Rand, Ayn – Capitalism

A majority without an ideology is a helpless mob, to be taken over by anyone.

Now consider the meaning of Mr. Kennedy’s advice to the Brazilians and to the world. It was not the political philosophy of the United States that he was enunciating, but the principle of unlimited majority rule—the doctrine that the majority may choose anything it wishes, that anything done by the majority is right and practical, because its will is omnipotent

This means that the majority may vote away the rights of a minority—and dispose of an individual’s life, liberty, and property, until such time, if ever, as he is able to gather his own majority gang. This, somehow, will guarantee political freedom.

But wishing won’t make it so—neither for an individual nor for a nation. Political freedom requires much more than the people’s wish. It requires an enormously complex knowledge of political theory and of how to implement it in practice.

It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established Was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his

leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both.

This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders’ motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world.

Instead, we are deluding the ignorant and the semi-savage by telling them that no political knowledge is necessary—that our system is only a matter of subjective preference—that any prehistorical form of tribal tyranny, gang rule, and slaughter will do just as well, with our sanction and support.

It is thus that we encourage the spectacle of Algerian workers marching through the streets and shouting the demand: “Work, not blood!”—without knowing what great knowledge and virtue are required to achieve it

In the same way, in 1917, the Russian peasants were demanding: “Land and Freedom!” But Lenin and Stalin is what they got.

In 1933, the Germans were demanding: “Room to live!” But what they got was Hitler.

In 1793, the French were shouting: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” What they got was Napoleon.

In 1776, the Americans were proclaiming “The Rights of Man”—and, led by political philosophers, they achieved it.

No revolution, no matter how justified, and no movement, no matter how popular, has ever succeeded without a political philosophy to guide it, to set its direction and goal.

The United States—history’s magnificent example of a country created by political theorists—has abandoned its own philosophy and is falling apart. As a nation, we are splintering into warring tribes which—only by the fading momentum of a civilized tradition—are called “economic pressure groups,” at present As opposition to our growing statism, we have nothing but the futile “willayas” of the so-called “conservatives,” who are fighting, not for any political principles, but only against the “liberals.”

Embittered by Algeria’s collapse into chaos, one of her leaders remarked: “We used to laugh at the Congolese; now it goes for us.”

And it goes for us, as well.

13. LET US ALONE! BY AYN RAND

Since “economic growth” is today’s great problem, and our present Administration is promising to “stimulate” it—to achieve general prosperity by ever wider government controls, while spending an unproduced wealth—I wonder how many people know the origin of the term laissez-faire?

France, in the seventeenth century, was an absolute monarchy. Her system has been described as “absolutism limited by chaos.” The king held total power over everyone’s life, work, and property—and only the corruption of government officials gave people an unofficial margin of freedom.

Louis XIV was an archetypical despot: a pretentious mediocrity with grandiose ambitions. His reign is regarded as one of the brilliant periods of French history: he provided the country with a “national goal,” in the form of long and successful wars; he established France as the leading power and the cultural center of Europe. But “national goals” cost money. The fiscal policies of his government led to a chronic state of crisis, solved by the immemorial expedient of draining the country through ever-increasing taxation.

Colbert, chief adviser of Louis XIV, was one of the early modern statists. He believed that government regulations can create national prosperity and that higher tax revenues can be obtained only from the country’s “economic growth”; so he devoted himself to seeking “a general increase in wealth by the encouragement of industry.” The encouragement consisted of imposing countless government controls and minute regulations that choked business activity; the result was dismal failure.

Colbert was not an enemy of business; no more than is our present Administration. Colbert was eager to help fatten the sacrificial victims—and on one historic occasion, he asked a group of manufacturers what. he could do for industry. A

Based on a column in the Los Angeles Times, August 1962.

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manufacturer named Legendre answered: “Laissez-nous fairel” (“Let us alone!”)

Apparently, the French businessmen of the seventeenth century had more courage than their American counfmarts of the twentieth, and a better understanding of economics. They knew that government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution, and that the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

To say that that which was true in the seventeenth century cannot possibly be true today, because we travel in jet nlanes while they traveled in horse carts—is like saying that we do not need food, as men did in the past, because we are wearing trenchcoats and slacks, instead of powdered WIPS and hoop skirts. It is that sort of concrete-bound superficiality— or inability to grasp principles, to distinguish the essential from the non-essential—that blinds people to the fact that the economic crisis of our day is the oldest and stalest one in history.

Consider die essentials. If government controls could achieve nothing but paralysis, starvation, and collapse in a pre-industrial age, what happens when one imposes controls on a highly industrialized economy? Which is easier for bureaucrats to regulate: the operation of hand looms and hand forges—or the operation of steel mills, aircraft plants, and electronics concerns? Who is more likely to work under coercion: a horde of brutalized men doing unskilled manual labor—or the incalculable number of individual men of creative genius required to build and to maintain an industrial civilization? And if government controls fail even with the first, what depth of evasion permits modern statists to hope that they can succeed with the second?

The statists’ epistemological method consists of endless debates about single, concrete, out-of-context, range-of-the-moment issues, never allowing them to be integrated into a sum, never referring to basic principles or ultimate consequences—and thus inducing a state of intellectual disintegration in then* followers. The purpose of that verbal fog is to conceal the evasion of two fundamentals: (a) that production and prosperity are the product of men’s intelligence, and (b) that government power is the power of coercion by physical force.

Once these two facts are acknowledged, the conclusion to be drawn is inevitable: that intelligence does not work under coercion, that man’s mind will not function at the point of a gun.

This is the essential issue to consider; all other considerations are trivial details by comparison.

The details of a country’s economy are as varied as the many cultures and societies that have existed. But all of mankind’s history is the practical demonstration of the same basic principle, no matter what the variants of form: the degree of human prosperity, achievement, and progress is a direct function and corollary of the degree of political freedom. As witness: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century.

In our own age, the difference between West Germany and East Germany is so eloquent a demonstration of the efficacy of a (comparatively) free economy versus a controlled economy that no further discussion is necessary. And no theorist can deserve serious consideration if he evades the existence of that contrast, leaving its implications unanswered, its causes unidentified, and its lesson unlearned.

Now consider the fate of England, “the peaceful experiment in socialism,” the example of a country that committed suicide by vote: there was no violence, no bloodshed, no terror, merely the throttling process of “democratically” imposed government controls—but observe the present cries about England’s “brain drain,” about the fact that the best and ablest men, particularly the scientists and engineers, are deserting England and running to whatever small remnant of freedom they can find anywhere in today’s world.

Remember that the Berlin wall was erected to stop a similar “brain drain” from East Germany; remember that after forty-five years of a totally controlled economy, Soviet Russia, who possesses some of the best agricultural land in the world, is unable to feed her population and has to import wheat from semi-capitalist America; read East Minus West ~ Zero by Werner Keller,1 for a graphic (and unrefuted) picture of the Soviet economy’s impotence—and then, judge the issue of freedom versus controls.

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