Lesson 6: Individual Rights and the State
The proper role of government
If natural rights are true, then the government must necessarily be small. Its proper role - to protect individual rights - implies that most political intrusions in society are misguided. That it should be much smaller than the governments of today is uncontroversial.
We will see a number of examples of this later. However, take the simple example of taxation, which by itself illustrates this clearly. Despite claims to the contrary, taxes are not voluntary, and most of them are not based on restoring individual rights (with some exceptions, such as taxes on gasoline, cigarettes, or other forms of pollution).
While financing a libertarian country with voluntary means would not be a problem, the current states could not survive. The maintenance of a large army of bureaucrats, soldiers and social programs would no longer be possible. This is, of course, a good thing.
In contrast, note that every political party, no matter what its allegiance (conservative, liberal, or other) or promises are, never substantially lowers taxes. This is natural : we can't expect a politician to lower his own salary. I will describe the perversion of the mechanics of self-interest by government in the next lesson.
This said, there is disagreement as to exactly how small the government should be. Ayn Rand herself held to an opinion which may be considered closer to the side of anarchism than most, in that she proposed that very few government institutions should remain.
The only proper functions of government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.
(from Atlas Shrugged)
Personally I see her analysis as basically correct, but incomplete. But whatever opinion one has on the subject, it is clear that an Objectivist government would be very small.
The logical consequences of this position are commonly called capitalism and civil liberties, although Rand herself designated both by "capitalism", since they cannot be dissociated.
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.(...)
In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions, and interests dictate. They can deal with one another only in terms of and by means of reason, i.e., by means of discussion, persuasion, and contractual agreement, by voluntary choice to mutual benefit.
For this quote and more on the nature of capitalism, see Capitalism : The Unknown Ideal, p19-20.
Finally, I need to touch on a question which trips a lot of beginners in philosophy in general, and also beginning Objectivists. As we have seen, politics is derived from ethics. However, that does not mean that they are one and the same.
They both treat the status of actions, but our judgment on the actions is not necessarily the same in all cases, i.e. an ethical (morally good) action is not necessarily a legal (politically good) action, and a legal action is not necessarily an ethical action ("legal" being understood here as not breaking anyone's objective rights, not as "accepted by current laws").
An action is legal because it does not break anyone's rights, but an action is ethical if it is most conductive to the person's survival. The former is much more vast than the latter. Suicide, for example, is perfectly legal, but would be of questionable ethical worth in most cases.
This difference arises because politics only treats of our relations with each other. A man alone does not need a political system. But he still needs an ethical system.
