Producers Should Reject Calls to “Give Back”
On the dedication page of Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto, we find these words:
“To my supporters: I have never been more humbled and honored than by your selfless devotion to freedom and the Constitution.”
The modifier “selfless” is intended as a moral tribute. Imagine instead if he had written “selfish.” How would that go over?
What are the facts? Can we really say that people who fight for freedom are acting in self-denial? Wouldn’t freedom be an infinitely better condition to live under than the controlled society we now have or the totalitarian slave state we’re edging toward? And if this is true, wouldn’t it be correct to say Paul’s supporters act in their conscientious self-interest, and therefore their support should be considered selfish?
So why didn’t he use that word?
As authors Yaron Brook and Don Watkins argue in their stimulating book, Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government, it is the widespread inability to affirm the self that accounts for the continuing decline of freedom. And since political freedom implies economic freedom, traditional selfless morality becomes capitalism’s greatest enemy.
The Triumph of Greed?
When the financial crisis arrived in 2007–2008, capitalism’s enemies had no trouble spotting whom they believed were the culprits: greedy businessmen and speculators. Once again, the government had trusted them with freedom, and once again their insatiable greed brought the economy to its knees. But Brook and Watkins point out what should be obvious, that freedom in economic affairs had been increasingly restricted for decades:
Because the conventional view of selfishness remained entrenched, it was not the “public servants” in Washington who took the blame. . . .
The true lesson of the financial crisis is exactly the opposite of what the pundits concluded. The conventional view is that the free market failed. In fact, it was the unfree market that fai
Article from Mises Wire
