinsically valuable thing that human beings ruin through industry. We’re taught that minimizing environmental impact is the ideal. In fact, the environment we should be concerned about is the human environment, and we should think in terms of how we can maximize our positive impact on the human environment. By default, nature is an extremely hostile place to live, which is why average human life expectancy throughout history is thirty.

In terms of key developments, there are many, but the overall one is just how amazing energy and industry has made our lives. Once you understand that, you can appreciate certain key developments. In energy production, there is the coal-powered steam engine and what that did to human life, and the oil-powered internal combustion engine and what that did to human life, and then the ability to turn energy into electricity, and what that did to human life. All of these made possible the agricultural revolution, the rise of the automobile, the rise of the computer—all revolutions that required massive amounts of cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy.

JL: What are the primary obstacles to industrial progress?

AE: There are two key obstacles to industrial progress: one is a lack of a positive and the other is a negative, in large part made possible by the lack of the positive.

The lack of a positive is the lack of a clearly fleshed-out pro-industrial philosophy that embraces the progressive transformation of nature through energy and technology. Such a philosophy, among other things, would define the proper political policies under which that transformation should take place—namely policies based on individual rights—and it would morally embrace industrialization.

Without the right industrial philosophy, people don’t value industrial progress sufficiently, and don’t know what policies will nourish that value.

Being clear on the positive is indispensable. For instance in oil, you can see throughout history that it is really important that property rights should be based on the principle that the creator of the value in the resource should own it. In a course I gave in 2008, the Triumph and Tragedy of the Oil Industry, I explained how the wrong philosophy of rights has undercut the oil industry from the beginning.

In electricity, you need the right view of competition, otherwise you end up with today’s government monopolized grid.

Unless we have a clear idea of what policy should be, positively, and why, the positive isn’t going to happen, and when the wrong view has a lot of advocates with very clear policy ideas, they’re going to take over. And that’s what happened to the anti-industrial movement, which at various stages has been called the conservation movement and the environmentalist movement. There’s a lot of good literature from Ayn Rand, ARI, and TOS about this movement so I won’t elaborate too much here, but basically making policy based on the idea that untouched nature is intrinsically valuable and that nature should be protected from man leads to the very common phenomenon, which I wrote about in the Industrial Manifesto: Every company who wants to do anything industrial—anything involving any transformation of nature—is met with an endless labyrinth of obstacles.

Again, a huge part of the solution is offering a positive alternative, including in policy, which is why a big focus of ours at CIP will be to roll out energy policy prescriptions.

JL: You recently debated Ryan Rittenhouse of Greenpeace. Where can people see the video of that? And how would you evaluate the debate?

AE: The debate is in post-production and going to be released soon, and I’d rather let people draw their own conclusions about it. I’ll only say that I think the debate shows a clear contrast between the two views. I think Ryan does a good job of representing the serious environmentalist view and I do my best to represent my own view. I hope it comes off very clearly that there is a real choice to be made in terms of what approach we should embrace so I encourage people to watch the debate. There’s a version on the Internet now of the debate but it’s not complete, and the version that’s about to come out is a lot better in quality.

JL: You also recently, as you put it, “Occupied the Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators with your colleague Dr. Eric Dennis, and spoke with some environmentalists there [see video here]. What was the takeaway from this event?

AE: I encourage people to watch it. There is a lot to say about Occupy Wall Street. I think, in general, the whole premise of defining a movement as being against the most successful people in society is incredibly corrupt. It’s not that everyone in “the 1%” is deserving—we don’t have a fully free market by a long shot, we have a mixed-economy and there are plenty of undeserving people in the 1%. But the way you deal with that is by going against the people in Washington making the country a mixed economy. Go after the people who gave bailouts, don’t go against the whole of Wall Street, when most of these people did not even receive bailouts.

It was revealing when Eric, a Wall Street executive himself, talked to a guy who said the 1% don’t produce anything. Eric brought up the most obvious example of why that is not true, which is Steve Jobs, the guy didn’t hesitate to say “to hell with Steve Jobs,” “Steve Jobs didn’t produce anything”—and this was probably the most intellectual guy we met that day. That really captures the essence of what it means to attack the 1% for being the 1%.

And in the realm of energy, the same way they attack the successful as such in the broader economy, they attack anything that’s prominent in this field. They attack fracking—an amazing technology—and they have no idea what fracking is, yet they hate fracking. They heard some story about why it’s bad, and that’s enough for them to advocate a ban.

The alternatives they give for the current sources of energy are usually non-existent; one girl talked about a perpetual battery that Duracell had a patent on. The common thing is they attack an actual value in favor of some non-existent utopia, and in reality their non-existent utopia would just be carnage. They have no idea how a solar panel even works, but they have no hesitation with saying we should destroy coal plants, natural gas, oil, nuclear, for whatever made up utopia they favor. They think “someone will figure it out, I mean someone figured it out so far” which shows their education. This goes back to the whole transformation of nature issue—they don’t regard that as an achievement that had certain preconditions, and that has certain requirements to maintain and improve. It’s a given that we have iPhones and plenty of food whenever we need it, the only issue is attacking “bad things” and getting rid of them, not realizing that the “bad things” they attack are the core foundation of what they’re taking for granted.

JL: Not everybody embraces environmentalism as religiously as those OWS protesters. How do you convince the less committed environmentalists to question their beliefs and check their premises?

AE: The mission of the Center for Industrial Progress is to promote industrial progress as a new ideal for our culture, and the reason I put it that way is because I want it to be a fundamentally positive thing, advocating the positive value of industrialization and certain positive policies that America needs to adopt, rather than just being against environmentalism. Obviously I’m against environmentalism, but I try to emphasize that this is because it stops the good things from happening. That’s how I position myself and the organization and that’s how I try to deal with it with people. I show them that the fuels environmentalists oppose are crucial, and yet they want to ban them. And if you look at the full context, it’s not because of economics, it’s not because of science, what is it? You have some basic discomfort with man transforming nature, well that’s an issue you really need to think about and I’ll argue you need to change your position on. So people will see their premises and why it matters and why it needs to be changed as they come up in practical issues.

JL: What are your future plans for CIP, and how can people support your efforts?

AE: As I mentioned, CIP has a very clear goal of getting Americans to embrace industrial progress as a cultural ideal, and we’re committed to finding and implementing the best way to do that through all of our works.

Our business model for doing this is a hybrid of customer-driven and donor-driven.

I’ll start with customer-driven. It’s very important for us to find ways monetize our activities whenever possible. For instance, there is a significant market for public speaking out there, and there’s no reason why really good speeches on industrial progress—properly positioned—can’t succeed in that market, and if we can’t succeed in that market that means we’re doing something wrong and we need to learn and get better.

In case it doesn’t go without saying, CIP will only accept money to promote its own ideas—to accept money to promote someone else’s agenda would defeat our whole reason for existing.

The second aspect of our business model is donor-driven. Our ultimate goal with the organization is to maximize impact. And there are many high-impact things we can do that don’t get a financial return but do get a cultural return.

For example, we are starting up a program to train people, especially young people and people with industry experience, to become effective advocates of industrial progress. I’ve been finding a lot of talent over the last few months, and I think there will be a huge payoff in training them and having them do original articles for our blog, “Industrial Progress Report.” But doing it right takes a lot of my time, and my partner Dr. Eric Dennis’s time, and the time of other teachers we’ll bring in, and that’s where donors are invaluable.

Another example of this is that I blog about energy and philosophy at MasterResource, the leading free-market energy blog. The head of MasterResource, Dr. Robert Bradley (CEO of the Institute for Energy Research) appointed me as one of the few Principal bloggers there, which is a great opportunity to impact the energy debate—if I can devote sufficient time to it. Again, donors are invaluable here.

In all our activities, customer-driven or donor-driven, the unifying thing is making a high impact, so we continually measure and optimize for results. That’s the bottom line and I think that mentality is going to make a lot of exciting things possible going forward.

For more information on contributing to CIP, financially or otherwise, go to www.industrialprogress.net and click on “Donate.” And if anyone has any specific questions about CIP, feel free to email me at alex@alexepstein.com.

JL: Thank you very much for your time, Alex.

AE: My pleasure.

Related:

• Vindicating Capitalism: The Real History of the Standard Oil Company
• Energy at the Speed of Thought: The Original Alternative Energy Market

Image of New York City: Wikipedia Commons

Where do the ideas, principles, constitutions, governments, and laws that protect our rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness come from? What is the source of the meals, medicines, homes, automobiles, and fighter jets that keep us alive and enable us to flourish? Who is responsible for our freedom, prosperity, and well-being?

Is freedom a gift from God? It is not. Freedom, the absence of physical coercion, is a political condition resulting from the rational, principled thought and action of men—men such as Aristotle, John Locke, the Founding Fathers, Frederick Douglass, and American soldiers.

Did God make the ambrosia that melts in your mouth, or the asthma medicine that keeps your child alive, or the plush recliner in which you relax, or the plasma TV on which you watch your favorite show? Did God create the jetliners that bring friends and family from afar, or the stealth bombers that keep the barbarians at bay, or the music that warms your heart and fuels your soul?

Since God is responsible for none of the goods on which human life and happiness depend, why thank him for any such goods? More to the point: Why not thank those who actually are responsible for them? What would a just man do?

Justice is the virtue of judging people rationally—according to what they say, do, and produce—and treating them accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves. If someone spends the day preparing a wonderful meal, justice demands that he, not God, be thanked for doing so. If someone provides his family with a warm, safe, comfortable home, justice demands that he, not God, be thanked for providing it. If a policeman or fireman or doctor saves someone’s life, justice demands that he, not God, be thanked. If a loving spouse or child or parent or friend provides you with great joy, justice demands that he, not God, be acknowledged accordingly. If a philosopher discovers the principles on which freedom depends—and if others put those principles into practice—justice demands that they, not God, be given credit.

To say grace is to give credit where none is due—and, worse, it is to withhold credit where it is due. To say grace is to commit an act of injustice.

Rational, productive people—whether philosophers, scientists, inventors, artists, businessmen, military strategists, friends, family, or yourself—are who deserve to be thanked for the goods on which your life, liberty, and happiness depend. This holiday season—and from now on—don’t say grace; say justice. Thank or acknowledge the people who actually provide the goods. Some of them may be sitting right there at the table with you. And if you find yourself at a table where people insist on saying grace, politely insist on saying justice when they’re through. It’s the right thing to do.

Related:

• Who Deserves Credit for Tebow’s 316 Yards?

Net neutrality violates the rights of Internet providers to use their property as they see fit and thus curtails the very thing that has made the Internet such a revolutionary and life-serving technology: freedom. Americans who care about rights, freedom, and the fruits thereof must condemn net neutrality and demand its elimination.

For an in-depth analysis of this subject, see “Net Neutrality: Toward a Stupid Internet.”

Related:

• Net Neutrality Means an Unfree, Slow, and ‘Stupid’ Internet
• Capitalism and the Moral High Ground

Image: Wikipedia Commons

The proper purpose of government, however, is not to protect the ozone, but to protect individual rights—including the rights of drug producers and consumers to act on their judgment in support of their lives. If there were sufficient evidence that aerosol was destroying the ozone and thus a threat to human life, then free markets and consequent technology would address the problem. (Those who doubt that people would address such problems without government coercion are stuck with the contradiction that the government consists of people.)

OTC inhalers, like countless other drugs, are produced, marketed, and purchased because they enhance or save human lives. The fact that there are “green” alternatives is irrelevant. Morally, individuals have a right to choose what they think is best for themselves. Economically, the green alternatives are more expensive, and, for many people, less effective. Further these alternatives require prescriptions—and thus visits to doctors and all the time and expenses involved therein.

This ban is a patent violation of individual rights. Americans who care about liberty must denounce it and demand its reversal.

Related:

• How the FDA Violates Rights and Hinders Health
• How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability

Image: Wikipedia Commons

The answer may be found in the popular “occupation” phrase: “We are the 99 percent.” As Vanity Fair explained earlier this year, “The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent.” The 99 percent, then, consist of everyone else. According to the typical Occupier, politicians should forcibly seize wealth, so long as they seize it from the relatively wealthy and give it to those with less. “Tax the Rich” (even more), many protest signs read. Vanity Fair compares America’s wealthy to Middle Eastern theocratic dictators: “Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few.” The magazine predicts that “even the wealthy will come to regret” the income inequality in this country. While some in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement may attempt to make good on that threat, if income inequality is their concern, they should instead consider some history.

True, throughout most of human history, great income inequality arose when the political class looted the masses. Slaves labored in Egypt to build elaborate burial pyramids for their jewel-crested Pharaohs. In the socialist Soviet Union, the “dictators of the proletariat” lived lavishly even as they starved millions to death while selling grain to other countries (for details, see the film The Soviet Story). Thus, while some Occupiers call to replace capitalism with socialism (see the Denver college professor and “born-again Trotskyite” or the Los Angeles Occupier calling for bloody revolution) if successful their strategies would in fact create another kind of income inequality.

But the income inequality under tyranny is fundamentally different from that under capitalism. One arises from looting and forcing; the other from producing and thinking. Looters seize available wealth. They add nothing to the supply of wealth, opting instead to smash things, divert human effort to the task of looting, and squash the incentive of their victims to produce much of anything. Thus, even if looters could achieve income equality, doing so would constitute a moral atrocity. Producers create new wealth: They restructure their own resources—their land, machinery, seeds, and minerals—to create goods and services that benefit human life. Producers earn money by trading voluntarily with those who also benefit from the exchange. Often producers hire others, improving the lot of employer and employee alike.

Looters win (in their own short-sighted view) at the expense of others. Producers win as they help others win. At worst, a looter takes your life; at best, he steals what you produce. At worse, a producer leaves you alone; at best—and most typically—he greatly enriches and expands our lives.

America’s capitalists have nothing in common with dictators in the Middle East or with any other type of looter. (I mean actual capitalists, not those pretenders in business who wield political power to seize subsidies and hamstring their competitors.) Steve Jobs did not earn a fortune by attacking others or stealing from them; he grew wealthy by building remarkably advanced machines that dramatically improve the lives of tens of millions of people. Whatever wealth Jobs personally gained, he added enormously more value to his customers’ lives. The same can be said of any of America’s business leaders, whether the energy producer George Mitchell, retailer Jeff Bezos, software developer Bill Gates, internet visionary Mark Zuckerberg, or anybody else who lives by thinking and producing at whatever scale. Producers trade goods and services for money, and the exchange benefits both parties. A producer’s wealth indicates the scope of his mutually beneficial exchanges.

From the economic point of view, as Ludwig von Mises wrote in a 1955 letter: “Destitution is in a feudal society the corollary of income inequality, but not in a capitalist society. The fact that there is ‘big business’ does not impair, but improve[s] the conditions of the rest of the people.” Mises writes here of productive business in a free economy, not politically-connected “business” that seeks reward in handouts and special favors. To the degree that today’s economy has brought some closer to destitution, the cause is not productive big business, but instead the looting mentality of inflationary government spending, political support for irresponsible mortgages, bailouts for banks and unions, out-of-control entitlements, corporate welfare, and the like. In short, the cause is government interference in the economy.

From the moral point of view, forcibly seizing wealth from producers violates their rights. The relevant moral distinction is not between the 99 percent and the wealthiest one percent, but rather between the producers and the looters on any scale. The great producers of our society do not deserve envious snarls and threats to forcibly seize their property. Instead, they deserve our gratitude and admiration.

Related:

• Harry Reid and Company’s Latest Immoral Scheme
• How to Actually “Separate Government from the Corporations”

Image: Wikipedia Commons