Mandela: No Convert to Capitalism

The title of a column by New York Times DealBook editor Andrew Sorkin certainly got my attention on the heels of Nelson Mandela's death: "How Mandela Shifted Views on Freedom of Markets". Recalling that Mandela was a Marxist and knowing that South Africa is hardly Galt's Gulch, I was intrigued. Had the man revered as the father of South Africa actually had a Yeltsinesque "supermarket epiphany", only to be frustrated by other politicians?

Not quite:

But as the five-day conference of high-level speed-dating wore on [the 1992 World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland --ed], Mr. Mandela soon decided he needed to reconsider his long-held views: "Madiba then had some very interesting meetings with the leaders of the Communist Parties of China and Vietnam," Mr. Mboweni wrote, using Mr. Mandela/s clan name. "They told him frankly as follows: 'We are currently striving to privatize state enterprises and invite private enterprise into our economies. We are Communist Party governments, and you are a leader of a national liberation movement. Why are you talking about nationalization?'"

Although the article claims a genuine change of heart on Mandela's part and touts "capitalist" reforms in South Africa, the very name of one of his major policies belies the claim that he embraced capitalism:

But for all of Mr. Mandela's embrace of capitalism and free markets, as demonstrated though his policy called GEAR (Growth, Employment and Redistribution), the results raise more questions than answers about its success. [bold added]

The article ends with the following gross injustice against capitalism, disguised as an inconclusive verdict on Mandela's legacy:

Mr. Mandela may have ended apartheid and years of awful violence, but his dream of creating a country that, as he said, is "a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities” may still remain a dream that capitalism and free markets have yet to solve.

As Michael Hurd recently pointed out, "Mandela's biggest enemy was not racism, but collectivism." Racism and communism are each just varieties of collectivism.

Mandela, by embracing a mixed economy, did not really try capitalism. I suppose, in that sense, we could say that, "capitalism and free markets have yet to solve" South Africa's troubles: Whatever he thought of them, Mandela never tried them.

--CAV

"Public Health" Plagues Body Politic

Reader Snedcat points me to an interesting, but somewhat rambling article about the "Disease of 'Public Health'" over at Spiked. Perhaps the most interesting is the first paragraph, which provides a laundry list of recent proposals that have been made in Britain the name of public health:

... minimum pricing for alcohol, plain packaging for tobacco, a 20 per cent tax on fizzy drinks, a fat tax, a sugar tax, a fine for not being a member of a gym, graphic warnings on bottles of alcohol, a tax on some foods, subsidies on other foods, a ban on the sale of hot food to children before 5pm, a ban on anyone born after the year 2000 ever buying tobacco, a ban on multi-bag packs of crisps, a ban on packed lunches, a complete ban on alcohol advertising, a ban on electronic cigarettes, a ban on menthol cigarettes, a ban on large servings of fizzy drinks, a ban on parents taking their kids to school by car, and a ban on advertising any product whatsoever to children.

The article goes on to raise some interesting methodological and motivational questions about the new breed of scolds behind such proposals. It also draws some historical parallels with religiously-motivated health and behavioral crusades from the past.

These are all worthwhile and interesting, and the author even touches on a crucial question usually missing from modern discussions about health policy (i.e., whatever role the government is assumed to have regarding our health): "[I]n an enlightened society the judgement [about whether a given health risk is acceptable] can only be made by the one person who bears all the risk and enjoys all the benefits: the individual." That said, the article wanders, as if in need of a moral and political compass. Morally, it could have stood to take a more fixed gaze at the whole idea of third parties making cost-benefit analyses. (That said, it does challenge the idea by examining how an individual could have different criteria for making a choice than some government official.) Politically, it would have done well to ask of all such measures, the question Ayn Rand asked when governments took money and freedom from individuals: "By what right?"

Modern puritans have the power they do because too many people tolerate them making such calls. This tolerance unfortunately extends to the political realm, where government coercion of private individuals is increasingly accepted, rather than regarded with the high degree of suspicion that it deserves. It is this coercion that empowers "the assortment of neurotics and authoritarians that make up the modern ‘public health’ movement" to dictate even to those of us who see them for what they are.

--CAV

Bad Ideas vs. IQ

Noting that "black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so," Thomas Sowell introduces some new data that demands different explanations.

The November 9th-15th issue of the distinguished British magazine The Economist reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England's schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time -- as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time.

At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time. [format edits]

Considered only in racial terms, the low-income result is the opposite of what recent studies in the United States usually find. Sowell has a good hypothesis regarding the differences seen on each side of the Pond:

What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.

This reminds me somewhat of the underlying thesis in Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals, except that he is considering the role that philosophical ideas  -- although he stops short of calling them that -- play in shaping a culture. That consideration is the hallmark of Ayn Rand's cultural commentary, and I think that more such analysis can only accelerate the abandonment of the wrong (and not even wrong) beliefs that are guiding so many of us today onto a path of certain ruin.

--CAV

Updates

12-10-13: Corrected a hyperlink, 

12-7-13 Hodgepodge

A Hard Road for the Creative

Writing for Slate, Jessica Olien maintains that most people actually dislike creativity, although they may well appreciate its fruits and grasp that it is good on an intellectual level. While I am not sure I agree with everything she says, I think the following point is particularly insightful:

Even people who say they are looking for creativity react negatively to creative ideas, as demonstrated in a 2011 study from the University of Pennsylvania. Uncertainty is an inherent part of new ideas, and it's also something that most people would do almost anything to avoid. People's partiality toward certainty biases them against creative ideas and can interfere with their ability to even recognize creative ideas. [link dropped, bold added]

Creative ideas take effort to evaluate and may well cause emotional discomfort among those with less-active thinking habits. Fortunately, as the article points out, many creative people learn to overcome that common limitation in others.

Weekend Reading

"Rather than dismiss this as new-age silliness or psychobabble, I encourage people to look inward and identify what leads them to feel more or less emotionally safe." -- Michael Hurd, in "Emotional 'Safety'" at The Delaware Wave

"As they spout off, they are admitting, albeit implicitly, that they are not able or willing to figure out what's true anyway, so all that matters is that they look like they know what they're talking about." -- Michael Hurd, in "Saying 'No' for No Reason" at The Delaware Coast Press

"It may surprise those who damn 'the lust for gold' to hear this but gold, like music and painting, is a spiritual value." -- Harry Binswanger, in "In Praise of Gold. Not a 'Barbarous Relic' but a Spiritual Value" at Forbes

"My previous column ... was not meant as an advocacy of a gold standard--not if that means giving government the power to dictate what is and isn't money." -- Harry Binswanger, in "Free Money! Then Free the Rest of the Economy" at Forbes

In More Detail

In his piece on gold, Harry Binswanger makes his argument that gold has spiritual value by generalizing from comments Ayn Rand made about music and applying her identification of reason as man's means of survival. I'll include his excerpt of Rand on music here.

Music offers man the singular opportunity to reenact, on the adult level, the primary process of his method of cognition: the automatic integration of sense data into an intelligible, meaningful entity. To a conceptual consciousness, it is a unique form of rest and reward.

And I'll encourage my readers to head over to Forbes for the rest of the piece (linked above), which is absorbing and inspiring in its advocacy of gold.

A Classic, Now Illustrated

From a recent announcement by the Ayn Rand Institute:

"Metaphysics in Marble," an article on sculpture by art historian Mary Ann Sures, was published by Ayn Rand in The Objectivist (February-March, 1969) and recommended by Rand in the revised edition of The Romantic Manifesto.

Quoting from the article: "This discussion is a brief historical survey  . . . to indicate the means by which sculpture expresses abstractions--and to demonstrate the connection between the dominant philosophy of a given era and its sculpture." The article was originally published without illustrations.

Now, for the first time, the article is available online, supplemented by footnotes containing links to more than thirty online illustrations selected by the author to enhance appreciation of her text. [links in original]

Especially after reading the related Binswanger piece on gold, I look forward to revisiting this classic.

--CAV

Friday Four

1. Will GMail soon be easy to export? Actually, it already is, because it can be accessed by standard mail protocols. This fact has allowed me to use getmail to back mine up weekly for well over a year.

At any rate, Google has announced the gradual rollout of a new feature that will make it easy to export email and calendar data. Interestingly, the announcement also mentions that this new feature will permit easy migration to other email services. If this new feature comes at the expense of GMail no longer behaving like regular email under the hood, I'll take the hints and switch.

2. We took the kids to see Santa yesterday evening. Pumpkin, who was terrified of Kris Kringle last year, had no trouble marching right up to the Big Man and asking for a "kitchen" this year. She was also a big help when we were getting pictures and having trouble getting her baby brother to smile. He usually smiles upon first seeing her, and often laughs at her antics. So when three adults failed to get anything more than a fleeting smile out of the boy, I put her to work.

We now have a picture of Santa and our smiling baby boy.

3. Can an elite rugby player hack it in the NFL? The Indianapolis Colts are in the process of finding out:

Now the experiment has yielded a very tangible result. [Kenyan-born Daniel] Adongo isn't yet ready to square off against veteran offensive tackles, coming off the edge to chase quarterbacks. Given the rate he's developing, that day probably will come. But for now, special teams are the perfect fit for Adongo. That's the closest thing to performing rugby tasks on the gridiron, with a single ball handler to be tackled and fewer moving parts. His speed will be an asset there, enabling him to cover a lot of ground in short order.

The transition makes sense in many respects, but has nonetheless required an impressive amount of hard work on Adongo's part.

4. File this one under comedy and "I'm married, not dead." I ran into an old LA Times blog posting that asked whether Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan on Mad Men is "too plump for primetime".

Uhhh ... No.

-- CAV

Altruism vs. Philanthropy

Within a recent discussion of the superior ability of capitalism to improve the general welfare, John Stossel describes an amusing encounter:

Today, [Bill] Gates spends his time giving money away. He's unusually conscientious about it. He experiments, funding what works and dropping what doesn't. His charity work saves lives. Good for him. But Gates was also unusually skilled at bringing people better software. Had he continued doing that at Microsoft, I bet the company would have been even more productive. And Gates would have done more for the world.

I tried that thought experiment on [Ted] Turner, who, in turn, unclipped his microphone and walked off the set. [bold added]

Stossel clearly hit a nerve, but I don't see benevolence as a primary explanation for Turner's reaction. At best, I can see self-doubt: Perhaps Turner finds his charity work more fulfilling than other activities, but since he rejects egoism, he can't see this as a valid reason to have moved into the area. Too bad for him.

Stossel's piece is informatve, but while it is true that the rising tide of capitalism lifts all boats, this is not why we should fight for it, as Ayn Rand once argued:

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve "the common good." It is true that capitalism does--if that catch-phrase has any meaning--but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man's rational nature, that it protects man's survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice.

It is interesting to see that Turner's anti-egoistic drive to "guilt" other wealthy people into parting with vast sums is making him less effective at his professed goal -- and perhaps even unable to derive any selfish enjoyment from his own charitable work.

-- CAV

Force-Fed Their Own Dog Food

Many blue state voters who supported ObamaCare are about to be force-fed their own dog food, according to Dick Morris:

In red states, Republican insurance commissioners have generally decided to let insurers and their customers cooperate to waive the cancellations. But the true believers in the blue states who serve as insurance commissioners have largely refused. Thus, the very voters the Democratic Party depends on are the most likely to continue to be forced to cancel the policies they want, despite their wishes and protests.

It's hard to think of a more shortsighted policy than to anger your own voters in so heavy-handed a way. Now the arguments about big government and the heavy hand of regulation will no longer be theoretical to Democratic voters. They will be forced to endure the cancellation of their own healthcare plans. [bold added]

This may be true, but I am less sanguine than Morris about this being anything but what reader Jim May is fond of calling a "teachable moment".

Why? The Democrats have two big advantages still with such voters: (1) They will play "blame the Republicans" to an always-receptive audience; and (2) This will be relatively easy for them to do because they (and this audience), being altruists, think that ObamaCare is the "right" thing to do. The GOP will lose long term unless it stops perseverating on the poor roll-out of a system that can't help but be bad -- because it is designed to forcibly nullify individual judgement throughout the process of caring for one's health. Until one rejects the premise that we are our brothers' keepers, one will not muster the moral courage or the indignant outrage to ask: "By what right does some clueless third party dictate to me out of the blue how and whom I pay for medical care?" The GOP should be doing this already, and should be helping these voters see that, if anything, they are not mad enough bout their policy cancellations.

Morris has found an opportunity to score, but the ball won't find the net on its own.

-- CAV