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by Joe Cobb

Know thy enemy, know thyself. Words of wisdom.

Terrorists are not just criminals, they are conspiracy criminals. The label “organized crime��? is out of style. Now the conspiracy criminals are called “El Quaida.��?

RICO is insufficient. Now the government wants war powers and Homeland Security police to control things, like immigration.

Typically, there is some conservative “bait��? in the government’s strategy, so Latinos are spotlighted (although most illegal immigrants are not Latinos and arrive by airplane; they come with legal tourist or student visas and just don’t go home).

Who are the crime victims here? Surely illegal immigration is a victimless crime?

Today as I write, it is September 11, the anniversary of an infamous tragedy. We know the victims and we mourn with their families. We rage at the violation of the victims’ right to life and shudder at how some of them died, by jumping or burning to death.

But revenge is not the solution. Prevention is the solution. It must never happen again. How can this be done?

First, more police and control over the American people are not the way to go. We cannot give up our freedom in the name of protecting our freedom. That is madness.

Second, we must understand why anyone, anywhere would want to do mass murder in the United States. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City and we are not sure why he did it. He was mad; he was against something. He was a mass murderer.

The Clinton Justice Department killed 80 people, 21 of them children, in Waco in 1993 because a nutty religious guy had a cult with some weapons, and children. He believed he was a messiah, so Janet Reno killed him and 79 others. Who was mad then? Why wasn’t she forced to resign, like Alberto Gonzales? She was a mass murderer.

But before they can take away our freedom, they should have to prove to us an “Enemy” exists, not just a mafia or criminal conspiracy.

There is (and never has been) any “War” on terror or drugs or poverty. There has only been a gigantic growth in the police state and welfare bureacracy - including the loss of common rights.

by Michael Kinsley

The party that reels in these voters will dominate the future of American politics.

To oversimplify: Democrats are for Big Government; Republicans are against it.

To oversimplify somewhat less, Democrats aren’t always for Big Government, and Republicans aren’t always against it. Democrats treasure civil liberties, whereas Republicans are more tolerant of government censorship to protect children from pornography, or of wiretapping to catch a criminal, or of torture in the war against terrorism. War in general and Iraq in particular–certainly Big Government exercises–are projects Republicans tend to be more enthusiastic about. Likewise the criminal process: Republicans tend to want to make more things illegal and to send more people to jail for longer. Republicans also consider themselves more concerned about the moral tone of the country, and they are more disposed toward using the government in trying to improve it. In particular, Republicans think religion needs more help from society, through the government, while Democrats are touchier about the separation of church and state.

Many people feel that neither party offers a coherent set of principles that they can agree with. For them, the choice is whether you believe in Big Government or you don’t. And if you don’t, you call yourself a libertarian. Libertarians are against government in all its manifestations. Domestically, they are against social-welfare programs. They favor self-reliance (as they see it) over Big Government spending. Internationally, they are isolationists. Like George Washington, they loathe “foreign entanglements,” and they think the rest of the world can go to hell without America’s help. They don’t care–or at least they don’t think the government should care–about what people are reading, thinking, drinking, smoking or doing in bed. And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights.

The relationship of these two ways of thinking to the two established parties is peculiar. Republicans are far more likely to identify themselves as libertarians and to vilify the government in the abstract. And yet Republicans have a clearer vision of what constitutes a good society and a well-run planet and are quicker to try to impose this vision on the rest of us. Now that the Republican Party is in trouble, critics are advising it to free itself of the religious right on issues like abortion and gay rights. That is, the party should become less communitarian and more libertarian. With Democrats, it’s the other way around.

Very few Democrats self-identify as libertarians, but they are in fact much more likely to have a live-and-let-live attitude toward the lesbian couple next door or the Islamofascist dictator halfway around the world. And every time the Democrats lose an election, critics scold that they must put less emphasis on the sterile rights of individuals and more emphasis on responsibilities to society. That is, they should become less libertarian and more communitarian. Usually this boils down to advocating mandatory so-called voluntary national service by people younger than whoever is doing the advocating.

Libertarians and communitarians (to continue this unjustified generalizing) are different character types. Communitarians tend to be bossy, boring and self-important, if they’re not being oversweetened and touchy-feely. Libertarians, by contrast, are not the selfish monsters you might expect. They are earnest and impractical–eager to corner you with their plan for using old refrigerators to reverse global warming or solving the traffic mess by privatizing stoplights. And if you disagree, they’re fine with that. It’s a free country.

The chance of the two political parties realigning so conveniently is slim. But the party that does well in the future will be the one that makes the better guess about where to place its bets. My money’s on the libertarians. People were shocked a couple of weeks ago when Ron Paul–one of those mysterious Republicans who seem to be running for President because everyone needs a hobby–raised $5 million from July through September, mostly on the Internet. Paul is a libertarian. In fact, he was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate in 1988. The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners, many of them rich and some of them complacently Darwinian, convinced that they don’t need society–nor should anyone else. They are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics.

Reprinted from Time magazine, October 18, 2007

By David Kelley

Fifty years ago today [Oct.10] Ayn Rand published her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. It’s an enduringly popular novel - all 1,168 pages of it - with some 150,000 new copies still sold each year in bookstores alone. And it’s always had a special appeal for people in business. The reasons, at least on the surface, are obvious enough.

Businessmen are favorite villains in popular media, routinely featured as polluters, crooks and murderers in network TV dramas and first-run movies, not to mention novels. Oil company CEOs are hauled before congressional committees whenever fuel prices rise, to be harangued and publicly shamed for the sin of high profits. Genuine cases of wrongdoing like Enron set off witch hunts that drag in prominent achievers like Frank Quattrone and Martha Stewart.

By contrast, the heroes in Atlas Shrugged are businessmen - and women. Rand imbues them with heroic, larger-than-life stature in the Romantic mold, for their courage, integrity and ability to create wealth.

They are not the exploiters but the exploited: victims of parasites and predators who want to wrap the producers in regulatory chains and expropriate their wealth.

Rand’s perspective is a welcome relief to people who more often see themselves portrayed as the bad guys, and so it is no wonder it has such enthusiastic fans in the upper echelons of business as Ed Snider (Comcast Spectacor, Philadelphia Flyers and 76ers), Fred Smith (Federal Express), John Mackey (Whole Foods), John A. Allison (BB&T), and Kevin O’Connor (DoubleClick) - not to mention thousands of others who pursue careers at every level in the private sector.

Yet the deeper reasons why the novel has proved so enduringly popular have to do with Rand’s moral defense of business and capitalism. Rejecting the centuries-old, and still conventional, piety that production and trade are just “materialistic,” she eloquently portrayed the spiritual heart of wealth creation through the lives of the characters now well known to many millions of readers.

Hank Rearden, the innovator resented and opposed by the others in his field, has not created a new type of music, like Mozart; rather he struggled for 10 years to perfect a revolutionary metal alloy that he hoped would make him a great deal of money. Dagny Taggart is a gifted and courageous woman who leads a campaign - not to defend France from England on the battlefield, like Joan of Arc - but to manage a transcontinental railroad and, against impossible odds, to build a new branch line critical for the survival of her corporation. Francisco d’Anconia, the enormously talented heir to an international copper company, poses as an idle, worthless playboy to cover up his secret operations - not to rescue people from the French Revolution, like the Scarlet Pimpernel - but to rescue industrialists from exploitation by ruthless Washington kleptocrats.

Economists have known for a long time that profits are an external measure of the value created by business enterprise. Rand portrayed the process of creating value from the inside, in the heroes’ vision and courage, their rational exuberance in meeting the challenges of production. Her point was stated by one of the minor characters of “Atlas,” a musical composer: “Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes. … That shining vision which they talk about as belonging to the authors of symphonies and novels - what do they think is the driving faculty of men who discovered how to use oil, how to run a mine, how to build an electric motor?”

As for the charge, from egalitarian left and religious right alike, that the profit motive is selfish, Rand agreed. She was notorious as the advocate of “the virtue of selfishness,” as she titled a later work. Her moral defense of the pursuit of self-interest, and her critique of self-sacrifice as a moral standard, is at the heart of the novel. At the same time, she provides a scathing portrait of what she calls “the aristocracy of pull”: businessmen who scheme, lie and bribe to win favors from government.

Economists have also known for a long time that trade is a positive sum game, yet most defenders of capitalism still wrestle with the “paradox” posed in the 18th century by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith: how private vice can produce public good, how the pursuit of self-interest yields benefits for all. Rand cut that Gordian knot in the novel by denying that the pursuit of self-interest is a vice. Precisely because trade is not a zero-sum game, Rand challenges the age-old moral view that one must be either a giver or a taker.

The central action of Atlas is the strike of the producers, their withdrawal from a society that depends on them to sustain itself and yet denounces them as morally inferior. Very well, says their leader, John Galt, we will not burden you further with what you see as our immoral and exploitative actions. The strike is of course a literary device; Rand herself described it as “a fantastic premise.” But it has a real and vital implication.

While it is true enough that free production and exchange serve “the public interest” (if that phrase has any real meaning), Rand argues that capitalism cannot be defended primarily on that ground. Capitalism is inherently a system of individualism, a system that regards every individual as an end in himself. That includes the right to live for himself, a right that does not depend on benefits to others, not even the mutual benefits that occur in trade.

This is the lesson that most people in business have yet to learn from Atlas, no matter how much they may love its portrayal of the passion and the glory possible in business enterprise. At a crucial point in the novel, the industrialist Hank Rearden is on trial for violating an arbitrary economic regulation.

Instead of apologizing for his pursuit of profit or seeking mercy on the basis of philanthropy, he says, “I work for nothing but my own profit - which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage - and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner…”

We will know the lesson of Atlas Shrugged has been learned when business people, facing accusers in Congress or the media, stand up like Rearden for their right to produce and trade freely, when they take pride in their profits and stop apologizing for creating wealth.

Mr. Kelley, author of “A Life of One’s Own: Individual Rights and the Welfare State” (Cato Institute, 1998), is the founder of The Atlas Society.

Published in The Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2007, page A21. Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.