Tallahassee Tax Day Tea Party -- Report

Tallahassee's Tax Day Tea Party took place today at 5pm in front of the old capitol. I spent the early part of the day getting my sign ready. Not particularly clever or artistic, but it said what I wanted to say. (Clicking on the pictures will take you to my Webshots album where there are more pics.)



I got there about 4:30pm, and had some trouble finding a parking spot in Klemen Plaza. Most of that was probably due to the legislature being in session. There were a number of fellow protestors, though, who rode the elevator up with me. By the time I got up the hill to the front of the capitol, there was already a good sized crowd. I took a few pictures from the north end of the lawn, and then moved through the crowd getting video. I'm not an expert on these things, but I'm estimating the crowd at 1200-1500 people.









The views on display were mostly concerned with economic issues: the bailouts, government spending, debt, socialism. A few of the signs mentioned Obama by name indicating that some see the issue in partisan terms, even though the bailouts were already in place when Obama took office. True, he's trying to take government spending to a whole new level, but it's a difference of degree rather than kind. The advantage of having Obama as president is that so many conservatives have suddenly remembered that they are opposed to big government. It's like the past eight years were a wild Saturday night, but now it's Sunday and they're back in church.

Yet I digress. Some of the signs...

Basic common sense: "You can't borrow your way out of debt. You can't spend your way to wealth. So how do you figure government can do it?"




Anarchists: I didn't catch the significance of the 'A' when I first saw this sign.




A Culpeper Minutemen flag with the coiled rattlesnake. There were quite a few "Don't Tread on Me" flags, and one guy was handing out small rubber snakes to the kids.




View from the south end of the lawn:



More signage:

An exremist showed up. I spotted him easily by his sign.




This one was pretty clever, although I would say that Obama's policies, so far, have more in common with fascism.




Obamanomics: It's similar to compassionate conservatism only moreso.




I'm not greedy. I'd settle for a billion.




I like her stimulus plan: A hot cup of tea, a beautiful girl, and freedom!




A surprise appearance by Johnny Depp.




Uncle Sam was there.



Part of a speech by a local radio personality named Preston Scott. Sorry for the lousy color.



The crowd was enthusiastic and united in their opposition to government spending, but philosophically very mixed. Whether these protests can serve as a basis for reducing the size of government, or whether they can even slow it down, remains to be seen.

Answering a Critic of Ayn Rand

The buzz about Atlas Shrugged is attracting attention on the left as well. Below is a response I typed to one of Ayn Rand's many new critics out there in the blogosphere.

We have a very different perspective on Rand's philosophy. What I see at it's core is a passionate love of man at his best. Far from being soulless, it reunifies man's body and soul and delivers them from the mind/body dichotomy that we inherited from Plato.

As for emotions, they are neither denied nor ignored by Objectivism. Rand was not advocating some sort of Vulcan approach to life. She would have considered it anti-human. Emotions, according to Rand, are automated value judgments. They are the summation of our previous thinking, and a reflection of previous evaluations. As such, they are not a primary source of knowledge. They only tell us what we already think, so they are only as good as the thinking that went into creating them. If our emotions seem to conflict with reason, that's not a sign that we should chose between reason and emotion, it's a sign that we should do more thinking to find the source of the conflict. It could be that our previous evaluation needs to be revised, or it could be that we've made an error in our current reasoning.

I don't know about you, but I find that a very reasonable and sane approach to the issue of emotions and reason. It disparages neither and fits both into their proper place. It is human in the best sense, because it appreciates the value of emotions in human experience while maintaining reason as our only source of knowledge. We should be neither emotional basket-cases following wherever whim takes us, nor repressed robots ignoring our feelings.

I agree with you that those who think they can mix Christianity and Objectivism are misguided. I view that as I view the attempt to merge Enlightenment values with Christianity. It certainly improved Christianity, but in the long-term I think it undermined the Enlightenment. Watering down poison will improve one's chances of surviving, but it would be better to give up the poison altogether.

Atlas Shrugged was not meant to be a realistic blueprint for how to accelerate the collapse of society. Its theme is the role of reason in human society. In order to dramatize the effect when a society abandons reason, the events and cast of characters are necessarily compressed. It took Roman civilization 500 yrs to collapse after the abandonment of the Republic. Rand chose to show that process in accelerated fasion, and as the result of a conscious withdrawal of reason from society, rather than the slow brain drain that occurs in a society in decline. The effect is far more dramatic and exciting.

Those who understand the strike as simply a tax revolt have missed the point of the story. Those who think of it as class warfare in which the rich win, have missed the point of the story. Rand's key identification was the immorality of the initiation of force by one man against another, or by a government against its citizens. As a corollary, she rejected all the spurious justifications for such force that have been advanced over the ages: right of conquest, divine right, the superiority of an elite, racial supremacy, vox populi vox dei, the needs of the many, etc, etc. Men do not own other men, neither in part nor in whole.

That is the moral point. There is also the practical point that societies based on enslavement inevitably crumble. Force drives out reason. You force a man to work, but you can't force him to think. All you can make him do is perform a set of manual tasks that you give him. In a society run on force innovation dies. The society deteriorates to a subsitence level, which is all that slavery is capable of maintaining over any period of time. The process of deterioration might be slower or faster given other factors, but it happens. The society becomes stagnant until it is swallowed up by a more dynamic culture.

You maintain that there will always be another titan to take the place of the ones who quit, but that is emphatically not true. In a culture that makes a point of cutting its titans off at the knees, people will stop trying to rise. No one will take up the burden of such a thankless job. They won't think, "Ah! Here's an opportunity for me!" They will think, "If they did that to him, what will they do to me?" They may not know enough to walk away from their job, but they know enough to keep their heads down. They know not to offer innovation where innovation is punished, not to work harder when hard work is for suckers. Not only that, but as the burden of society shifts ever downward, from the titans to the giants to the stalwart to the weary, more and more people find themselves cast in the role of sacrificial victim for the group. Eventually, you end up with a small, elite group at the top--call them aristocrats or call them commissars--living off the labor of the overburdened masses. That is not some airy theory, it is what happened when Rome fell, and it is what happened under communism.

You are correct, though, when you say that people who talk about reducing their productivity as a way of "going Galt" are not really emulating Galt. They are not walking away completely. They are shrugging, however. They are not completely rejecting our society yet, but they are showing definite signs of apathy towards its survival. They are not the $250k/yr wage earners either. It may not be entirely accurate to call them Galts, but they feel the same thing that Galt felt when he walked away from the 20th Century Motor Company. They are tired of their lives being regarded as the property of other men. Those are the people for whom Ayn Rand wrote, not just the titans, but all of us. She gave us the words to express the idea, and the moral courage to say, "Enough!"

An Atlas Shrugging?

Jake DeSantis has resigned from AIG, publishing his resignation letter in the NYT. His statement is not as uncompromising as it might have been, but he does reject any notion that he should feel guilty for the money he earned at AIG. He is nonetheless donating all of the money he should have received under his contract to those who have been hurt by the economic downturn, and he is daring Congress to retroactively tax the money away from the the recipients of his charity. That may be a misguided attempt to protect his coworkers by making the taxation of those earnings politically impossible. I don't think it will help, though, because there's nothing to stop Congress from simply inserting a clause to exempt charitable donations from the tax. In fact, it would make it much easier on Congress if they could say that they forced the folks at AIG to donate their money to charity, rather than confiscating it for the government. I would rather have seen the managers band together and fight any attempt to strip them of their compensation, but given the mood of the nation I can't really blame them for keeping their heads down.

To be clear: AIG has no right to one dime of taxpayer money. Having given them the money, though, the government has no right to deny them the right to use it to meet a contractural obligation to pay their employees. Any voter who accepts the bailouts while getting livid over the bonuses has swallowed the elephant and choked on a gnat, and the politicians who are making an issue of the bonuses are trying to redirect taxpayer anger from its proper target (them) to a scapegoat (businessmen).

Grimly Amusing

Today's Non Sequitur, which is an apt title for this particular joke.

Anger is being directed at the bankers on Wall Street, when it should be directed at Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve. What I found amusing about the cartoon is how it sums up the attitude people have towards the rich and successful. Need a scapegoat? Does someone need to be thrown into the volcano? Look around for a rich guy, and toss him in. It may not solve the problem, but it's sooooo cathartic.

One of these things doesn't belong with the other

Another example of how clueless some on the right are with respect to Ayn Rand.

Mark Thompson, 50, was arrested Thursday night by UI police for resisting
arrest after he disrupted a speech by UI-Chicago professor Bill Ayers at Allen
Hall in Urbana.

[...]

UI spokeswoman Robin Kaler said Thursday evening that Thompson tried to
give Ayers a Bible and a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

It's almost funny, but not really. Someone needs to explain to Mr. Thompson that he can't have his life and sacrifice it too.

The Moral Case for Capitalism

In the comments at PW, Ric Locke does a good job of making the practical case for capitalism, but I again find myself wishing that conservatives would focus on the moral case for capitalism. I wonder how far abolitionists would have gotten by arguing against slavery on the grounds that it is inefficient? Probably as far as conservatives have gotten in reestablishing a capitalist system.

Every year we move further and further away from capitalism and freedom. Why? It's not because the case for socialism is so compelling, it's because the argument from efficiency is so weak. People care about morality first, and practicality second. It doesn't matter if we all starve under a socialist system, we will all starve together in a magnificent act of self-sacrifice. So long as people believe that self-sacrifice is the moral ideal, they will continue voting for the system that enshrines it in law; and if it leads to our collective self-destruction, so be it. It wouldn't be self-sacrifice if it didn't.

Ric accuses socialists of demonizing the rich, but the reason they can do that successfully is because accumulating wealth is a selfish act. There is no way to accept the premise that self-sacrice is the standard of morality without accepting the conclusion that rich people are evil. By that moral standard, anyone who refuses to hand over his surplus earnings to those less fortunate is immoral, and the greater the surplus, the greater the immorality. That standard of virtue must be completely rejected in order to make the moral case for capitalism.

How can conservatives do that, though, if they remain committed to Christianity? How can they do it when even a conservative who claims to be non-religious remains committed to the ethical framework of Christianity? I don't see it happening.

And so we'll continue to drift towards totalitarian socialism with the conservatives occasionally complaining about inefficiencies yet consistently voting for ever-increasing levels of sacrifice for the good of all.

UPDATE: I missed this earlier article in the Wall Street Journal Online edition. I love the way the author attempts a six-degrees-of-separation style jump from Ayn Rand to Bill Clinton via Walt Whitman. You see, Rand wrote about selfishness, and Walt Whitman wrote a poem called "Song of Myself," and Bill Clinton used to hand out Leaves of Grass to impressionable young females. ("Hey, little girl... want a book of poetry?") So obviously Rand would have admired Clinton.

Is this what passes for reasoning at the WSJ? Was she too chicken to attempt a connection with Hitler or Stalin? Or does she consider Clinton worse?

The entire article is just one long smear, including all the obligatory references to cultish followers, Gordon Gekko's greed speech in Wall Street, and moral absolutism. (I love the way that Rand gets pinned with the amoralism of Gekko, while also being accused of moral absolutism. Which is it?) I knew what I was in for at the beginning, though, when she referred to Rand's writings as "individualist screeds." Hurrah for objectivity in the media.