Happy Birthday, Ayn Rand --America's Last Founding Father

Ayn Rand, a Russian Immigrant who escaped Communism to become an American novelist and philosopher, was born on February 2, 1905, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. 

After she came to America, she established herself as one of history’s foremost champions of reason, freedom, and individualism. Her place in history is that of an heir to a long line of intellectuals of The Enlightenment and of Americanism.

Rand once called Aristotle “America’s first Founding Father” because of his discovery of the laws of logic, which helped form the philosophic foundation for The United States of America. Since Rand established fully and explicitly, through her philosophy of Objectivism, the moral foundation of America’s Declaration of Independence, I believe she deserves the title America’s last Founding Father.

Her written works, interviews, and speeches are all still readily available for anyone interested.

I consider Ayn Rand to be one of the most important champions of individual liberty in world, and American, history. 

So, on this February 2, 2022, in recognition of her great intellectual and philosophic achievements, Happy Birthday, Ayn Rand.

Related Reading:

Ayn Rand’s Philosophic Achievement, Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4

The ‘Real Meaning of Christmas’: What Would Jesus Teach Today?

[This is a republication of my post of December 26, 2014]

In The Real Meaning of Christmas, Brian Regal, a fellow of the Kean University Center for History, Politics, and Policy, explained why Christmas should be celebrated by all people:

 

 

    [A] common refrain today . . . is the exaltation to "keep Christ in Christmas." This, I would suggest, is the much better argument than the "war on Christmas" angle. . . .

    Commercialization and atheists are the least of our problems here. Jesus said some of the simplest, yet most moving statements ever uttered: statements to inspire all human kind.

    Whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or Ufologist, one can’t help but be touched by the profound humanity of "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in."

    He urged his followers to treat people as we would have them treat us. He rejected the pursuit of wealth and political power. He embraced the poor and the outcast, not Hollywood celebrities or mega-preachers. He said the meek would inherit the Earth. It’s unlikely he ever owned more than one set of clothes, let alone an assault rifle.

    Jesus did not say, "When I was hungry, you turned away from me," or "When I was sick, you cut my health care," or "When I was poor, you mocked me," or "When I was a stranger, you pulled a gun on me and stood your ground."

 

I have a different take on Christmas. Following is an expanded version of my posted comments:

 

I agree that Christmas is a holiday for all, but for a different reason. (I don't agree with Jesus's ethics.)

Christmas ceased being a religious holiday when Congress declared it a national holiday. A national religious holiday in a secular nation based on the separation of church and state is a contradiction in terms. Today, Christmas is a secular holiday by law, and everyone should feel free to observe it (or not) based on his own values. You want Christ in Christmas? More power to you. No Christ? Same sentiment. To each his own. To paraphrase Jesus, respect others' right to their values, just as you would have them respect your right to your values.

As to Jesus, the context of the time in which he "rejected the pursuit of wealth and political power" was one in which wealth was largely accumulated by thieving rulers. Poverty was the widespread norm, save for the politically powerful few, who took from the meager earnings of their subjects. The pursuit of wealth and political power were synonymous, so Jesus's position was perhaps understandable, if not justifiable.

But the rise of modern capitalistic, free market individual liberty unleashed productive work and win-win, mutually beneficial trade as the path to wealth. People pursue wealth, not by theft, but by creating wealth and then exchanging value for value, simultaneously enriching both themselves and others. The rise of the free market economy separated the pursuit of wealth (economics) from political power. As the Declaration of Independence states, the purpose of government was set to protect individual rights, not the power of parasitical rulers to enrich themselves at the expense of the average man. What would Jesus say to that? Would he understand the difference between the pursuit of wealth by legalized theft, and the pursuit of wealth by work? Hopefully. But his 2000 year-old ethical ideology is not applicable to a free market economy, to the extent that we have one.

Of course, political power can still be an avenue for pursuing wealth by theft, as is the case with the modern redistributionist welfare state. Regal implies that Jesus would endorse this legalized theft with his statement "When I was sick, you cut my health care"—a slap at those who oppose government handouts paid for by forcibly taking from someone who earned it. Jesus certainly preached the morality of what we know today to be socialism; self-sacrifice for the needs of others. But remember the context. Would he endorse the modern union of wealth pursuit and political power—forced transfer of wealth from those who earned it to those who didn't—over voluntary giving? 

The blind, dogmatic adherence to Jesus's 2000 year-old ethical ideology is resurrecting that ancient evil; the pursuit of wealth through political power. It's time to modernize our ethics. What would Jesus preach today if he observed the broad-based prosperity created by self-interested, reason-guided labor (productive work) and trade? What would he think when he observed "poor" people living in comparative luxury vs. the "rich" rulers of his day, as is the case in the semi-free industrialized nations? 

We need a new ethics. In the modern world of wealth creation, should Christmas be about the worship of poverty? No. It should celebrate the rise from poverty made possible by the liberty to selfishly and rationally pursue one's own happiness by one's own efforts. By all means, lend a helping hand to someone in need, if it's consistent with your values and personal circumstances. That doesn't require a holiday to justify. Christmas should be a celebration of the good things in our lives, including our life-enhancing material achievements and the free exercise of spiritual values like rationality, productiveness, honesty, and pride that made those achievements possible. Spirituality and good will toward one's fellow man are not the exclusive monopoly of religion.

This Christmas season, I'll celebrate family, food, cheery decorations, and the wonderful commercialization—the symbol of freedom of production and trade—that enriches all of our lives. Earned spiritual and material enrichment go hand in hand.

 

Related Reading:

What is Capitalism?—Ayn Rand

Criminal Socialism vs. a Free Society 

The Capitalist Manifesto by Andrew Berstein

The Creed of Sacrifice vs. The Land of Liberty—Craig Biddle

The Declaration of Independence

Books- Understanding Rational Selfishness

The Maplewood Board of Education’s Shameful Snub of Thomas Jefferson

 The Maplewood Board of Education’s Shameful Snub of Thomas Jefferson

Citing slave ownership, N.J. district to change name of Jefferson school, read the heading of a small blurb in the 8/19/21 New Jersey Star-Ledger. As Chris Sheldon reports:

By this time next year, Jefferson Elementary School in Maplewood will have a new name as school district officials were looking to cut the school’s tie to one of America’s founding fathers due to his affiliation with slavery.

That Founding Father is, of course, Thomas Jefferson, the man who authored the Declaration of Independence, the document that declared the liberty equality of all men. That Declaration was the tip of a massive philosophical and moral revolution that would be the death knell of slavery in America and around the world.

The South Orange Maplewood Board of Education approved a resolution Monday to rename the school to one that will “ensure and model an inclusive, welcoming and respectful learning environment” by the 2022-23 school year.

A respectful learning environment? These board members don’t know the first thing about learning, education, or history, apparently. They don’t understand how history works and evolves. 

History is an evolutionary process driven primarily by philosophy. Jefferson was instrumental in ending slavery by articulating the most anti-slavery ideas ever articulated as the philosophic foundation of a nation. The Maplewood school board may not get it, but the Abolitionists certainly did. So did the Confederate leaders. The Abolitionists embraced Jefferson. The Southern slavocracy rebelled against him. Said Frederick Douglass in his famous 1852 4th of July speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,

You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country. [emphasis in original]

Douglass held up Jefferson’s words to call out the hypocrisy of American slavery. He did not repudiate Jefferson. Those words fueled his Abolitionist activism. He went on:

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age.

The “forces in operation,” Douglass understood, included “the great principles” that Jefferson articulated -- and that indeed guaranteed “the doom of slavery.” 

Contrast Douglass with a leading political leader of the newly formed Confederacy.  Said Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, in his famous 1861 oration known as the Cornerstone Speech declaring the South’s repudiation of the foundational principle of the Declaration of Independence, 

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." [my emphasis]

Unlike the Maplewood board, Stephens, like other pro-slavery thinkers, understood the power of Jefferson’s words and the danger they posed to the slave-holding South.

One need not forgive Jefferson’s “affiliation with slavery” to recognize Jefferson’s true place in history, that of the antithesis of slavery. Jefferson occupied a unique place in history. He sat at a major historic intersection--the intersection of the death throes of slavery and the ascendency of Enlightenment liberalism. He represented both the old that was on its way out, and the new that was on its way in. His slaveholding was hypocritical, but it represented the old. His leadership in the American Revolution represented the new -- the philosophical and moral revolution that was for the first time recognizing the equality and inalienable individual rights of all human beings regardless of color, origin, status, gender, or wealth. The signers of the Declaration, whatever their flaws and hypocrisies, engineered a tectonic shift under human history: They signed the death warrant for African slavery, and slavery everywhere. 

That, not Jefferson’s slaveholding, is what we revere and celebrate in Thomas Jefferson. He left the world an enduring intellectual fuel for the march of liberty. He left the world a better place. This is why freedom and justice warriors like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther king Jr., and Harvey Milk called on Jefferson for support. It seems the Maplewood board’s definition of “inclusive” does not include some great Americans, or those millions of we ordinary Americans who revere them. If the South Orange Maplewood School Board were serious about its commitment to “ensure and model an inclusive, welcoming and respectful learning environment,” it would integrate the recommendations of the Open Letter to the National School Boards Association & Local School Boards by 1776 Unites, a nonpartisan and intellectually diverse black-led alliance of writers, educators, thinkers, and activists. The open letter urges adoption of its curricula that, among much more, calls on America’s schools to

confronts the realities of slavery and racism in American history while also recognizing them as betrayals of our founding’s highest principles. Leaders like Thomas Jefferson are celebrated in our history despite, not because of, their personal and political failings. The struggle of Americans to rise and realize our own values is part of our story—and always has been.

Maplewood’s action is not a repudiation of slavery. It is a repudiation of American ideals. It is a kowtow to ignorance, and a slap in the face to the memory of slaves. Somewhere, the ghost of Alexander H. Stephens is smiling down on the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education. Shame on the South Orange Maplewood Board of Education. It does not deserve to have the word “Education” attached to its heading.

Related Reading:

July 4, 1776: 'Words that Will Never Be Erased'

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

Nike Shamefully Turns it’s Back on Americanism

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of

Independence

QUORA: ‘Why do law schools teach constitutional law but not the Declaration of Independence as an animating principle?’

Another Reactionary’s Flawed Framing of American Ideals

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. For His Moral Ideals Rather Than His Politics

 In commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Peniel E. Joseph, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, said in a 2014 article:

King emerges as a talented individual whose rhetorical genius at the March on Washington helped elevate an entire nation through his moral power and sheer force of will.

The March on Washington was when King delivered his famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. Joseph goes on:

Yet missing from many of the annual King celebrations is the portrait of a political revolutionary who, over time, evolved into a radical warrior for peace, justice and the eradication of poverty. During his last three years, King the “Dreamer” turned into one of the most eloquent, powerful and scathing critics of American society. King lent his moral force and power to anti-poverty crusades that questioned the economic system of capitalism and called for an end to the Vietnam War. . . . King’s powerful rage against economic exploitation and war is often overlooked when we think of him as only a race-healer.

The "moral power" of King's famous "Dream" speech in Washington was actually the moral power of the Founding Fathers resurrected. In that speech, King reminded Americans of the ideals laid down in the Declaration of Independence—the philosophic blueprint for the constitution and the new nation—and called on Americans to fully live up to those ideals. “In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check,” King said.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Yet, King's Dream was to be corrupted by an inner contradiction. In his later years, King questioned the legitimacy of capitalism and turned to what he termed "democratic socialism," a hybrid of two evil systems (democracy and socialism) that repudiates the very ideals he espoused in his speech. In a supreme irony, King unwittingly aligned with the political ideology of America's first encounter with Democratic Socialism, the Confederate Slaveocracy.* Therein lies one of the great American paradoxes—the clash between King the moral force and King the political revolutionary.

When the Founders drafted the Declaration of Independence, they laid down the radical principles that would give birth to capitalism. These 55 brilliant words—the opening lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration—sum up the essence of capitalism:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .

When King reaffirmed those ideals—that all men are created equal, possessing inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness protected equally and at all times under a government of objective law rather than of men—he was really, though apparently unwittingly, affirming the foundational principles of capitalism.

Capitalism is the system based on individual rights, rights-protecting government and the only kind of equality consistent with justice—equality of individual rights before the law. Because of these principles, Capitalism is the only social system that banishes exploitation and war, because individual rights banishes aggressive or initiatory force from human relationships—particularly aggressive force by government against the people. Under capitalism, exploitation is replaced with voluntary trade to mutual benefit among individuals, a win-win in which individuals trade value-for-value and get better together. Capitalism liberates every individual to think and act on his own judgement and work to lift himself from poverty, and protects those who take up that life-affirming challenge from would-be exploiters who don’t. And under capitalism, war is replaced with peaceful coexistence among nations based on that principle of trade.

So why would King uphold the moral principles of capitalism in his most famous speech while repudiating it in his politics? It's obvious that King didn't understand capitalism or fully grasp the moral implications of the Declaration of Independence that he so eloquently honored.

He undoubtedly viewed the America of the 1960s as capitalist, when in fact what America had was a mixed economy; a mixture of economic freedom and government controls—that is to say, an economy corrupted by heavy political interference, which included the virulently anti-capitalist Jim Crow segrgation laws. America in the 1960s was just emerging from a time when large segments of blacks were legally oppressed and hence unable to enjoy “the riches of freedom and the security of justice” that is capitalism. Blacks, King failed to understand, were not victims of capitalism but of statism.

King’s legacy includes an end to state-sponsored segregation and oppression—a monumental achievement. But his democratic socialist political policies also “succeeded,” strengthening and entrenching the mixed economy in America, which he mistakenly perceived as capitalism—the result being, in turn, to reduce economic opportunities for many poor but ambitious people, including African-Americans.

To his credit, King explicitly opposed full-blown socialism, which he believed leads to communism, a system that he correctly understood "forgets that life is individual." But he wrongly believed that "Capitalism forgets that life is social," leading him to his hybrid democratic socialism. He failed to see that capitalism, by leaving individuals free to pursue their own values in the absence of physical coercion, provides the only proper moral foundation for both individual flourishing and robust benevolent social interaction. That moral foundation, rational egoism, is implicit in the Declaration of Independence, which defends the inalienable rights of every individual to pursue his own happiness.

Thus is the paradox of Martin Luther King.

Commentators like Joseph urge us to elevate his politics to at least the level of his ideals. That, of course, would be an impossible contradiction. But ideas are where the real power lies. Since ideas are the driving force of human events, Martin Luther King, despite his politics, remains one of my heroes. Standing in a line that includes John Locke, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Ayn Rand, among others, King reaffirmed America's Founding ideals at a crucial point in American history. That, to me, is his real legacy contribution to America. For that, I am grateful to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

HAPPY MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY!!

* [See Randy E. Barnett, Our Republican Constitution, Chapter 4 “How Slavery Led to a More Republican Constitution.” See George Fitzhugh, "Centralization and Socialism." See especially C. Bradley Thompson, America's Revolutionary Mind, Epilogue, Page 359-386: Thompson documents the "common intellectual heritage" of 19th Century pro-slavery intellectuals and 20th-21st Century Progressives.]

Related Reading:

Martin Luther King: An 'Authentic American Hero'—or Not?

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

“I Have a Dream”: Martin Luther King Urges Consistency to Founding Principles

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal—Ayn Rand

Martin Luther King: Right On Racial Justice, Wrong On ‘Economic Justice’

Related Viewing:

Harriet Tubman Was a Hero for Individual Rights, Not ‘Social Justice’

In a New Jersey Star-Ledger “news” article, As statues come down around N.J., a new one rises of social justice hero Harriet Tubman, Tim Hawk “reports” on a statue of Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman being erected as part of the opening of the Harriet Tubman museum in Cape May, New Jersey.

Harriet Tubman arrived in Cape May in the early 1850s to earn money in her efforts to free enslaved people from the south. Her return last Friday morning — in the form of a 9-foot statue — has sparked excitement and anticipation in the community where she once worked as a cook and as a domestic laborer for hotels and families.

The statue of Tubman leading a slave girl to freedom, by Emmy and Academy Award winning sculptor Wesley Wofford, is the first installment of the soon-to-be open Harriet Tubman Museum which on June 29 took a step closer to becoming New Jersey’s official Harriet Tubman Museum after the state assembly unanimously passed a bill. The legislation will next go to the state Senate.

But the “report” evades the actual, true nature of Tubman’s heroism: She was a fighter for inalienable individual rights, but the term individual rights, the heart of her struggle to free slaves, is not mentioned once in the article. The only reference to individual rights is in a backdoor fashion, questioning whether Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, two Founding Fathers upon whose shoulders Tubman stood, are even heroes at all.

Instead, Tubman’s heroic legacy is demeaned and shattered by calling her a fighter for “social justice”, a collectivist term. Collectivism is applicable to Southern slavery, not freedom. Slavery’s defenders justified slavery by the notion that blacks are an inferior race, not suitable for freedom based upon individual rights promised as by the Founding Fathers, and are better off with guaranteed satisfaction of their needs, including work. 

Social justice is defined as “ the equal distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society” with the state as the distributor and groups as the sole focus of concern. It means, in practice, that no one is entitled to any personal achievement or virtue until everyone can have a piece of it, which means no one is safe from exploitation and oppression. Social justice basically means not ending slavery, but expanding it to the whole of society. There is no place for the individual, and no place for America in this idea, since America is the nation that liberated individual human beings from the tyranny of collective subjugation to the group, society, or tribe. 

Justice is fundamentally individual, not group, centered. If not, then the looting, enslavement, and even killing of any individual[s] for the sake of some balance of group concerns, claims, or measurements can be rationalized on the basis of some egalitarian “distribution” of wealth, opportunities, privileges, or [fill-in-the-blank]. But the group is an abstraction. You can’t see it, touch it, talk to it. You can only observe the actual individuals who comprise the group. But collectivism morally inverts that order, and identifies every individual by group characteristics, then judges the group regardless of any individual member’s character, ideas, or actions. When you deny the individual as the focus of moral, economic, political, or cultural concern, no freedom, and no justice, is possible.

Harriet Tubman was no Social Justice warrior. Like all Abolitionists—she also fought for women’s suffrage—Tubman stood with the Declaration of Independence. The freeing of Confederate slaves was a fight to recognize the rights of the slaves to join the cause of leaving every individual equally free to live by her own judgement, deal with others on the basis of equal rights to life, liberty, and earned property, in self-governed pursuit of her own personal values, not to re-enslave them to some other group goal. Tubman didn’t fight to end subjugation to white masters for the sake of subjugation to the state.

Social Justice is a perfect cover for criminal socialist dictators, not freedom fighters. Hawk’s article is propaganda, not news reporting. It is dishonest and derogatory and does no justice to Harriet Tubman..

Related Reading:

Happy Birthday, Frederick Douglass

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?--Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

July 4, 1776: Words that Will Never Be Erased

The Colorblind Constitution: Frederick Douglass on Race and America’s Founding—Hannah Sternberg

1776: Reality, the Principal, and the Principle

The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

How Heroes Improve Our Lives: An Interview with Andrew Bernstein ...--John Hersey for The Objective Standard

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. For His Moral Ideals Rather Than His Politics

In commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Peniel E. Joseph, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, said in a 2014 article:

King emerges as a talented individual whose rhetorical genius at the March on Washington helped elevate an entire nation through his moral power and sheer force of will.

The March on Washington was when King delivered his famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. Joseph goes on:

Yet missing from many of the annual King celebrations is the portrait of a political revolutionary who, over time, evolved into a radical warrior for peace, justice and the eradication of poverty. During his last three years, King the “Dreamer” turned into one of the most eloquent, powerful and scathing critics of American society. King lent his moral force and power to anti-poverty crusades that questioned the economic system of capitalism and called for an end to the Vietnam War. . . . King’s powerful rage against economic exploitation and war is often overlooked when we think of him as only a race-healer.

The "moral power" of King's famous "Dream" speech in Washington was actually the moral power of the Founding Fathers resurrected. In that speech, King reminded Americans of the ideals laid down in the Declaration of Independence—the philosophic blueprint for the constitution and the new nation—and called on Americans to fully live up to those ideals. “In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check,” King said.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Yet, King's Dream was to be corrupted by an inner contradiction. In his later years, King questioned the legitimacy of capitalism and turned to what he termed "democratic socialism," a hybrid of two evil systems (democracy and socialism) that repudiates the very ideals he espoused in his speech. Therein lies one of the great American paradoxes—the clash between King the moral force and King the political revolutionary.

When the Founders drafted the Declaration of Independence, they laid down the radical principles that would give birth to capitalism. These 55 brilliant words—the opening lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration—sum up the essence of capitalism:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .

When King reaffirmed those ideals—that all men are created equal, possessing inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness protected equally and at all times under a government of objective law rather than of men—he was really, though apparently unwittingly, affirming the foundational principles of capitalism.

Capitalism is the system based on individual rights, rights-protecting government and the only kind of equality consistent with justice—equality of individual rights before the law. Because of these principles, Capitalism is the only social system that banishes exploitation and war, because individual rights banishes aggressive or initiatory force from human relationships—particularly aggressive force by government against the people. Under capitalism, exploitation is replaced with voluntary trade to mutual benefit among individuals, a win-win in which individuals trade value-for-value and get better together. Capitalism liberates every individual to think and act on his own judgement and work to lift himself from poverty, and protects those who take up that life-affirming challenge from would-be exploiters who don’t. And under capitalism, war is replaced with peaceful coexistence among nations based on that principle of trade.

So why would King uphold the moral principles of capitalism in his most famous speech while repudiating it in his politics? It's obvious that King didn't understand capitalism or fully grasp the moral implications of the Declaration of Independence that he so eloquently honored.

He undoubtedly viewed the America of the 1960s as capitalist, when in fact what America had was a mixed economy; a mixture of economic freedom and government controls—that is to say, an economy corrupted by heavy political interference, which included the virulently anti-capitalist Jim Crow segrgation laws. America in the 1960s was just emerging from a time when large segments of blacks were legally oppressed and hence unable to enjoy “the riches of freedom and the security of justice” that is capitalism. Blacks, King failed to understand, were not victims of capitalism but of statism.

King’s legacy includes an end to state-sponsored segregation and oppression—a monumental achievement. But his democratic socialist political policies also “succeeded,” strengthening and entrenching the mixed economy in America, which he mistakenly perceived as capitalism—the result being, in turn, to reduce economic opportunities for many poor but ambitious people, including African-Americans.

To his credit, King explicitly opposed full-blown socialism, which he believed leads to communism, a system that he correctly understood "forgets that life is individual." But he wrongly believed that "Capitalism forgets that life is social," leading him to his hybrid democratic socialism. He failed to see that capitalism, by leaving individuals free to pursue their own values in the absence of physical coercion, provides the only proper moral foundation for both individual flourishing and robust benevolent social interaction. That moral foundation, rational egoism, is implicit in the Declaration of Independence, which defends the inalienable rights of every individual to pursue his own happiness.

Thus is the paradox of Martin Luther King.

Commentators like Joseph urge us to elevate his politics to at least the level of his ideals. That, of course, would be an impossible contradiction. But ideas are where the real power lies. Since ideas are the driving force of human events, Martin Luther King, despite his politics, remains one of my heroes. Standing in a line that includes John Locke, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Ayn Rand, among others, King reaffirmed America's Founding ideals at a crucial point in American history. That, to me, is his real legacy contribution to America. For that, I am grateful to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

HAPPY MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY!!

Related Reading:

Martin Luther King: An 'Authentic American Hero'—or Not?

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

“I Have a Dream”: Martin Luther King Urges Consistency to Founding Principles

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur

Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal—Ayn Rand

Martin Luther King: Right On Racial Justice, Wrong On ‘Economic Justice’


Related Viewing: