Part 12 (1/2)
[Ibid., 120; pb 100.]
The acceptance of full responsibility for one's own choices and actions (and their consequences) is such a demanding moral discipline that many men seek to escape it by surrendering to what they believe is the easy, automatic, unthinking safety of a morality of ”duty.” They learn better, often when it is too late.
The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, unchosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats. His metaphysical att.i.tude and guiding moral principle can best be summed up by an old Spanish proverb: ”G.o.d said: 'Take what you want and pay for it.' ” But to know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.
[Ibid., 121; pb 101.]
See also ALTRUISM; ”ANTI-CONCEPTS”; FREE WILL; KANT, IMMANUEL; MORALITY; MYSTICAL ETHICS; RATIONALITY; RELIGION; RESPONSIBILITY/OBLIGATION; SACRIFICE; SELF-ESTEEM; SELF-INTEREST; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS.
E.
Ecology/Environmental Movement. Ecology as a social principle ... condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men's return to ”nature,” to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.
[”'The Lessons of Vietnam,” ARL, III, 25, 1.]
An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times-a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream-an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly-an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth-these do live with their ”natural environment,” but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: ”Should one do everything one can? Of course not.” Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars. [”The Left: Old and New,” NL, 88.]
In Western Europe, in the preindustrial Middle Ages, man's life expectancy was 30 years. In the nineteenth century, Europe's population grew by 300 percent-which is the best proof of the fact that for the first time in human history, industry gave the great ma.s.ses of people a chance to survive.
If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States (from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company): 1900-47.3 years
1920-53 years
1940-60 years
1968-70.2 years (the latest figures compiled)
Anyone over 30 years of age today, give a silent ”Thank you” to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest smokestacks you can find.
[”The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 137.]
The dinosaur and its fellow-creatures vanished from this earth long before there were any industrialists or any men.... But this did not end life on earth. Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of ”equilibrium” that guarantees the survival of any particular species-teast of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.
[Ibid., 134.]
Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists-amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for ”harmony with nature”-there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision-i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears....
In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the G.o.ds which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.
[Ibid., 136.]
Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In ”nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man's energy and spirit; it is a losing struggte-the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that mankind cannot afford.
[Ibid., 149.]
It has been reported in the press many times that the issue of pollution is to be the next big crusade of the New Left activists, after the war in Vietnam peters out. And just as peace was not their goal or motive in that crusade, so clean air is not their goal or motive in this one.
[”The Left: Old and New,” NL, 89.]
The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today's mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictators.h.i.+p. This goal does not have to be inferred-many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.
[”The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 140.]
If, after the failure of such accusations as ”Capitalism leads you to the poorhouse” and ”Capitalism leads you to war,” the New Left is left with nothing better than: ”Capitalism defiles the beauty of your countryside,” one may justifiably conclude that, as an intellectual power, the collectivist movement is through.
[”The Left: Old and New,” NL., 93.]
City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological probtem-not a political one-and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.
[”The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 142.]
See also CAPITALISM; MAN; NEW LEFT; POLLUTION; PRODUC-TlON; SCIENCE; TECHNOLOGY.
Economic Good. In order for a thing to become a good, three conditions must be fulfilled. Not only must it satisfy a human need, but also one must know that it satisfies one's need, and one must have disposal over it.
[George Reisman, ”The Revolt Against Affluence: Galbraith's Neo-Feudalism,” pamphlet, 6.]
See aGco MARKET VALUE; PROPERTY RIGHTS.
Economic Growth. ”Economic growth” means the rise of an economy's productivity, due to the discovery of new products, new techniques, which means: due to the achievements of men's productive ability.
[”Promises to Parasites Fail to Bring Results,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1962.]
Nothing can raise a country's productivity except technology, and technology is the final product of a complex of sciences (including philosophy), each of them kept alive and moving by the achievements of a few independent minds.
[”The Moratorium on Brains,” ARL, 1, 3, 5.]
See also CAPITALISM; ECOLOGY/ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT; NEW LEFT; PRODUCTION; TECHNOLOGY.
Economic Power vs. Political Power. A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: ”A hungry man is not free,” or ”It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations-and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.
The difference between political power and any other kind of social ”power,” between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.
[”America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]
What is economic power? It is the power to produce and to trade what one has produced. In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who partic.i.p.ate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined-not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone's ”greed” or by anyone's need-but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the partic.i.p.ants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values--better products or services, at a lower price -than others are able to offer.
Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, ”democratic” vote-by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country. Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to subst.i.tute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself ”the voice of the public” and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.
Now let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury. imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear.
[ibid., 47.]