California found a convenient piggy bank to raid in response to its looming budget crisis. A proposal to tax 5% of the net worth of roughly 200 billionaires is gaining momentum.1^, 2 Proponents claim this “Billionaire Wealth Tax” (BWT) will save California’s crumbling health care system from federal funding cuts.3 While not a serious solution to an out-of-control spending problem, the initiative still draws on popular demand for the ultra-rich to pay their “fair share.”4

Support for the proposal is widespread, despite fears of losing much of the budget the wealthy already fund by pushing them out of state, and of BWT eventually expanding to everyone (as income tax did).5^, 6 Why do Californians, most of whom also believe the state wastes taxpayer money anyway, support the BWT? Why do they think it is “fair”?7

“Billionaires have built their extraordinary fortunes with the help of California resources,” the BWT initiative says.8 But it’s ridiculous to suggest they used roads or bridges thousands of times more intensely than the rest of us, proportionate to how much they’re now being asked to fork over.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia has bought into a version of this idea, saying he will pay “whatever taxes” he must if that’s the cost of access to California talent.9 He is wrong and owes no such fee. Talent follows visionaries like Huang. Nvidia, Google, Meta, and other startups over the last half century made California attractive to skilled, ambitious people. Huang and other entrepreneurs generously compensated them with salaries, bonuses, and stock options. They were not taken advantage of.

Two-thirds of California’s annual takings come from income taxes, 40 percent of which, on average, comes from the top 1 percent of earners.10 It’s manifestly unfair that a small minority carries such a disproportionately heavy burden in the first place.

Californians are turning a blind eye to what most would recognize as a grave injustice in a different context. Few would condone taking their neighbor’s jewelry to cover a credit card debt. It doesn’t become fair when a few individuals are singled out for outright wealth appropriation simply because others need it.

BWT is also not a routine tax increase. Many have noted its retroactive nature.11 BWT would apply to billionaires residing in California starting January 1, 2026, even though the vote on the proposal is not due until November. If not the whole BWT, then at least this provision will likely be struck down because the U.S. Constitution forbids retroactive laws. It would be unconstitutional and unjust for a city council to pass a law in December effective last January, making driving on Tuesdays a $10,000 offense. The BWT does the equivalent.

But BWT, like any wealth tax, reaches into the past in a more fundamental way. It would remain unjustly retroactive even if effective only from a future date. It penalizes the value of stock portfolios (and other assets) which are the result of past production and investment decisions. This makes it just as unfair as a retroactively enforced tax. The state scammed the wealthy by luring them to build their lives, companies, and wealth under one set of rules, just to turn the tables after they’ve planted roots. If the billionaires had known their wealth would be so brazenly taken away, they wouldn’t have built it — or their lives — in California. They could, of course, sell their assets, register them as income, and pay 13.3 percent California income tax in addition to 20–37 percent federal capital gains tax. The only way to avoid that is to leave California for good.

Retroactively targeting the results of past production and investment makes the BWT blatantly un-American. In the American ideal, the government’s role is to protect individuals’ life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. This, crucially, involves protecting the property with which they build their lives. Even in cases where it’s thought that the state needs property “for public use,” as the 5th amendment reads, the state must justly compensate the individual to whom it belonged.12

Since billionaires have taken nothing they haven’t already paid for, the BWT is plain expropriation without compensation. The unjust taking flips the relationship between the government and the individual that the American ideal established. By reaching into the past, the California government acts as ruler rather than as a servant.

California faces a budget crisis. But its moral crisis is more urgent. As incredible producers, as Americans, and as Californians, the wealthiest few should not have to surrender their earned wealth. They should be left alone to live, plan, work, and enjoy the results of their ingenuity.

Instead of demanding that productive geniuses carry a welfare state on their shoulders, Californians should direct their rage toward the cause of the crisis: the officials running the dysfunctional system and burning taxpayer money at unprecedented levels.13^, 14

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group.

Does the First Amendment separate church and state?

Thomas Jefferson thought so. In a letter written early in his presidency, Jefferson famously described the First Amendment to the US Constitution as “building a wall of separation between Church & State.” But Jefferson’s often-used metaphor of a wall is, by itself, insufficient to convey with precision the principle of church-state separation and the reasons in support of the principle. In the ensuing years, public debate has overly focused on the metaphor and become increasingly confused.

To resolve this confusion and clarify the vital principle at stake, Ayn Rand Institute philosopher Onkar Ghate has contributed a chapter called “A Wall of Separation between Church and State: Understanding This Principle’s Supporting Arguments and Far-Reaching Implications” in the book Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand’s Political Philosophy, edited by Gregory Salmieri and Robert Mayhew. The editors of New Ideal are pleased to publish Ghate’s chapter here.

The explicit separation of church and state is a vital new principle of the American experiment in freedom. The most philosophical of America’s Founding Fathers, Jefferson and Madison, certainly viewed it in this way. As did Ayn Rand, who in political philosophy saw herself as securing and extending the foundation built by these Enlightenment thinkers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Rand described herself politically as a radical for capitalism and, when briefly expanding on her position, would often make the following comparison: “When I say ‘capitalism,’ I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism — with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”¹

Rand’s comparison, however, would now increasingly fall on deaf ears. Americans today, far from being able to extend the reasons supporting church-state separation to the economic realm, have little understanding of this principle or of the arguments advanced by Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and others in its favor. This is the topic of my essay. I begin by examining today’s confused popular debate about the proper relation between church and state, and why almost no one in America upholds a “wall of separation” between the two anymore. Most of the rest of the essay then focuses on the actual principle of church-state separation and why a “wall of separation” is an appropriate metaphor for the principle and its supporting arguments. I conclude with a brief discussion of why Rand thought both that the principle extends to the economic realm and that this extension is vital to the full, consistent case for freedom.

The Popular Debate about Church-State Separation

Perhaps the easiest angle from which to see the confusion in today’s American debate is this: people are debating a metaphor with little to no understanding of the abstract principle for which it is a metaphor. I distinguish three major factions sparring in this debate, which I call the Religionists, the Secularists, and the Compromisers.

The metaphor of “a wall of separation between church and state” is usually traced back to Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, though one certainly can find earlier uses of similar imagery. The US Supreme Court famously expanded on Jefferson’s metaphor a century and a half later in Everson v. Board of Education: “The clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between church and state.’ . . . That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.”2 But if this is all one has to guide one’s reasoning — a metaphor and no principle — numerous questions will arise that seem to throw the idea into doubt and disrepute.

For instance, with the description of the wall as “high and impregnable,” the implication seems to be that the church is completely walled off from the state and the state is completely walled off from the church. Never the two shall meet. How can this be proper? It seems to imply that the government cannot intervene in religious ceremonies or set foot on church property no matter the circumstances. But what if a church is practicing some ritual of human sacrifice? What if, on church grounds, boys are being raped? Or, to take much less disturbing examples, what if a church’s bells are ringing throughout the night or a mosque is loudly broadcasting prayers in the early morning? Do neighbors have to put up with the noise, with no recourse to the government, because church is completely walled off from state? Surely not. Church grounds are not a separate country, as some view the grounds of an embassy.

So, most people think, the church cannot be completely walled off from the state. What about in the other direction? Is the state completely walled off from the church? If it is, does this mean that if a person becomes a member or an official of a church, he can no longer work in government? Does it imply that religious people should not make political arguments or engage in public advocacy? Some people in the debate seem to hold this. Those trying to defend the separation of state from church will often say that religion is a private matter, which should not be brought out in public. The “public square,” as they put it, using another metaphor, should be “neutral” and “religion-free.” As President Obama stated their view, they think you have to “leave your religion at the door before entering into the public square.” But this is wrong, Obama said. Did Martin Luther King violate the Constitution when he, often in religious terms, protested governmental oppression of blacks? Should the government have jailed those who advocated for the abolition of slavery in religious language? Should their appeals have been ignored? If the answer to these questions is “No,” then, many Americans conclude, the state is also not completely walled off from the church, politics from religion.3

But if the First Amendment does not erect a wall of separation between church and state, high and impregnable, what exactly does it do? What does the metaphor mean? This is the focus of the debate. One faction — often labeled “the Religious Right,” but which I call the “Religionists,” in part because this faction cuts across the (blurry) left-right political spectrum — frequently asserts the following: The First Amendment creates freedom for religion. It prevents the government from persecuting religion. The state cannot stop someone from preaching or practicing his religion by fining or imprisoning him. On this interpretation, the “free exercise” clause is the heart of the First Amendment.4 It creates a one-way wall of protection for churches against the power of the state. All the “establishment” clause means, by contrast, is that the state cannot erect one church as the state-sanctioned and supported church of the United States. This leaves many powers still in the hands of the federal government to aid and support religion and religious groups — just as the government today aids and supports autoworkers, the unemployed, and banks deemed too big to fail.

But many people object to the Religionists’ interpretation of the First Amendment. It permits much too much intermingling of religion and politics, they contend, and thereby violates the rights both of nonbelievers and of people whose religious beliefs do not enjoy governmental aid and support. A different interpretation of the First Amendment, and of the wall of separation it creates, is needed. This is supplied by the faction typically labeled “the Secular Left” — so the basic debate is supposedly between the Religious Right and the Secular Left. But for reasons similar to why I prefer the term “Religionists,” I rename this second group the “Secularists.” What do the Secularists claim that the First Amendment means? It means freedom from religion.

Why do we need freedom from religion? Because religion has been a source of strife, discord, warfare, and tyranny throughout history, particularly when religion wielded political power. So we have to say to religion: hands off government. You cannot get any taxpayer money to support your religious organizations or programs; the government is not going to display your religious symbols in its buildings; the government is not going to begin the day in governmental schools with religious prayers; in short, the government is not going to allow any believers to use the law to “impose [their] narrow morality on the rest of us.” This quote is from a flyer handed out by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in which it is also stated, “Not only is it un-American for the government to promote religion, it is rude.” The public square, Secularists say, must be religion-free.

The heart of the First Amendment, on this interpretation, is the “establishment” clause, which not only prohibits one church from being established as the state-sanctioned and supported church of the United States, but also prohibits any funding of churches or religious organizations and any involvement of religion in government. It creates a one-way wall of protection for both the government and the “public square” against the power of the church. The “free exercise” clause, by contrast, is secondary. As a citizen, you are free to practice your religious beliefs in private. But do not bring them out in public, into the “public square.” In effect, the Secularists treat religion as many people treat sex: so long as it is voluntary and consensual, do whatever you want behind closed doors but do not display it in public, because no one else wants to hear it and no one else wants to see it.

To this, of course, the Religionists have a response. They say to the Secularists, in effect, that when you tell us that religion is a private matter not to be brought into the “public square,” what you are declaring is that our religious beliefs are dirty laundry not to be aired in public. Who are you to decide this? The “public square” can contain anything in it, no matter how crazy or disgusting — it can contain Hippies, Communists, and pornography — but not a display of the Ten Commandments. It can contain the Piss Christ but not the nativity scene. Governmental schools can teach Marxist pseudohistory and “diversity training” but not prayer or faith-based opposition to gay marriage. Attacks on religion are permitted, but not acknowledgments of it. This, the Religionists say, is unjust — a violation of our rights to free exercise and free expression — and must stop.

Enter the Compromisers, which I suspect is the largest faction numerically. The Compromisers say that we live in a “pluralistic,” “multicultural” society, and what we need to do is balance the interests, rights, and values of members of competing factions. Obviously, there is no wall of separation between church and state, high and impregnable, in either direction. At most, to quote the words of Justice Burger — who, notice, is still speaking in metaphors and images — there is a line of separation which, “far from being a ‘wall,’ is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship.” Others talk of a “very permeable wall,” a wall “punctuated by checkpoints,” and a wall “with a few doors in it.”5 On this interpretation of Jefferson’s metaphor for what the First Amendment accomplishes, there is no principle which it symbolizes. There are only ongoing compromises and concessions made in the hope of satisfying opposing factions.

Is there freedom for religion, as the Religionists demand? Yes, answer the Compromisers. America is a predominantly religious country. America has a public religion, which it is appropriate if not crucial for the federal government to recognize. As Jon Meacham, former managing editor of Newsweek states the point: “public religion is consummately democratic. When a president says ‘God bless America’ . . . each American is free to define God in whatever way he chooses. A Christian’s mind may summon God the Father; a Jew’s, Yahweh; a Muslim’s, Allah; an atheist’s, no one, or no thing. Such diversity is not a prescription for dissension. It is part of the reality of creation.”6 What is the problem, the Compromisers in effect wonder, if one’s fellow Americans look at one suspiciously when one declares: “No thing bless America?” What is the problem if one is simply forced to acknowledge the reality of creation?

But is there also freedom from religion, as the Secularists demand? Yes, the Compromisers answer again. We need some religion in government, but not too much; obviously, we must not go to extremes. After all, Meacham tells us, the great problem of the twentieth century was totalitarianism, but so far the great problem of the twenty-first century is: extremism.7 How we are to know the proper amount of religion in politics is, of course, left unspecified.

We now have before us the contours of America’s popular cultural debate about church-state separation, a debate between the Religionists, the Secularists, and the Compromisers. I submit that no members of these factions understand what Jefferson’s metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state means because no one understands the principled, philosophical position that the metaphor is meant to capture. And having lost sight of the principle and its supporting arguments, people today are increasingly abandoning the metaphor as unhelpful and misleading, thereby letting crumble this crucial pillar of American freedom. It is past time to take a look beyond the metaphor to the principle it encapsulates and the arguments on behalf of that principle.

The Locke-Jefferson Case for Church-State Separation

I regard Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) as the seminal text for the American separation of church and state, and will treat it as such.8 Jefferson and Madison were familiar with Locke’s Letter and echo its language and arguments. They do, however, extend and generalize the argument in certain ways, particularly Jefferson, the Founding Father who is my focus here.

In essence Locke’s is a jurisdictional argument: if one understands the proper and limited jurisdiction and powers of a church and the proper and limited jurisdiction and powers of a state, one will recognize that there exists a wall of separation between church and state. Observe that we are already well beyond the terms of today’s cultural debate. Neither the Religionists nor the Secularists nor the Compromisers speak much about the proper delimited purpose and functions of the state. Today many people seem to think that the state can do virtually anything, so long as it respects and follows a democratic process. Someone who holds this will never accept or even understand the principle of church-state separation. If the state can provide medical insurance, bail out banks, fund the research of professors, and set the curriculum of primary and secondary governmental schools, why can it not also ban prayers in the schools it runs, aid faith-based charities, and fund a Billy Graham? If the government’s powers are virtually unlimited, then it can legitimately control virtually anything, so long as it follows the appropriate procedures; it is a mistake to think of it as, in principle, walled off from any area of life.

In contrast to this, Locke is concerned with defining and justifying the state’s proper purpose and functions, which in his view are highly delimited. His basic goal in the Letter, he tells us, is to identify the limited jurisdictions of both state and church: “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other” (1689 [1824], 9–10). When Locke accomplishes this, his conclusion is that “the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these societies” (21). It is certainly natural to describe Locke’s conclusion here as being that a wall of separation exists between church and state. With this basic framework in mind, let’s turn to his argument.

First, Locke has a definite conception of what the proper scope of government is. The state is not a Leviathan with unlimited power. It is an institution created by individuals to protect each person’s natural rights — to secure, on earth, each individual’s life, liberty, health, and property (10). The state’s legitimate powers are derived from this basic purpose. True, Locke does often speak of the public good, and it is not obvious that this notion is reducible to securing the rights of all the individuals involved. Nevertheless, the essence of his view remains that the state is created to protect the rights of the individual. A proper state, Locke argues in the Letter, does not have the power to tell us how best to live our lives in this world. The decisions of how to maintain our health and estate, to use Locke’s examples, are up to us: our own thought, judgment, reason and action (22–23).9 And if the state does not have this kind of power over our lives on earth, he says, it certainly does not have it in regard to the next world. As Locke puts it, the power of the state “neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls” (10).

This is Locke’s view of the proper jurisdiction and delimited power of the state: its function is nothing more and nothing less than to secure the rights of the individual citizens. Now consider a church. A church is simply a voluntary association of individuals who have chosen to come together to worship God in a certain fashion. We are all free to form or join a church, if we agree with its teachings, and free to leave, if we disagree (13–14). As a voluntary association in civil society, a church has no power to use force. Like any other voluntary association, it must use persuasion, argument, exhortation. Given this, Locke thinks there is not much reason for state and church to come into contact — any more than there is reason for state and, for example, voluntary chess clubs to come into contact. Consider why.

The job of the state, as we have seen, is not to take care of our lives in this world or of our souls in the next world. Both jobs are our responsibility, and we must possess the freedom of thought and action to carry them out. This implies that the state qua state has no business trying to teach, let alone to enforce, any doctrines about how to take care of our lives in this world or the next. The “business of law is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth, and of every particular man’s goods and person” (40). An aspect of this point is that the state also has no role in trying to ensure that citizens are acting as though they believed that this or that idea were true — that, for example, they are acting as though a carbohydrate-rich diet is superior to a protein-rich one or that Luther’s version of Christianity is superior to Calvin’s (18–19). Indeed, Locke holds that the attempt to enforce religious conformity is particularly wrongheaded. As is the case for any idea, we cannot coerce someone into understanding and accepting an idea he does not grasp firsthand to be true; all we can do is make him mouth the words or act as though he believed the idea. But in the case of religious doctrines, God obviously would grasp the hypocrisy of someone just mouthing the words or acting as though he believed them, and therefore it is particularly wrongheaded to think that we can save a man’s soul through coercion (10–11). Thus the state is not charged with the task of propagating or enforcing any doctrines, including religious ones, and in this respect will not come into contact, let alone conflict, with churches.

A church, on the other hand, is concerned with doctrine, specifically doctrines about the next world and salvation. But as a voluntary, private association it is not concerned with protecting an individual’s rights and worldly goods from encroachment by the actions of others — that is what the state properly does, as the agency of coercion. In essence, therefore, the state has no business scrutinizing what goes on inside a church qua church — and a church has no business trying to wield the state’s coercive power. There exists, in principle, a wall of separation between state and church. But this principle does not mean that church and state are literally cut off from each other, with no contact at all. In particular, a church is not like the grounds of a foreign embassy.

Basically, Locke argues that for any action which does not violate the rights of an individual, every individual or voluntary association of individuals is free to perform that action, including a church. But for any action that does violate the rights of the individual, no individual or group is free to perform that action, including every church (34–36). Thus, to use Locke’s examples, a church can sacrifice a calf as part of a religious ceremony. But it cannot sacrifice a human being (34). And when the state intervenes in a church’s affairs to stop human sacrifice, it is not policing religious doctrine but only protecting the rights of an individual against actions that encroach upon them. In other words, the state does not care why a church is trying to murder a person, whether it be for religious reasons or not; it only cares that a church is trying to murder someone, irrespective of the reason.

This broaches a wider issue. Locke notes that many people think state and church must come into constant contact and become intertwined because both state and church seek to promote morality and moral action. But they do this in fundamentally different ways, Locke argues (41–43).

First, churches may promote morality only by voluntary means. To live a good life in this world, and certainly with a view to our eternal happiness, requires that we be inwardly convinced that what we are doing is right — and that we are doing it precisely because it is right. This conviction cannot be coerced. We must have liberty of conscience. So a church, like every other person and association, must respect the individual’s right of conscience: in the realm of morality a church can try to teach and persuade, but it must not reach for a sword.

Second, the morality and goodness of one’s own life is not at the mercy of other people’s choices. In this world we should not care, Locke says, if our neighbor lives a bad life. We should not care if he eats too much, spends too much on remodeling his house, or drinks his money away in a bar. The pain and suffering from his errors and irrationalities will be his, not ours. Our rights and freedom to live remain intact. Likewise, Locke says, why should we care if our neighbor is committing sins against God and thus jeopardizing his soul in the next world? That is his problem, not ours; he is the one going to hell, not us. So long as we retain the liberty of conscience to ensure that what we are doing is right, we are safe; no recourse to government is necessary.

This implies that, third, the state promotes morality only in the sense of protecting the rights of the individual, including his liberty of conscience. In effect, the state preserves the conditions in which we can each live a good life, but we then, as individuals, have to take advantage of those conditions. Thus Locke’s position is that even though both church and state are concerned with promoting morality, they must do so in fundamentally different ways. A church is concerned with teaching and propagating moral doctrines; the state is not. The state is concerned with protecting by force an individual’s rights, including liberty of conscience; a church is not. And so long as an individual’s rights are respected, he need not worry about the moral stature of others in regard to this world or the next. State and church therefore remain fundamentally separate, each in a principled way walled off from the other.

This is Locke’s basic account of the principle of church-state separation in his Letter.

I now want to highlight two crucial ideas that Locke is counting on for his argument, in order both to appreciate the scope of the argument and, much more importantly, to indicate why Locke would be so concerned, from the perspective of establishing a proper government, to separate church from state. The first, obvious point is that Locke’s argument rests on him having an account of natural or individual rights and of the state’s essential function as securer and protector of these rights; both of these issues are discussed in the Second Treatise, though the latter issue more so than the former. The second and less obvious point is that Locke’s argument rests on a definite conception of what religion and God are. This point is worth exploring in a bit more detail.

Locke, as we have seen, argues that the salvation of one’s soul is independent from other people’s actions. This viewpoint conflicts with many other religious approaches. What would happen, for instance, if I told a Taliban leader that he should stop beating up women for showing their skin? I point out to him that even if these women are sinning against God it has no effect on him and the salvation of his soul. Now if this Taliban warrior decided to answer me instead of immediately slitting my throat, I think he would answer thus: “Of course it affects me! God demands obedience from everyone. He demands that we all carry out His will. If I don’t enforce obedience to Allah by everyone, He will strike me down!” If I replied that God does not want blind, unreasoning obedience, that a woman has to be inwardly persuaded that God would want her to cover up, and that this reasoned conviction has to be why she will not show her skin in public — how would the Taliban leader answer me? “Reasoned conviction? Persuasion? She has to be convinced by reasons and evidence!? I didn’t need these things to embrace Islam! Why should she? What she needs is to fear and obey. And my knife is pretty effective at generating fear and obedience!”

Now, of course, I don’t think this sort of religious mentality is restricted to the Taliban; it has characterized many religious movements across the centuries. But it is not Locke’s attitude; his approach to religion is light-years from this type. Locke does believe in God and in two worlds, but each world is rational and orderly. For Locke, in effect, God is a powerful but rational overlord. Reason constrains Him. Locke’s attitude in the Letter is basically that God would not be so unreasonable as to make the salvation of our souls depend on blind faith or on the choices and actions of other people, over which we have no control. To do so would be to create an irrational universe.

For Locke, our lives in this world are between each of us and nature. We each have to use our reason to work and produce and live well; so long as our rights are protected, we need not be concerned with the choices and actions of other people and the mess they may make of their own lives. Similarly, our lives in the next world are between each of us and God. In regard to this realm too we each have to use our reason and conscience to do what we think is right. And we need not be concerned with the religious choices and actions of other people, including any sins against God that they may commit, because a rational God would never make the salvation of our soul depend on preventing or rectifying other people’s sinful actions. Thus the root of Locke’s particular approach to religion is the supremacy he gives to reason. He is not at the point of discarding faith entirely. But he subordinates it to reason. “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.”10 And this emphatically includes matters of faith. “Reason and faith [are] not opposite, for faith must be regulated by reason” (Essay IV 17 § 24). But if faith is not the opposite of reason, what is it?

Basically, faith is the acceptance of an idea as true because God has revealed it. Revelation means getting a message from God, which cannot contradict reason but which can supplement it. But even if God sends the message directly to you — you have to rationally judge whether the message is in fact from God. Locke suggests that it is pretty hard to get the evidence necessary to be convinced that God is communicating with you. Why is it so hard to be rationally convinced of this? Because there are two other possibilities. It could be Satan who is communicating with you. Or, and Locke suggests this is the much more typical case, it could just be a whim of yours, that you really, really want to believe — and so you pretend to yourself that it is the word of God. This last is an aspect of what Locke calls Enthusiasm, which he dislikes. He hates all those people who, devoid of rational arguments for their position, “cry out, It is a matter of faith, and above reason” (Essay IV 18 § 2). About this Tertullian kind of religious mentality (namely, the “We believe it because it is absurd” crowd) Locke says, in his sober way, that this “is a very ill rule to choose their opinions or religion by” (§ 11).

Locke further argues that it is this kind of mentality — a mentality that betrays its own rational nature, a mentality that subordinates reason to whim — that will coerce others. This kind of person, Locke says, “does violence to his own faculties, tyrannizes over his own mind, and usurps the prerogative that belongs to truth alone.” The kind of person who abuses and tyrannizes his own mind, will abuse and tyrannize the minds of others. As Locke asks rhetorically: “Who can reasonably expect arguments . . . from him in dealing with others, whose understanding is not accustomed to [arguments] in dealing with himself?” (Essay IV 19 § 2).

This I think is a profound insight. And it points to both the deeper reason and the deeper way in which Locke separates church from state. The very purpose of the state is grounded in reason — for Locke, man’s natural rights are connected to the fact that man is a rational being. And the formulation and execution of laws, Locke stresses in the Second Treatise, must be done in accordance with reason. There is no room for Enthusiasm in how the coercive power of the state will be deployed in society. To give Enthusiasm such room would be to create a government with arbitrary power and thereby to descend into tyranny. The extent to which churches and religions are dominated by Enthusiasm (and Locke seems to think this happens a fair amount) is the extent to which it is vital to ensure that churches and religions have no say in controlling or directing the use of force in society. Government must be the province of reason, not Enthusiasm.

With all this in mind, let us turn to Jefferson and Madison’s implementation of the principle of church-state separation. They build on this entire Lockean philosophical foundation. They accept Locke’s principle of church-state separation and extend it. They essentially agree with Locke that the state’s proper jurisdiction is to protect the rights of the individual from encroachment by the actions of others, and nothing more. A proper and limited state, therefore, as the point was often expressed, takes no cognizance of religion. They also essentially agree that religion is a personal matter between oneself and God — between “me and my Maker” as Jefferson often states the point; other people’s sins are their problem, not yours. They agree that religion and blind faith are unnecessary to run a proper government and a threat to it; only the idea of individual rights and the guidance of reason are needed. And they agree that reason has supremacy over faith. They demand the freedom to follow the dictates of conscience, as it was often expressed. To them this means to follow reason and (moral) conviction, and not to be coerced. An individual’s conscience, properly, should yield only to evidence and arguments, not Enthusiasm.

Where they extend Locke’s argument is specifically in regard to the idea of liberty of conscience, of which I think Jefferson has the most profound grasp. He seems to see most clearly that the issue of liberty of conscience is, more fundamentally, the issue of freedom of thought, or intellectual freedom, as such. The fundamental issue is the government’s power to persecute or to establish, to penalize or to promote — that is, to police — ideas as such. Religious and moral ideas are but an instance of this. An implication of this fact, as both Jefferson and Madison realize, is that contra Locke a proper government does not tolerate this or that idea or voluntary association, religious or otherwise. The government possesses no power to outlaw any idea or voluntary intellectual association, however morally “intolerable” the idea or association may be. The use of the phrase “religious toleration” at best obscures this fact and at worst implies that a proper government does possess such power — as it still does for Locke: in his Letter atheists are not to be tolerated.

On the Jeffersonian view, by contrast, the government’s jurisdiction, to use Locke’s term, is not ideas but actions, period. In the letter in which Jefferson coins his metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state, he writes that “the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions.”11 He states elsewhere that even though ideas produce actions, the state can intervene only when “principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.”12 The government’s proper power extends “to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”13 Further, he says, our civil rights do not depend “on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”14 He argues that it is not the state’s prerogative to establish ideas about religious matters, or ideas about proper medicine and diet, or ideas about physics, such as censoring Galileo’s discoveries or establishing Descartes’s theory of vortexes. Jefferson maintains that intellectual freedom requires — in his language — that the operations of the mind are not subject to the coercion of the laws.15

Thus Jefferson holds that it is no accident that the First Amendment contains the content that it does, and that it addresses not just religion, but freedom of speech and freedom of the press as well, because what the First Amendment is doing is protecting intellectual freedom as such. Whatever violates any aspect of the First Amendment, Jefferson writes, “throws down the sanctuary which covers the others.”16

With all of this in mind, Locke’s articulation of both the principle of church-state separation and the arguments in its support together with Jefferson’s broadening of the principle’s scope and meaning, let us consider again Jefferson’s metaphor of a wall of separation. Fundamentally, it means more than the idea that a wall of separation exists between church and state; it means that a wall of separation exists between the state and, to use Jefferson’s language, man’s opinions, religious or otherwise. To say that the church is walled off from the state is a shorthand way of saying that the state is to take no cognizance of an individual’s ideas, religious or otherwise. The state’s concern is only with an individual’s actions, specifically with any actions that trespass on the rights of other individuals, irrespective of the particular ideas generating those actions. The state should neither penalize nor tolerate nor promote any ideas — it should be fundamentally unconcerned with and neutral toward the ideas individuals hold. And from the other direction, to say that the state is walled off from the church, means that a citizen, including any voluntary association of them, such as a church, is walled off from using the state’s coercive power either to penalize or to promote ideas, religious or otherwise. If an individual wants to hinder or support an idea, he must argue his case with others and try to persuade them to adopt the idea — not enact a law. Moreover, to say that the state is walled off from the church means there is no room for faith to dictate the terms, purpose, or functioning of government; these are solely the province of reason.

Whether Jefferson (and Madison) consistently held to this position and its logical implications and applications is a separate issue, which I am not here focusing on; I believe, for instance, that just as there is a contradiction in Locke’s basic argument in his Letter and its attitude toward atheists, so there is a contradiction between Jefferson’s argument for church-state separation and his support for public education. Although I will briefly return to this issue below, my central point is to capture the principle that Jefferson was advancing. His metaphor of a wall of separation is meant to capture a principled position, which he argues for by extending and generalizing Locke’s basic argument in the Letter.

Rand’s Development of the Locke-Jefferson Case for Separation

As Jefferson (and Madison) sought to deepen, broaden, and render more consistent Locke’s argument for church-state separation, so Rand seeks to do the same with theirs. On her account the principle rests, fundamentally, on the need to embrace reason as an absolute in both thought and action.

This means, first, that whereas Locke and Jefferson give supremacy to reason over faith and posit a supernatural realm governed by rational considerations, Rand discards all appeal to faith and the supernatural. Neither Locke nor Jefferson is able to demonstrate that God or a supernatural dimension exists, let alone that God is a rational overlord and that religious morality is an affair exclusively between “me and my Maker.” In the end, the existence of God and a supernatural realm must be accepted on faith. And as we have seen, someone like a Taliban warrior whose “faith” tells him something very different about the nature of God and of religious morality will reject the notion that God is constrained by reason and that He does not command us to intervene coercively when other people sin. Rand eliminates from the argument for church-state separation all appeals to the supernatural and to faith, even if it is only a faith that somehow “supplements” reason. She argues that the notion of the supernatural — of something “transcending” existence, identity, causality, and human consciousness, that is, of something “transcending” nature — is incoherent.17 And reason permits no “supplementation” by faith. On her view, it is never rational to embrace an idea or perform an action without some evidence supporting the idea or action. Faith, she maintains — “belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason” — “is the negation of reason.”18 Accordingly, Rand dismisses all knowledge claims that rest directly or indirectly on the notion of the supernatural as attempts to integrate the incoherent, and she places all faith-based assertions into the special category of the arbitrary.19

For Rand, therefore, even more so than for Jefferson, the issue is not religious freedom, as though there were some special freedom pertaining to a supernatural realm and to (supplementary) guidance by faith. The issue is intellectual freedom. The argument for freedom rests solely on the nature and requirements of reason to grasp and navigate this (natural) world. Nor does Rand appeal in her argument to the “rights” or “dictates” of conscience. Insofar as these dictates pertain to the supernatural and supposedly supplement reason, Rand rejects their existence. Insofar as these dictates refer to choice in accordance with moral principles and convictions, Rand regards this as an aspect of reason. Going further than Locke (and Madison and Jefferson), she views “the will” as an aspect of the faculty of reason and views moral knowledge as a species of scientific knowledge: ethics is a science that studies and defines the fundamental values an individual must seek and the fundamental virtues he must practice in order to thrive.20

Thus when Rand writes that reason and force are opposites — that a “rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone’s orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone’s opinions, threats, wishes. . . . Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this attitude is Galileo.)” — it is important to keep in mind that for Rand this principle encompasses both science and morality.21

It encompasses both, because for Rand, as I have said, reason and will are not two separate faculties. Rather, the faculty of reason sets an individual’s goals and values and determines the ways in which he will pursue them, all of which is done by a volitional process of thought and subsequent action:

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality — or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.22

The attempt to coercively override or bypass a person’s will is the attempt to override or bypass his reason. Or, looking at the same issue from a positive perspective, the choice to activate his conceptual mind and embrace reason — as against evading the facts of reality and the need for thought — is, according to Rand, the root of moral good and evil. The central principle of Rand’s philosophy is that reason is man’s basic means of survival. The essence of morality is the acceptance of reason as an absolute, the passionate quest for knowledge and the commitment to enact this knowledge in the pursuit of one’s own life and happiness. The root moral choice, the existence of which grounds a valid notion of conscience, is the choice to think or not. To betray one’s conscience is to betray one’s mind:

You who speak of a “moral instinct” as if it were some separate endowment opposed to reason — man’s reason is his moral faculty. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? — Right or Wrong? . . . A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest — but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.23

Coercion, then, for Rand is a negation of an individual’s reason, will, and moral conscience because these are all perspectives on the unity that is a properly functioning rational faculty. As Rand briefly summarizes her point, “Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”24 On this approach, the concept of individual rights is formulated precisely to extract coercion from human relationships. The concept is grounded not in the supernatural, Rand argues, but in the “social recognition of man’s rational nature — of the connection between his survival and his use of reason” and thus “preserves and protects individual morality in a social context” by defining the areas in which the individual must be sovereign, free to think and act — free to reason and produce.25

From this fundamental perspective, Rand maintains, the arguments for intellectual freedom and economic freedom share the same root: the requirements of the rational mind to guide the individual. In the realm of thought, this means that the government must not have the power to penalize or promote ideas. As Rand expresses the principle, in terms similar to Jefferson’s, “Since an individual has the right to hold and to propagate any ideas he chooses (obviously including political ideas), the government may not infringe his right; it may neither penalize nor reward him for his ideas; it may not take any judicial cognizance whatever of his ideology. . . . Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime.”26 Rand explicitly extends this principle to the entire realm of thought, including education, scientific research, and the arts, arguing that governmental schools, governmental funding of scientific research, and governmental funding of the arts violate the individual’s right to intellectual freedom.27 Thus she rejects both Locke’s claim that the government should not tolerate atheists and Jefferson’s desire to establish public schools in part so that the people would have the education necessary to safeguard their liberty. In order for the entire realm of ideas to be fully free from coercion, the government must have no power in any way to penalize or promote ideas as such, even if those ideas are necessary for proper government or civilization itself. A “proper government is based on a definite philosophy,” Leonard Peikoff writes in presenting Rand’s conception of intellectual freedom, “but it can play no role in promoting that philosophy.”28

The same essential point follows, Rand maintains, in the realm of production: the government must not have the power to penalize or promote any form of economic activity or organization. This is why she says that there should be a separation of economics and state in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of church and state. The root of industrial production, Rand argues, is abstract thought. “Production,” she writes, “is the application of reason to the problem of survival.”29 “Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions — and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.”30 For thought fully to be free, Rand argues, the realm of production must be free. Or, stating the same point negatively, all governmental controls over and interventions into the individual’s productive activities (and of his ensuing consumption and voluntary trading) are instances of penalizing or promoting ideas.

Take the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an example. Among the FDA’s activities are determining which drugs a doctor can legally prescribe, which drugs a patient can purchase, and how a company must test and manufacture pharmaceuticals. What if an individual doctor thinks that a particular drug, although banned by the FDA and not without risks, is worth the risk for a particular set of patients? The doctor is not free to act. What if, within this set of patients, some of them judge that they would like to take the drug? They are not free to act. What if a company argues that the way the FDA wants it to test its drugs is wasteful? Or what if it concludes that there is a better way to test for safety or efficacy? Or what if it has invented a whole new process of manufacturing pharmaceuticals, unapproved by the FDA? It is not free to act. In prohibiting actions like the taking of an experimental medicine, the government is effectively banning the thought processes and ideas that generate the action and is discarding the principle that reason is the individual’s basic means of survival. And in promoting (commanding) actions such as how to manufacture a drug, the government is effectively proscribing alternative thought processes and ideas that could generate alternative productive actions. The freedom to produce is a crucial aspect of the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. If the purpose of individual rights is to preserve and protect individual morality in a social context, the two realms that, above all else, must be protected are those of thought and production. Politically, there should exist a separation of church and state (the issue of intellectual freedom) and, for the same reasons, there should exist a separation of economics and state (the issue of economic freedom).

And the idea of “separation” designates the same thing in the economic sphere as in the intellectual sphere — that is, the spheres should be separated in the same way. To say that there is a separation of state from economics is to say that the state is walled off from taking cognizance of another aspect of man’s life-sustaining activities: not only of his abstract thoughts but also of his productive actions. The state neither tolerates nor persecutes nor promotes any form of production or trade. It is not the state’s prerogative to decide whether it should tolerate that Microsoft includes an Internet browser within its operating system — or to decide whether to persecute a firm because it consulted some competitors when setting what prices it would charge — or to decide whether to promote domestic automakers or individual homeowners. All of these activities should be left to the voluntary decisions of the individuals involved. And it is certainly not the prerogative of the state to act as a central planner, trying to “control” and “steer” the entire economy by, say, manipulating the money supply. The job of the state is to secure and protect the individual’s ability to think, produce, and trade, not to try to curtail this activity or to direct it toward some allegedly noble goals that transcend the individual’s own life and pursuit of happiness. Only if the state is so restricted is the individual’s rational, productive mind truly free.

From the other direction, to say that there is a separation of economics from state is to say that every economic actor — be it an employer or an employee, a capitalist or a consumer — is walled off from using the state’s coercive power to stop economic activity he dislikes or to promote economic activity he likes. No one can enact his economic doctrines into law. No one can declare that given my economic views, there should be tariffs on foreign steel producers and subsidies for US corn producers; or that a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile should be legally prevented but a merger between HP and Compaq should be allowed; or that gold should be outlawed as money. If a citizen wants to try to implement his economic views and theories, he must do so privately and voluntarily, seeking as necessary the agreement and cooperation of other individuals. He can stop buying foreign steel and try to convince others to do the same; he can donate his money to US corn producers; he can stop using gold as money and encourage others to do likewise; he can set up a voluntary socialist commune and try to persuade other people to join. But what he cannot do is use the power of the state to override the productive judgment and activities of others. Only if one’s fellow citizens are so restricted from gaining control of the coercive power of the state is one’s rational, productive mind truly free.

For Rand, therefore, freedom forms a unity whose roots are the full requirements of man’s rational mind. As she states her point in a crucial formulation: “Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”31 This principle, that a free mind and a free market are corollaries, Rand regards as the full philosophical extension of the reasoning that led, first, to the principle of church-state separation. Seen from this perspective, the principle that a free mind and a free market are corollaries is the culmination of the Enlightenment’s intellectual quest for freedom.

Why are supporters of President Trump’s war with Iran seeking the sanction of medieval Catholic theology and bickering with the pope?

Vice President Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and sundry other commentators have now invoked “just war theory” to defend the president against Pope Leo XIV’s criticisms of the war.¹ Their “gotcha” attempts seem to aim at catching the pope in an inconsistency. In reality they reflect the administration’s failure to justify what is truly a righteous war against Iran. Invoking the religious doctrine is a futile and defensive measure that will only undercut the war effort.

Since Trump launched this war, his rationale has shifted dramatically, from helping the protesters foster regime change and the “unconditional surrender” of the Islamic Republic to merely dismantling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.2 But he’s failed to explain why any of these objectives justifies American blood and treasure.

What he should have stressed from the beginning is that Iran’s 47 years of aggression against American citizens, soldiers, and allies long ago gave America an absolute right of self-defense to eliminate the threat of the Iranian regime.

Contrary to conventional thinking, the Christian “just war theory” does not allow this justification.

Pacifism — the idea that war cannot be justified even in self-defense — has long been the core of the Christian approach to war. This is no “leftist” innovation by the pope. The Catholic Catechism invokes Jesus’s injunction to love your enemies, and the Sermon on the Mount’s beatitude “blessed are the peacemakers.”3 The pope’s sermons are laced with references to Jesus as the “King of Peace,” who told his disciples to put away their swords even to defend him, as he gave himself up to be crucified.4 Christianity’s pacificism comes straight out of its morality of humility and self-sacrifice.

It’s true that the Catechism also contains provisions about “just war.” But it’s noteworthy that the elements of “just war theory” were first proposed by St. Augustine centuries after Jesus. In fact, Augustine had no real “theory” to speak of, just scattered passages sometimes allowing for war, contradicting his earlier denunciations of it in City of God.5 By this time the Church had finally achieved political power and had to fight wars to maintain it. This modest permission represented a compromise between the Christian faith and reality.

But even as Augustine allowed for some war, he never wandered far from his deeply Christian roots. In one letter, he writes: “As to killing others in order to defend one’s own life, I do not approve of this, unless one happen to be a soldier or public functionary acting, not for himself, but in defense of others or of the city in which he resides.”6 This denies a right to actual self-defense, allowing only for self-sacrificial defense of others — the humble, self-sacrificial approach to war. Subsequent formalizations of the notion made this clear, dramatically limiting even a victim of aggression to fighting back only “proportionally” and only as a “last resort.”

Trump is not the first president to humbly defer to just war theory’s irrational restrictions. American foreign policy has done it for decades. It was just war theory that guided us toward fighting “nation-building” wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which we prioritized dropping humanitarian aid, not bombs. It demanded that our troops be hindered and endangered by self-sacrificial rules of engagement, tying their hands against dangerous enemies. The fact that we’ve waited half a century to respond to Iran’s many acts of aggression is because we have, indeed, treated war as a “last resort.”

Given this history, there’s no chance just war theory would support a war in which American citizens and soldiers watch in relative safety as Iranians are targeted in response to the threat their Islamist regime has long posed.

And it’s also pointless to debate the applicability of the doctrine to the Iran war. There are no facts that will settle the question of whether, under just war theory doctrine, a particular war is being fought in a “proportionate” manner, as “a last resort,” or with a “good intention.” Not when what counts as “too much” and “too soon” are evaluated against someone’s faith-infused idea of what is “good” to achieve. (Anyway, Vance and Johnson are out of their depth in a debate with Pope Leo XIV about the relevance of Christian humility to its views on war — Leo wrote his dissertation on Augustine’s views of political authority.7)

Politicians’ last ditch eagerness to gain the sanction of religion will only undercut the war effort. One report suggests that the White House actually actively lobbied Vatican diplomats to join the campaign for the war.8 This betrayed a deep defensiveness and lack of independent moral clarity. If the president needs to secure the blessing of the Roman pontiff, and dares not challenge his basic premises, what chance does he have to understand let alone defeat the even more fanatically religious ayatollahs?

Citizens of a free republic rightfully demand their government’s accountability for its decisions to go to war. Obviously, questions of life and death should not be left to anyone’s whim-driven discretion. President Trump has already failed to secure the approval of Congress for this war. He adds insult to injury when instead of giving reasons to a deliberative, elective body, his supporters instead express their faith to impress a foreign cleric.

A morally principled American commander in chief does not traffic in humble faith. He should stand proud for his nation’s right to self-defense on the fully secular moral grounds of protecting its citizens’ individual rights to life and liberty.

We are being pushed to take a bow for a new revolution. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and cadres of journalists and theoreticians have made it their mission to revive the case for socialism.

But didn’t the case for socialism die with the collapse of the Soviet Union and other socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in the 1990s? Not according to the new socialists. The socialism they champion is supposedly new and improved. This time, they say, the socialism they champion is democratic.

When advocates of a political ideology that has so far led to the deaths of tens of millions of people claim that this time it will be different, there’s a heavy burden of proof for thinking they are not advocates of more slaughter. I don’t think the burden can be discharged. In the end, democratic socialism is only superficially different from the socialism that was pushed, bloodily, on its twentieth-century victims.

The meaning of “democratic socialism”

What is democratic socialism, and how is it supposed to be any different?

When asked by Stephen Colbert about what she means by “democratic socialism,” Ocasio-Cortez answered: “what that means to me is health care as a human right. It means that every child no matter where you are born should have access to a college or trade school education if they so choose it.”¹ In a recent prominent campaign speech, Bernie Sanders gives a similar list of policies and concludes, “in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights. That is what I mean by democratic socialism.”2

Bear in mind the mechanism by which both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders would implement these “economic rights.” “Medicare for all” would abolish private insurance, giving government de facto control of the health care industry.3 Sanders’s “College for All” program would push even private colleges to accept more federal funds, hastening the day when the distinction between private and public colleges would come to nothing.4 The new socialist politicians really do advocate state ownership of some of the “commanding heights” of the modern economy.5

Why think that increasing state control of the economy is “democratic”? Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder and publisher of Jacobin magazine, claims in a recent book that “democratic socialism” is a redundancy: socialism, he thinks, simply extends the concept of democracy from the political to the economic realm. In the more consistent socialist vision he advocates, all firms should be owned by the state and controlled by workers, who would all receive a share of their firm’s profits and elect members of a worker’s council and a managing director to run the company. Unemployed workers would be supported by state welfare programs. Such a system would be “the world’s first truly democratic society.”6 The “economic rights” advocated by the new socialist politicians would clearly push us in the direction of realizing this “ideal.”

In advancing this point, Sunkara makes explicit what the politicians often do not: that real democratic socialism goes well beyond the Scandinavian “social democracies.” Though these systems offer significant welfare payments, they have lately been moving to privatize more state-controlled industries.7 Both Sunkara and the politicians want to push in the direction of greater state control.

“Democracy” disambiguated

What will prevent the democratic socialism that Sunkara advocates from exhibiting the authoritarian tyranny of Soviet-style socialism? The answer typically given is that the state ownership will be subject to “democratic control.”

This answer relies on a confusion about the meaning of “democracy.”

“Democracy” originally meant the system of unlimited majority rule, as in ancient Athens, in which every citizen would vote on important decisions governing the city. This is the system that voted to execute Socrates, the kind of tyranny of the majority which the U.S. Constitution was designed to safeguard against. Why is anyone fooled into thinking that socialism will be any better just because it involves tyranny of the many rather than tyranny of the few?

Through various linguistic twists and turns, in modern usage “democracy” has come to mean a political system involving elections while offering some protections for individual rights. This gives the term a more positive connotation. But this redefinition stems from the confusion that the right to vote is the hallmark of a free society. Voting is an important safeguard of individual rights insofar as it serves as a check against a tyrannical government. But it can do this job only in the context of the rule of law, only when laws protecting individual rights cannot be voted away by the majority.8

Revealingly, Sunkara admits that the “democracy” he advocates amounts to unlimited majority rule, when he criticizes the American Founding Fathers for having intentionally subverted democracy. He cites a passage from James Madison’s Federalist No. 10, in which Madison bemoans democracies for generating “turbulence and contention” that negate the individual’s right to property.9 Madison recommends a republican form of government rather than one that allows a majority faction to violate the rights of the minority. Sunkara opposes Madison’s republican constitution in favor of this majority factionalism.

The democratic threat to freedom

Sunkara and other democratic socialists will likely respond that in the system they advocate, they would still insist on protection of basic “human rights,” just not property rights. But can these rights be separated? Ayn Rand argued otherwise. As a refugee from Soviet communism herself, Rand was a direct witness to the manner in which the abrogation of property rights violated basic individual freedoms:

Socialism is merely democratic absolute monarchy — that is, a system of absolutism without a fixed head, open to seizure of power by all comers, by any ruthless climber, opportunist, adventurer, demagogue or thug.

When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.10

To understand this point, consider the freedom of speech. Does a man have this freedom if he cannot own pen and paper, or a press, or a computer? If individuals must first secure the permission of the relevant council of writers or publishers before they can use these “means of production,” how can they be free to speak? A permission is not a right.

Democratic socialists might respond that it’s only big firms that would need to be democratically governed; private individuals could still own their pens and paper. But how big can an individual’s operation become before it is taken over by the state? Presumably, that question would itself be left up to majority vote. A system in which one’s peers vote to decide how much property one can keep (and how effective one’s speech can be) is not a system of inalienable rights or a system in which one’s life is one’s own.

In actual historical practice, every major socialist system that began with voting by councils eventually transitioned to more authoritarian central control. Sunkara’s Socialist Manifesto itself gives ample evidence of this. The bulk of the book is devoted to a history of failed socialist movements around the world. Sunkara celebrates the short-lived Paris Commune in 1871. Though he neglects to mention how the Paris Commune went as far as to impose censorship and execute dissidents, he does speak favorably of how Marx thought it didn’t go far enough to seize control. We hear of how the moderate Social Democratic Party rose to power in Germany by having members of the rival (but formerly allied) Spartacus League murdered. We hear of how life during the Russian civil war was too chaotic for worker councils to retain control of factories, so central planning was necessary. We hear of how when peasants clung to their grain and kept prices low, Stalin collectivized their farms without the benefit of putting it to a vote, causing millions to starve. We of course hear of the bloody Stalinist purges of fellow communists and of the murderous chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.11

Leave aside times of war: even during peacetime, governing an entire complex society by direct majority rule is difficult if not impossible. Political power has to be invested in representatives and centralized authorities. When a government’s purpose is not to protect the rights of each individual, but to implement the undefinable “will of the people,” factions within the government invariably struggle with each other for the title of representatives of the people. As Ayn Rand puts it, “Since the concept [of “the public interest”] is so conveniently undefinable, its use rests only on any given gang’s ability to proclaim that ‘The public, c’est moi’ — and to maintain the claim at the point of a gun.”12

The inherent brutality of collectivism

As the history of strife among socialist activists and the bloody party purges in Russia and China demonstrate, history’s socialist movements were unable to govern themselves peacefully. Why think that the winners of internal socialist turf wars who then wrest control over a society of those who disagree with them would not treat dissidents even more brutally?

Consider the kind of revolution Sunkara himself calls for. He maintains that “lawbreaking and sabotage . . . [are] hallmarks of any worthwhile labor militancy,” and urges today’s socialists to create “pressure” for change through “street protests and strike actions” that “force businesses to make concessions to reformers once they are elected.”13

Sunkara more generally urges today’s socialists to shy away from mere political reform and to instead push for widespread class struggle. Indeed, he celebrates Bernie Sanders’s campaign precisely because he sees his rhetoric about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent as inciting just such class conflict. But when someone proposes political change through the clash of rival collectives, why should it be a surprise if individuals are trampled upon in the process? Though Sunkara insists that he abhors the crimes of the socialist movements of the past, he resists any effort to see how these crimes were justified by the very collectivist ideology he endorses.

We should turn one last time to the observations of Ayn Rand, who worked to identify the underlying essence of the ideology that led to these crimes:

The essential characteristic of socialism is the denial of individual property rights; under socialism, the right to property . . . is vested in “society as a whole,” i.e., in the collective, with production and distribution controlled by the state, i.e., by the government.

Socialism may be established by force, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — or by vote, as in Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. The degree of socialization may be total, as in Russia — or partial, as in England. Theoretically, the differences are superficial; practically, they are only a matter of time. The basic principle, in all cases, is the same.

The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure — terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.

Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.14

Today’s “democratic socialists” say they want to avoid the terrifying failures of the last century. To evaluate their sincerity, consider their attitude toward the Chavista government in Venezuela, a regime that was originally democratically elected. Ocasio-Cortez refuses to denounce the current regime in Venezuela and said the situation there is “complex.” Sanders argued that the regime has now become undemocratic, but even still refuses to call President Maduro a dictator. And though Sunkara says much about the crimes of twentieth-century socialism, he simply ignores Venezuela, whose experiment with socialism Sunkara’s Jacobin defended for years, until only recently.15

Why, when socialists endorse the same collectivist ideas that have always led to tyranny, should we listen? In this latest socialist revolution, let’s not get fooled again.

When Vice President JD Vance was recently heckled for supporting genocide in Gaza, it was made clear that even after the war in Gaza has wound down, the charge that Israel is a genocidal state still lives.¹ The International Court of Justice is still investigating Israel. Advocacy groups across Europe have opened criminal complaints against their governments for complicity in genocide for supporting Israel with arms.2 And the charge has now been resuscitated about Israel’s recent actions against Lebanon.3

This charge, often delivered with fervor and hatred that barely masks anti-Israel prejudice, carries enormous moral weight for many people as it invites comparisons to the Holocaust. Let’s break down why this claim has no basis in reality.

The Holocaust is the paradigmatic case of genocide. Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews and millions of others.4 What distinguished this massacre from others?

Genocide has a specific motivation: Perpetrators of genocide judge certain groups to be inherently superior to others.5 The Nazis believed that Jews and others were corrupting the German race through intermarriage. From this warped perspective, the mass deportation and murder of millions of innocent and unarmed people was rationalized by the Nazis as an act of self-defense.

But of course the Jews posed no real threat of violence to anyone in Germany, none that could possibly justify removing them by force. Instead, they were merely an obstacle in the way of the perverse goal of racial purification. Thus, in reality, genocide is not any kind of “self-defense” but unprovoked aggression against innocent individuals.

By contrast, Hamas has long posed a military and terrorist threat against Israel, since its founding in 1987. Since it consolidated dictatorial rule in Gaza in 2007, it’s launched numerous rocket attacks on Israel. On October 7th, 2023, their operatives invaded Israel, murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 hostages. It was the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history. Israel rightfully demanded the immediate return of the hostages, and Hamas refused. Israel did not want war: It wanted to hold the perpetrators of October 7th responsible for their crimes, and to allow its citizens to continue with their lives in a free society. In stark contrast with the Nazi genocide, Israel’s war was truly motivated by self-defense.

The attack by Hamas on October 7th, on the other hand, was genuinely genocidal: It aimed at killing Jews and at destroying the nation of Israel out of religiously inspired antisemitic hatred. The 1988 Hamas Charter cites Islamic texts: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.”6 Sickeningly, Hamas frames the killing of Jews as virtuous and deserving of divine reward, and teaches children in schools that Jews are inherently corrupt, violent, and treacherous.7 All of this aims at fomenting ongoing hatred against Jews, using antisemitic tropes, such as claims of global financial manipulation and warmongering. They eerily echo Nazi propaganda.

Moreover, to the extent that civilians in Gaza suffer from the war, it is the moral responsibility of Hamas. It initiated a barbaric attack, leading Israel to retaliate in self-defense. Further, Hamas treats Palestinians as mere pawns to be sacrificed in their religious and racial war. Hamas orders Gazans to ignore Israeli evacuation orders, intentionally putting them in harm’s way, and uses houses, schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure as command centers or arms depots.

By contrast, Israel clearly has no such mission to kill all Palestinians: It sought the destruction of Hamas. If Israel did want to kill all the Palestinians in Gaza, it could do so easily, by simply smothering Gaza with bombs indiscriminately. Instead, Israel minimizes violence against noncombatants, via humanitarian corridors, bomb warnings, and the use of precision weapons. I would argue that Israel goes too far in attempting to protect enemy civilians. But even if you thought Israel’s military tactics were unjust, this would still provide no basis for the charge of genocide.

The charge of Israeli genocide is morally corrupt. It requires an incredible series of evasions. It evades that Israel’s motivation is self-defense, and that Hamas’s is actually to commit genocide. It evades that Israel seeks to defend its citizens against a genocidal opponent that repeatedly attacks them. In truth, Israel’s war to defeat a fanatical enemy is the moral opposite of genocide.

Consider the moral inversion: The focus of Israel as the perpetrator of genocide not only distracts from this reality but treats the real perpetrators of genocide (Hamas and its many supporters) as victims. Giving Hamas this moral cover enables their genocide.

Justice demands that we condemn this inversion and dismiss the mendacious charge of genocide against Israel.

Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) have a knack for keeping audiences on the edge of their seats, but their most gripping thriller of the year has nothing to do with Stranger Things or Game of Thrones. The story that commanded attention of customers, critics, competitors, the Department of Justice, and President Donald Trump was the attempted merger between the two.

While Netflix had the WBD board’s blessing, the merger faced an insurmountable challenge from regulators’ and Trump’s opposition. Eventually, David Ellison’s Paramount wrested WBD out of Netflix’s hands. But the saga ended with unanswered questions: was Netflix simply unable to outbid its competition, or was it pressured into submission by those holding discretionary power over business by means of antitrust laws? And if two media companies were strong-armed out of the deal, were their First Amendment rights violated?

It might seem that David Ellison’s Paramount simply offered more money than Netflix investors thought WBD was worth. But to think Neflix was simply outbid, one would have to ignore that Paramount’s deal was backed by the president of the United States in exchange for Ellison’s promise of sweeping changes to the Trump-critical editorial board at CNN (owned by WBD).

Ellison himself boasted that Paramount’s regulatory path was more certain than Netflix’s because of his friendly relationship with the administration, and because the size of the Paramount/WBD merger wouldn’t trigger an automatic presumption of illegality under the antitrust laws (as a Netflix/WBD combination likely would). Despite the DOJ’s promise that Paramount will “absolutely not” have a fast track to approval, and despite being a merger of two major legacy film-studio-and-network operators, Paramount in fact faced no hurdles in clearing the review stage in which the DOJ bogged down Netflix.

Because of differential regulatory scrutiny, Netflix didn’t just lose a business opportunity. Together with WBD they were strong-armed out of the deal. Withdrawing in the face of an uphill regulatory battle is not the same as losing a fair competitive bid.

Uniquely concerning, as many recognize, is that they were strong-armed because of Trump’s hostility to Netflix’s ideology and CNN’s critical stance toward the administration. Republicans more broadly opposed the merger because they are terrified of how a diversified Hogwarts could affect their children, fearing that Netflix–WBD would spread more “woke” ideas.

With regard to CNN, the threat to intellectual freedom is out in the open. But the attack on freedom of thought is also on display when antitrust enforcers scrutinize a private business deal because they’d prefer Netflix’s influence in the culture be pruned. Both WBD and Netflix were robbed of their intellectual freedom protected by the First Amendment. Don’t let the idea that it was a routine antitrust merger investigation obscure that.

Even if Paramount weren’t trying to snatch the deal, consider what Netflix and WBD would have had to avoid during the regulatory review process to curry political favor. A stand-up special that would pique the interest of vengeful regulators? A documentary unfavorable to the administration? A movie that triggers sensitivities of the party in power? What would get silently killed or edited while the threat of antitrust loomed over the deal?

Netflix and WBD faced an impossible choice: pursue their business strategy at the cost of fighting an unwinnable regulatory battle while walking on eggshells in their content decisions, or withdraw from the deal. So they withdrew. Paramount’s higher bid made the fight less attractive, but it doesn’t mean the antitrust threat didn’t play a role in swaying WBD away from Netflix.

With the Netflix deal killed, the projects Netflix and WBD would have produced together died too. What things will go unsaid and not be portrayed in what documentaries, movies, or shows that will not be made? The state’s intervention silenced the voice of the new company before it could take its first breath.

To regulate the size of a media company is to regulate the reach of its ideas, and thereby violate the freedom of thought, speech, and action, all of which are inseparable from each other. Blocking a merger between Netflix/WBD because it would have too much “power” is like threatening a publisher by saying, “Nice printing presses you’ve got here — it would be a shame if you lost a few.” Inhibiting the free use of property is inhibiting free thought and communication that property serves.

Regardless of whether you favor Netflix, prefer Paramount, or simply want WBD to stay a separate entity, you should be worried about any side using the force of law to push the outcome in their favor.

If we don’t defend the right of businesses to merge and speak freely, we will soon find that the only voices left are those the government has cleared for broadcast. That is a horror story we should only see on the screen, not in reality.

A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group on April 15, 2026.

Image credit: NurPhoto / NurPhoto / via Getty Images

ARI’s Intellectual Incubator invests in early-career intellectuals committed to relentless growth and to impacting their fields. We catalyze their growth through training, mentorship, and work opportunities. One example: We hire Incubator members to develop and teach micro courses in their areas of expertise. Such courses are an opportunity to strengthen their ability to communicate complex ideas with clarity and precision.

The first micro course concluded earlier this month. David Bakker, a graduate student in mathematics and philosophy of science, taught Joseph Fourier’s The Analytical Theory of Heat, using the French mathematician’s work as a case study in the process of scientific discovery.

Over the course of five weeks, Bakker guided students through Fourier’s intellectual journey: how his experimental observations led to the formulation of mathematical laws, how those laws were developed into the heat equation, and how the solution provides genuine physical insight.

Students engaged directly with both the technical and conceptual dimensions of mathematical physics, working through the material inductively. Rather than beginning with finished equations, they started from Fourier’s own observations and gradually reconstructed his reasoning, allowing them to grasp how the theory emerges from the concretes.

In May and June, the Incubator will offer two new micro courses on the intellectual history of the United States, a timely topic on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. The courses are open to current and former ARI students.

In Political Philosophy of the Founding, Dr. Tristen Fleig, who also attends law school, will guide students through key documents and debates of early American history. Conventional university courses cover the figures and timeline of the Founding, Dr. Fleig says, but they rarely “help students grasp what animated these figures or events. I’ve designed my course so that students can get that experience of just what ideas and principles inspired these men to embark on the radical mission to create a wholly unique nation.”

The Republic of Producers: Natural Rights and the Rise of Capitalism in America, taught by Mohamed Ali, a graduate student in philosophy, will offer a complementary perspective on the philosophical currents that defined America’s creation. “My course follows natural rights theory from Locke through Paine and Jefferson and uncovers the specific legal and social changes it produced in the first half-century of the American republic,” says Mr. Ali. “For anyone who has wondered how philosophy produces real consequences in the world,” says Mr. Ali, “the early American republic offers the clearest possible answer.”

“Core to the design of the Incubator is the recognition that doing intellectual work — writing, editing, teaching, lecturing — is essential to catalyzing growth,” says Elan Journo, a senior vice president at ARI, overseeing the Incubator. “Crucially, micro courses are not simulations or classroom exercises. We hired David, Tristen, and Mohamed as instructors, and we expect them to produce new knowledge and effectively impart it to students. I believe micro courses hold great promise, and I’m eager to see more Incubator members teach them in future.”

Learn more about these courses and sign up here.

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Texas A&M University recently adopted a policy restricting the topics professors can discuss. In a recent discussion, my colleague Ben Bayer made a point that resonated with me: this policy rests on an implicit view of the human mind that is worth challenging.

A&M’s policy bans professors from teaching “gender ideology” and even just raising the topics of “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” That last part is notable: no discussion of these topics is permitted, even if it includes multiple viewpoints and encourages students to think for themselves.

The implicit view is that exposure to certain ideas, by itself, has a corrupting effect. Hearing the views of “gender ideology” expressed or even described is thought to act on students’ impressionable minds, turning them into adherents to this ideology. The only safe policy is to shield them from such notions entirely.

But I for one don’t experience ideas as imprinting themselves on my mind against my will, turning me into a mindless adherent. I was exposed to many “woke” claims as a college student, but I was able to think about the arguments and evidence presented in their favor and decide whether or not to accept them.

Upon assessing the evidence and arguments, I did accept a few, such as the point that women and non-white people still face subtle forms of discrimination that others sometimes do not notice. But I did not encounter any compelling reasons for the notion that grouping people into identity-based collectives and treating the historically oppressed groups more favorably is a solution. So I did not accept this idea.

True, some people do choose to unthinkingly absorb ideas from others, including “gender ideology.” The idea that all knowledge works this way is probably familiar to religious conservatives. Their worldview preaches blind faith rather than rational understanding as the way to know religious truths. But religious conservatives should not assume everyone parrots the viewpoints of whatever seeming authorities they happen to have encountered.

The only way a university can help dogmatic students who unthinkingly accept ideas from others is by urging them to think for themselves. Sheltering all students from controversial or false ideas to allegedly “protect” those with this mindset only inhibits the intellectual development of the students who are most thoughtful.

Image credit: MAXIM ZHURAVLEV / iStock / via Getty Images

Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal, defines “state capitalism” as “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.”¹ Ip argues that the U.S. is becoming more similar to China by adopting “state capitalism with American characteristics.” Commentators at prominent organizations like The Washington Post, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Cato Institute have made similar statements.2^,3^,4^,5

There’s reason to worry that the United States is heading toward a system like China’s where the government exerts more control over businesses. But the term “state capitalism” obscures the real nature of this disturbing trend and muddies our understanding of capitalism. There’s a different concept — one completely antithetical to capitalism — that accurately captures the current trend, and it’s one that opponents of that trend desperately need to understand more deeply.

The Marxist origin of “state capitalism”

One reason to be suspicious of the term “state capitalism” is its origin. The term doesn’t come from advocates of free markets, but from Marxist theoreticians.

According to Marx, genuine socialism arises only when the state “withers away” after the revolution of the working class. His collaborator Friedrich Engels claimed that a system in which the state seizes private businesses from their owners and runs them itself is still a form of capitalism, and the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht introduced the term “state capitalism” to name the situation Engels described.6^,7

Subsequently, some Marxists have used the term to distance themselves from the Soviet Union. The brutal Soviet dictatorship, they argued, cannot be blamed on socialism, because it is not real socialism — it’s “state capitalism.”8

This origin gives opponents of Marxism (like Ip and Cato) every reason to ask whether it carries false Marxist assumptions that distort discussions of political systems.

It does. The term “state capitalism” presupposes the Marxist view that the defining feature of capitalism is that a “class” of people owns the “means of production” and employs others to perform labor (who are thereby, they say, “exploited”). Marxists consequently don’t claim to recognize a fundamental difference between private industry and industries owned and operated by the state. To Marxists, any society in which one “class” of people owns the means of production is some type of capitalism. Under the “real socialism” they imagine, “classes” will disappear along with the state.

The Marxist view, in essence, is that the state becomes a capitalist by owning and operating a business. But this wrongly conflates private businesses with government-owned businesses. By applying “state capitalism” to China and to Trump’s policy of acquiring ownership shares in businesses, Ip and others are buying into a blatantly Marxist distortion.

Private vs. state-owned businesses

There are fundamental differences between private ownership and state control that must not be ignored. A private business operating in a free economy can only deal with people by voluntary agreement. Its employees, suppliers, customers and investors are free to decide whether to deal with it or not. And it can only stay in existence by figuring out how to make profits — which it can only do by producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Not so with state-owned businesses like China’s three largest mobile carriers, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom. These three companies almost completely dominate the market because the Chinese government prohibits any new company from entering the field unless it is at least 51% government-owned. This means that anyone who wants to do business in the telecommunications market is forced to deal with one of these three firms.

And although Chinese state-owned enterprises have some nominal autonomy in their operation, they must seek approval on all major decisions from a committee of members of the Chinese Communist Party organized within the enterprise.9 And the central government body that oversees many of the country’s state-owned enterprises can force them directly to make changes to their operations. For example, all three of these companies were engaged both in operating cellular networks and in constructing cell towers. In 2014, however, the Chinese government forced these companies to give up their tower construction businesses. It took over their assets related to tower construction and created a new state-owned business, China Tower Company.10

These state-owned businesses operate in a fundamentally different way from Verizon and AT&T. The owners of private companies are free to decide which industries to enter, what goods and services to produce. They succeed by creating value and offering trades that people willingly agree to. But a government forcibly controls the decisions of executives of state-owned businesses companies. And it runs a business like China Mobile by wielding force to limit competition. Describing this authoritarian control as a kind of “capitalism” obscures the fundamental difference between voluntary trade and coercion.

Marxists, of course, want to obscure that difference, because they want to destroy the system of free enterprise. The coinage “state capitalism” doesn’t just permit them to whitewash Marxism by distancing it from the Soviet nightmare; it also enables them to smear private entrepreneurs by equating their operations with government coercion. Advocates of economic freedom should not walk into their trap.

The right concept for America’s ominous direction

Think about what it means more broadly to say that both China and a country with completely free, private enterprise are “capitalist” societies simply because someone or other “owns” its businesses.

China, a country with state ownership of businesses, is a brutal dictatorship that heavily restricts speech, surveils its citizens and arrests them for long periods of time without any due process.11 A country with free markets in which businesses are privately owned could also completely and consistently protect individual rights, including not just property rights but also freedom of expression, personal liberty and due process. On all the most important political issues, such a country would be the opposite of China. Equating them under the label “capitalism” would be absurd. It would serve only to whitewash China and/or smear free countries.

I would argue, following Ayn Rand, that capitalism is best understood as a system “based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”12 This definition highlights the stark difference between a country of private enterprise and a country in which the economy is largely controlled by the state, and reserves the term “capitalism” only for the former.

On this conception of capitalism, it doesn’t make sense to think the United States was a fully capitalist country even pre-Trump. The U.S. certainly has much more private ownership and economic freedom than China, and it does a far better job protecting citizens’ rights more generally. But the regulatory state has long infringed in major ways on Americans’ economic freedom. By the 21st century, the American economy was already only partly capitalist, mixed with heavy elements of statism. It would be most apt to describe it as a mixed economy moving further and further away from capitalism.

What is it moving toward? If not “state capitalism,” is there a name for the specific type of statism toward which the U.S. is moving under Trump? Another statement from Rand is illuminating here. In contrast to socialism, which abolishes private property in favor of state ownership of industry, there is a variant of statism in which individuals “retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.”13

The name for that system is fascism.

Although people today mainly associate fascism with racism and nationalism, Rand’s point is that there is also a characteristically fascist type of control over the economy.14 In spite of still calling themselves “communist,” the Chinese government exercises this same type of fascist control over many of its officially private businesses. And Trump’s use of tariffs and regulation to control American businesses are an ominous step in America’s journey toward the same destination.

Those of us who oppose the shift of the U.S. political system in the direction of China should name it clearly for what it is. We are not in a transition from one type of capitalism to another, “state capitalism,” but a transition away from capitalism and toward a fascist form of statism. If we are to have a chance at reversing this transition, we must clearly identify it as a fascistic trend, not equate it with its opposite.

Ayn Rand offers an answer in her essay “The Age of Envy.” Originally anthologized in her book The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and now available online for the first time, she argues that hostility to values more generally is nothing less than the defining spirit of our time.

What is this spirit? Rand calls it “hatred of the good for being the good.” It is a drive not to attain the good but to punish and destroy it. Once this motive is named, it can be seen everywhere in the culture, from classrooms to boardrooms.

As one illustration, Rand draws a striking contrast between early conceptions of socialism and modern egalitarianism. However evil and destructive in practice, socialism at least pretended to aim at raising the standard of living for all. By contrast, today’s egalitarians show little interest in achievement or production, seeking instead to level all distinctions, rejoicing in the downfall of the successful. Rand goes on to show how other modern ideologies, such as multiculturalism and environmentalism, are manifestations of the same underlying psychology.

What is the underlying psychology? Rand traces it to a troubled relationship with self-esteem, in which the sight of achievement is experienced not as an inspiration but as something to resent or evade.

A culture driven by hostility to the good demands explanation. Read “The Age of Envy” to see how she accounts for it.

Find a passage from the beginning of the article below.

A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life — an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture’s dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.

Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.

Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Continue reading the essay here, or find it in Rand’s book Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

Today, April 6, 2026, as the world watched the journey of Artemis II disappear around the far side of the moon — in America’s first manned mission to lunar space in over 50 years — Astronaut Victor Glover quoted scripture. He spoke of the mystery of love and quoted Jesus Christ’s commandment to “love God with all that you are.”

This was not the first stunt bringing religious faith into space. During the very first Apollo manned mission to orbit the moon on December 24, 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts read from the Book of Genesis. Ayn Rand, who was enthusiastic about the human achievement that the space program represented, published scathing criticisms of the incident in her periodical, The Objectivist. Here is an excerpt from these comments:

When, from the distance of the moon, from the height of the triumph of science, we expected to hear the astronauts’ message and heard, instead, a voice reciting the moldy nonsense which even a slum-corner evangelist would not have chosen as a text — reciting the Bible’s cosmology — I, for one, felt as if the capsule had disintegrated and we were left in the primordial darkness of empty space.

If you wonder what perpetuates the reign of irrationality on earth, you have seen a demonstration: it is not done by the worst among men, but by the best—not by the masses of the ignorant, but by the leaders who default on the responsibility of thought — not by witch doctors, but by scientists.

No witch doctor’s power to encourage mankind’s darkest superstitions is comparable to the power of an astronaut broadcasting from the moon.

There are two questions that should be asked: Would the astronauts treat the slightest malfunction of the least significant instrument aboard their spacecraft as carelessly and thoughtlessly as they treated the most important issues of philosophy? And, if not, doesn’t man’s spirit deserve the same disciplined, conscientious, rational attention that they gave to inanimate matter?

The flight of Apollo 8 was a condensed dramatization of mankind’s tragedy: a demonstration of man’s epistemological double standard in the fields of science and of the humanities.

Why this reaction? In her later essay on the occasion of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Rand made clear why the Apollo missions represented a triumph of human rationality:

One knew that this spectacle was not the product of inanimate nature, like some aurora borealis, nor of chance, nor of luck, that it was unmistakably human — with “human,” for once, meaning grandeur — that a purpose and a long, sustained, disciplined effort had gone to achieve this series of moments, and that man was succeeding, succeeding, succeeding!

She says “for once” because in the tradition inherited from religion, “human” has come to mean “imperfect,” “corrupted,” “sinful.” As a champion of the absolutism of reason, Rand saw religious faith as the historical enemy of all forms of human achievement. So it should come as no surprise that she saw the Bible reading as a throwback to the primitive ideas that had long undercut and persecuted the scientific achievement that made the space program possible.

Rand’s full comments are available in the November 1968 edition of The Objectivist (issues were frequently backdated), which can now be purchased in paperback. Between 1962 and 1976, Ayn Rand published a series of periodicals: The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter.

Students interested in learning more about Rand’s philosophy of reason, individualism, and capitalism can learn more by ordering free books like Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. They’ll see why, even though she was fascinated by space exploration, Rand advocated first and foremost “a philosophy for living on Earth.”

It is a philosophy that holds reason as an absolute, and holds that faith is an “only a short-circuit destroying the mind.” It was not “love” of some alleged God that brought man to the moon, but the rational love of truth.

This winter, Nikos Sotirakopoulos and I co-taught an ARI course titled “Reactionary Authoritarianism: From Mussolini to the ‘New Right.’” Working through the historical readings and lectures with Nikos gave me a richer understanding of the ancestors of today’s anti-freedom factions — and the dynamics that enable them. Three brief reflections:

1. What fueled fascism, Nazism, and authoritarianism lives on.

To understand the rise of these movements in the 20th century, it’s crucial to view them as part of a wider trend, not only or primarily as responses to such upheavals as World War I and the Great Depression. The wider trend, Nikos argued, is a rejection of the best features of the Enlightenment: its emphasis on reason, individualism, and freedom. That anti-Enlightenment impulse lives on. You can see it infusing the self-described “post-liberals,” the “new right,” the National Conservatives, and other MAGA-adjacent factions today, which repudiate “individualism” and “capitalism” in favor of the nation or tribe.

2. The deliberate attacks on “individualism.”

It’s well known how fascists and Nazis vilified “individualism,” but a theme throughout the course is how thoroughly that ideal was misunderstood, misrepresented, and distorted by its detractors. Deliberately so. The individual, left free to think and act on his own, was seen as corrosive of group bonds. But in reviling the individual, they offer a false picture: a self-absorbed seeker of momentary, decadent pleasures, unconcerned with moral norms and traditions. Such people exist, but as Ayn Rand argued, it’s false to view them as (genuine) individualists. Consider how she projects the ideal of individualism in the character of Howard Roark, whose animating principle is his independent rational judgment, and who is vested deeply in building a lifelong productive career; Roark rejects moral norms and traditions when he judges them to be irrational.

The distortion relies on what Rand called a “package deal”: the fallacious bundling together of things that are essentially different. Part of how this works: they lump the rational individualist together with the self-absorbed pleasure seeker, because of superficial, non-essential commonality, since they appear self-interested and stand apart from the collective. Echoes of this are evident today in the writings of Patrick Deneen (Regime Change; Why Liberalism Failed) and Yoram Hazony (The Virtue of Nationalism), whose work we’ve written about in New Ideal and analyzed on the podcast. There’s urgent work to be done clearing away the package-deal conception of individualism and educating people about the actual nature of this ideal.

3. The power of moral sanction.

Well before Britain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler in 1938, the German political establishment had already enabled his entry into the mainstream. A similar pattern was involved in Mussolini’s rise in Italy. Broadly, the ideologists of racism, tribalism, authoritarianism, and kindred factions are often grasping for precisely this: a moral sanction from reputable, establishment figures. They want the semblance of belonging in respectable, civilized society. This is an enduring dynamic that people grossly under-recognize.

Flash forward to a recent example, but on a far smaller scale. When Tucker Carlson hosted the racist, antisemitic, misogynistic influencer Nick Fuentes for a long, friendly conversation, it was moral laundering. Fuentes was getting the same thing he enjoyed after his 2022 dinner with Donald Trump and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago.

Seeing this pattern — then and now — deepened my appreciation for Rand’s insight that evil is impotent and parasitic on the good. Put another way, there is enormous power in withholding the “sanction of the victim.”

One personal highlight of this eight-week course was working with Nikos Sotirakopoulos. He led the course, selected the readings, and lectured each week; I consulted on the outline and chimed in during class. Nikos is a dedicated, energizing teacher and a historian committed to getting at the facts of the matter.

Coming up this spring and summer are several new ARI courses, including on Rand’s individualist ethics, the corporation, and globalization — frequent targets of today’s dominant political tribes.

Nationalism is clawing its way back. At a rally last October, Donald Trump galvanized the audience by declaring himself a proud nationalist. Europe, too, is witnessing the growing influence of political parties advocating nationalism. Even as nationalism has entered the political mainstream, it remains intellectually disreputable.

But Yoram Hazony, a political scholar, wants to redeem nationalism and rehabilitate its reputation. His book The Virtue of Nationalism is bound to resonate with a swath of intellectuals and voters, here and in Europe, who thrill when Trump and other politicians hammer on nationalist themes. Hazony presents a conception of nationalism with soft edges, one that is supposedly compatible with some measure of liberty. And therein lies part of the book’s danger. It is calm, erudite, and theory-heavy. The book attempts to provide a serious, intellectual case for embracing nationalism.

When I first heard about the book, in an email exchange with Hazony about a year ago, I looked forward to reading it — not because I expected him to convince me, but because I always learn a lot from engaging with people I disagree with. Did I find the book convincing? No. But to engage with its argument is to see (or, see more acutely) why there’s a fundamental chasm between nationalism and a free society. Hazony’s case for nationalism is a philosophic repudiation of individual freedom.

The book’s argument is intricate, and here, rather than review the book as a whole, I want to draw out some of its crucial premises, because they are so telling.

The argument: From family to tribe to nation

Central to Hazony’s argument is the question: What kind of political order is best? For centuries, he contends, we in the West have faced two alternatives, “empires” (or “imperial” orders), enforcing universal political ideas — or independent national states. Imperial regimes, Hazony argues, are predicated on the conviction of having attained the ultimate political truth — and bringing it to all, by force if necessary. For Hazony, any embrace of universal political ideas leads to imperialist aims, animosity against those who resist those aims, and conflict.

By contrast, Hazony argues, it is only the “national state” that can lead to a stable political order. This is because it is built on the only foundation for social order: the mutual loyalties of family, and by extension a tribe. Such bonds extend from family and tribe to nation: the “national state” consists of an agglomeration of tribes who share a common language and history, and see themselves as a community. Accordingly, Hazony insists that we must reject “empire,” or “imperial” orders, mainly because these negate the particular character and needs of the nation.

The “order of national states” is best, Hazony writes, because it “offers the greatest possibility for collective self-determination.” [Emphasis added.] Thus there would be “many such national states, each pursuing its own unique purposes and developing its own vision of human life.”

The concept of nationalism that Hazony argues for in the book is allegedly distinctive. First, Hazony distances his view from racial theories of nationalism, arguing that one can be adopted into tribes, not only born into them. Second, and even more remarkable, the “national state” that Hazony envisions is uninterested in war-making, conquest or domination. The true nationalist, he writes, “knows that there is great truth and beauty in his own national traditions and in his own loyalty to them; and yet he also knows that they are not the sum of human knowledge, for there is also truth and beauty to be found elsewhere, which his own nation does not possess.”

Nationalism, for Hazony, is peaceful because of its parochial orientation, whereas “empire” fuels conflict because of its claim to universal truth. What to make of this argument?

Unpacking Hazony’s argument

Hazony offers his narrow, unambitious conception of nationalism as the basis for a peaceful, stable political world order, but in fact it unavoidably sets the stage for conflict. His argument depends on an underlying philosophic view that pushes aside the crucial faculty — reason — that makes peaceful coexistence possible.

One inheritance from the Age of Enlightenment is the recognition in political thought of the individual as a rational being. It is reason that enables people to reach objective truth, grounded in observable fact, which everyone can come to recognize. That’s what enables us to communicate ideas and resolve disagreements through persuasion, rather than physical force. The principle of individual rights — itself a universal truth — is a recognition that each of us is a rational being and must be left free to set our own path in life according to our own best judgment. Politically, this principle endorses only persuasion as the means of resolving disputes and it bars the initiation of force from human life.

But Hazony repudiates this Enlightenment view of individuals as sovereign and capable of using reason to attain truths about the world. Instead, he writes, “no human being, and no group of human beings, possesses the necessary powers of reason and the necessary knowledge to dictate the political constitution that is appropriate for all mankind.” For him, it’s a mistake to think of the principle of individual rights as a universal political truth. It is rather a “cultural inheritance of certain tribes and nations.”

Hazony argues that a national state fosters the creation of a particular kind of moral character in its members, and he repeatedly stresses his belief that individuals have an intense need to serve the well-being of the collective. (One wonders: Is this a universal political truth?) But the picture we get of group-centric society is peculiarly devoid of specific, real-world detail.

What really happens in societies where reason and individual rights are dropped out of the picture, where each tribe/nation is left to do its own thing? At least two things are clear: First, such societies are highly tribal. People define themselves primarily, if not exclusively, by their tribal or racial identity, while viewing outsiders as less-than-human, because they were born to the “wrong” tribe/race. Second, and crucially, the door is left wide open for disagreements and enmities to be resolved through brutality, not persuasion, because outsiders are seen as innately inferior, wrong, unreachable. For example, consider the tribal wars that have decimated Africa. A notorious example is Rwanda’s tribal war in 1994, which claimed upwards of 800,000 lives. Or look at the repeated eruption of tribal/nationalist wars in the Balkans. There, during the early 1990s, we witnessed the return of “ethnic cleansing” and concentration camps. These are manifestations of tribal/national groups jockeying for collective self-determination.

Occasionally Hazony will mention in abstract terms that actual tribal societies, which are notorious for conflict and bloodshed, do have a dark side, but we get little else.

Hazony seems to view Israel as aligning with his distinctive conception of nationalism as parochial, unambitious, peaceful. But it is actually a counterpoint to his argument. In my book What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, I analyze Israel’s character as a nation. Israel is a blend of nationalist/tribal elements (defining itself as a “Jewish” state) and individualist elements, reflected in its robust protections of individual rights and freedom. And because of those pro-freedom elements, Israel is non-imperialistic, unlike its more tribalistic neighbors (Syria, for example, dominated Lebanon for decades; Iran today holds sway over Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria). Israel’s remarkable virtues stem from the degree to which it lives up to the ideal of individual freedom. But many of its shortcomings, including some of its moral failings, derive from the country’s religious-tribal aspects, particularly the encroachment of religion into politics.

The individualist aspects of Israel’s political system are not only at odds with its tribal/nationalist character. They are borrowed from outside. What’s good about Israel stems from the degree to which it has adopted and implemented the universal political truths in the post-Enlightenment approach that recognizes people as rational, sovereign individuals. These ideas are truths that anyone, regardless of race, tribe or ancestry, regardless of where they live, can and should recognize and embrace.

Universal truth leads to conflict?

And yet Hazony contends that any claim to universal truth is dangerous. It is at the heart of what he calls “empire” (or “imperial” orders), and it’s a wellspring for conflict. For Hazony, the Soviet regime is an exemplar of “imperialism,” because it claimed to have the ultimate political truth and proceeded to impose it as a universal idea through brutal conquest. Hazony writes that one can have “no better destroyer than an individual ablaze with the love of a universal truth.”

If we take this claim seriously, we’d have to regard someone like Thomas Jefferson as some kind of “destroyer.” Clearly he was “ablaze” with a love of several universal truths. For example, in the Declaration of Independence, he writes that human beings are created equal, and that they are morally entitled to live in freedom, rather than under tyranny. Even recognizing Jefferson’s personal failure to live up to his own conviction (he abhorred slavery but retained his slaves), it’s absurd, and grossly unjust, to put him in the same category as Lenin and Stalin, brutal tyrants responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.

It’s not only Jefferson who refutes Hazony’s claim; you could count as well Martin Luther King Jr., who famously gave voice to the universal ideal that individuals should be judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin. We can find many more counterexamples of thinkers and activists who, in the name of universal truths, pushed civilization forward.

The evil of the Soviet regime was not its claim to hold a monopoly on universal political truth. It’s that Marxism-Leninism is a false ideology, one that clashes with the facts of reality and human nature. It’s an ideology deeply rooted in group-centric premises, which we also find in Hazony’s argument.

Nationalism as a type of collectivism

For Hazony, as we’ve seen, the starting point and yardstick in political thought is not the individual, but the family, the tribe, the nation. This group-centric approach views the individual as subordinate. What matters is the collective’s self-determination, the development of its own vision of human life. Hazony’s approach therefore is a form of “collectivism,” which the philosopher Leonard Peikoff defines this way:

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective — society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. — is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it — or its representative, the state — deems this desirable.¹

Collectivism was not just one, or even a prominent factor, but the defining feature of the Soviet Union. The proletariat came first, and individuals mattered only insofar, and for as long, as they served the needs of the collective. “You cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”: That’s a justification often attributed to Stalin. The “eggs” were human lives, and not a few — but millions, smashed in the name of serving the needs of the proletarian collective.

Or take another example, one invariably associated with “nationalism”: Nazi Germany. Hazony, a Jew and committed Zionist, is at pains to dissociate his conception of “nationalism” from the Nazis.

The National Socialist party, he acknowledges, clearly had “national” in its name. But a true nationalist, in Hazony’s conception, values peaceful coexistence. So Hazony contends that because Hitler wanted to replace the international order of independent national states with German dominance, he was not in fact a nationalist. Hazony classifies the Nazis as “imperialists,” because they sought to take their political vision global. Such classification obfuscates rather than clarifies. Why wouldn’t a nationalist, eager to subordinate and sacrifice individuals within his own nation to the collective, not be eager to do the same to outsiders?

Obviously, it’s true that the Nazis sought to dominate and conquer, but it’s impossible to look at their doctrines and policies without recognizing that Nazism blended racism and nationalism — two forms of collectivism. Listen to their leader:

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole . . . that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. . . .

This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture. . . . The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call — to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness — idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifice for the community, for his fellow men.2

The point to take from this comparison of the Soviet and Nazi regimes is that collectivism was integral to what made them so destructive and aggressive. And it is this same premise that underpins “nationalism,” despite Hazony’s attempt to formulate a redefined, unambitious conception of it. To unpack Hazony’s argument is to see that his conception of nationalism is fundamentally opposed to the ideal of freedom.

The thrust of Hazony’s learned book is to urge us to turn away from a legacy of the Enlightenment: the focus on the value of the individual as a sovereign, rational being. Let us instead bury “nationalism” and dedicate ourselves to better understanding what’s required to defend a free society.

Among Isaacman’s goals for NASA is to “partner with industry . . . to figure out how to extract more value from space than we put in — and critically attempt to solve the orbital economy.” NASA would accomplish this by, for example, a “bulk buy” of guaranteed contracts to support commercial space stations.¹ The euphemism of “partnership” obscures the reality of public-private “partnerships:” an industry that “partners” with government is one that is subsidized, therefore, controlled by the coercive power of the state.2

What Isaacman fails to understand is that his proposed means — “partner with industry” — is in contradiction to his stated end: “extract more value from space than we put in.” His premise — widely shared by those in a position to shape space policy3 — is that commercialization either requires or will be accelerated by government subsidies and direction. The truth is the opposite: to the extent that NASA or other government agencies assert control over the space industry, they are an impediment to the commercialization of space.

The Regressive Effects of “Partnering” with Government

NASA has always prioritized human space flight. But, despite a thriving private space industry, human space flight has not become commercially viable. Insofar as NASA has encouraged private companies to spend their talents on human space flight, it has retarded commercial progress.

To see why this is so, take a step back to the early 2000s when the current private-sector space race kicked off. At the time, the widespread presumption was that space would become profitable through tourism. The original “Billionaire Space Race” was not just between Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (SpaceX) but also included Richard Branson and his company Virgin Galactic. Branson’s company was founded to provide suborbital flights to space tourists. Its twenty-two-year history has been marked by failures and setbacks, culminating in a 2023 bankruptcy. (It is still in operation though it paused attempts at commercial flights in 2024).

Virgin Galactic received some support from NASA, but that support was insignificant in comparison to what its competitors received. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX received significant support from NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. For example, COTS provided funding for SpaceX to further develop its partially reusable Falcon 9 orbital rocket. (This funding came at a time when Musk would have had to further risk his own wealth or raise more private investment to keep SpaceX afloat.) The COTS contract also funded the development of SpaceX’s human spacecraft Dragon, which was conceived for the sole purpose of earning the contract. Without NASA’s initial support and continuing support as a customer, Dragon would not exist.4

However, despite public enthusiasm and NASA support for manned spaceflight, after twenty years Blue Origin can send popstars to space and wealthy philanthropists like Isaacman can conduct manned science experiments, but no one can turn a profit from human space flight. The failure of Virgin Galactic, and the inability of Blue Origin and SpaceX to profitably monetize manned spaceflight, is definitive evidence that human spaceflight was not and is not currently an “extract more value than we put in” venture.

In contrast, by the mid-2020s unmanned spaceflight has become incredibly profitable, just not in a way anyone outside of SpaceX dared to pursue: the first profitable use of low-cost space launch is selling internet subscriptions.

In the early days of the company, Elon Musk and SpaceX thought deeply about how to make cheap access to space profitable and began building the Starlink program, which is now earning them $15 billion-per-year in revenue and growing.5 At present, SpaceX is really a telecommunications company, vertically integrated to provide its own launch services! Falcon 9 made it possible for them to deploy Starlink, a constellation of approximately 10,000 satellites. Starlink does not require government subsidies to turn SpaceX a profit. This fact has signaled to SpaceX that the best use of its profits is to re-invest into launch technology and the expansion of orbital computer infrastructure.

Now, it is true that COTS funding contributed to the development of Falcon 9, the workhorse of the Starlink constellation. But to obtain the COTS contract, SpaceX had to build Falcon 9 so that it would be safe enough to transport human beings. As exciting as human space flight is, to the extent that Falcon 9’s design was altered to enable human cargo, it was not optimized to transport Starlink satellites.6 Furthermore, every dollar spent on Dragon and every engineer devoting time to human spaceflight was one not available to Starlink.

In other words, COTS incentivized SpaceX to devote resources to human space flight in addition to their efforts toward space-based internet. A more systematic and heavily funded COTS program would have invigorated their early competitors, pulling talent away from what became proven, value-increasing uses of space. Had NASA meddled in the market then to the degree that Isaacman now envisions, the evidence that human spaceflight is not yet valuable and that space-based computer infrastructure is, could have been drowned out by the illusion of “successful” space tourism.

Diverting resources from Starlink to human spaceflight delayed the deployment of the constellation, thereby delaying its profitability, thereby delaying the signals its success sent to the industry, and therefore delaying the commercialization of the space industry.

From the perspective of profitable, self-sustaining technological progress in space, SpaceX’s accomplishments in human spaceflight were missteps, made possible only by NASA’s intervention in the industry.

As I argued in “Freedom to Launch,” space is only valuable if it is profitable in a market in which all participate freely — including investors and customers. Since NASA is funded through the coercive tax system, a space industry predominantly dependent on government contracts is not profitable in the commercial sense of being independently self-sustaining.

Isaacman rightfully wants the industry to “extract more value from space than we put in.” But this does not simply mean that a company’s ledger shows numbers written in black larger than those written in red. The mark of a self-sustaining industry is that its revenues come from voluntary customers. When its profits are earned, rather than expropriated, a company proves its services valuable to investors and customers. Such proof is by its nature unavailable to an involuntarily funded industry. This is what it means to commercialize space.

How could a former tech entrepreneur like Isaacman fail to see the difference between an industry made profitable through voluntary exchange and his envisioned industry dominated by the coercive powers of the state?

Defense Tech’s Misleading Example

Isaacman’s embrace of the private sector is part of the broader trend among technology-forward government institutions. The leader here is the Department of Defense, which abandoned the model of purchasing weapons from a few privileged suppliers to one of fostering a defense tech startup culture. The result has been a flourishing of defense startups; companies like Anduril and Palantir are now household names, and their work is keeping American military technology far ahead of our adversaries’.7

In support of his view of NASA’s role in the space economy, Isaacman cites the military development and then commercial adoption of jet aircrafts as a model.8 Isaacman’s NASA would develop and subsidize technologies not yet commercially viable, such as nuclear electric propulsion, until the commercial sector can take over.

Isaacman is taking the wrong lesson from the defense industry’s pro-market reforms. His model confuses the features of a thriving, private defense industry with those of a thriving commercial industry.

The defense industry is essentially different from commercial industries. It is necessary to America’s security, but its size and profitability are not the result of “extracting more value . . . than we put in.”

Imagine a world in which far fewer countries were potentially hostile to America. Do we think that, in such a world, the defense industry would need to be as large as it is today? The size of the defense industry is not a function of how much productive value it creates but of how great is the threat from hostile countries. Ideally, the size of the industry would be small because the threats we face would be minimal.

In contrast are the many, non-defense industries that have the U.S. government as a customer. The government needs laptops. But the existence of Apple and Dell do not depend on selling to Uncle Sam.

By taking the success of the private defense industry as inspiration and model, Isaacman is continuing the space community’s decades-long conflation between the defensive functions of government and of private, voluntary commercial activity. That longstanding confusion left the industry unfree until the early part of the 20th century. Now its administrator’s plan to increase NASA’s control over the orbital economy threatens to hobble the newly freed industry’s nascent attempts to become commercial.

In the abstract, it is obvious that cheap, easy access to space is valuable. Space holds unlimited resources, unlimited real estate, and countless potential scientific discoveries. Who wouldn’t want to see Earth rise during a lunar vacation? But it is far from obvious in the concrete how those values can be profitably realized, given the current state of the industry’s technological and business knowledge. To bring the harder to capture values within our grasp, entrepreneurs must first discover easier, high-value uses of space technology.

One company’s commercial success sends a signal to the whole industry. We are seeing this in real-time as the industry learns from SpaceX’s lucrative Starlink products. Early missions for Blue Origin’s New Glenn are expected to launch satellites for Amazon’s Leo, a competitor to Starlink. Blue has recently announced plans for its own satellite constellation, TerraWave, another space-based high-speed internet service.9

The success of Starlink is also a signal as to what new products might be profitable. It’s increasingly looking like the best use of Earth’s orbital space, right now in 2026, is not space stations or tourism, but computer infrastructure. Unlimited space and direct sunlight make space a great place to put energy-hungry data centers, powered by massive solar arrays. At least, that’s what SpaceX thinks.10 Alphabet is exploring space-based computing infrastructure through Google Research’s Project Suncatcher, a proposal for solar-powered satellite constellations equipped with TPUs to scale machine-learning compute in space.11 Blue Origin has announced its intention to pursue space-based data centers.12 The market signals are clear.

Isaacman’s plan to promote commercial space stations would be a long-term subsidy of an unproven path to profitability. If a commercial station would fail without government contracts to “solve” its business model, it is not a profitable use of space technology. The effect would be the direction of taxpayer wealth and engineering talent toward ventures Isaacman favors and away from proven paths to value.

Of course, if entrepreneurs can (voluntarily) raise money from investors to experiment with the commercial viability of space stations, they should do so. The technology developed for orbital compute will undoubtably contribute to the viability of human space travel. But for the future of the space economy, it is essential that these experiments are the result of the free judgment of all parties, including their funders. This is how industry will discover what human presence in space iscommercially viable.

Government’s Role in the Space Economy

There is a respect in which Isaacman is right, though not in the way he intends. There is a “problem” with the space economy that only government can solve. As I argue in “Space Pioneers Need a New Homestead Plan,” until very recently, America’s policy with respect to space property has been dismal. The commercialization of space is only possible if the property rights to resources and real estate are clearly defined and forcefully protected.

The enforcement of individual rights, including property rights, is the only legitimate function of government. To achieve this end, the U.S. government must act domestically to pass laws recognizing property rights in space (easily reversed executive orders are inadequate).13 Internationally, America must use its position as the dominant space power to negotiate treaties that secure the property rights of American space investments (non-binding agreements are inadequate).14 Finally, it must acquire or develop the technology to enforce those rights, should the time come when its physical presence in space is required (this includes, but is not limited to, military functions).

Only when the U.S. government commits itself to enforcing property rights and abandons its efforts to force industry will we be able to capture the full potential of space travel.

The recent film by Agnieszka Holland, Mr. Jones, portrays the Soviet Russians’ attempt in the 1930s — with the assistance of sympathetic Western journalists like Walter Duranty — to cover up the famine caused by collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine. The film is a heart-wrenching and damning account of the Soviet experiment — and of the dishonesty that enabled it.

And yet, 87 years after Gareth Jones showed the world the crimes of socialism, there are still Western enablers who engage in a different kind of coverup of the same facts. As a result, a growing number of young people consider themselves socialists, and socialist politicians have risen in prominence. One was almost nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States.

It is only thirty years since socialist regimes collapsed economically around the globe, leaving in their wake a death toll of tens of millions. We have seen the same pattern repeated in Venezuela in only the last twenty years. How do today’s defenders of socialism try to cover up this history and justify the ideology that supported such murderous regimes?

One tactic that today’s socialists employ is to portray the lessons of history and world affairs as irrelevant to their cause. They claim that the Soviet Union, Communist China, Communist Cuba, and today’s regime in Venezuela are not real examples of socialism at all. Real socialism, you may have heard them say, has never been tried.

What makes people think this is true? What do they mean by “socialism” and is their view even plausible?

What is “socialism”?

Socialism, in a standard definition, means public ownership of the means of production, which implies the abolishing of private property and ending the capitalist system of free trade and free markets. This is often understood to mean state ownership of the means of production.

By that standard, the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other authoritarian regimes all count as “socialist”: in every case, insurgents seized control of governments which then expropriated private farms, factories and shops from their capitalist owners — many of whom lost not only their property, but their lives. What’s more, these insurgents were led by figures (Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc.) that were explicitly committed to socialist ideology.

The economic failure, famine, and bloodshed suffered by each of these countries flowed directly from the same policies advocated by today’s socialists. Just as socialists demand, businesses were torn from the hands of their creators, those who both knew how to produce and who had a personal financial stake in improving their ability to produce. These businesses were then managed by bureaucrats who lacked both of these qualifications, and who also lacked the tool of the free market pricing system to calculate how much of which goods to produce. Production decisions were determined not with an eye to creating value above cost, but to the demands of arbitrary edicts from central planners. It is no accident that this system created shortages and starvation, and that regimes had to crush the resulting dissent to retain power.

Socialists try to insulate the system they advocate from this evidence of failure by using a talking point that (as we shall see) they have used since the beginning of their movement. They put a spin on the “public ownership of the means of production” definition. Real socialism, they say, doesn’t mean state control of the economy; it means control by “the people,” especially by the workers.

For instance, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto, claims that real socialism means “democratic” control of the workplace by worker collectives. He claims that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a socialist society because it did not involve democratic control.¹ Likewise, Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs and author of Why You Should Be a Socialist, claims that, for similar reasons, none of the authoritarian socialist regimes of the twentieth century were socialist, and claims to “hate government and capitalism alike.”2 Richard Wolff, who has been described as “America’s most prominent Marxist economist,” agrees.3 He argues that the Soviet Union was really an example of “state capitalism”: while the nominally socialist party controlled the state, the state was “still capitalist in the employer-employee organization of its economy” because “a minority of persons . . . [the central planners] functioned as employers of an employee majority.”4

Using their definition of “socialism,” these thinkers would have us believe that since state control of the economy is not control by “the people,” no full-scale socialist political system has ever existed in history. If true, this would allow them to excuse their ideology from any responsibility for the murder and oppression of the brutal, allegedly “socialist” systems of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. It also allows them to pose as the torchbearers of a noble ideal that has simply been corrupted by political operators of the past.

Is there any plausibility to the claim that “socialism” doesn’t really mean state control of the economy, but something else? Are today’s socialists really envisioning a wholly new system than what the revolutionaries of the past actually implemented? Or are they simply playing games with the word “socialism” to avoid the obvious facts?

Fantasy speculation about the role of the state

Not everyone proposing a novelty is indulging in fantasy. A newly envisioned invention, like an airplane, can be based on known facts about birds, kites, and gliders. But even then, experiments are needed to prove the efficacy of the idea. And if the proposal is, say, a perpetual motion machine, which has no experimental basis and goes against the laws of physics, the proposal is selling a fantasy.

Although the proposal that “real” socialism doesn’t require the use of state power might sound new or innovative to the uninitiated, a few questions and a little knowledge of history are sufficient to show it is just as much a fantasy as a perpetual motion machine.

First, note that the socialists paper over the coercion and even violence that would obviously need to happen to expropriate private property from peaceful citizens to set up their system in the first place. (The mask drops when they start advocating “lawbreaking and sabotage” as worthy tactics in revolutionary social change.5) By itself this calls into question any assertion that socialism can be implemented without bloodshed: socialist ends cannot be detached from socialist means.

But even if we could imagine that private property holders were simply persuaded to give up their holdings peacefully, the notion that the ideal socialist system would work without coercion or oppression is hard to imagine, if it is even coherently meaningful to begin with. Consider Richard Wolff’s explanation for how a system of worker co-ops would gradually wean itself from the need for a state:

An economy based on worker co-ops would revolutionize the relationship between the state and the people. In their capacity as a self-employed collectivity, workers would occupy the spot traditionally held by the workplace in state-workplace relations and interactions. . . . The workers would collectively and democratically hold the purse strings to which the state would have to appeal. The state would thus depend on citizens and workers rather than the other way around. . . . The state would have fewer ways and means to impose its own momentum and goals upon citizens or workplaces. To that extent, the state’s “withering away” would become more immediately achievable than in any other variety of socialism known thus far.6

As I’ve argued elsewhere at greater length, the allegation that “democratic control” ensures freedom from coercion and oppression is an old fallacy that turns on an equivocation between a government with elected representatives and a society run by majority rule. The latter is what socialists advocate when they claim that factories should be run by workers, regardless of what the factory’s original creators have to say about it. This constitutes a direct violation of the rights of a minority of individuals. So if workers really do end up holding “the purse strings” of the factories and the power to make the state appeal to them, it makes little sense to say that the state would “wither away” as an entity independent of the workers.7 Rather, the workers would in effect be running a state.8

When Wolff is pressed to provide a real-world example of the system he envisions, he and other socialists often point to the Mondragon Corporation, a Spanish worker-owned manufacturer of a variety of industrial and consumer goods.9 But Mondragon is an international corporation that sells its products to private firms all over the globe, and employs an increasing number of foreign workers who are not members of the collective. At the same time, its workers increasingly depend on pensions from the Spanish state.10 Invoking the Mondragon example evades the question of whether a company like Mondragon could survive in the absence of a more general capitalist system that buys its products and provides market prices by which to calculate resource allocation, and the system of state-sanctioned private property rights that makes this possible.11 It also evades the question of whether a company run “democratically” (unlike most corporations) could exist in the absence of a coercive state that taxes capitalists to fund worker pensions.

The idea that real socialism involves social control of the economy without the state is not new, but you need to be aware of some history to realize this. It goes back at least as far as 1877, when Frederick Engels claimed in Anti-Dühring that after the proletariat seizes control of the state and thereby the means of production, the state would “wither away” or “die out.”12 Evading the important role of a state in protecting peaceful coexistence among individuals by protecting their rights, Marx and Engels held that the only role of a state is to enforce the exploitation of one class by another. Working from this fantastic premise, they deduced without evidence that once the state comes to represent the proletariat, class distinctions would disappear and, with them, the need for the state.13 Lenin toed the same line in a lengthier work of no greater depth, but since he was himself a political operative who needed to rationalize his revolutionary actions, he argued that state control of the means of production was necessary as a transitional measure on the way to the achievement of real socialism.14 The same argument was then invoked for years by Stalin as he continued to starve and murder people in the name of eventually achieving the ideal of real socialism.15

All of this means that Lenin and Stalin and the other founders of the brutal Marxist regimes justified their actions using the exact same fantasy as today’s socialists do. They promised that the system they advocated would eventually eliminate state oppression as well. We saw what it actually delivered.

Why should we believe socialists today who also claim that their proposals to nationalize industries will take us further from and not closer to the specter of the Soviet catastrophe? They offer no better evidence than hucksters who sell perpetual motion machines. In fact what they’re doing is much worse, both because they actively evade the evidence, and because what they sell isn’t just dysfunctional — it’s deadly.

The real meaning of socialism

Socialism means public ownership of the means of production. But to understand what this means in practical reality — and why it cannot mean what the socialists propose — we must appreciate what “public ownership” actually refers to.

There is no magical entity called “the public.” A society is composed of individual human beings. In reality, the only mechanism by which the actions of an entire society can be coordinated is by means of a government. And so the only way for anything resembling “the public” to systematically deprive capitalists of private property and to abolish capitalist free trade is for the state to do it. Every socialist acknowledges this, whether they advocate violent revolution to establish a collectivist state or a majority vote to establish the same.

“Socialism” can only mean state ownership of the means of production. There is simply no evidence that there is a way of implementing or maintaining a universal system of worker co-ops without state enforcement. (Without a state, there is no way of maintaining any kind of social system. Anarchy is incompatible with even the semblance of a peaceful social coexistence.) This means that the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, and the other catastrophic regimes of the twentieth century are the real meaning of the concept of “socialism” — as is the democratically elected but now dictatorial Chavista regime in today’s Venezuela. Socialists cannot escape this reality through wordplay or fantastic speculation.

It is no surprise that socialism evades facts about the nature of the political system it works to achieve. The whole idea that animates the drive for socialism, the idea that human life would be improved by eliminating capitalism, is itself founded on similar evasions of basic facts.

I believe that those who are willing to study the facts carefully will realize that the entire edifice of socialist thought evades everything we know about human social and economic life. It evades that the root of production is the individual human mind, not the labor of brute muscle or blind “economic forces.” It evades that capitalists add value to workers’ labors by conceiving of new goods and services and coordinating the capital, labor, and marketing necessary to produce them. It evades that individuals have free will and can accept the opportunities capitalists offer, or not (whether the invitation to work with them, or to consume their products). And, as a consequence, it evades that the violent expropriation of private property and vestment of it in the state cannot create a peaceful and prosperous society.

Evading all of these facts, the Soviet Union openly declared its intention to centrally plan the lives of its citizens. Western intellectuals of the 1930s who knew these basic facts really had no excuse for apologizing for the Soviet experiment — regardless of the poor reporting coming out of Russia. But this means that today’s socialist intellectuals are doing something especially inexcusable. They know all of the journalistic facts about the horrors of the 1930s that intellectuals then did not. But still they defend the same policies that led to these horrors. Their sophistry asks us to discard these facts as irrelevant. It should not take a Gareth Jones to expose their cover up. It should only take a commitment to intellectual honesty.

Expressions of fear over climate change are reaching apocalyptic proportions:

“The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” claims Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Our house is on fire,” says 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, telling world leaders at Davos:

We are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes. . . . I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. . . . I want you to act as if the house was on fire. Because it is.

But these apocalyptic warnings are fueled by a massive lack of perspective.

For one thing, despite the constant claim that disasters caused by man-made climate change are already happening, the end-of-the-world scenarios we’re presented with are not primarily derived from real-world data but from computer models that are demonstrably unreliable. According to climate scientist Judith Curry, the former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, “the climate models making dire predictions of warming in the 21st century are the same models that predicted too much warming in the early 21st century, and can’t explain the warming from 1910–1945 or the mid-century grand hiatus.”¹

And these scenarios ignore the bigger picture of mankind’s relationship to the climate. I’ve argued previously in favor of taking a broader look at what makes us vulnerable to climate-related risks. Doing so suggests an alternative perspective: That the changes that might occur in the climate system itself pose far less of a risk to us than do the destructive consequences of the political policies offered as “solutions” — policies such as severe restrictions on carbon-fueled industrial development and regulations that impede resilience and adaptability.2

Even if one accepts the need to plan for an increased risk of climate-related disasters, the proponents of end-of-the-world scenarios show no recognition of the life-or-death importance of abundant energy, the physical and economic realities of energy production, or the devastating consequences of the sweeping carbon-cutting policies they propose.

As a corrective to the near-panic that pervades our cultural atmosphere, what’s desperately needed is a broader perspective on the climate issue.

Fortunately, such a perspective can be found in a recent book exploring the connections between the current fears over climate change and previous environmental concerns — in particular, fears related to population growth.

The book is Population Bombed!: Exploding the Link Between Overpopulation and Climate Change by Pierre Desrochers, associate professor of geography at the University of Toronto, and Joanna Szurmak, a graduate student at York University.

Published in October 2018 by the Global Warming Policy Foundation — a UK-based think tank that offers sober and scientifically rigorous perspectives on issues related to climate and energy — Population Bombed! argues that the apocalyptic warnings we’re seeing today over climate change are nothing new.

Far from being an unprecedented and uniquely intractable crisis, the climate change issue is essentially similar to previous anticipated environmental crises — crises that failed to materialize, for reasons we’ll explore below.

By offering a broad, historical perspective on these unrealized environmental fears, Population Bombed! provides a welcome corrective to the climate of panic over climate.

The fizzled population bomb

The title, Population Bombed!, is a nod to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, a classic work in the environmentalist canon that offered forecasts as alarming in its day as today’s climate warnings are in ours.

Based on 1960s projections of world population growth in relation to global food production, Ehrlich predicted mass-starvation. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote. “In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The only way to avert catastrophic over-population, Ehrlich insisted, was by immediate and radical population control “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”3

But Ehrlich’s “population bomb” failed to detonate.

Instead of worldwide famine and death, the 1970s witnessed a revolution in food production led by agricultural innovator Norman Borlaug. Despite a doubling of world population over the last fifty years, rates of poverty and hunger have steadily declined, and food production continues to grow as technological advances enable farmers to produce more and more food on each acre of farmland.

Where did Ehrlich go wrong?

The essential flaw in his perspective, Desrochers and Szurmak suggest, is its failure to recognize the power of the “ever expanding human intellect” (p. 50)4 to transcend the limits of nature through technological advances.5

An analogy often used by Ehrlich and similar thinkers is the fate of bacteria in a closed petri dish, which will feed and multiply without restraint until they use up their finite food supply and die off en masse. But this model ignores the fact that, as Desrochers and Szurmak argue,

unique among other species, modern humans transmit information and knowledge between individuals and through time, innovate by combining existing things in new ways, and engage in long-distance trade, thus achieving, to a degree, a decoupling from local limits. (p. xvii)

As one data point among many they reference, consider corn production in the United States. On the “bacteria” premise, one might expect our ability to grow corn to be limited by the availability of arable land and other required agricultural inputs. But in reality, even as US population has grown, corn production has increased by an order of magnitude over 150 years. Thanks to numerous innovations, farmers have been able to produce dramatically more with fewer resources.

Not only have farmers produced more corn per acre, but their yield has completely decoupled from acreage and other inputs such that, according to environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel, “American farmers have quintupled corn [production] while using the same or even less land.” “Crucially,” he writes,

rising yields have not required more tons of fertilizer or other inputs. The inputs to agriculture have plateaued and then fallen — not just cropland but nitrogen, phosphates, potash, and even water.

Multiply this kind of “decoupling” between production and resources across all industries and it becomes clear that mankind is not constrained by the same limitations applicable to blindly multiplying bacteria.

And it sheds light on why throughout history prophets of doom such as Ehrlich have always failed so dramatically in their predictions.

A long history of failed predictions . . . and improved human well-being

One of the chief values of Population Bombed! is its comprehensive historical research.

Paul Ehrlich was far from the first person to make spectacularly wrong predictions based on fear of unchecked population growth. For centuries, there have been thinkers who’ve expressed the idea that mankind’s impact on its environment is inherently destructive, and that an ever-increasing human population will soon find itself unable to marshal the resources needed for continued survival.

The works of such thinkers and their critics have given rise to a long-standing historical debate between “two main perspectives on the relationship between humans and nature,” which Desrochers and Szurmak designate as the “pessimists” versus the “optimists.”

One [the optimist perspective] argues that we can and should reshape the natural world for our own benefit. The other is that humanity should live within natural limits and that failing to do so will result in considerable harm. (p. 7)

Arguably, these competing perspectives go back millennia, but their modern form is generally traced to Thomas Malthus’s 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population. Anticipating Ehrlich by two centuries, Malthus famously argued, on mathematical grounds, that unchecked population growth must inevitably outstrip food production causing mass starvation and strife.

But just as Ehrlich’s predictions of catastrophe came at the exact moment that Norman Borlaug’s innovations were transforming agriculture, Malthus published his essay right when the burgeoning industrial revolution was massively expanding man’s productive capacity — rendering his alarmist predictions failures, too.

Since the time of Malthus and his critics, thinkers from these opposite perspectives have returned again and again to these issues and, according to Desrochers and Szurmak, “the same ideas about resources, development, environment and population have been reborn — or, perhaps, recycled — every generation.” (p. 4)

The result has been a vast literature on both sides of this issue — and although Population Bombed!, itself, is relatively slim and concise, readers interested in exploring environmental issues in more detail will find the book an invaluable summary of, and guide to, that literature.

Although the book gives a fair analysis of the chief arguments offered by both schools of thought, Desrochers and Szurmak find that the balance of evidence comes out unequivocally supporting the “optimist” school.

Numerous authors, they write, have “documented and synthesized recent trends using a vast array of credible sources” (p. 59) — including such “data-filled books” as Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Reviewing these works, Desrochers and Szurmak find that every prediction of impending environmental catastrophe based on the “pessimists’” premises has been dramatically wrong, again and again. Instead there has been dramatic improvement in every aspect of human flourishing.

As a result of “spontaneous market processes” — which includes two centuries of population growth, industrialization, and a steadily increasing global standard of living — every measure of human well-being has steadily improved over the past two hundred years and continues to do so.

Indeed, even when it comes to measures of “environmental quality,” the data shows the opposite of the “pessimists’” expectations.

Market processes improve “environmental quality”

In an especially valuable chapter, Desrochers and Szurmak explain some of the market processes that drive continued growth and human flourishing. And they find that the same market incentives that brought about the steady, continuous improvements in economic measures of human well-being have also resulted in steady improvements in “environmental indicators.”

Where the “pessimist” perspective takes it for granted that any improvement in standard of living must come at the expense of a livable environment, Desrochers and Szurmak find that market processes “simultaneously deliver economic and environmental benefits.” (p. 63)

We’ve already seen, above, the phenomenon of “decoupling” — whereby innovation results in greater productive returns despite constant or even decreasing demand on resources. “In a competitive context,” explain Desrochers and Szurmak, “creative individuals have every incentive to develop production processes that generate more or better output using less input.” (p. 66)

Similar incentives drive the phenomenon of “substitution” — the replacement of one type of resource with another that can fill the same economic need. The ability to use natural gas for heating instead of wood, for instance, not only provides a cleaner and less expensive source of heat, but it also reduces demand for firewood. Partly as a result of this substitution (as well as other factors), the amount of forest acreage in the United States — which was on a steady decline from the colonial period through the early 20th century — has been gradually increasing in the last hundred years. (p. 99)6

Even reductions in pollution have been driven by competition and the profit-motive, according to Desrochers and Szurmak, incentivized by the “development of valuable by-products out of what used to be polluting production waste.” (p. 65) The most fascinating section of Population Bombed!, in my view, is one that briefly reviews historical examples of industries in which competition “gave corporate managers a strong incentive to turn waste into wealth.” (p. 72)

Desrochers and Szurmak offer the following summary of their “reading of the evidence on resource availability and the environmental impact of increased consumption”:

• Non-renewable resources are more abundant than ever before.

• Most environmental indicators in advanced economies and in many developing ones show marked signs of improvement.

• Predictions of future collapse by past pessimistic writers, whether based on resource scarcity or the environmental impact of increased production and consumption, have not come to pass.

• The best predictor of long-term population trends, the total fertility rate, has been declining since the early 1960s. Even though we disagree with the pessimists that human population growth is a problem, the available evidence does not support their alarmist forecasts of critical overcrowding far into the future.

• The problems and threats described by pessimistic writers are typically based on models, scenarios and conjectures rather than time series of environmental data showing actual damage from the use of modern technologies and/or increased consumption. (p. 116)

This last point is especially relevant to the parallels that Population Bombed! draws to current predictions about climate change.

The climate change issue as essentially similar to past environmental scares

Desrochers and Szurmak acknowledge that their focus is not on systematically reviewing “the scientific details and economic controversies surrounding the climate change debate” which “have been discussed in much more detail elsewhere.” (p. 129) In keeping with the character of Population Bombed! as a valuable literature guide, they refer their readers instead to reputable secondary sources on these topics.

Their primary focus is on exploring the historical roots of climate change as an environmental issue. And they find that it has grown out of the same intellectual framework as all the previous environmental scares.

The essential flaw in environmentalist thinking, as we’ve seen, is its failure to recognize the power of human reason to transcend the supposed limits of nature.

In the case of fears over population and resources, this means a failure to recognize how trade and specialization in a division-of-labor society have allowed an ever-growing population to create unimaginable levels of wealth out of fewer and fewer “natural” resources.

In the case of climate change, the same error takes the form of a failure to recognize the extent to which carbon-fueled industrial development has made people dramatically safer from climate disasters than ever before in human history. Our ability to build resilience against climate extremes comes from the same source as our ability to overcome resource constraints: the rational human mind.

In both cases, the “doomsday scenarios” offered by environmentalists are “based on theoretical frameworks and computer-generated scenarios rather than longitudinal time series demonstrating actual harm or degradation.” (p. 129)

Desrochers and Szurmak trace the links between proponents of population alarmism and climate alarmism, and the development of the climate issue into the central concern of the environmentalist movement. They find that “much recent thinking is often nothing more than a repackaging of long-debunked arguments.” (p. 5)

But this raises the question of why these thinkers cling to those “long-debunked arguments” in the face of so much contrary evidence. No matter how overwhelmingly the data shows dramatic improvement in every measure of human well-being — even measures of “environmental quality” — environmentalists continue to sound new alarms, the climate change issue being simply the latest in a long series.

“Every generation,” observe Desrochers and Szurmak, “believes that a new global environmental catastrophe changes everything and warrants severe constraints on population and economic growth.” (p. xviii)

Why is that?

“Why do pessimists resist reality?”

To explain this stubborn defiance of reality requires an examination of the goals and basic ideas driving the environmentalist movement, an analysis of environmentalism as an ideological movement. Unfortunately, this is the weakest aspect of Population Bombed!

At one point, taking the purported goals of the environmentalist movement at face value, Desrochers and Szurmak argue:

If the key to truly sustainable development is a reduction of human impact on sensitive ecosystems, then the available evidence suggests that economic development based on ever more globalized trade, greater use of carbon fuels and continuous innovation seems preferable to greater material deprivation and increased reliance on local renewable resources.

By contrast, however, the assumptions built into frameworks and models of environmental doom seem more reflective of their authors’ lack of understanding or dislike of economic development, market processes (and especially a misunderstanding of the true incentives created by the profit motive), carbon fuels and technological advances rather than actual negative environmental trends. [Emphasis added] (p. 116)

But this leaves open the question of what explains that “lack of understanding or dislike” of economic development and market processes, and the fact that environmentalists seem to find greater material deprivation “preferable”?

To try to explain why “pessimists resist reality,” Desrochers and Szurmak spend a chapter delving into the psychology literature on cognitive biases and considering the “dynamics of socially based decision-making.” (p. 148) While the ideas they draw from “psychologists, political scientists, and other researchers” might offer some insight, in the end they don’t sufficiently explain the environmentalist movement’s philosophically consistent hostility toward freedom and human progress.

I have argued in the past that most people have a mistaken view of environmentalism, seeing it as a movement whose goal is simply to preserve a livable environment so that we, and future generations, may continue to prosper.

But if that were true, then one would expect to find environmentalists celebrating the abundant evidence that market processes “simultaneously deliver economic and environmental benefits.” Instead, as we’ve seen, they dismiss that evidence and continue to predict imminent catastrophes based on their “theoretical frameworks and computer-generated scenarios.”

The problem is not that they are “pessimists.” The problem is that their actual goal is not, in fact, to promote human well-being, but to protect nature from human encroachment. The core premise underlying environmentalism is that “nature must be protected, not for man, but from man.”7

By the standard of human well-being, there isn’t really any meaningful distinction between “economic” and “environmental” improvement. The purpose of all productive human activity is to improve man’s quality of life, which includes developing and improving his physical surroundings — i.e., his environment.

But that sort of “environmental improvement” is not what environmentalists have in mind. As Desrochers and Szurmak report, it’s taken for granted as a “built-in assumption” to equate “wealth creation and negative environmental outcomes” (p. 102) and to “equate smaller population numbers and greater material poverty with lesser environmental impact.” (p. 107)

This is because the ultimate goal of the environmentalist movement is to prevent any form of human impact on untouched wilderness. So any form of economic development — which necessarily involves some kind of impact on nature — is automatically viewed as destructive and as necessarily leading to future catastrophe.

While Population Bombed! does not, in the end, offer a fully satisfactory explanation of the motives underlying environmentalism, the copious evidence that it does offer strongly supports a more fundamental understanding of the movement based on an analysis of its philosophical premises.

To find such an analysis, take a look at Ayn Rand’s illuminating discussion of the burgeoning “ecology” movement as it existed in the 1960s. (See, in particular, her essays “The Anti-Industrial Revolution” and “The Left: Old and New.”)

What Population Bombed! does offer is a refreshing perspective on environmental issues and a badly needed corrective to the hysteria that dominates the cultural conversation today. Anyone seeking a more sober and rational perspective on environmental issues, and on the environmentalist movement, will find much of value in Population Bombed!

Rand came to America 100 years ago this February as an expatriate from Soviet Russia. She was indignant at the question in 1973, no doubt, because she saw clearly the fate that awaited her had she not escaped. She knew that, as an outspoken anti-communist, individualist writer, she would not have survived Soviet persecution. So, in 1926, she applied for a visa to travel to the U.S. to study the film industry. While she had assured both Soviet and American immigration officials that she planned to return to the USSR to share what she had learned, this was never her intention.

Immigration was not a subject of cultural controversy in the heyday of Rand’s career as a political commentator, as it is in ours. So, she never explicitly wrote about such a controversy in her nonfiction essays. She does, of course, endorse free trade as “the essence of capitalism’s foreign policy.” She also endorsed Isabel Paterson’s characterization of free trade, in which “any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety.”2 Free trade obviously includes the freedom of movement.

Still, opponents of freedom of immigration are incredulous that it is implied by the principles of capitalism. The questioner in 1973 thinks it would be against the self-interest of a nation’s citizens to allow freedom of immigration that lowers a country’s standard of living. Rand replies forcefully that the questioner has no understanding of her conception of individualist self-interest: freedom of immigration does not have this effect and, even assuming it did, rational self-interest could never include the right to forcibly bar others’ freedom to trade, move and compete, violating their right to pursue their own self-interest.

In any case, no one who is familiar with Rand’s most famous works should be surprised for a moment by her position on immigration. Her most famous works are also the works that bear the mark of her own experience as an immigrant and of her empathy for other individuals fighting the same battle. I’m speaking, of course, of her fiction.

Rand’s fiction does not focus on the immigration of non-Americans into America. It does, however, portray the plight of the migrant, more abstractly considered. Three out of four of her major works of fiction portray heroes and heroines who must seek refuge somewhere far away from home to live in freedom — whether or not in another national jurisdiction.

Like all of Rand’s fictional heroes and like Rand herself, Rand’s heroes are unwilling to settle for a life of stagnation or oppression. They risk everything to find a better life somewhere else, even when it means picking up stakes and (often) breaking ties with everyone they know.

Anyone who appreciates Rand’s heroes would do well to ponder how their stories relate to the current immigration debate. To assist them, I will highlight the relevant aspects of these stories.

(Note: this essay contains plot spoilers.)

We the Living

We the Living, Rand’s semi-autobiographical account of life under communism in Soviet Russia, was her first novel, and the one that most obviously tells the story of the spirit of one exceptionally brave and fiercely independent would-be migrant to the West, Kira Argounova.

Like Rand herself, Kira and her family are uprooted from their native St. Petersburg by the Russian Civil War. Kira flees home with her family to the distant Crimea (in present-day Ukraine) to take refuge from the Reds behind White Russian lines. When the Reds are victorious, they return to a renamed Petrograd where they have lost everything: her father’s business, their home, most material comforts, and their freedom (they are regularly conscripted into street labor and forbidden from most other jobs).

Throughout the story, for Kira and her family the “magic words” that give them distant hope are “from abroad”: news of possible action against the Soviets, rare, smuggled cosmetics, the latest operettas, news of unheard-of comforts and freedoms — and hope of refuge abroad.3

Kira then tries to flee Russia when her lover Leo pays black market figures who “smuggle human flesh” to take them to Germany.4 “Beyond the snow was the world; beyond the snow was that consummate entity to which the country behind them bowed reverently, wistfully, tragically: Abroad. Life began beyond the snow.”5 But they are intercepted by the Red Baltic Fleet, and Leo is imprisoned. Only chance decency from the powerful gets him out.

For a while Kira dreams of becoming an engineer in Russia, but her hopes are dashed when she is expelled from the university for her bourgeois origins. She watches workers at a building site, imagining herself as an engineer, but realizing it will never happen in Russia. She still has hope: “And in her mind, four words filled the void she felt rising from somewhere in her breast: ‘Perhaps . . . Some day . . . Abroad . . .’”6

Leo nearly dies from tuberculosis and then is psychologically destroyed as he is cut off from all avenues of meaningful work. Kira sees him falling apart but saves money from his work in the black market: “For the escape. For Europe. . . . We’ll do it . . . some day.”7 But when Leo is arrested for his black marketeering, he breaks. She now has nothing left in Russia. She proclaims this to a member of the secret police:

Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want — isn’t that life itself? And who — in this damned universe — who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left — look! . . . . Well, here I am! Here’s what’s left after you took him, after you reached for the heart of my life.8

With Leo gone, Kira makes a last, desperate attempt to get out of this airtight cellar — on her own. She applies for a foreign passport but is told it would be pointless because “No foreign country will admit a Russian.”9 She’s told that if she tries to escape, she’ll have no money, no profession, no friends. She does not care. “I want to get out.”10 She knows that human life is more than eating and digesting food.

Her foreign passport is denied. She is indifferent: she knows no one has the right to forbid life to the living and dares to flee the country illegally. She sells everything she can to buy information about a way across the border with Latvia, and a white coat to serve as camouflage as she walks across the border in the snow. Her relatives try one last time to give her hope that things will change for the better. But she bids them farewell.

The ending of We the Living is unforgettable. But as it approaches, we see an expression of the conviction that propels Kira forward to a better life, the view that the misery and evil around her are an aberration and that things must be better, abroad:

She had to walk. There, in that world, across the border, a life was awaiting her to which she had been faithful her every living hour, her only banner that had never been lowered, that she had held high and straight, a life she could not betray, she would not betray now by stopping while she was still living, a life she could still serve, by walking, by walking forward a little longer, just a little longer.11

Anthem

None of Ayn Rand’s other novels bear the mark of the migrant experience as explicitly as We the Living. But Anthem and Atlas Shrugged feature analogous plot elements, in which heroes, beset by restrictions and oppression in their native land and wanting a better life seek to escape. Even more important, like all of Ayn Rand’s fiction, they portray heroes willing to stake everything for the sake of their happiness.

Anthem is set in a dystopian future society that has regressed to a medieval standard of living because of a global collectivist dictatorship. The word “I” has been replaced by “we.” Equality 7-2521, obviously more intelligent and curious than his peers, longs to be a scientific scholar. But he is assigned a “life Mandate” as a street sweeper. Though torn by guilt for his “sin of preference,” he refuses to accept his lot: he steals away in the night to an abandoned tunnel where he discovers remnants of ancient technology and re-invents the light bulb. Holding out hope that he will be able to become a scholar, he shares his invention with the authorities. But the Council of Scholars condemns him for the crime of thinking for himself and challenging the established “knowledge.”

So, Equality flees from his society, alone into an uninhabited, ungoverned “Uncharted Forest.” In this new freedom, he discovers further remnants of the long-lost civilization, re-discovers the word “I” and abandons the morality that had paralyzed him with guilt. He realizes that the morality that each must serve as a means to others had brought his society to its primitive state.

In rejecting the morality that bound him in service, he realizes he is not tied down to his brothers or his place of birth: “Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the lodestone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.”12 He realizes his happiness is not the means to any other end, but “its own goal.”13 With his new knowledge and conviction, he begins a plan to help his friends escape from the collectivist society and build a new and powerful free society in the Uncharted Forest.

Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged repeats the pattern of Anthem’s allegory, but tells the story in a more recognizable, contemporary American setting. In this setting, all the nations of the world except America have collapsed into collectivist “People’s States.” Many of those left with ambition and hope for the future, like Argentinean Francisco d’Anconia and Norwegian Ragnar Danneskjöld, have come to America. But America is rapidly turning into a People’s State itself. The world of Atlas Shrugged represents the horror of a world where there is no longer any “abroad” left to which anyone can flee.

Like Equality, John Galt in Atlas is also an innovative genius who has invented an electrical wonder (a new source of power). But he is never tempted to share his invention with his society once he realizes the depth of its demand for his sacrifice. So, he destroys all remnants of his invention and quits his job as a researcher.

Rather than escaping to an uncharted wilderness as Equality does, Galt convinces his friends Francisco and Ragnar to go on strike with him, withdrawing the intellectual value they add to the world. Eventually they take refuge with other strikers in the American wilderness, in a valley in the Colorado mountains. Each of them is an ambitious individual who is unwilling to settle for the role of well-fed slave in the collapsing world.

Like Equality, Galt wants to rescue his friends and comrades in spirit from the collapsing world. But he struggles to convince them to join. To achieve this goal, he formulates a new moral philosophy, giving full and conscious voice to the values of ambitious people pursuing their own happiness through creative production. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden eventually join, but not without first having to break free from one form or another of the same errors that tied Equality to his society. But like Equality, Galt and the other strikers hope eventually to rebuild society when the country collapses and the road is clear. And this is the society Galt envisions:

Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force. Every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment. If he fails to use it and falls, he will be his only victim. If he fears that his judgment is inadequate, he will not be given a gun to improve it. If he chooses to correct his errors in time, he will have the unobstructed example of his betters, for guidance in learning to think; but an end will be put to the infamy of paying with one life for the errors of another.14

Here it is hard not to see that Galt wants to make America a refuge for those who would escape the rest of the world’s People’s States. He does not imagine that all who come will be paragons of virtue. Some will be irresponsible, but in the society he creates, none of these will have the power to drag others down with them.

A sanctuary for free minds

In 1946, just after she had begun work on Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand was also at work on a screenplay dramatizing the history of the development of the American atomic bomb. Though the screenplay for “Top Secret”would never be completed, nor the movie ever made, her research notes draw connections between many of the themes we’ve already explored. The atomic bomb was a quintessential American innovation made possible by the relative freedom in America vs. in the Axis nations — and by the minds of the immigrants fleeing those nations:

The fact is that Germany did not, could not and never would have created the atomic bomb; nor Italy; nor Russia. . . .

Is it an accident that since the beginning of the machine age, all the great, basic, epoch-making inventions and discoveries [“the steam engine, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the telegraph, the motion picture, the radio”] have come from America and England? Mostly from America, secondly from England — and with very few contributions from all the other countries. Why? Anglo-Saxon superiority? No. The inventors were of all races and nationalities. But they all had to work either in America or in England. . . . If we take the greatest invention of man and do not draw from it the lesson it contains — that only free men could have achieved it — we really deserve to have an atomic bomb dropped on our particular heads.15

Rand goes on to speak of how Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner all had to flee various statist dictatorships to continue their work. “They could not continue to work there. They had to escape to a free country.”16 Rand’s notes for Lise Meitner’s story are particularly evocative, as it must have reminded her of her own story escaping Soviet Russia:

Lise Meitner is forced to leave Germany. On the train going to the frontier, she is snubbed and pushed around by arrogant Nazi brown-shirts; the Nazi State has damned her on three counts: the old are useless, women are useless, Jews are useless. She sits alone in a corner of the train, her mind intent on the inexplicable experiment; she makes calculations on a piece of paper. A solution occurs to her suddenly; it is a stunning solution — but she must keep quiet about it. At the frontier, Nazis search her luggage: they take from her an old camera, a typewriter, and other physical objects of such nature; nothing of value to the State, they declare, can be taken out of Germany. We see a close-up of Lise Meitner — the broad forehead, the intelligent eyes. What she is taking out is in her mind.17

Ayn Rand saw America as an important sanctuary for free minds who rebel against oppressive regimes. She held that even when they sought refuge from an enemy nation during the deadliest war in human history.

Ayn Rand’s fiction is well known for celebrating heroic individuals who create value in the pursuit of their happiness and so defy tyrannical governments who would suppress them. And for Rand the quest for happiness is morally sacred: each of us has the right to pursue our happiness to the ends of the earth.

It’s no wonder then that some of Rand’s heroes and heroines literally go to the ends of the earth — as she did herself when she immigrated to America. So there should be no confusion why she would later say she could never advocate the restriction of immigration. Anyone surprised by this does not grasp the moral meaning of Ayn Rand’s fiction.

“Is it good to live as ethical a life as possible?” This question is at the heart of a recent book by Larissa MacFarquhar called Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help.

The book focuses on people whom MacFarquhar calls “do-gooders.” Do-gooders, as she explains, are not those who commit to charity work on Saturday afternoons, nor are they people who heroically respond to an extraordinary situation and then return to normal life. Do-gooders are people who devote their lives, energies, and resources full time to serving others, sacrificing their own security, comfort, enjoyment, personal goals, and freedom to such a degree that they make other people uneasy.

Through a series of extended vignettes of real-life do-gooders, interspersed with her own connecting commentary, MacFarquhar prompts readers to consider whether such people are moral exemplars whom they should be emulating, or whether these do-gooders have gone wrong in some way by taking morality too far.

What the book reveals is an entrenched and deeply problematic way of thinking about morality — one that has tragic consequences.

Equating morality with altruism

The do-gooder, writes MacFarquhar, “is the person who sets out to live as ethical a life as possible . . . who pushes himself to moral extremity, who commits himself wholly, beyond what seems reasonable.”¹ What do-gooders have in common “is that they consider it their duty to help other people.”(11) “The usual way to do good,” she writes, “is to help those who are near you.”(4) But the do-gooder feels that he must help strangers just as much as anyone else. He is “moved not by a sense of belonging but by the urge to do as much good as he can.” (5; emphasis added)

So, what does it look like for a do-gooder to live “as ethical a life as possible” and to “do as much good as he can”? Consider a few excerpts from the lives of the do-gooders that MacFarquhar highlights.

There is Aaron and his girlfriend Jen:

During graduate school, [he] arranged his classes so he could volunteer at Food Not Bombs on Fridays. That was awful work. He’d get up before dawn on a frigid Boston morning to show up in a tiny alley, with excrement everywhere, to lift box after box out of a van until his knuckles bled, and then he’d toil in a hot basement kitchen, making meals. . . . (45-6)

Laundry would pile up in his room, dishes in the sink. He would make large batches of food to save money . . . and leave crusted pans and bowls all over the kitchen. When she complained, he told her that time spent washing dishes could be time spent working for animal rights, which were more important. She couldn’t think of a good counterargument to that . . . . [A]ll she could say, when she felt herself going crazy, . . . was, “But I need it, I want it, I’m asking you.” . . . (48-9)

They got married in 1999. . . . The marriage lasted two years. One of the hardest parts of the breakup for Jen was that she now had to admit to herself that she wasn’t the ethical person she’d thought she was. She was not just leaving Aaron; she was choosing selfishness. She was choosing her own happiness over the survival of other creatures. (52-3)

Then there is Dorothy and Charles:

Charles was living on sixty-two dollars a month, earning a tiny wage working as a carpenter; Dorothy worked part time in a nursing home, and threw herself into her activism. Charles taught her how to Dumpster-dive for food . . . .

At one point early on, when they were living in one room together in a shared house, Charles told Dorothy he thought they should live on the street. They were using money to pay rent that they could give away to people who needed it more . . . . [Dorothy refused.] [Dorothy:] “We used to fight — he was always adding up every penny, he kept a notebook. Once, he told me that I was thirty-eight cents over budget. I said, ‘Would you repeat what you just said?’ And then I told him what he could do with his World Equity Budget.” (31-2)

MacFarquhar observes that we feel ambivalent about such individuals and the way they live their lives.

Ambivalence toward do-gooders also arises out of a deep uncertainty about how a person ought to live. Is it good to try to live as moral a life as possible — a saintly life? Or does a life like that lack some crucial human quality? Is it right to care for strangers at the expense of your own people? Is it good to bind yourself to a severe morality that restricts spontaneity and freedom? . . . (6)

Suppose you don’t aspire to be a do-gooder; how much can morality demand of you? Is your life your own, to spend as you like, or do you owe some of it to other people? And if you do owe something, then how much? The moral question here is less one of quality — What should I do? — than of quantity: When can I stop? (61)

MacFarquhar’s framing of the problem is revealing. She assumes that the question of the content of morality (What should I do?) is settled: morality is basically a matter of “helping others,” which here means placing the interests of other people above one’s own. In other words, she equates morality with altruism.

She mentions, in passing, other moral obligations, such as paying one’s debts and telling the truth, but notes that these can be fulfilled while leading a perfectly normal (non-altruistic) life of career, personal goals, family, and enjoyment. The do-gooder, on the other hand, makes helping others his overriding moral concern, making any kind of normal life impossible. The do-gooder, in short, is the full-time altruist — i.e., one who lives for others as his central moral duty and rule of life.

This equation of morality and altruism explains why the author sees her book as a book about morality, rather than about an altruistic approach to morality. It is why she frames the book’s central question as: “Is it good to live as ethical a life as possible?” rather than “Is it good to live as altruistic a life as possible?” And it is why she thinks the moral question one needs to grapple with is one of quantity (When can I stop living for others?), rather than one of quality (Should I live for others?).

MacFarquhar is by no means unique in thinking about morality in this way; it is in fact quite conventional. It is also quite dangerous.

Altruism as the source of the dilemma

The equation of morality with altruism is precisely what generates the fundamental conflict between morality and life that MacFarquhar’s book illustrates.

For if morality means “helping others,” then living “as ethical a life as possible” means helping others as much as possible — in fact, devoting one’s life entirely to it, sacrificing to the greatest extent possible one’s own interests in the service of that moral end.

Of course, few people aspire to live a do-gooder’s life. To the extent that they value their own interests, it strikes most as too “extreme” to live like that — it would involve more sacrifice than they are willing to make. But given the prominence of altruism as a respected moral ideal, many find it hard not to concede that the do-gooders are in fact morality’s saints, and thus the questions that MacFarquhar raises understandably surface in people’s minds: How much (sacrifice) can morality demand of me? And is it good to live as ethical (i.e., as sacrificial) a life as possible?

According to this way of thinking about morality, if one pursues one’s interests and sacrifices little or not at all, one must accept immorality as a permanent state, or abandon morality altogether. Yet, if one sacrifices everything in one’s devotion to morality, one gives up everything that makes one’s life worth living. MacFarquhar formulates this conflict quite clearly:

This is the core of it. There is decency, and honor, and ordinary humanness, and family, and children, and life — and then there is saintliness. There is everything you love about the world — everything that, if you found yourself shipwrecked on a distant planet, or close to death, you would most inconsolably remember of your earthly life — and then there is saintliness. (269)

In other words, the consistent practice of the morality of altruism (“saintliness”) requires sacrificing “everything you love about the world.” Even do-gooders must turn a blind eye to what their morality requires of them in order to survive. As MacFarquhar puts it: “any do-gooder who is not dead or irredeemably jaundiced by the age of thirty has learned to acquire a degree of blindness in order to get by.” (299)

But what MacFarquhar fails to realize is that this tragic clash between life and morality is not necessitated by morality as such or by being “extremely” (i.e., consistently) moral; it is generated by a specific conception of what morality is (altruism) and of what it demands (self-sacrifice).

Breaking the equation

The question of quality, as MacFarquhar puts it — the question “What should I do?” — i.e., of the content and goal of morality, is a deeply important question, and not one that should be taken for granted, as if the answer were simple or obvious just because one particular answer — in this case, altruism — has long dominated the cultural mainstream.

It is important to be aware of the fact that there are major moral theories that do not treat service to others as the central (or even a major) aim of morality. The best example of such an approach in the ancient (pre-Christian) world is the moral philosophy developed by Aristotle.

Aristotle held that the goal of ethics is something that we need to identify — it is not obvious, and there are competing views about what that goal is. Aristotle’s own view is that the goal of ethics is the achievement of one’s own happiness and well-being, as an end in itself — and he identified a host of virtues of mind and character that such a goal requires and entails. The moral ideal, according to Aristotle, is the individual who is fully rational in every aspect of his life and, as a result, possesses a tremendous, earned, self-esteem. Such a man does not surrender his interests — he seeks the best and the highest.2

The most significant modern development along Aristotelian lines is the moral philosophy of “rational selfishness” developed by Ayn Rand. Rational selfishness, as I have summarized it elsewhere, means “pursuing the values and practicing the virtues that objectively sustain and enrich one’s own life, not just in the immediate moment, but over the course of one’s entire life. It means living by the judgment of one’s own mind, by one’s own productive effort, and enjoying the results — materially and spiritually.”3 On such a view of morality, one’s attitude toward others is not “How can I sacrifice for them?” but “What values can I gain by interacting with them?” — values such as love, admiration, trade, knowledge, inspiration, friendship, enjoyment, etc.

In other words, philosophers like Aristotle and especially Rand treat an individual’s own life and happiness as the goal of ethics, and as a result they project a very different conception of a moral exemplar.

Given how culturally deep-seated altruism is as a moral framework, it can be difficult to take seriously other approaches to morality, or to even recognize them as approaches to morality, rather than as alternatives to morality. This is because the philosophical ideas one accepts, or simply absorbs from the culture, become part of the framework through which one views life, and one can easily forget that there are other frameworks — ones that lead to very different visions of a moral life.

As a colleague of mine wrote recently: “Having a worldview is like having a pair of glasses you forgot you’re wearing. What happens when you take them off for a moment and try on a different pair?”

Seeking a new moral perspective

It is from this perspective that I want to conclude with Stephanie — the final do-gooder featured in MacFarquhar’s book — because this woman’s tortured struggle to set herself free from the grip of altruism illustrates perfectly the deep moral conflict and the damage caused by altruism — as well as the need for a new approach to morality.

Stephanie’s religious upbringing instilled a deep sense of guilt in her, but she was “devout and unquestioning.” (284) Just before college, however, doubts began to surface. She studied philosophy in college and went on to pursue graduate studies in the field. She struggled with her faith until she realized that she was not a believer anymore. She found a job teaching philosophy at a small Catholic college and married a man who was zealously “trying to save the world” — a full-time altruist, a do-gooder — and she became wrapped up in altruistic causes and the “effective altruism” movement.

Over the years, however, she began to question and reconsider her moral outlook. Here is an extended quotation from the book that is worth reading in full because it captures her moral courage, her self-reflection, and her plight:

If she truly committed herself to saving the world as she ought to, she thought, she would never have fun anymore — she wouldn’t be able to travel, she would never go to beautiful places. . . . She would have to cut out of her life the things she loved, one by one, until there were none left. . . . She always felt guilty . . . . (291)

All her life, she had believed that there was something fundamentally bad about her; but now she thought that maybe she had simply been wrong about this. . . .

It took her a long time to get to this point — several years of guilt and self-laceration — but at the end of it, she no longer believed that she was obliged to dedicate every waking moment to saving the world, or to pry ever more waking moments from her hours of sleep. . . . (292-3)

She had rejected Christianity, she had rejected philosophy, she had rejected unlimited altruism. Now she had nothing left — only herself. It made her happy to think about doing things she wanted to do, but it was also frightening. . . . (293)

“Is it somehow legitimate to say what is valuable is what I consider to be valuable?” she wondered. “Is that okay?” It sounded so subjective to her — so flimsy, so groundless. . . . But what was left? Could you base a life on ideals that you invented? . . . She had rejected moral systems built on centuries of the thought and faith and obedience of millions of people, and now her foundation was going to be herself? It sounded ridiculous. But it was all she had. Is it okay to say, These are the things that I value, this is what I’m going to pursue in life? she wondered. . . . She didn’t know. (293-4)

Stephanie’s case is both hopeful and tragic. She is groping, in effect, for a different pair of glasses, a different lens to view a moral life — one that treats her own life and happiness as legitimate moral ends — but she cannot help thinking that such an approach can only be a flimsy matter of subjective preference.

This is particularly tragic in that a proper education in philosophy should teach any student that there are other moral theories than altruism. Perhaps she encountered such theories but found them unconvincing or too alien. Even more tragic is that she almost certainly didn’t encounter Ayn Rand because too many academic philosophers are unwilling to recognize Rand as a philosopher worth studying, precisely because she presents a radically different philosophical framework.

What advice would MacFarquhar offer to this young lady? She does not say. But the next page of the book features a long quotation from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason praising the elevation of moral duty above life itself.

What would Ayn Rand’s advice be? How would she respond to Stephanie’s question: “Is it okay to say, These are the things that I value, this is what I’m going to pursue in life?”

I think she would say at least two things: First: that not only is it “okay” to pursue one’s own values, it is the essence of a moral life. But, second: one’s personal values must be real values, ones that objectively advance one’s life and happiness. Even if one decides to pursue one’s own happiness as one’s highest goal, all kinds of errors and missteps are possible, so the idea that “what is valuable is what I consider to be valuable” is hopeless as a standard. One needs a rationally defined and validated code of values that gives one real guidance on how to live one’s life in a rational, principled, and life-serving way.

In other words, the way to escape the moral dilemma caused by altruism is not to draw an arbitrary limit here or there on the continuum of sacrifice, but to step outside the moral framework that generates it and find a better morality — one that seeks to advance an individual’s life and happiness.

This is what Rand sought to offer in her novels and philosophic writings. One can only hope that the Stephanies of the world — and anyone else seeking this kind of moral perspective — will find it in time.

American military action against Iran was long overdue. But despite going to war, President Trump has apparently not learned the lesson that eluded his predecessors: Iran’s distinctive Islamist nature is what drives its hostility.

One red flag: asked on March 1st about the war’s political endgame, Trump told the New York Times that, “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.”

Days later he again expressed hope that he can simply appoint a new leader, “like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.” Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists the U.S. objective in Iran is to degrade Iran’s missile program, not regime change. Even after floating the slogan “unconditional surrender,” Trump mused about welcoming religious leaders in Iran, provided they somehow diverge from current policies.

The idea that the Iranian regime’s policies might change for the better simply by appointing a more pliable leader, as in Venezuela, is a delusion.

While Maduro’s Venezuela had its roots in the socialist ideology of Hugo Chavez, socialism’s power to motivate fails when the earthly goods it promises fail to materialize. When that happened, it’s no surprise that the Venezuelan state was captured by cartels who made it a haven for drug trafficking and money laundering. Delcy Rodriguez herself has long been a key figure in the Cartel of the Suns, perhaps the power behind Maduro’s throne all along. Rodriguez seems to care about little more than maintaining her power. She can plausibly be counted on to do Trump’s bidding, else face the same punishment as Maduro — though it’s premature to deem this setup a success.

Whereas Venezuela is led by thugs and gangsters, Iran is an ideologically driven militant regime.

Iran’s 1979 revolution created an Islamist regime led by a clerical “supreme leader.” Its founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, established a religious dictatorship that subjugates the Iranian people under sharia law, while zealously exporting its dogma by force. The constitution embraces “the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world” (citing a Koranic verse [8:60]). “Martyrs” sacrificing themselves for this cause are celebrated. The regime glorified one 13-year-old boy who strapped grenades to his body and threw himself under an enemy tank; his face appeared on postage stamps and banknotes. This extolling of self-sacrifice has roots in Iranian Shiism.

Iran’s revolution galvanized the Islamist movement across the world. Iran not only taught jihadists that their nihilistic goal is realizable, it also spearheaded the cause, funding, training, arming and coordinating such factions as Hamas and Hezbollah, which sometimes function as its proxies.

The clerics lead chants of “death to America,” condemning it as “the great Satan” to be destroyed, because of our secular, pro-individual freedom society. Iran’s first act of war against us was the 1979 seizure of the embassy in Tehran and the humiliating 444-day captivity of American diplomats. Then came lethal bombings of American targets in Lebanon. Then the enabling and arming of Iraqi insurgents slaughtering U.S. troops. Iran has been waging a religious war against America for decades. Our presidents since Jimmy Carter have failed to recognize that.

Trump’s notion that “what we did in Venezuela” would be “perfect” for Iran is beyond ludicrous. It projects a leadership of anti-ideological dealmakers like himself. But Iran’s regime has proven itself committed to its vicious ideas, which cannot be bought off. A fact underscored by Iran’s violations of the 2015 nuclear deal. An obvious risk of any deal with surviving members of the regime is that they would accept it only as a temporary ploy to fight another day.

To defeat Iran’s Islamist regime, our war planners must keep the regime’s ideology firmly in mind. They are not the gangsters of the Maduro regime, easily bought off or even afraid of death. If our war planners have any end game in mind — and it is scandalous if they do not — they must think about how to facilitate the end of a deeply ideological regime.

Eliminating the threat from Iran’s Islamic totalitarian regime necessitates discrediting its ideology, making it a lost cause. Some may doubt this is possible, in the shadow of the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles, and indeed, it has been decades since America has followed the right approach. History, however, provides a compelling model.

Consider the lesson from the 1945 defeat of martyrdom-extolling imperial Japan, which offered an “unconditional surrender” only after two atom bombs. The historian John David Lewis has eloquently described American efforts to discredit and uproot the regime’s ideology from schools and government, and to block from political office former regime leaders.

A hopeful sign in Iran: Even before the US-Israeli strikes, countless Iranians have courageously risen up against the theocratic regime, calling for “death to the dictator,” in 2022 during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” mass protests; and then in January, across 180 cities in all 31 provinces (which Tehran brutally crushed). Such protesters deserve our moral support. They could open the way for a secular, non-threatening, peaceful, even friendly, Iran.

Image credit: Arezoo / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images

SpaceX’s reusable Falcon Heavy now delivers payloads to orbit for under $700 per pound; Blue Origin’s New Glenn targets a similar price point. SpaceX’s Starship aims to reduce costs further to under 10s of dollars per pound. The industry’s radical cost reduction has enabled entire new sectors: private planetary science missions, commercial space stations, and asteroid mining ventures.

What changed? The legal framework governing space launch services.

Until 1984, the U.S. government maintained a complete monopoly on space launch through NASA and the Department of Defense. Even after the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984 technically permitted private launches, NASA effectively blocked commercial competition by using the Space Shuttle program to offer taxpayer subsidized launch services.

The Space Shuttle, despite being pitched as a vehicle to make spaceflight routine and affordable, ultimately cost approximately $29,000 per pound to orbit — roughly ten times more expensive than Apollo’s Saturn V. It also suffered two tragic failures. Meanwhile, NASA acquired and then abandoned the promising Delta Clipper vertical landing rocket in 1996, delaying by two decades the technology that would eventually revolutionize spaceflight.

The industry’s unfettering occurred gradually: the 1990 Launch Services Purchase Act required NASA and the Department of Defense to procure commercial launch services; the 1998 Commercial Space Act declared that “free and competitive markets create the most efficient conditions for promoting economic development” in space; and the 2004 Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act established a framework for private crewed spaceflight.

The final barrier fell in 2014 when SpaceX successfully challenged the Air Force’s practice of awarding launch contracts exclusively to United Launch Alliance (ULA), a government-created merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s launch businesses. Only then could new entrants compete on equal terms for lucrative military contracts.

The dramatic improvements made possible by this expanded freedom aren’t merely about better management or technology. They reflect the fundamental difference between government and market approaches to innovation. NASA secures funding through taxation — the forcible expropriation of wealth — by convincing politicians that its programs serve political objectives. Private companies must convince investors to voluntarily provide capital to create commercially viable ventures.

This distinction creates entirely different measures of success. When entrepreneurs are free, they must integrate scientific possibilities with economic realities to deliver valuable services at competitive prices. Success is measured objectively by profitability, which enables increased investment in improved technology. When innovation is administered by the government, “success” is determined by political factors disconnected from economic reality.

The old space industry employed brilliant scientific thinkers, but, because its course was controlled by government force, it necessarily lacked the brilliant entrepreneurial thinkers required for self-sustaining technological progress. Scientists discover what is physically possible, and, when given the freedom to do so, entrepreneurs discover what is economically possible. Together, they transform those possibilities into world-changing realities.

For this progress to continue and to accelerate, the space industry must not merely benefit from its newfound freedom but actively defend it. To this end, the industry must demand that governments take affirmative steps to protect its freedom. The 2015 SPACE Act, Florida’s 2023 Spaceflight Entity Liability Bill, and similar legislation are important steps toward protecting property rights and defining liabilities in space. But more must be done.

For example, as orbital space becomes more crowded, some regions of orbital space may be made unusable by a cascade of colliding objects. Whatever the technical fix, entities that place and operate satellites in stable orbits should be recognized as having a property right not only in the satellites but in the orbits they occupy. Such a property rights framework would recognize the freedom of those creating value in orbital space to continue to do so while avoiding both a tragedy of the commons and more of the central planning that has hobbled space exploration.

America leads in space technology because it has led in the expansion of economic freedom to launch and to explore. By removing barriers to innovation and establishing clear rights and liabilities, we can ensure that the space industry continues or even accelerates its rapid progress. As the cost of reaching orbit falls below $100 per pound, entirely new possibilities will emerge that we can scarcely imagine today.

After fifty years of stagnation, the space industry has finally been unleashed. To secure continued progress in the space industry and to bring its dynamism to other cutting-edge industries, we must recognize and double down on the defense of its essential catalyst: freedom.

Image Credit: peepo / E+ / via Getty Images