On Pages 125 and 126 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand introduces essay 14, The Nature of Government: “A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area.
Do men need such an institution and why?
Since man’s mind is his basic tool of survival, his means of gaining knowledge to guide his actions—the basic condition he requires is the freedom to think and act according to his rational judgment. This does not mean man must live alone and that a desert island is the environment best suited to his needs. Men can derive enormous benefit from dealing with one another. A social environment is most conducive to their successful survival—but only under certain conditions.”
My response: We need others; we need society for we are social creatures; we need some institutions, hierarchies, and the government, but it must be limited in size and scope, without despotic supervision of the people, and then people have a chance to flourish and be happy.
Rand: “The two great values to be gained from social existence are: knowledge and trade. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than anyone man could hope to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is division of labor; it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. The form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve, if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or self-sustaining farm.
‘But these very benefits indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of society: only rational, productive and independent in a rational, productive, free society.’ (‘The Objectivist Ethics’)”
My response: I agree.
Rand: “A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment—a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirement of a man’s nature—is not, strictly speaking a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. Such a society destroys all values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents, not a source of benefits, but the deadliest threat to man’s survival. Life on a desert island is preferable to existence in Soviet Russian or Nazi Germany.
If men are to live together in a peaceful, productive, rational society and deal wit one another to mutual benefit, they must accept the basic social principle without which no moral or civilized society is possible: the principle of individual rights (See Chapters 12 and 13).”
My response: Very good.
Rand on Pages 126 and 127: “To recognize individual rights means to recognize and accept the conditions required by man’s nature for his proper survival.
Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him or prevent him from pursuing his goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.
The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relationships—thus establishing the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may only do so by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary uncoerced agreement.
The necessary consequence of a man’s right to life is his right to self-defense. In a civilized society, force may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.
If some ‘pacifist’ society renounced the retaliatory use of force, it would be left helplessly at the mercy of the first thug who decided to be immoral. Such a society would achieve the opposite of its intention: instead of abolishing evil, it would encourage it and reward it.
If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.
The use of physical force, --even in its retaliatory use—cannot be left to the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by malice—the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.”
My response: Sound good.
Rand on Pages 127 and 128: “Visualize, for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be proof of guilt.
The retaliatory use of forces requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed, and to prove who committed it, as well as the objective rules to define punishment and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody private feuds or vendettas.
If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.
This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, is only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.
A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.
The fundamental difference between private action and government action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly of the legal use of physical force. It has to hold such a monopoly, since it is the agent of restraining and combating the use of force; and for that very same reason, it actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch or whim of caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled.”
My response: Yes, the government has to be controlled and limited in size, but who will control it and how? For it sure is Ameritopian now, headed for cultural Marxist authoritarian status. Only the little people from the bottom up can control it, and to do this they need four adjustments personally. First, always stay alert and never trust any government, because government always turns on those it is meant to protect and serve; we are lied to and indoctrinated all the time. Second, the masses must get organized as a political party with their agenda for what they allow government to and not do. Third, each citizen must insist with Patrick Henry: give me liberty or give me death—there is not slow road to socialist hell that is to be countenanced. It our moral obligation to revolt when government turns tyrannical, for that must not be tolerated, one minute, not one minute. Fourth, unless the citizens evolve and develop into personally existing as anarchist-individuator supercitizens, they will not have accumulated the wisdom, intelligence, and courage to withstand governmental tyrannical attack on their natural liberties, their constitutional liberties.
Rand on Pages 128 and 129: “Under a proper social system, a private citizen is legally free to take any action he pleases (so long as he does not violate the rights of others), while a government official is bound by law in his every official act. A private citizen may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.
This is the means of subordinating ‘might’ to ‘right.’ This is the American concept of ‘a government of laws and not of men.’
The nature of the laws proper to a free society and the source of its government authority are both to be derived from the nature and purpose of a proper government. The basic principle of both is indicated in The Declaration of Independence: ’to secure these (individual) rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . ‘
Since the protection or individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it.
The source of the government’s authority is ‘the consent of the governed.’ This means the government is not the ruler, but the servant or agent of citizens; it means that the government as such has no rights except rights delegated to it by the citizens for a specific purpose.
There is only one basic principle to which an individual must consent if he wishes to live in a free, civilized society: the principle of renouncing physical force and delegating to the government his right of physical self-defense, for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement. Or, to put it another way, he must accept the separation of force and whim (any whim, including his own).”
My response: How does the right to bear arms, own guns, and defend one’s family and property figure into all this?
Rand on pages 130 and 131: “Now what happens in case of a disagreement between two men about an undertaking in which both are involved?
In a free society, men are not forced to deal with one another. They do so only by voluntary agreement and, when a time element is involved, by contract. If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other—and the victim would have no recourse except to seize the offender’s property as compensation. But here again, the use of force cannot be left to private individuals. And this leads to one of the most important and complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.
Criminals are a small minority in any semi-civilized society. But the protection and enforcement of contracts through courts of civil law is the most crucial need of a peaceful society; without such protection, no civilization could be developed or maintained.”
Rand on Pages 130 and 131: “Man cannot survive, as animals do, by acting on the range of the immediate moment. Man has to project his goals and achieve them across a span of time; he has to calculate his actions and plan his life long-range. The better a man’s mind and the greater his knowledge, the longer the range of his planning. The higher and more complex a civilization, the longer range of activity it requires—and, therefore, the longer the range of contractual agreements among men, and the more urgent their need for protection for the security of such agreements . . . A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods and services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right—i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner . . . Some of these actions are obviously criminal. Others, such as a unilateral breach of contract, may not be criminally motivated, but may be caused by irresponsibility and irrationality. Still, others may be complex issues with some claim to justice on both sides. But whatever the case may be all such issues have to be made subject to objectively defined laws and have to be resolved by an impartial arbiter, administrating the laws, i.e., by a judge (and a jury, when appropriate).”
My response: All of this legal reasoning seems American and reasonable to me. Note how she points out that there are some veritably complex issues “with some claim to justice on both sides.” Now whether that is a legal dispute, an ethical conflict or epistemological uncertainty, it appears that either/or black-and-white do not capture what is legal or illegal—a bit on both sides—what is right or wrong—a bit on both sides—for what is true or false—a bit on both sides: some situations in life are borderline and tricky, and that is really the law of moderation at work.
Rand: “Observe the basic principle governing justice in all these cases: it is the principle that no man may obtain any values from others without the owners’ consent—and, as a corollary, that a man’s rights may not be left at the mercy of the unilateral decision, the arbitrary choice, the irrationality, the whim of another man.
Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of government: to make social existence possible to men, by protecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another.
The proper functions of government fall into three broad categories, all of them involving the issues of physical force and the protection of men’s rights: the police, to protect men from crinimals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invadeers—the law courts—to settle disputes among men according to objective laws.
These three categories involve many corollary and derivative issues—and their implementation in practice, in the form of specific legislation, is enormously complex. It belongs to the field of a special science: the philosophy of law. Many errors and disagreements are possible in the field of implementation, but what is essential here is the principle to be implemented: the principle of individual rights.”
Rand on Pages 131 and 132: Today, this principle is forgotten, ignored and evaded. The result is the present state of the world, with mankind’s retrogression to the lawlessness of absolute tyranny, to the primitive savagery of rule by brute force.”
My response: I cannot say the world as improved since Rand wrote this article 60 years ago. Outright tyrannical, collectivist and socialist government promote collective rights, a fiction that does not exist, and individual rights are barely paid lip service her in Ameritopia where the Administrative state is now so tyrannical, so woke, so costly, so corrupt, so intolerant of dissent, free speech and independent thinking (Do you want a visit from the weaponized IRS, ATF or FBI?)
Rand: “In unthinking protest to this trend, some people are raising the question of whether government as such is evil by nature and whether anarchy is an ideal social system, Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naïve floating abstraction: for all the reasons expressed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal to come along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need for objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.”
My response: Rand is most right here: we do not corrupt, tyrannical government that ignores the consent of the governed, but it happens all the time, even in America. Government, by nature is evil and turns tyrannical and corrupt, BUT IT IS A NECESSARY EVIL SO THAT WE CAN HAVE LAWS AND JUDGES TO SETTLE DISPUTES. The other extreme of pure anarchism is one that Rand shoots down firmly, and she is right to a point. I am a political moderate: we need federal, state and local government, but it needs to be limited and curtailed by the governed. And they must be anarchistic (handling as much of their legal, social, capitalist, and private affairs as possible in a state of huge liberty), but still within a constitutional republic with government structures lean, limited in size and intrusion into the lives of the citizens but existent and potent.
I want the masses to be heavily armed, feisty, organized, smart and informed beyond belief, and not in the least be cowed by any authority figure, whom, they ae willing to obey and be ruled by, and will only depose of them by legal means. Supercitizens, self-developed, wise, critical of authority, and yet mindful to preserve our fine political institutions and Western culture, and very willful, and jealous of their liberty, will make nasty, corrupt little career bureaucrats and power-addicted politicians unable to push them around.
A world filled with supercitizens, living angels, whose telos is expanding God’s kingdom on earth and in heaven, will not be pushed around by any earthly prince, and they will know it and he will know it, and he will come to heel and do their bidding for the governed masses consent to be governed but they will call the shots, and that is how God means for it to be and liberty political for a people is where individual rights are upper most in the minds of millions of supercitizes that come with an agreed-upon, national platform for how to protect their personal interests while promoting the common interest locally and nationally. They will compromise and find win-win negotiated ways to resolve the disputes voluntarily, and then they will be quite faithful in living up to agreements that they have made with neighbors and fellow countrymen . . “
Rand on Pages 132 and 133: “The evolution of the concept of ‘government’ has had a long, arduous history. Some glimmer of the government’s proper function seems to have existed in every organized society, manifesting itself in such phenomena the recognition of some implicit (if often nonexistent) difference between a government and a robber gang—the aura of respect and moral authority granted to the government as the guardian of ‘law and order’—the fact that even the most evil types of government found it necessary to maintain some semblance of order and some pretense at justice, if only by routine and tradition, and to claim some sort of moral justification for their power, of a mystical or social nature. Just as the absolute monarchs had to invoke ‘The Divine Right of Kings,’ so the modern dictators of Soviet Russia have to spend fortunes on propaganda to justify their rule in the eyes of their enslaved subjects.
In mankind’s history, the understanding of the government’s proper function is a very recent achievement: it is only two hundred years old and it dates from the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. Not only did they identify the nature and needs of a free society, but they devised the means to translate it into practice. A free society—like any other human product—cannot be achieved by random means. By merely wishing or by the leaders’ good intentions.’ A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free—as a system that does not intend on motives, the moral character and intentions of any official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.”
My response: I like what she writes. She notes, presciently, that the understanding of government’s proper function is a recent development. Just so. If Mavellonialist ethics and political principles were added onto our American free-market, constitutional republican system, we finally would have figured out how to have a just, long-lasting, rather incorruptible, government here on earth, not perfect but pretty darn good and stable, chock full of liberty, peace prosperity, and happiness.
Rand on Pages 133 and 134: “The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.
Today when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of government—that is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.”
My response: She predicted our current dilemma 60 years ago, that statism and Leftism would make the Leviathan so huge, so addicted to endless growth and absolute power, that nothing short of converting America to Red Communist totalitarian will satisfy and placate these radicals and killers (or soon will be). We must thwart them if we can.
Rand: “Now consider the extent of the moral and political inversion in today’s prevalent view of government. Instead of being a protector of man’s rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guaranteeing freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly , subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim—so that we are fast approaching the stage of ultimate inversion: the stage where government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
It has often been remarked that in spite of its material progress, mankind has not achieved any comparable degree of moral progress. That remark is usually followed by some pessimistic conclusion about human nature. It is true that the moral state of mankind is disgracefully low. But if one considers the monstrous moral inversions of the governments (made possible by the altruist-collective morality) under which mankind has had to live through most of its history, one begins to wonder how men have even managed to preserve even a semblance of civilization, and what indestructible vestige of self-esteem has kept them walking upright on two feet.”
My response: Wow! This is a powerful paragraph of denunciation. Humans have not advance at all morally because they are still born evil, running in packs, group-living, nonindividuating and self-loathing with no self-esteem—this fills people with rage, ingratitude, and self-loathing, so they will tear each other up incessantly. When you add altruist ethics, authoritarian and totalitarian, governmental structures with hierarchies that make each cog in the machine small, shattered, and self-hating, as she says, it is a miracle that we are upright morally at all. The present altruist-collective ethical code is brilliantly negative—there is not a better way to take and evil beast like humans, with some residual goodness in their heart, and prevent them from ever making much moral progress. Leftists and liberals have us doing and living exactly in a way that poisons us and is killing us, but they lie to themselves and each other, and argue that they are compassionate and bringing social justice to the world—hell on earth, and the absence of the Light Couple’s love and guidance is more like it. With faith in God, and egoist-individualist ethics, people will gain self-esteem, good wills, and a vey developed consciousness and personality as their telos to live as great souls is a journey that they now willingly and eagerly adopt.
Rand: One also begins to see more clearly the nature of the political principles that have to be accepted and advocated, as part of the battle for man’s intellectual Renaissance.”
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