The Freedom to Say No is the Only Freedom

My choice for president, Austin Petersen, understands freedom of association and how it is at the base of every other freedom that we have. None of the other candidates do.

Baking is a personal choice. Whether you bake. Who gets to lick the bowl. #AustinPetersen2016 pic.twitter.com/pUlFKDe1lz

— Aya Katz (@AyaKatz) May 6, 2016

Freedom of contract, which is the bedrock of free enterprise, is just free association in business transactions. Freedom of speech is the freedom to agree or disagree with any other person. It is the freedom to formulate an opinion of your own and to share it with others, if you wish. It is also the freedom to stay silent, when others want to force an agreement. There is no other kind of freedom besides the right to say no or yes -- as we choose.

The people who say that freedom from hunger is a kind of freedom are actually advocating slavery. They think by existing we have a right to force others to feed us. The people who advocate freedom  from disease want to enslave others to heal us. They are too scared to conscript doctors, the way they are currently conscripting bakers, but they want to force healthy people to pay the doctors to heal the sick. The people who say every person has the right to live in a house are in favor of slavery to force people to build other people houses. Or to pay for houses that are already built. Even those who say we have a right to be free of fear or terror want to enslave others to protect them. Everything has a price and everything requires people to agree in order for it to get done. There is no problem that can't be solved in the free market. But in order for the market to work, every participant has to have the right to say "No!"

It's that simple. And in theory, the Objectivists agree. But you have to wonder sometimes when they are talking about how capitalism is behind industrialization and how industrialization has brought us a higher standard of living, whether they really don't understand the difference between free enterprise and capitalism.

It is stunning how ignorant people are about history.That Capitalism brought us out of a natural state of poverty should be uncontroversial

— Yaron Brook (@yaronbrook) May 7, 2016

A natural state of poverty? I just don't understand what that means. There were rich people in the Bible. There were rich people in the United States of America right after the revolution -- as well as right before. Why does Yaron Brook think our natural state is poverty? And isn't poverty a relative term -- which would have no meaning without a comparison with contemporaries?

@yaronbrook Are you saying poverty is natural? Per capita land ownership was much higher before industrialization. I love free enterprise.

— Aya Katz (@AyaKatz) May 7, 2016

There is something about city people that makes them think land ownership as a measure of wealth does not count.

@AyaKatz yes. Until Capitalism we wee all poor. Land not a good measure. Think standard of living.

— Yaron Brook (@yaronbrook) May 7, 2016

Sometimes I think there are people who use "capitalism" and "free enterprise" interchangeably -- and I give them the benefit of the doubt and agree with them. But here Yaron Brook, Ayn Rand's successor, shows that he does know the difference, and he thinks that until incorporation of collective business entities with limited liability that allowed industrialization to go full throttle occurred, everyone was poor. Really, everyone? What about George Washington? Was he poor? How about John Hancock? Poor? Thomas Jefferson? A poor man?

@yaronbrook We were not all poor. Some had a very high standard of living. Servants. Unequal is not always unfair.

— Aya Katz (@AyaKatz) May 7, 2016

But maybe Yaron Brook does not care about the major founding fathers. Maybe he is talking about the little guy. Maybe he means the great multitudes.

@AyaKatz very, very few.

— Yaron Brook (@yaronbrook) May 8, 2016

This is a guy who has just published a book titled Equal is Unfair. So I am confused. Does it matter there were more poor people than rich? And what about the middle class? Until the end of the nineteenth century, most middle class households had servants. They were not rich,  but certainly not poor. Very, very few rich people. Is that what bothers the author of Equal is Unfair?

Austin Petersen, on the other hand, understands that freedom is the ability to embrace technology and capitalism -- or to stay aloof from it. He champions the rights of the Amish to their segregated lifestyle as well as the rights of New York businessmen. And by the way, I understand some Amish can be quite wealthy -- while practicing free enterprise, but not capitalism. Imagine that!


https://www.gofundme.com/2d8gren8

Queen Isabella and the Paradox of How Tyranny Drives Exploration

This blog post is a follow up to my earlier post about why we have not colonized Mars yet.

http://theodosiaandthepirates.blogspot.com/2016/02/yaron-brook-ayn-rand-and-virtue-of.html

I got a comment recently to the effect that "If you are free you can use your power to reason and act on it and huge advancements are made. Going to Mars is a stupid idea relative to how we are now. It is not beneficial."

It's actually quite a bit more complicated than that.

• The greatest freedom does not necessarily lead to the highest degree of technological advance, because if you are happy with your current situation, you tend to have less incentive to change things.
• It's not "stupid" to want to go to Mars. That is a value judgment. Some people are naturally interested in exploring the world and learning what is out there, even when there is no "need" for a new invention or more space. Not everything in life is about dire "need". The only issue is who will pay for the curiosity itch. Under free enterprise, the curious pay for their curiosity themselves.

Chimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers in their natural habitat have less technology than people living in the Scandinavian countries or in habitats that are not naturally suited for apes to live in. Why? Partially, because there is no "need" and hence it would not be "beneficial", as the commentator said about colonizing Mars.

But whenever conditions get too crowded in the environment in which we evolve, some of us are spurred to move out and travel great distances and go to places where food does not just grow on trees, and you have to find ways to heat during winter and to store seeds and grain and dead meat, and do all sorts of things that do not come naturally and require thought and planning. Later, when people who have done this look back at their ancestors and their contemporary cousins who are still in the natural lifestyle, they think they themselves are much more advanced and the others seem primitive and lazy. But necessity is the mother of invention, and if you don't have to work for others in order to survive, why should you? Arguably, there is less freedom under more advanced technology, because things that nature gives us for free in a tropical paradise-- warmth and food -- have to be worked for, and people find themselves specializing in certain skills and trading with others who have other skills. As long as people work only for themselves and not to support others by force, it's still free enterprise, but when property taxes to pay just for getting to hold onto a plot of land are figured into the equation, people are forced to work for others to pay the cash for the taxes on the property every year. Once health insurance becomes mandatory, they have to work for others just for the right to exist. And now freedom to decide how to live is gone, which is a great incentive to move someplace else where one might be able to find more freedom from serving others by force.

That's one side of the issue. The other side is that there will always be people who are curious about what is found beyond the distant horizon. Scientists want to know -- they pursue knowledge for its own sake. Explorers are people who want to travel far from where they live. They don't care if they profit. They have the itch. But who will pay for it? Many space aficionados admit openly that the Statist desire to beat other countries is the motive behind the funding they hope to get from their government. Take Leslie Fish's song, "Queen Isabella", in which it is explained that Christopher Columbus got state funding that was entirely motivated by colonial expansionism and misguided missionary zeal. The would-be space explorer realizes that only through an arms-race competition with other nations did NASA land a man on the moon. And the hope is that some new Queen Isabella, equally deranged, will continue to fund the space program.

It is not "stupid" to want to visit Mars. It is not "stupid" to try to teach an ape human language. The thirst for knowledge for its own sake is as old as mankind. The only problem is: how to pay for the experiment? As long as it is privately funded, no experiment need be "beneficial" -- because it does not involve unwilling participants.

Questions like "what do we need?" or "what is beneficial" depend entirely on the person asking them. In a free society, what one person wants is not what another wants. Each decides what is beneficial to himself. And no question is stupid. Knowledge for its own sake is fine, as long as you pay for it yourself.

Freedom does not entail constant growth. Science does not serve technology; it is a value in its own right. Expanding technology is not necessarily a product of free enterprise. In a free society, people are left to be as lazy or as industrious as they like -- as curious or as lethargic as their own nature dictates. There is no norm. There are no rules -- except that you don't force another person to work at something that he does not choose to do. If you want to go to Mars, you pay for it yourself.

Free Enterprise, Capitalism and The Panic of 1819

There is an enormous difference between free enterprise and capitalism. In today's culture, those two systems are conflated, and this causes misunderstandings between and among people who might otherwise have found that they have common ground.

Image from the Wikipediahttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Pedal-driven-weaving-machine.jpg/640px-Pedal-driven-weaving-machine.jpg

Free enterprise is an economic system where  people are allowed to come to agreements and reach bargains amongst themselves without government interference. Free enterprise says nothing about whether businesses are small or large or whether capital is concentrated or diffuse.

Capitalism is an economic system where large amounts of capital are concentrated in the hands of a few controlling interests. Those who control the capital might be corporations or the government. They are usually not individuals. But either way, capitalism says nothing about whether people are free to arrive at their own bargains under terms agreeable to themselves.

It is theoretically possible to have both free enterprise and capitalism at the same time. It is also theoretically possible to have capitalism without free enterprise or free enterprise without capitalism.

However, in practice, capitalism tends to move a country away from free enterprise, as when only a very few control the means of production, they are able, in a democracy,  to pass laws that favor themselves and hurt the competition. In practice, in order for free enterprise to remain stable, a more diffuse dispersal of capital is optimal.

For independent people even of very modest means, it is important to be able to make business decisions unfettered, so what they really want is free enterprise. For others, industrialization implies capitalization, and industrialization creates more goods and feeds the masses, so they favor special legal breaks for corporations. However, when they see what inequality is brought about by this system of capitalization, they start crying out for redistribution.

In the 19th century, the United States moved from being a country characterized by free enterprise to becoming an industrialized nation whose economic system involved allowing a few interests to control more capital. The means whereby this happened was the spread of corporations.

Corporations are legal entities whose investors enjoy limited liability. This means that the corporation can cause harm to others, but the stockholders cannot be held accountable for more than their individual investment. Due to this lack of accountability, investors cede control of their funds to a few individuals who run the day to day business of a corporation without  owning the capital that they control. When things go smoothly, everybody is happy. But when things go badly, you get massive economic downturns, like the Panic of 1819.

In Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain, Edward Livingston explains the change from free enterprise to capitalism to Jean Laffite.

Protectionism at home for certain businesses against others breeds protectionism from abroad through tariffs and embargoes, and what started out as free enterprise becomes capitalism, and the government is recruited to help protect unviable businesses from bankruptcy.

Today, the people who cry out to expropriate the rich are really targeting individuals who own their businesses: the small family farm or ranch, the mom and pop store, the home seamstress or tailor. When they speak up in favor of the estate tax, they forget that corporations never die, and that if families lose their property every time a father or a mother passes away, then very soon all businesses will be run by large corporations, and nobody will have any choice but to be employed by corporate conglomerates who lobby the government for protection. Then  prices and wages will be fixed by government fiat, and goodbye free enterprise.

Jean Laffite did not want that result. He was against wage slavery. How about you?

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