Earned Pay vs. Need-Based Pay--or, Justice vs. Injustice

A couple of years ago, major bank CEOs appeared before a Congressional committee. One CEO, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, was asked a stupid question by an ignorant Congresswoman, Katie Porter. According to CNN,

Freshman Rep. Katie Porter stumped multimillionaire JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon during a hearing Wednesday with a simple question: How are workers supposed to make ends meet?

The back-and-forth occurred during a House Financial Services Committee hearing featuring the CEOs of several major banks on Wednesday. Porter, a California Democrat, shared the story of a JPMorgan Chase employee – making a fraction of what the company’s top executives are paid – who is running a $567 deficit each month because her salary is insufficient to cover basic expenses.

“How should she manage this budget shortfall while she’s working full-time at your bank?” Porter asked Dimon.

Dimon’s answer was basically that he’d have to think about, and would need to check the math. The hypothetical employee’s salary is $16.50 per hour, plus benefits. Porter used the exchange to demand that Dimon’s bank pay employees enough to make ends meet, regardless of any other considerations. 

With Dimon’s disappointing response leaving much to be desired, Michael Dahlen, writing for The Objective Standard, suggested How Jamie Dimon Should Have Answered Representative Katie Porter. 

As you’d expect from TOS, Dahlen suggested a good, hard-hitting moral and economic lesson to Congresswoman Porter. I give Dahlen a thumbs up. But I thought I’d take a crack at an answer myself. I composed my rough draft before reading Dahlen’s article, just to compare for myself. I must say, I think I did a very credible job. Here is my “How Jamie Dimon Should Have Answered Representative Katie Porter”:

First, let me say that a job is a two-way street. It’s based on mutual self-interest. We, as an employer with particular concerns, have as much right to do what’s best for our business as the employee has to do what’s best for herself in the context of her life and concerns. Ideally, both can find common ground and advance our respective interests together by the prospective employee accepting our job offer.

As to our policy, the employee is paid according to her productive contribution to our business, not her needs. As she gains knowledge, skills, and experience, she has the opportunity to advance in pay and position. In the meanwhile, she’ll have to figure out how to get by. Her life is her responsibility. 

We do “provide a way for families to make ends meet.” We offer jobs--good paying jobs with opportunity for advancement. But we don’t give handouts. If we pay people by need, rather than productiveness and competence, then soon enough there will be no business and the jobs, including mine, will be gone. Then how will she make ends meet? If a person doesn’t have to earn her pay, and instead get paid according to whatever she claims are her needs, then all incentive to excel at her job evaporates--along with the incentive of all of the other employees, whose competence suddenly doesn’t matter, only their needs.

Yes, I make vastly more money than her. That’s because my responsibilities and productiveness are vastly greater than hers. In fact, hers and the jobs of all 250,000+ JP Morgan employees depend on my ability to do my job competently. The only just and objective method of setting pay rates for all of these employees is merit, as judged by management and, ultimately, the judgment of the market; i.e., our customers, the ultimate end of our business. Anything other than a merit-based standard will ultimately result in inferior products, harm to our customers, and finally the loss of our customers. Need is neither just nor objective as a standard, and thus is not rational or sustainable. 

I started by emphasizing that a job is a two-way street. And as it turns out, such a relationship of mutual self-interest turns out to be win-win. Both sides advance their own well-being, based on mutual agreement. Our employees' jobs depend on a fair and rational pay policy just as much as our business does. 

I wish more businessmen would stand up for their right to exist, not just on economic grounds, but on moral grounds as well

Related Reading:

No Conflict Between People and Business

"Greed" is a Two-Way Street

If We’re to Have Labor Laws, Should They Work Both Ways?

Is ‘Common Good Capitalism’ a One-way Street?

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 1

On the Purpose of a Corporation by the Business Roundtable, PART 2

Understanding the Role of the Senate Filibuster

In Killing off the filibuster would end the Senate’s undemocratic pretensions, Marketwatch columnist Daniel Wirls complained that the filibuster rule “allows a 41-vote minority in the Senate to block legislation.” Wirls opens by announcing his partisan motives:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the latest Democrat to argue an arcane Senate rule governing debate stands in the way of passing a progressive agenda, such as meaningful gun control.

It’s also blatantly hypocritical. The party in control of the Senate wants to eliminate the filibuster? That’s nothing new. When the Democrats are in the minority, they love the filibuster. Wirls goes on:

The procedure, known as the filibuster, allows a 41-vote minority in the Senate to block legislation. Its power has been steadily eroding, however, as both Democratic and Republican lawmakers create procedures to get around the roadblock to pass everything from the Affordable Care Act to President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees.

Should the Senate move even farther toward being a legislative body characterized by majority rule rather than minority obstruction?

Wirls provides a little history, including this:

As political scientists and historians have noted over and over again, supermajority cloture is not part of — and cannot be derived from — the Constitution or any original understanding of the Senate. Elements such as equal representation by the states, six-year terms and a higher age requirement are what distinguish the Senate’s style of deliberation and decision-making from the House.

In fact, although it may seem like the 60-vote filibuster has been with us forever, it’s actually only been around since 1917. 

But maybe the timing of the institution of the filibuster rule is significant. I posted these comments (no longer available online):

Undemocratic is the whole point. 

America is fundamentally about securing individual rights, not democracy. Democracy is secondary to freedom in America, because freedom is not the right to vote. Freedom is the right to live by one's own judgment regardless of the outcome of any election. Consequently, the American government is about checks and balances--balances of power to check the rise of any form of tyranny, including democratic tyranny. It's interesting that the filibuster rule was established shortly after the 17th Amendment was ratified (1913). That Amendment established the popular vote election of Senators. That replaced state legislatures' authority to select their respective senators, thus eliminating one of the checks that state governments have on federal power. Perhaps the Senate sought to restore some of that checking power of the states. Maybe "supermajority cloture is not part of — and cannot be derived from — the Constitution or any original understanding of the Senate." But the filibuster rule is certainly consistent with the original understanding that our government must be regulated by checks and balances.

Another advantage of the filibuster is that it prevents legal whiplash—the constant change in laws based on which party controls the Senate. Legal consistency is important to people trying to plan their lives long term, especially in the economic realm. Simple majority rule would make it much easier to pass laws, which means much easier to repeal or alter laws. The more laws are altered or repealed or reimposed, the harder it is for people to plan. Requiring a supermajority moderates both the pace of change and the laws themselves. That’s not a bad thing. America is a Constitutional Republic with a democratic process, not a strict democracy.

Related Reading:

Some Thoughts on the Filibuster

Save the Filibuster

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 Slavocracy.* 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’

Transcript of the ADDRESS OF REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. commemorating the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

In NJ, Wind Energy Requires ‘Political Commitment’. That’s Precisely the Problem.

In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, Offshore wind is a jobs magnet for New Jersey, and labor is ready to lead, legislator says NJ state assemblyman Wayne DeAngelo enthusiastically promotes a massive offshore wind project. The key point DeAngelo makes is this telling statement, buried near the end of the article:

“Wind power can fuel New Jersey, and what fuels wind power is political commitment.”

So true, and precisely why it shouldn’t be built. “Political commitment” means force; that is, special interests using the machinery of government to force on all of us it’s pet technology, by direct subsidy and/or hampering alternatives—in this case an unreliable, costly energy source that no one would willingly invest in, build, or pay for without ratepayer/taxpayer subsidies and other government favors. No industry should be fueled by government coercion. Wind energy should succeed only by voluntary market acceptance, or fail. 

As to jobs, there is no doubt government-driven wind projects create jobs. But the jobs not created, or destroyed, must also be considered. Money spent on fossil fuel and nuclear power projects also create jobs. I understand DeAngelo is an electrician, and represents the electricians union which would get a jobs bonanza from giant wind farms. But the plumbing/pipefitters union, of which I am a member (ret), goes to bat for pipelines, which are being restricted by political commitment. So he can’t speak for all building trades unions. The same interests who push wind often want to stop fossil fuel projects, costing a lot of plumbing/pipefitting jobs. And the extra money consumers spend on the inflated electricity prices that “fuel” subsidized “renewable” energy spending can not be spent in other areas, reducing growth and thus jobs there. Worse, energy fuels every other industry. Raise the overall price of energy, which history shows happens when renewable energy is forced on us, and you take away growth and jobs across the board. Basic economics teaches you’ll end up with fewer jobs.

I’m not against wind farms. I’m against wind power fueled by political commitment. Government should streamline the permitting process for all energy projects, but otherwise leave all energy producers free to compete on a level legal playing field—that is, a market free of political coercion. Only voluntary consumer choice should determine energy choice, not political coercion. Put another way, market commitment, not political commitment, is what we should strive for. 

Wind champions will whine that the dominance of fossil fuels leaves no chance for wind to compete without government help. So they push for a government coercion-fueled “energy transition,” often camouflaged behind “justice” or “democracy” labels. But that’s nonsense. In a free market, better products generally spell doom for the dominant but inferior products, if consumers so choose. That’s how genuine transitions come about: Think of the transistions from kerosene lighting to electric lighting; from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles; from silent movies to “talkies''; from film photography to digital photography; from analogue television to cable and now to streaming. These are a few examples of market transitions, the only legitimate kinds. It just so happens that wind cannot compete in the market because it is inferior in cost and reliability. Even today, in 2022, even after decades of subsidies and government favoritism, fossil fuels are the dominant market choice, which is why they’re still growing like gangbusters despite the utopian dreams and massive political favoritism of wind’s political champions. 

If “Wind power is the future [and] can fuel New Jersey,” why hasn’t it happened already? Why is it a perpetual future fuel? Despite a decades-long massive political push, including $trillions in subsidies worldwide and other government favoritism, no place on Earth does wind generation, and renewable energy more broadly, exist without the life support of reliable energy from fossil, nuclear, or hydro—and for good reason. Renewables simply cannot carry the primary load for well-known reasons, the intractable twin drawbacks of dilutedness and intermittency. 

Perhaps as-of-now unforeseen dramatic technological advances will someday make that possible. But then, it wouldn’t need subsidies, would it? Or for that matter fear-mongering “climate crisis” nonsense. But in a competitive, largely free energy market, solar and wind tech innovations would have to compete against tech progress on other energy sources, including not only fossil fuels but non-carbon energies like nuclear, hydro, and possibly even fusion. That’s as it should be. It’s a matter of justice.

We need political commitment, alright. But that commitment should be directed toward liberating the NJ market for all energy sources, rather than politically favoring some, like wind, while hampering others, like natural gas, which along with petroleum is facing a War on Pipelines. Why are renewables champions so afraid of competition? The answer is obvious for anyone willing to be informed. 

Related Reading;

Hyping the Energy Transition by Robert Bryce

The ‘Jihad on Pipelines,’ New Jersey Front

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century—Ronald Bailey

End preferences for unreliable electricity by Alex Epstein

Contra Michelle Purdy, Education is about Independent Thinking, Not Indoctrination.

Today’s public schools are not primarily educational facilities. They are indoctrination battlegrounds, whereby political factions fight for control of the schools’ curriculums in order to impose their own ideological agendas across school districts. 

Michelle A. Purdy, an associate professor of education at Washington University in St. Louis, makes this observation plain in a revealing Washington op-ed, As the right fights the teaching of race, a new AP course expands it: The sub-title reads, A tug of war over disrupting or conserving social arrangements has long buffeted schools. After making her far Left ideological bias plain early on, she makes this astounding statement:

The nation’s public schools have long been caught in a tug of war over whether they should be used to conserve or disrupt existing social arrangements. Alternate efforts to constrict and expand academic freedom in the nation’s schools have been central to how politicians, educators and activists have tried to encourage social change or resist it.

Purdy’s ideological bias is plain. If you disagree with my agenda, you are constricting academic freedom and reactionary—resisting social change, as she puts it, as if all change is necessarily good. But we’ll leave that aside for the moment.

What Purdy is acknowledging is: Yes, American schools are political institutions. They are not primarily educational institutions. And what would you expect of a monopolistic government system funded by taxes and populated by students forced into assigned schools based on the students’ addresses? And as with any socialistic institution, conflict over control of the central planning apparatus is bound to flourish in such a setting. Ideological conflict is not a “bug.” It is a feature inherent in government schooling. What’s lost, or at least relegated to the “back burner,” in an institution of this type? Education. 

The purpose of education is to teach the children how to individually think for themselves in order to prepare them for living their lives. 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand defines education this way:

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

This is, I believe, correct. It’s the broadest definition. If education is not fundamentally about kids learning how to use their minds objectively and independently, then what is it? 

Instead, they get subjected to the political or social ideological agendas of whomever happens to be in control of the curriculum. Purdy is not wrong to say that there were serious flaws in the ideological biases of the status quo. But she is no more interested in real education than those agendas she would replace. She would merely replace agendas she disagrees with with her own, leaving out the training of students to independently evaluate and compare competing perspectives based on all available facts. 

Purdy doesn’t seem to be concerned with such objectivity in learning, at least not as implied in this article. Purdy denounces the prevailing and/or past teaching of American history as “white history,” and proposes to replace it with “black history,” in the form of myriad black studies curricula. No doubt the teaching of American history has often been tainted by white racism. But replacing it by tainting history with a black racial tinge for the purpose of advancing a social justice political agenda is just as wrong. The truthworthiness of history courses is not determined by the skin color of the person interpreting/teaching it. It is determined by facts. What should be examined and adopted are history lessons that are accurate and fact-based. There could be honest, unbiased disagreements in interpretation of the facts. Where such differences emerge, children could be exposed to the disagreements, and taught how—and allowed—to objectively weigh the differences, discuss them, and come to their own conclusions—the purpose being to teach children how to articulate their case, listen to others’ views, refute them intelligently, and integrate it all objectively. The main ingredient is to teach facts. Facts, not dogma, is the starting point. That is how real education should work. Truth in history (or any other subject) is not determined by the skin color of the person discovering and/or interpreting the facts. We don’t need racially slanted history, whether white or black. We need accurate history.

Getting to a quality, genuine educational system will be all but impossible as long as that system is government controlled—which means, thoroughly, coercively politicized. Purdy labels forcing her own agenda on schools “academic freedom.” But there can be no real academic freedom in a system where any political faction can impose their school agendas on everyone by force. The monopolistic public school system is the ultimate enemy of academic freedom in American education..

Purdy speaks of academic freedom. But academic freedom is not defined by a war of factions over who gets to impose their school dogma on everyone else. Academic freedom means the individual’s right not to have to submit to any school scheme one doesn’t agree with, including being forced to pay for it. Academic freedom means to have a real marketplace of ideas— including educational ideas, where all ideas have the equal opportunity to be market tested. 

Such a market can only flourish when the customers of education, the parents and students, can vote with their feet and their dollars. Under the current system, parents seeking alternatives to the traditional public schools are burdened with the need to pay for the alternative private schooling while still being stuck with thousands of dollars in education taxes that fund the public school, effectively being forced to pay double or triple the private school price. 

I am for the complete separation of school and state, with the government having no role in funding or administering education. Given political realities, I favor an interim step, universal parental/guardian school choice through having education taxes follow the student rather than fund school districts directly. Whether by tax credits, education savings accounts (ESAs), or other broad-based funding methods, Such a liberation would spur a vibrant education marketplace where all education methods, curriculums, philosophies and teacher qualifications would have the opportunities to be market tested by entrepreneurs and businesspersons, afford parents myriad choices, and end the ridiculous and damaging curriculum wars.

That would be real academic freedom.

Related Reading:.

The Comprachicos by Ayn Rand

Toward a Free Market in Education: School Vouchers or Tax Credits by me for The Objective Standard

Educational Freedom, Not Just Education, ‘Has to Be the Top Priority for Candidates'

The Educational Bonanza in Privatizing Government Schools by Andrew Bernstein for The Objective Standard

2022 Vindicated Margaret Hoover’s Warning to the GOP

The Republican Party was in an excellent position to sweep to substantial Congressional majorities in the midterms this year. Yet, it flopped. Why? 

There is no question that Donald Trump’s stolen election demagoguery cost them many seats. But there’s more to the story, I believe. Abortion, in the form of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, is believed to have been a major factor. Another is the threat that horrendously reactionary ruling implies for Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage across America.

The second cause leads me to a book published about a decade agoe, American Individualism—How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party—which I reviewed for The Objective Standard. The author, Margaret Hoover, great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, made a strong case for the idea that social/religious conservatives were holding the Republican Party back from political dominance. On abortion, gay marriage, drug prohibition, immigration, and other social conservative causes, the GOP was losing votes that they should naturally be able to attract, Hoover argued. Her solution was to embrace a consistent platform of American Individualism, which would lead to pro-individual rights positions on these and other issues, including the environment and, naturally, economics. 

This is a winning platform, Hoover argues, but not until the GOP disconnects its allegiance from the powerful social/religious conservative movement, which contradicts the Republican Party’s historical allegiance to individual rights and limited rights-protecting government.

I believe the biggest political story of 2022 is the vindication of Margaret Hoover’s thesis. The Republican Party must become the party of American Individualism, and all that the principle implies. A consistent platform of individual rights in the social, economic, and academic fields, accompanied by a consistent allegiance to limited government interference in people’s lives generally, could very likely be the path to solid GOP dominance. If the Republican Party abandons American Individualism—currently, the Trump-infused Party is actually moving away from individualism—it will likely “fade into irrelevance.” 

While Hoover is not always consistent, and leaves room for challenge from consistent advocates of individual liberty on some points, she generally points down the correct road. Now more than ever, it’s time for the GOP to heed her challenge and warning. As I concluded in my TOS review:

General support for individualism as the American political ideal is simultaneously a means to a better political environment in the short term and to greater opportunities to make the case for the deeper principles. Imagine a GOP with the explicit banner “American Individualism” firmly planted atop its political platform. This would greatly expand the opportunity for truly consistent champions of individualism to enter the mainstream of political dialogue. It could explicitly redefine American politics as a clash between individualism and collectivism, compelling Republicans toward consistency in defense of freedom while painting Democrats into a collectivist corner. And within both the Republican party and in the country at large, it could infuse U.S. politics with a badly needed debate on individual rights, the proper role of government, and the deeper moral principles at play.

Despite its flaws, Margaret Hoover’s American Individualism is a step by a conservative toward genuine liberty and an opportunity for capitalists to change the terms of the debate for the better.

It’s time—or the GOP’s time may run out.

Related Reading:

Review: American Individualism, by Margaret Hoover by me for The Objective Standard

Contra Mark Levin, Americanism Rests on Reason, Not Faith

George Will: A Conservative “None” in Need of Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights by Stephen Bourque and Craig Biddle for TOS

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

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

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

HAPPY NEW YEAR

May your 2023 be prosperous, healthy, and fulfilling.

Pursue Your Happiness. It's your moral right.