But even worse than the dollar amount–a total of almost $4 trillion, starting a year from now–is that Obama will not freeze or cut spending on the parts of our budget that most urgently need to be cut. While Obama pats himself on the back for “saving $20 million by stopping the refurbishment of a Department of Energy science center that the Department of Energy does not want to refurbish”–.0005% of the budget–he will not touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which will cost $1.35 trillion this year. This is particularly egregious since these programs have catastrophic unfunded liabilities some estimate at upwards of $100 trillion.

President Obama wants to pretend that he can meaningfully freeze or cut spending without rolling back the welfare state; he can’t. It’s time for all of us to face the reality that celebrated wealth-transfer programs such as Social Security are robbing the present and future of productive, responsible Americans.

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Allow me to register a dissenting perspective.

Obama’s so-called diplomatic outreach has treated Iran as a morally worthy interlocutor and estranged friend, whose goodwill it is our duty to cultivate. And that entire initiative is predicated on evading Iran’s bloody record and militant ideal of global Islamist rule. It’s a long way to go from that to a clear-eyed recognition of the regime’s character.  Obama would have to do, and publicly say, a lot more to convince me — let alone convince Tehran — that the administration now views the regime as fundamentally hostile and is willing to use military force to eliminate the threat it poses. Everything our president has done since taking office has reinforced the contrary view.

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In honor of the 105th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth (February 2, 1905), I’d like to recommend Jeff Britting’s short but surprisingly comprehensive biography, Ayn Rand. Lavishly illustrated with items from the Ayn Rand Archives (a special department Britting manages within the Ayn Rand Institute), this biography is especially valuable because it pays close attention to the mental choices and processes by which Ayn Rand shaped her own character and ideology.

Britting’s biography traces Rand’s brilliant successes to the fundamental choices she made—choices about how to manage her own thinking and action. It started in early childhood, Britting observes, with a vigorously questioning attitude “aimed at understanding the things around her.” (p. 4) As she entered her teens, she “began asking why she liked what she did and, as a result, she began integrating her ideas into wider generalizations. She called this approach to integrating ideas ‘thinking in principle.’” (p. 13)

This allowed her, while still a teenager residing in St. Petersburg, to assess the unfolding Russian Revolution and its communist leaders. Britting writes:

For Rand, the Communist motto, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” meant that man should live for the state and not his own personal happiness. The revolution was her first confrontation with the “ethics of altruism” (the view that service to others is the highest moral virtue), which she rejected instantly as an attack on men of “intelligence, ability, and heroism.” (pp. 14-15)

It was this careful type of thinking over many decades that enabled Rand, as a mature philosopher, to identify the moral base of capitalism in an ethics of rational self-interest.

Britting’s analytical method focuses on how people choose to think and act, within the historical context in which they find themselves. Ultimately, this is the only way to explain how one young girl could emerge from the brutality of Soviet Russia to write a great novel championing capitalism, defining in the process a philosophy of reason that clashed with every irrationality she had endured in her childhood.

Image: Gage Skidmore on Flickr

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which struck down restrictions on certain kinds of political speech by corporations, was a profoundly important decision. Not only did it eliminate the most odious parts of McCain-Feingold, but it did so largely for the right reasons. In particular, the Court recognized that a corporation is an association of individuals, who retain their First Amendment right to free speech. I highly recommend reading the decision in its entirety.

The decision couldn’t have been more timely. The purpose of the First Amendment is to protect our ability to communicate our views without interference by the government. Politically, it is, as James Madison called it, “the only effectual guardian of every other right.” By enabling us to freely criticize our leaders, it is the best and last defense against the threat of unlimited government power.

As this blog has argued at length, Obama has been making an alarming grab for power since the day he entered office. He has shown nothing but contempt for economic freedom and limited government–and now he is seeking to silence those, corporations in particular, who challenge him.

In a statement released the day of the decision, Obama complained: “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

Obama was condemning “powerful interests,” while claiming for himself and his colleagues the awesome power to decide who can speak during an election. In Obama’s universe, he should be free to use his unmatched megaphone to push his agenda, but corporate executives and shareholders should not have the right to speak out in opposition to it.

In our universe, however, the President’s job is not to bully Americans and American corporations. His job is to protect our rights by executing the nation’s laws and upholding the Constitution. And it is the job of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution. That makes Obama’s response to the Court’s decision all the more disturbing.

According to Obama’s State of the Union address: “With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests. . . . I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.” If that weren’t clear enough, Vice President Biden said of the Court’s ruling, it “was dead wrong and we have to correct it.”

This is brazen defiance of the rule of law. The President and Congress do not get to “correct” the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution. They do not have the power to pass laws the Court has found violate the First Amendment rights of Americans. Someone should tell the President that saying “with all due deference to separation of powers” does not by itself constitute due deference to separation of powers.

Now, more than ever, we need to protect our right to speak out against government power. Thankfully, the Supreme Court made a significant step toward securing that right.

We need to rise above fear, hesitation, and partisan politics–to give the government all the power it needs to solve all our problems.

That was the message of President Obama’s State of the Union address, which named dozens of problems in America and not once suggested that individual rights, liberty, or freedom were the solution.

From a quick reading of the speech, some statistics:

• Number of times President Obama said “I”: 105–mainly pushing for the government programs he seeks to pass.
• Number of times President Obama said “individual rights”: 0.
• Number of times President Obama said “liberty”: 0.
• Number of times President Obama said “freedom”: 1–but it was freedom for Afghanistan.

flickr: Darwin Bell

“These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” he famously said, “are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Frank also explicitly endorsed the reckless lending that proved Fannie and Freddie’s downfall: “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. . . .”

Last week, Barney Frank changed his mind: “The remedy here is…as I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…”

But don’t celebrate just yet. Frank didn’t call for a meaningful abolition–he called for “abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance” (emphasis mine).In other words, there is nothing inherently wrong with government housing entities, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which subsidize mortgages and manipulate the market at taxpayer expense. It’s just that we didn’t do it the right way last time. But now we’re going to “come up with a whole new system of housing finance,” so Americans should rest easy.

The easy objection to all this is that Barney Frank, the veritable Ambassador for Fannie and Freddie, wants to lead the mission to create “a whole new system of housing finance.” And to be sure, if this were a valid mission, Frank would be one of the least qualified people on the planet to lead it. But it’s not a valid mission. No one has the right or qualification to dictate how homes are financed besides lenders and borrowers with their own money at stake. As I wrote in 2008,

Decisions about how best to finance mortgages should not be made by politicians or by editorial page columnists–they should be made by individuals in a truly free mortgage market, where lenders are free to lend as they choose and reap the full consequences of their decisions. The problem with the current system is not that borrowers and lenders have been unaware of more sensible financing options, but that implicit bailout guarantees have made reckless, short-sighted lending options more appealing. Abolishing the housing welfare-regulatory apparatus is the only “fundamental reform” that will do.

flickr: seier+seier+seier

The leader of the United Nations mission here [Kabul] called on Afghan officials to seek the removal of at least some senior Taliban leaders from the United Nations’ list of terrorists, as a first step toward opening direct negotiations with the insurgent group.

What’s next, a plea-bargain for Osama bin Laden? That’s crazy talk, yes. But on 9/12/01, erasing Taliban fighters from terrorist watch lists would have sounded outlandish, too. Here we are, though, eight-plus years later, currying favor with enemies we have failed to defeat in the hopes they’ll deign to talk to us.

It was meant to deliver a message — which the Taliban’s spokesman put into words afterward: “We are ready to fight, and we have the strength to fight, and nobody from the Taliban side is ready to make any kind of deal.”

Horrific scarcely begins to describe the attack, but there was ample reason to expect the baksheesh (bribes) to elicit that kind of response from the Islamists. There are many parallels you could draw, but take just one: the current U.S. approach toward Iran.

The Afghan government — acting with the endorsement of Washington — reached out to the enemy forces with an appeasing deal. That’s exactly what Washington has tried in its so-called outreach to Iran. Result: the offer of baksheesh to Islamists in Afghanistan only energized them, in part because they (justifiably) interpret it as a sign of arrant weakness. Likewise, a year into Obama’s effort to cozy up with Tehran, we’ve seen that regime grow more confident.

Think about what doctors would do if faced with a similar situation. Suppose a widely prescribed treatment routinely made patients sicker; that treatment would, at minimum, be halted, objectively studied, and, if the data warranted it, repudiated. That’s the kind of scientific mindset that our political and intellectual leaders ought to bring to bear on the policy of appeasement.

image: flickr/isafmedia

What is that philosophy? As Don notes, it’s the idea that “the government has the right to force us to sacrifice our freedom, interests, and desires for the sake of the ‘common good.’”

If you want a sense of what’s wrong with this idea, I recommend Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living, which is set in Communist Russia—a society that implemented the idea of sacrifice for the “common good” as its fundamental principle. You’ll get a wrenching depiction of the misery and oppression of a totalitarian society (as well as a moving, plot-driven story filled with the heroic figures typical of an Ayn Rand novel), and a preliminary understanding of why life beneath a government wholly dedicated to the “common good” has to be so horrific.

In that vein, I’d also like to recommend this interview with Dr. Leonard Peikoff in the January Impact, the monthly newsletter of the Ayn Rand Institute. Dr. Peikoff was a friend and student of Ayn Rand for more than thirty years, and wrote the introduction to the new trade edition of We the Living. He’s also the author of Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand and The Ominous Parallels. Here’s an excerpt in which Dr. Peikoff discusses the universal evil of totalitarianism and why We the Living is so relevant today—especially to the United States:

The timeless evil of totalitarianism derives from two fundamental ideas: unreason and self-sacrifice. Which amounts to: give up your mind, and thus lose any means of independent judgment; and give up your values, and thus lose any independent purpose. If this is what people come to accept, they’re ripe for a dictator to tell them: “OK, this is what to think and this is what to value”; in other words, “now I control you in thought and action, soul and body.” That is the definition of totalitarianism—total state control over every aspect of the individual.

These two essentials underlie every totalitarian regime—from the medieval Christians preaching worshipful faith in and service to God (Christianity is the historical originator of totalitarianism) on through their twentieth-century variants. According to Communism, truth is determined not by your mind, but by the dialectic process as interpreted by adepts in proletarian logic, and service is sacrifice to the (correct) economic class. For Hitler, truth is grasped by Aryan instinct or blood, while service is sacrifice to the (correct) race. The result in all three cases was rule by institutionalized brutality—the Inquisition, the GPU, the Gestapo—with all of its anti-life consequences: mass impoverishment, mass terror, and piles of corpses.

The relevance of We the Living lies in the fact that these deadly ideas are spreading in the United States today. They are more than spreading; they are essential to our intellectual Establishment, and have now been adopted across the political spectrum, with an intensity unprecedented in American life. Conservatives uphold faith as against reason; and morality, their faith tells them, is service to God (which includes sacrifice for the sub groups of have-nots picked out by the Bible). The liberals uphold principled ignorance, i.e., skepticism, as against reason; and their ignorance somehow leads them to demand sacrifice for the very same biblical favorite.

In many respects beyond politics, the United States is moving rapidly toward and getting ever closer to totalitarianism. The heritage of our Founding Fathers is still a large obstacle to the statists, but that heritage is now crumbling before our eyes.

Read more here.