(HT: Libertarian Christians)

On Rand as a Totalitarian:

“Objectivism can be a wonderfully appealing religion substitute for disaffiliated Jews and Catholics from the middle class who turn to it with mania formerly reserved for their ancestoral religion–and also to the sons and daughters of Old American WASPS, brought up in the Protestant ethic of hard work and self-sufficiency. It is a closed system of ideas, even more so than the conservative Catholicism in vogue until the middle sixties. Under the most doctrinaire of Catholic upbringings there is a certain margin for flexibility. The boundaries are clearly defined, but you are permitted an area of deviation from the straight and narrow before stepping onto the wild shores of heresy. To a lesser extent the same holds true for Judaism.

Not so under the tutelage of the Rand.

Objectivism is an inflexible package deal. Ayn Rand, having established herself as a radical individualist, an uncompromising mudracker and free thinker by the 1950’s, then proceeded to ereect a tight system of logic embracing every conceivable area of human endeavor. Economics, politics, psychology, child-rearing, sex, literature, even cigarette-smoking–Rand has written about them all, issuing her pronouncements on each subject in turn. Curiously enough, for a woman who started out as a champion of the independent mind, she began to consider her own ideas as natural corollaries of truth and objectivity.

‘Objective reality’ was what Rand said it was.

‘Morality’ was conformity to the ethic of Ayn Rand.

‘Rationality’ was synonymous with the thinking of Ayn Rand.

To be in disagreement with the ideas of Ayn Rand was to be, by definition, irrational and immoral.”

(from It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille p.15-16)

On The Place of Humor in Objectivism:

“Smiling, when it happened at all, was indulged in surrepitiously, since humor in the Objectivist handbook was considered immoral and anti-life, a device contrived to destroy man’s capacity of greatness”

(from It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille p.22)

On The Objectivist Theory of Litearture

“My second crisis of conscience revolved around the Randian theory of literature. For someone whose tastes in literature ran the gamut from Hemingway to Maugham to Fitzgerald to Steinbeck to Duerrenmatt to Cheever to Mailer to Salinger to Evelyn Waugh to Perelman to Vonnegut, naturalists and satirists to the last, it was a bit difficult to accept the theory that naturalism and comedy were immoral and anti-life, or that Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming were the greatest living practitioners of the romanticism of Victor Hugo”

(from It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille p.23)

The excommunication of Murray Rothbard:

“The falling away of Murray Rothbard began..Shortly afterward it became known that Rothbard’s wife, Joey, was a devout Protestant, a practicing Christian who actually believed that faith an altruism had a positive moral value. When the last tremours caused by this revelation finally faded away, a pall of silence fell over the living room. There was a Christian in the house…a real, live, breathing Protestant who admitted belief in the existence of a Supreme Being! A heretic such as this was occupying the armchair in Ayn Rand’s living room. And was married to one of Rand’s most gifted protoges [Murray Rothbard], no less, who now sat beside her with a look of villainous unconcern on his face.

Well, if Murray Rothbard’s wife was a Christian there could only be one logical explanation for it: she had obviously never read Ayn Rand’s proof that a Supreme Being does not, did not, will not, and could not exist. Ever

…This incident marked the beginning of the end of Murray Rothbard’s eminent position in the Objectivist hierarchy…[h]e…had begun to question the wisdom of many Randian attitudes on political, and particularly, historical affairs. He compounded his crime of being happily married to a practicing altruist at the following meeting when he refused to leave his wife and take a more rational mate.

…Shortly afterward there was a meeting at which he found himself denounced for not smoking cigarettes.

…Since it was unthinkable for anyone to leave the Randian nest of his own accord, and emergency meeting of meeting of the Senior Collective was called to hear the various charges of deviationism that had been compiled against Rothbard over the past six months.”

(from It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccille p.29-33)

“It often happens with ‘egalitarians’ that a hole, a special escape hatch from the drab uniformity of life, is created — for themselves.”

– Murray Rothbard in Messianic Communism in the Protestant Reformation (an exerpt from Economic Thought Before Adam Smith)

However, there is another aspect to his thought, specifically relating to politicial issues. Was he a libertarian? George Marsden, The Freeman, and other sources believe so!

Historian George Marsden called him “radically libertarian” and stated that he “opposed almost any extension of state power and took stands on a variety of issues. Like most libertarians, his stances violated usual categories of liberal or conservative.”

Daniel Walker said the following of him: “Machen is one of many prominent American defenders of political liberty and economic freedom who have been largely forgotten by a people intent on abandoning its heritage of freedom.”

Machen opposed the military draft during World War I and also opposed prohibition, two stances that might not seem to jive with the common caricature of how a theologically conservative Christian would think, especially in the early 1900’s.

Here are a few quotes right from Machen:

“Personality can only be developed in the realm of individual choice. And that realm, in the modern state, is being slowly but steadily eradicated.”

“Everywhere there rises before our eyes the specter of a society where security, if it is attained at all, will be attained at the expense of freedom, where the security that is attained will be the security of fed beasts in a stable, and where all the high aspirations of humanity will have been crushed by an all-powerful state.”

On education, he said “If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well.” He also said: “Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.”

“The key issue in the entire discussion is simply this: shall the parent or the State be the overseer of the child? An essential feature of human life is that, for many years, the child is relatively helpless, that his powers of providing for himself mature late. Until these powers are fully developed he cannot act completely for himself as a responsible individual. He must be under tutelage. This tutelage is a complex and difficult task. From an infancy of complete dependence and subjection to adults, the child must grow up gradually to the status of an independent adult. The question is under whose guidance, and virtual  “ownership” the child should be: his parents’ or the State’s? There is no third, or middle, ground in this  issue. Some party must control, and no one suggests that some individual third party have authority to  seize the child and rear it.

It is obvious that the natural state of affairs is for the parents to have charge of the child. The parents are the literal producers of the child, and the child is in the most intimate relationship to them that any  people can be to one another. The parents have ties of family affection to the child. The parents are interested in the child as an individual, and are the most likely to be interested and familiar with his  requirements and personality. Finally, if one believes at all in a free society, where each one owns himself and his own products, it is obvious that his own child, one of his most precious products, also comes under  his charge.”

- Murray Rothbard in Education: Free and Compulsory (p.6)

HT: Mark Horne

As an Eric Margolis points out in The Ghosts of Vietnam Haunt Washington (September 22, 2009), mission Afghanistan is continuing to be a disaster for the U.S. He makes a comparisons to the old British imperialist failure in Afghanistan, except with the telling assesment that “[t]he British imperialists did it much, much better and with a lot more style”.

Margolis points out how American general Stanley McChrystal is “warning that the US risks being beaten by lightly armed Taliban tribesmen in spite of his 107,000 western soliders, B1 heavy bombers, F-15’s, F-16’s, F-18’s, Apache and A-130 gunships, heavy artillery, tanks, radars, killer drones, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, rockets, and space surveillence.” The U.S. has spent $250 billion (that’s approximately the cost of 10,000 F-15s!) in Afghanistan since 2001. And each wave has caused an increase of resistance and more power for the Taliban.

After 8 years and $250 billion, the Taliban still controls 55% of the country. And get this, the commanders are still asking for 40,000 troops, even after Obama has tripled the presence there. Margolis does a fine job of exposing the sheer lunacy of what is going on over there.

And all of this is not even getting into things he brings up in other columns, such as the illegitimacy of the “elections” that the U.S. has implemented in Afghanistan–stage managed votes with canadidates hand-picked beforehand. All parties were banned, only individuals were allowed to run. It has been said that even the Soviets allowed parties to run in the elections they imposed on Afghanistan in 1986 and 1987. In the U.S.-run election, only candidates who favored continued U.S. and NATO occupation were allowed to stand. Foreign observers reported extensive fraud and vote-rigging. As Margolis has said elsewhere, “Compared to this pre-determined vote, Iran’s recent elections almost look Swiss by comparison”. Is this the democracy being exported?

This is not merely a crazed empire, this is a crazed empire on a self-destruct mission.

May some day God bless the U.S.A. with a leader or leaders that will be capable of ending this non-sense. May God spare the people of Afghanistan and us Westerners from the present and future chaos that this is causing.

Nathaniel attended a Baptist church and was an intimate friend of figures such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Randolph.  It should be noted that Jefferson’s famous quote about truth in advertising originated from a letter to Macon. He is known for having stood up against a Alien and Sedition acts, among other things and quite consistently stood against the expansion of federal power.

In the memoir written by Weldon Nathaniel Edwards, it is said that

“Of his political creed, it is scarcely necessary to speak. His unchequered consistency–the frank and manly avowal of his opinion on all proper occasions….Adopting to the fullest extent, the doctrine which allowed to men the capacity for, and the right of self-government…and never would consent–however strongly the law of circumstances, the common plea of tyrants, might demand it–to exercise doubtful powers.”

John Randolph commented about Nathaniel: “He is the wisest, the purest, and the best man that I ever knew”.  He leaves a legacy of republicanism (with a small ‘r’) and has had a handful of towns and counties are named after him.

Here are a few exerpts from an article by Clyde N. Wilson on Macon:

“…an important Founding Father almost unknown these days.  Comparing Macon with the politicians of today gives us a benchmark as to how dreadfully far America has degenerated from the principles on which it was founded…Macon was admired because he never changed from the principles with which he began.  What were these principles?  The federal government should be tightly bound by the Constitution.  It should not tax the people and spend money any more than was absolutely necessary for the things it was entitled to do, nor go into debt, which was just a way to make the taxpayers pay interest to the rich.  Eternal vigilance was the price of liberty.  Power was always stealing from the many to the few.  Office-holders were to be watched closely and kept as directly responsible to the citizens as possible.   A few words from Macon in Congress often stopped bills that proposed supposedly attractive measures…As time went on, Macon realised more and more that preserving true republican principles was a losing cause, but in the company of John Randolph and John Taylor he never wavered…But Macon, like Washington and Jefferson, was not important and respected because he was elected to office.  He was elected to office because he was important and respected.  He never campaigned for an office.  He never attended a party caucus.  He never promised anyone patronage to support him.  Macon was elected over and over and revered because of what he was….Macon was more Jeffersonian than Jefferson himself.”

No doubt Macon, along with many other founding fathers, kept slaves and had a troubling and despicable view on the slavery question. And many of these politicians and other later highly lauded politicians, including the often revered Abraham Lincoln, had very racist ideas. But nonetheless, there is much to be learned here about principles of politics and nobility in politics by looking into the history of these men.  Macon, for all his warts, is an example of a early zealous “Dr No”, so to speak.  In a few different ways, he should be an inspiration to those who would boldly against statism.