Public Interest Over Ayn Rand Objectivism

Individualistic selfish thinking doesn’t have a place in government policy because the policies that a government makes are not and never were intended to benefit an individual. They should be made with the public interest in mind and little else. And public interest, by its definition is not about one person, but rather people as they are, many individuals in one jurisdiction interacting with each other.

In today’s US political debates, however, public interest frequently seems to have fallen off the map, in many cases in favor of obviously biased propaganda, but in many others toward the focus on one individual or one situation.  Modern debate has “Joe the Plumber” examples of one guy not liking a situation and that is enough to tear down a whole taxation policy which could make millions of people better off. This appears to be because, as frustrating as it is, these individual allegorical stories resonate with the public better than logical debate. Which appears to be supported by the fact that I know who Joe the Plumber is. Fuck Joe the Plumber. Not the actual guy, I don’t really care about him either way (though I probably disagree with him on most important things). But fuck Joe the Plumber the political tool used to dumb down the conversation and move debate away from public interest. His interest is not public interest. If a policy is good for the public at large, that is all that matters and as long as we are transparent in how we get to that policy and we openly weigh competing interests against each other, there really shouldn’t be a problem. And if there is, it means there is something we have overlooked, or circumstances have evolved, perhaps differently than anticipated, and now we must look again and determine the current state of public interest on this issue.

Libertarians, especially the Ayn Rand objectivist types, essentially deny that there is such a thing as public interest, or that multiple people matter. But I have to ask: If only the individual matters, then why is there a government in the first place? Can’t we just make that person accountable to keep track of their own rights? The flat obvious response is a definitive “No”. The objective reality (if we’re debating government policy anyway) is that people cohabitate in the same spaces and must interact with each other. This is where the limits of self-interested personal philosophies become exposed and this is the reason that Ayn Rand’s objectivism doesn’t really fit with reality. 

We are all here together, mashed into big cities, waiting in lines, taking public transit places, working for and with each other. We started interacting with each other (on a large scale anyway) primarily for economic reasons. People didn’t progress from the nomadic lifestyle to the city-state because government told them to do it. Yet libertarians will often point to the government as the source of the problem. Roll Reagan inauguration clip… “Government is the problem” (here we go personifying legal fictions...). How is it the government’s fault? Yes, the organization and execution of any government department can certainly be misguided, inefficient, and flawed. But can’t we say the same of any organization made of people? Even the biggest corporations staffed with the highest paid people money can buy have major screw ups. Military organizations with arguably the most disciplined group of people have screw ups. People acting on entirely their own accord screw up. Any faults of the government are very explainable in that it is an organization comprised of imperfect people who screw up from time to time.

If you want to pinpoint the ultimate cause for societal problems, blame the people that ever strayed from the nomadic lifestyle and tried to cohabitate, or specialize labor, or trade goods and services with other people, which created societies and reared a need for some sort of code of conduct and leadership structure. Remember, government is the result of the choices made by freely acting people, not the cause. It’s a bit impractical now to revert back into nomads, so it seems we’re stuck trying to figure things out together for the foreseeable future.

Luckily, when any organization isn’t working as well as it could, the people who run it can always make changes and evolve the way it operates so things work better. The one thing that those almighty revered founding fathers ever did, for which they are enshrined in the annuls of our nation’s proud history, was build a government with rules that could be changed. They thought it was necessary! The rules of society will naturally get complicated as people continue to stretch the limits of free will, but this is why a government is able to make up new rules, and be flexible and adjust. In fact, if a society were to focus its attention on good policy in the name of public interest, these solutions and adjustments could come about much quicker.

The notion that one should not live their life for anyone else and one should not ask others to live their life for them is neat to ponder for five minutes in a mental-masturbatory, Intro to Philosophy sort of way, but it isn’t applicable to the laws of society. How can anybody formulate an opinion on something like intellectual property law from that basic premise? It is wholly inadequate to derive rules for complex societal interaction, so to use the objectivist personal philosophy (and much of libertarianism for that matter) to make rules for a complex society completely oversteps its capabilities.

An example: One thing libertarians will say is that government shouldn’t be involved in the building or maintaining of roads. That is something that free enterprise should take care of. But this issue doesn’t arise from a philosophical discussion. It arose from actual practical problems that all these people who lived together wanted to move themselves and other things around and they needed a means to do it. With the lack of a wealthy benefactor to manage the road building, the people went to whichever government body would help solve problems and disputes for the people, and a system of taxation and road building was set up to solve this problem in the name of public interest. This is not a case of government overstepping its rights or forcing its will on people (stop personifying the government!). Government does not have a will of its own, it is just the will of the people. A libertarian would not be able to solve that problem without losing their philosophy.

I find that most libertarian policies may well address one individual’s problems or gripes, but they don’t address the total problem. “I pay too much in taxes!” someone will say. “Ok, then let’s lower their taxes” the libertarian would say. “Why are we even taxing him in the first place? He doesn’t regularly use government.” I hear similar stupid arguments all the time. They are stupid because they so quickly lose track of the big picture and don’t recognize or remember the reason for anything that is in place. It is a simpleminded problem solving strategy which jumps to the easiest solution that will solve the thing identified as the problem, which is usually a personal one. But that might not even be the actual problem, and shouldn’t we try to remember why we tax people in the first place? These self-interested arguments only distract from getting to the best policy.

The truth is this person does regularly use government and receives benefits. Those benefits may be more passive than the libertarian realizes or perhaps they take the protection of their rights for granted. There is court system available at the citizen’s disposal to protect their rights. There is law enforcement that he can call to protect his safety. There are publicly funded utilities and infrastructure projects which benefit everyone. There is a national defense protecting foreign invasion. But the libertarian sees it only to the extent that if they don’t receive a check from the government means that he doesn’t use government. The libertarian talks about rights, but doesn’t see the privilege of rights in action. And moreover they refuse to believe they have any responsibility in society.

In the issue of government surveillance and data storing there are two interests in conflict: the individual’s right to privacy and the interest in protection from enemies. The intelligent discussion that should follow should involve how helpful surveillance is in protecting safety and preventing harm to the public (e.g. terrorism, foreign enemies, etc.) versus how much privacy a person is willing to give up and how that loss of privacy could be exploited. And this matters not in just the opinion of one person or their extreme case but for the public at large. This is how the debate should be framed, but we really hear very little of anyone trying quantify or measure the public benefit to either side of the issue. Admittedly, public interest, especially on this issue is very difficult to measure. But we are coming up with better and better methods to do so and if we could focus more energy on these sensible pursuits we could more quickly arrive at a good policy.

What about individual rights? If people don't speak up about rights won't they will be lost? Individual rights do matter. However, if properly assessed, individual rights will be included in the measurements of public interest. It is easy to see how in an assessment of censorship that the public benefit of having open media and platforms for voices to be heard and stories to be told would drastically outweigh the public benefit of suppressing that, and thus, the individual's right to free speech is supported, not through one person's perspective, but through measured public interest. They key is to not assume that what is good for the individual is a good policy for the rest of the citizens, but rather, trust that if all policies were made with true public interest in mind that individuals will be best off.

It’s embarrassing, but moreover, it’s truly scary that we have leaders in our society, Ted Cruz, Ron and Rand Paul, etc. who were elected to represent the interests of the people but are openly saying the solution to our problems is to turn their back on people and let it be theirs to solve. They push that government shouldn’t get involved and make determinations on what is good, or moral, or just for people. And so they work at dismantling the government and would rather leave the decision up to the free market, which is frequently rigged and/or broken. Markets don’t value humanity. Markets don’t value morality. Take the mortgage crisis (or really any other white-collar crime in history will be a suitable example). In just about every case, there was a person willing to do something misleading or deceptive in exchange for money. Without some law or regulation or oversight to tell people that it is wrong, what would ever stop some thinks-they’re-clever capitalist from taking piles of cash to originate garbage mortgages? The idea of having markets which are so perfect that they factor morality into the decision are simply a pipe dream. I’ve written about this before.

Perfect markets don’t exist. They never have and I doubt they ever will. Markets can be flawed and very susceptible to manipulation in so many ways that while they can still be a very useful indication of how to allocate capital, they cannot at this stage be relied upon to determine morality. Markets worship only the dollar. But that is not the only thing that matters in a society. In a good society the people matter. And what is important to those people, is expressed through their opinions and their votes when they elect representatives to speak for them. And it is those representatives' task to implement rules on behalf of the best interests of the people. Capitalism needs a conscience, and that conscience comes from the democratic process

The point of this is definitely not to defend anything Democrats do when elected, because many, if not most of their decisions completely neglect public interest. This is also not an anti-capitalist argument because I feel it is in the public interest for individuals to have the right to own certain property and make selfish decisions (to an extent, obviously) regarding that property. The point is only to say that Ayn Rand’s ideas are definitely not the solution to good government policy. I have no difficulty with the basis of objectivism as a personal philosophy, in fact I generally agree that physical perceptions and sensations in the body are the cold (or hot) reality and that consciousness evolved from that. It’s a rather scientific approach really. However, I don’t feel the need to extend those ideas in generating government policy, because that is not the point of government policy. The whole reason government policy exists is because we made the assumption that other people do exist and that they have interests of their own and that in order to deal with all these competing interests we have created these government bodies. Therefore, in creating policy for that government we need to set aside personal philosophies and focus solely on public interest. Doing so will provide the greatest opportunity for citizens to appreciate life and liberty and to pursue their own happiness. To do anything else is an attempt to manipulate government for the benefit of individual special interests which becomes a detriment to government and society.