Technological Retrogression

C. August has written an article titled The Government Killed My Jet Pack over at Titanic Deck Chairs, about how the government is to be blamed for the slowing, and sometimes elimination, of technological progress:

Still, he points to the fact that our highways are still jammed, and that people are becoming disillusioned with what technology can promise the future. He notes dystopian movies like Blade Runner where "technology creates more problems than it solves," and Battlestar Galactica where "human beings abandon their faith in technology's ability to improve the future. They destroy their fancy machines and start again as simple hunter-gatherers."

I don't think our culture's disillusionment is coming from a loss of "faith" in technology to "save us" but instead the ever-increasing draining of reason and the ever-increasing power of the state over our lives. The loss of reason and the increase of the state go hand in hand. We are losing our confidence in our individual ability to command our own lives, and instead are turning to government to "save us." Government, in turn, is crushing the productive output of what is left of capitalism.

In effect, the loss of reason precedes technological retrogression. It may seem absurd and impossible, but it is possible for humans to retrogress all the way to the barbaric life of jungle savages if they were to abandon the mind, and therefore its products, which is why it is important to grasp the issue of the relationship between technological progress and freedom, and therefore by implication reason itself. Stagnation is not possible; without the mind humans cannot even maintain the current level of technology.

If things keep going the way they are now we will have bigger things to worry about than a slower growing prosperity: we will be going backwards.

Read the article.

"Atlas Shrugged and the Tea Party Revolts"

The Ayn Rand institute has come out with a new video advertising the best-selling book Atlas Shrugged.



I must confess that I find this video to be unsatisfactory, but it suffices for the time it runs. What is troublesome, as I have said in a previous post, is that the majority of the current focus on the book is on its plot-theme, that is, its political aspects. Atlas Shrugged is not a political novel, but rather a primarily ethical and epistemological work.

It is not about what happens to the economy when the government imposes controls; its about what happens to the world when men stop using their minds.

Wesley Mouch with your Paycheck?

Another disturbing proposal is upon us. Legislators are actually entertaining the notion of dictating the pay of all employees of companies that have received government funding.

But now, in a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the "Pay for Performance Act of 2009," would impose government controls on the pay of all employees -- not just top executives -- of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

Of course, this is but only a logical development, as would be known by anyone familiar with the nature of government intervention and money in general. When we spend money, we want to know where it is going and, if we are smart, will not finance activities we do not approve of. When the government starts paying for the operation of a business or industry the politicians involved will sooner or later act as if it were their money that had been spent, and will be suggesting, or forcing, courses of action.

What is their standard of how people should be paid?

In addition, the bill gives Geithner the authority to decide what pay is "unreasonable" or "excessive." And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate "the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates."

And how will he decide what is "unreasonable" or "excessive"? And by what process will the Treasury Department come up with method to evaluation performance? Will it be based on sound economic principles of how employers keep their employees, or by the popular opinion of voters?

This will be particularly harmful to our economy, especially at a time like this, since the government does not work from the motivation of profit as a business does. I predict that, if Geithner is granted these powers, he will take a look at some sheets and decide that everyone is being overpaid. In a free economy, the proper amount of payment is according to the economic worth of the work or the abilities of the person; in the government, the arbitrary ideas of politicians as influenced by the smiles and approval of potential voters.

Worst yet, what is to stop this from expanding even further beyond businesses that received government funds? As I argued in The Sisyphean Judgment of Politicians, any attempt by politicians to run the economy is doomed to failure as Sisyphus is doomed to have the boulder roll down the mountain, so we have a vicious circle of government creating crises and trying to cure those crises with more government.

If this continues unabated by principled thinking or cultural change, Timothy Geithner may soon be cutting your own paycheck.

"Is Rand Relevant?" Editorial

Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute has published his first editorial for the Wall Street Journal.

It is a shame these days most people advocate reading Atlas Shrugged on purely political grounds, that the novel speaks only of what happens when the government intervenes in the economy. Politics is but part of the plot-theme of the novel; the real theme of the novel is ethical and epistemological: it is, as Rand states, "the role of man's mind in his existence."

Hopefully new readers will be able to walk away with more than a superficial understanding and become more integrated in principle. What the leading voices today advocate will lead to nothing but superficial understandings, making the reading of the novel almost entirely worthless.

To help stay consistent in principle or find out more information about Objectivism, I give great recommendation to the browsing of the Ayn Rand Lexicon.