This little blog post over at ABCNEWS.com points out that the essence of Barack Obama's political philosophy is altruism, or the sacrifice of some for the sake of others, and gives a great hat-tip to Ayn Rand's views on selfishness.
Barack Obama purports to believe in the American Dream, and he believes that living this dream requires forcing some people to pay for whatever other people consider to be the dream. Obama says some people should have the "opportunity" to become rich and live the American Dream, while other people should pay for this opportunity. What is interesting is the way in which Obama believes people become rich. Obama does not believe that the rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the protection of private property are what give people the opportunity to live a fulfilling life. No, Obama believes that when young people have "free" college education, when all people have "free" health care, when you take money from the haves and give it to the haves-less, then everyone becomes rich. How this is any one's vision of the American Dream is mind-boggling to me. The government will give you everything it determines you should want, and you will be happy with that. To Obama, the American Dream no longer means working hard, making sacrifices, and going as far as your own skill, intelligence, and effort will take you. Obama wants to condemn selfishness as a vice, and promote selflessness as a virtue. You want your work, your intelligence, your passion to ultimately benefit yourself? PSShtt. You evil, selfish person! Obama has no concept of how wealth is produced, why it is produced, nor what the concept of selfishness actually means and why it matters.
Obama sees people as generally falling into two categories: victims and thieves. Obama believes people who generally work for wages are victims. The people in this group would have things like infinite quality health care, infinite quality education, free gasoline, large houses, phones and TVs, if the thieves didn't "steal" their labor for their own selfish gains. The thieves, on the other hand, have more than their fair share. They have large houses, cars, savings, and presumably better educations, not because the things they offer to society are valuable to a larger number of people than what the average person offers, but because they are greedy and selfish and have "stolen" too much from everyone else. Therefore, it is necessary for the government, supported by those who feel robbed, to steal back from the rich and give it to the poor. Then everyone will be free to enjoy the American Dream once all wealth is equally distributed. Everyone will take comfort in being unselfish through never being able to improve their own state of being because not everyone else may be able to improve their well being to the same degree. Any reasonable person should be able to understand how the standard of living that did exist for each person will quickly disappear when each individual is no longer allowed to set the price, terms, and conditions for his knowledge and abilities.
Contrast Obama's view of selfishness with that of Ayn Rand, who wrote the following in The Virtue of Selfishness:
The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required forhuman survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.
The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rationalinterests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.
The idea that people are entitled to an "American Dream" makes me wonder what advocates of such "unselfish" ideals would do if they were stranded on a deserted island. Would they curse the sky for not showering milk upon them? Would they curse the fish for not walking onto the shore and placing themselves into the fire? Would they curse the trees for not shedding off lumber (which assembles itself into shelter)? I suppose they would curse God for not providing Eden, or for not having created him with pre-existing knowledge about how to survive. Perhaps "unselfish" people may put forth the effort to survive to some extent, learn how to catch or grow food, and build shelter, but they may still curse the universe because they somehow deserve a mansion, health care, and a risk-free world. The universe is so selfish.
The purpose of the desert island example is to isolate the fact that as human beings, our survival depends upon our own thought, action, and desire to live. This example also points out what selfishness truly means: it means to have concern for and to act in accordance with one's own well being. As Ayn Rand points out in her book The Virtue of Selfishness, the concept of selfishness does not tell us what in fact is in our best interest, it simply describes whom our actions are ultimately intended to benefit. If Obama's views were taken to their logical extreme, then a person stranded on a deserted island should really just kill himself, because he has no purpose in life without the existence of other people to provide for (or he may suggest you kill yourself for the starving vultures).
So why is it that having access and exposure to other people within a society that makes living for one's own well being a vice? If a person had a choice between subsisting on a deserted island or living in a free society, it would certainly be in the interests of a person's long-term survival to choose a free society. It is not because other people can become one's slave that makes living in society beneficial. The benefit of society is such that a person acting for his own interests has the option to voluntarily trade his skills, knowledge, and labor with other people acting in their own interests for mutual trade to mutual gain.
Society allows for specialization and efficiency in the production of goods and services that improve man's living conditions. Even a person vastly superior than everyone else in terms of intelligence and ability is made better off by trading with people of lesser intelligence and ability. Conversely, a person with comparatively lower intelligence and ability is made better off by trading his labor for food, clothing, and shelter with people comparatively more intelligent and productive than he is.
For example, let's say a person spent many years on a deserted island and managed to survive quite well. Then imagine that this person built a crude boat and decided to cast himself off into the ocean. If the conditions were just right, assume this person will eventually land upon the shores of a highly advanced civilization, complete with skyscrapers, agriculture, and advanced technologies of which this man could not have ever dreamed. If the intent of the island man was to discover a less hostile environment than the island on which he had been living, could anyone really disagree that his life was made better off by landing on the shores of an advanced civilization? Aside from language barriers and the absence of knowledge of social customs, the value of this person's labor to himself will increase exponentially due to the existence of trade, specialization, and everyone acting in their own selfish interest. While the shipped-wrecked individual may not know what to do once he arrives, many other people in society would likely be willing to put him to work because the cost of his labor would be negligible to them in comparison to the returns. I should not fail to mention that the island man's labor would be negligible in comparison to his returns over the returns on his labor on a desert island.
Why should the ship-wrecked individual care that everyone else in this new society already has large houses, shoes, tables, cars, phones, etc., when he didn't have any of those things to begin with, and couldn't have achieved any of those things on his own? Why should he care that he cannot easily afford open heart surgery, when even an infection from a cut was a tremendous ordeal for him before? Over time, this individual will have clothing, food, and shelter at a level which may seem crude by the majority of society's standards, but which are luxurious by the standards he existed with on a deserted island.
Someone may then ask, "If someone finds himself significantly poorer than some members of society, would it not be in his interests to, through whatever available means, force others to give up some of their hard earned wealth?" The answer is no. Such an individual that wishes to live through the sacrifice of others can have no self-respect and can only live in constant anxiety. He is admitting to himself that he is incapable of producing anything of value in an effort to further his life. He views others as having mastery over his life even though he is trying to be master over them. He begins to think that the intelligence of others is actually a threat to his own survival. Here is an excerpt from Ayn Rand's book The Virtue of Selfishness which states this idea succinctly:
There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).
If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no conceptof a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice.
If Barack Obama truly wants all boats to rise, then he should promote the idea that every individual is an autonomous being and has the right to live and work for his own well being, and he should fight for the protection of property rights. When each individual begins to have respect for his own long-term survival, and respects all others' right to do the same, only then will all boats rise.
