Mysterious Abandoned Twitter Account Sounds Like My Troubled Friend — So I Have This to Say

Stuart K. Hayashi

Years ago, I was close to someone who turned out to be dangerously mentally ill. By this, I mean that she was a danger to self and others — and remains so. In her teen years back in her country of origin, she posted online her fantasies about stabbing her romantic rival to death and even doing the same to her own mother. She left that material up for posterity. She insisted to me that by 2009 in Hawaii she was all better. I greatly wanted to believe that was true. And so I went with it. But she wasn’t all better. Nor is she. I have recounted these events before. Before getting to the main topic of this post, I will give a briefer recap.

The Background
In February of 2010, my friend told me that an acquaintance of hers had threatened to kill her. I completely believed that accusation. She also repeatedly told me, unsolicited, about how, through her teen years, she maintained a strong desire to kill herself. And she repeatedly brought up her fascination with the topic of child molesters but never elaborated on the source of this fascination. She discussed a series of incidents with someone when both she and the perpetrator were 13 years old, but I didn’t think it explained why she kept talking about adult men being with prepubescent children so specifically.

Finally, she told a very odd story about how, after learning a particularly unhappy family secret, her American-born father legally changed his last name to his mother’s maiden name. My friend said, “ ‘My mum said to him, “How do we know you won’t change your name again? We’ll give our daughter my last name. That’s simpler.’” My friend laughed as she repeated that, and this was her explanation for sharing her last name with her mother and not her father.

Then in April, she once again brought up the acquaintance she had said had threatened her life. This time, she talked of him just being a flirt who was fun to have in the immediate vicinity. In May, she switched her opinion on him every one or two days. Even completely in private, she alternated between those two contradictory interpretations. She returned to saying he threatened her. Then she resumed talking about him just being a flirt. A day later, she went back to saying he threatened her. Every time my friend switched, she sounded as though she didn’t remember what she said previously — even when it was just a single day prior.

Later, my friend uploaded images of herself photoshopped to resemble a dead body with a chalky white face. In this time, I learned that her paternal grandfather and two of his brothers — my friend’s grand-uncles — were all credibly accused of abusing little girls over whom they were supposed to care. One of those cases has even been documented publicly by journalists. In the accounts directly addressing the abuse, the alleged abuser’s name isn’t given, but the victim’s is. The victim is the one who gave the account, and she mentioned what her relationship was to the man she accused of abusing her. When the abuse is not mentioned directly, though, the abuser is not so anonymous.

 

As I have said, because I knew the context behind my friend’s obsession with suicide, I couldn’t write off her public displays of her corpse images as just her “being a goth.” In 2015, my friend stopped uploading pictures of herself as a dead body. She once again started uploading photos of herself as someone who is alive. But she did something else. She legally changed her last name to that of her father’s. I have been told of how my friend’s paternal grandmother — the one whose maiden name is now my friend’s last name — was informed about the abuse going on in the family. Apparently, to her dying day in late 2016, this grandmother unconvincingly denied knowledge of it or that it ever happened.

My friend legally changing her last name to her father’s last name is not a healthy sign. Once again, my knowing the context behind her actions is what prevents me from writing off this gesture as something harmless or benign. It’s presented as some touching tribute. But, knowing the context of what has gone on her father’s side of the family, I don’t interpret it as a loving one. It’s much subtler than the previous one, but this comes across as yet another morbid gesture in public.

Because of all the manipulative behavior, I told my friend that I wouldn’t be in direct contact with her until such time as she returned to regular psychiatric care. She refused. She also responded by feigning memory loss. She pretended to hold no memory of her telling me anything of her past.

She also put up numerous social-media accounts where she puts on this act, trying to pass off the image that she is happy, with her life together and with her being placed in positions of authority and responsibility — the implication apparently being that such high-ranking positions would never be held by someone who’s dangerously mentally ill. To no one’s surprise, putting on that façade became much easier after she stopped uploading her photoshopped-as-a-corpse pictures next to her résumé and proclamations about being professional all the time.

I was therefore surprised, one day, to stumble upon what looks like another one of her social-media accounts, this one on Twitter.

 

Discovering This Strange Twitter Account
This one isn’t like her two other Twitter accounts — self-consciously unrevealing, bland, and milquetoast — trying to sound professional. This one’s tone is very personal and confessional, much like those older LiveJournal accounts where she posted her homicidal fantasies.

This other Twitter account makes some very half-hearted attempts to have some plausible deniability. I mean my friend can deny that the account is hers. The account consists of only eleven tweets and they are only from two days. The first nine tweets are from July 25, 2017, and the last two are from August 4, 2017.

My friend doesn’t have her real photo up. Instead, the profile photo is a crudely drawn image by an obscure social-activist cartoonist. As an aside, when I looked up that cartoonist for the first time ever, I found that on Twitter she already had me autoblocked. The drawing is of a faceless blonde girl. On the Twitter bio, the “location” listed is an American city that I doubt my friend has visited. And the name given on that account is my friend’s original legal name with her mother’s surname. This account went up two years subsequent to my friend already legally changing her last name to her father’s.

I have good reason to suspect that this mysterious, inactive account was indeed created by my friend. It uses — almost verbatim — a disturbing and inaccurate sentence that my friend repeated to me in our final telephone conversations when she was still in Honolulu. I had not directly quoted that sentence on this blog or to anyone, and yet it’s almost exactly the same on this Twitter timeline. The tweets also have the same idiosyncratic grammatical errors that my friend makes habitually in her typing.

In the tweets, the mysterious Twitter account’s owner addresses only one person, someone it does not name. If, as I suspect, this Twitter account was made by my friend, then I think the tweets are referring to me in particular. I conclude as much because the tweets addressing the unnamed person happen to sound just like what my friend told me in our telephone exchanges. If this Twitter account was made by my friend but, for some reason, made to address someone other than me, then she is talking to that other person in the same manner that she claimed was exclusive to me. Hence, I am going to respond to these tweets.

These tweets sound as if their authoress wants emotional reconciliation with the unnamed person that they address. And, after all these years, I would like such reconciliation as well. But there are many problems. The last time we spoke over the phone, my friend wanted only a pretense of reconciliation. My participation in that pathological sham would have been dangerous for both my friend and me.

 

The Real Reconciliation That Is Needed, Versus the Empty “Reconciliation” She Demanded Years Ago Over the Phone and Again Pines Over in These Tweets
That is, my friend wanted to go on making her morbid gestures — including going back and forth in repeating and then withdrawing her accusations about violence — and for me to play along with her flimsy pretense at leadership, mental health, and success at life. She wanted me — like many people in Hawaii and in Norway whom I mistook for my friends — to pretend not to be disturbed by the morbid gestures. She wanted me to be an enabler and sycophant reinforcing the pathology rather than confronting her compassionately about getting the psychiatric treatment she needs. This was the perfect rehearsal to Donald Trump surrounding himself with sycophants in the White House and the GOP who are very aware of his obvious pathology and yet feign ignorance of it.

What I am about to describe wasn’t the worst aspect of my friend wanting me to help her live this lie. But I will tell you right now what was personally insulting about it for me. Throughout 2009 and 2010, my friend heard me give public speeches about the urgency of embracing objective reality and holding to the principle of not helping anyone live a lie. I explained how people seeing something obviously pathological, and yet just going along with it, was a major cause of injustice and even history’s biggest atrocities. I quoted the principle, “Do not help them to fake reality.” In turn, my friend gushed to me about how the principles I espoused were so meaningful to her.

And now, here was my friend trying to pressure me to do exactly what I preached not to do. And the obvious rhetorical question to pose to her is, “When I gave those speeches about the importance of honesty and refusing to fake reality, do you think I was reciting lines with no comprehension of what I spoke? Did it not occur to you that I am interested in my actions being consistent with my professed ideals?”

But that insulting implication behind my friend’s expectation wasn’t the most important consideration. What was most important was, and is, my friend’s well-being. And that means not to be another one of the sycophants and enablers with whom she had surrounded herself in at least two different countries.

I already knew what the consequences would be if I capitulated to what my friend expected. The “best” case scenario, then, would be that, for a fleeting duration, she would return to her previous state as Dr. Jekyll. She would go back to being affectionate. She would “miraculously” rediscover her memory of what she had previously told me of her past and her family.

But that would not last. Mr. Hyde would return as well, and the devaluation and abusiveness with him. And I wouldn’t just have to help her live this lie by itself. I would also have to pretend not to remember how my friend kept changing her story when it came to whether or not some acquaintance violently threatened her. I would have to be that citizen of Oceania acting as if he didn’t remember that what Big Brother says today contradicts what Big Brother said yesterday. And, to make a comparison with something more recent, I would have to be that White House staffer pretending not to notice President Trump taking several mutually contradictory positions at once.

This is because, contrary to what my friend insisted, she doesn’t have a Jekyll side that can be separated from Mr. Hyde. Those are the same person — even though, as she often said, she feels as if she has no stable concept of her own identity anyway. Contrary to what my friend said, it is not a reprieve for her or anyone else around her simply to pretend that the ugly side of her psyche and her past just doesn’t exist. For her to have true peace, she has to confront that ugliness head on. 

Instead of trying to wish the sadness and anger and fear away through play-acting as “a professional,” the sadness and the anger and fear have to be integrated into a one true self. That is, literally, what it is to have integrity — integrity as in having a single face where one’s behavioral traits are integrated with consistency. That is the reconciliation my friend must have with herself before she can truly reconcile with anyone else, whether a member of her family or not.

And that does mean directly confronting the abuse in the family to which she and her aunts alluded. This is abuse to which she alluded indirectly — in the form of raising the issue of child molestation without obvious explanation — and to which her aunts alluded directly.

And until she begins to make an effort at such an inner reconciliation — necessarily with psychiatric guidance — my friend’s Dr. Jekyll side, as much as it may seem sweeter and more pleasant, is not less manipulative or abusive than the Mr. Hyde side.

I would not be surprised if, upon somehow reading this blog post today, my friend slapped on a smile and proclaimed, “I was in a dark place when I wrote that. But I’m all better now. Life is great. These days I don’t miss Stuart at all.” But we’ve already heard and read that false and comically grandiose announcement many times — at least the falsehood within those first three sentences. Absent of the compassionate intervention required, my friend will continue her accursed cycle. She will pronounce herself confident and a great success, only to return to despair months later — feeling forlorn and crying over what she tells herself is lost to her.

 

Second Person: Addressing My Friend Directly 

I feel sorry for you. And when I read these tweets, I want to hug you — I do care about necessary rules against spreading COVID, of course — and wipe away your tears and remind you I don’t want your hurting to continue. The hurting will not stop — a part of you already knows this — from your continuing to pretend to ignore the pain, as though that were enough to make it go away for the long term. It is to be mitigated by facing directly the pain and its domestic origins. 

 You say, “From the start I've known that keeping my feelings to myself is the safest choice.”

That was never safe. And, on some level, you know that. Your refusal to be open and upfront is the source of your loneliness and yearning. It is precisely the reason why everything came pouring out of you and into your old LiveJournal accounts and this series of tweets from you. And I’m sure that mere days after you sent out those last two tweets in August of 2017, you probably switched back to your other mode. I know that, since then, you have made additional social-media postings once again to put on the ploy that your life is safe and fine. But I’m equally sure that all of the pain and loneliness has returned to you many times since that last tweet, probably hitting even harder than before. The inept attempts at maintaining an illusion of stability and strength will always fail you in a matter of months. They are not what will give you strength and peace.

And then there is this series of tweets:

• I felt like myself with you. I didn't have to hide who I was. I was so comfortable. 
• but one day you left me so fast. 
• I still don't understand why because nothing went wrong. Everything was perfect actually.

Every one of those three tweets displays a lie you have been telling yourself. The first and last one contain lies you have told yourself throughout  the entire duration in which we were speaking face-to-face.

First, you did hide the truth. You blamed all of your fears and paranoia on that series of incidents when you and that friend were thirteen. That friend should have made a real effort to understand informed consent; there is no excusing what he did. What we know is that, as you and your aunts have conveyed, that manipulation by someone you trusted was not without precedent even then. That the long-term harm inflicted upon you started years prior — and much closer to home — was much-needed context that you withheld.

Had you been upfront about this, I would not have turned you away. I would only have had more knowledge and insight in helping you get through your flashbacks and panic attacks and anxiety.

Second, we both know that I never left you. Because you let your fears override your judgment and happiness, you ghosted me. You withdrew all affection. You decided only to address me with a rediscovered air of condescension and dismissal, the same tone you originally used with me when we were first speaking in the autumn of 2009. And then your insistence that we maintain “friendship” at the price of my subordinating myself to your pretenses of normalcy — knowing completely well, by then, the principles by which I try to conduct myself — was your initiation of the dissolution of what we had together. You know it.

Thirdly and finally, you describe what we had as “perfect actually.” No, it was not. The situation seemed happy for a time. But because you weren’t getting the professional psychiatric help you need, and because you refused to face the aspects of your family that are still traumatizing you, all the pain and fear regained its hold over you. Rather than you managing the pain, it was pain that was managing you. That is why what we had together had melted down — and you with it. And if I did what you wanted — resume a “friendship” by playing along with your act — the cycle would have repeated.

This is a curse, but not a supernatural one. There is no supernatural. This is far worse. It is a curse that began with unhealthy attachment dynamics in the generations preceding yours. These unhealthy family dynamics were taught from one generation to another. Much of the traumas you have experienced are the logical consequence of that. And that elder people have imposed it on you is not your fault. But with years of effort, you can break that curse. Freedom does not arrive from your running from contemplation about what has been going on in your home. Freedom is attained through running toward that contemplation — with courage and resolve.

And you need not face it alone. Nor even can you. You need regular psychiatric guidance. Recognition of the need to return to regular psychiatric care — and to stick with it this time — was nowhere mentioned in your series of tweets. But that — not real-estate investing, putting up images to insinuate that you’re doing awesomely, or continuing to have your morbid gestures reinforced by the same circle who lauded your corpse pictures — is what is most worthy of consideration and public acknowledgment from you.

And I had not “left” you. For valid reasons, I did not make any direct replies to your demand that I accommodate your pathology. But my spirit, my heart — my concern for your true lasting happiness — was with you all these years, even oceans apart.

Stop putting on this pretense on social media about your life being together. Everyone knows, deep down, that it is not. Stop trying to use your legal name and social media to put on this illusion of family harmony. For those who come across you, even casually, be upfront about your psychiatric condition and the risks involved. In consideration of the violent threats and dubious accusations about crime that you have made, people in your acquaintance do have a moral right to know about your mental illness — for your safety and theirs.

Those who write you off upon learning about your psychiatric condition are people who are wrong, and that is their problem. The people you need around you are the ones who, upon learning of your condition, will reciprocate honesty and support your courage in getting regular psychiatric care and in healing that little girl inside you who suffered that abuse in secret, the little girl who cried out in the form of these morbid public gestures.

Even before I knew the full truth about you, I was saddened that you spoke disparagingly of those lyrics from Jon Bon Jovi: “It’s my life/now or never.” Sneer as much as you want, but those lyrics are true. And they are about you. It is your life. It has been many years and, to this day, I still wish that you valued yourself at least as much as I do you.

Not Personal? Part of It Was About Me

Stuart K. Hayashi

 

Many psychologists and self-help writers like to say that when someone treats you horribly — especially as it harms her own well-being — it’s not personal. They say that even if she very consciously wants you to feel aggrieved by her action, it’s about her own issues and not about you. And in most instances, that applies. But not always.

Years ago, I was very close to someone who turned out to be terribly unwell. She told me about her long history of threatening suicide, and happily insisted she was all better now. At the time, I believed her. She told me that knowing me was so refreshing because I’m so much about life and embracing life. Then, merely weeks into being back in her country of origin, she mostly ghosted me. The few times she communicated, she switched to an impersonal tone, as if we never met. And when it came to the many hours she told me, unsolicited, about her mental disturbances — she feigned memory loss about that. And then, for the next two years, she uploaded photos of herself that were photoshopped to make her look like a corpse with a chalky white face.

I know that the “correct” interpretation that those psychologists would want me to take from this is that none of this was personal or meant to be personal. No, goes the insistence, it was all about my friend’s issues and not about me. It was indeed more about my friend’s issues than about me. But it’s actually not true that none of this was personally about me.

Previously, my friend gushed to me that she saw me as inspiring her about the need to embrace life. Upon switching to treating me in a dehumanizing fashion, she uploads images conspicuously depicting herself as dead. Yes, that was a very conscious repudiation of me and what she thought I represented.

She had told me for hours about her history of suicide threats. And then, for two years, she uploads depictions of herself as a corpse. While many of the other people on Oahu who encountered her were bewildered by this gesture, she knew that I knew the context behind it. She was aware that, because of my knowledge of the context behind her morbid imagery, that this gesture would compound my worrying for her. Yes, part of it was about contributing to the worrying I already had for her.

After telling me that she thought I was all about life and embracing life — her very conspicuously turning her own image into a symbol of her own demise was, in part, about sticking it to me.

That’s consistent with a point that William Swann makes about self-verification theory. It’s that when you like someone, whereas that person hates herself, that mismatch is something that person will hold against you — and for which that person may easily punish you. Knowing that she had told me about her years of wanting to be dead, part of her decision to upload photos of herself as a corpse was about playing mind games and “testing” me. It was a gesture to convey that it’s the principles that I most cherish that are being repudiated.

I have to face that a lot of my friend’s public morbid gesturing was personally directed toward me, and that a lot of it was about me.

Essay That Got Me in the 3rd-Place Category in the Ayn Rand Institute’s 2009 Essay Contest: ‘Making Money Versus Having Money’

Stuart K. Hayashi

Below is the essay for which I received one of the five third-place slots in the Ayn Rand Institute’s 2009 Atlas Shrugged essay contest. That year there were 4,000 entrants — more than double the previous record.

In this essay, I explain that money, as a commodity, is a complement. This means that its value hinges upon the value of some other product. For instance, the value in my having a can opener — qua can opener — is contingent upon my having sealed tin or aluminum cans to open. Likewise, the value of money is contingent upon there already being goods and services, such as food and shelter, for which that money can be traded. Therefore, it is such wealth — these goods and services created by entrepreneurs — that confer value upon cash and credit.

The quantity of goods and services that can be produced in a society is directly commensurate with the amount of freedom — freedom from force and fraud — existing in that society. A totalitarian society can have trillions of monetary units in circulation in the form of cash and credit, but as the lack of incentive will discourage entrepreneurial production, that society will remain poor.

Grammatically, what you see below is not exactly the same as the version I submitted. Years later, I noticed that the draft I submitted split some infinitives. I have decided to change that for the version below.

_________

 

Topic 2: Making Money Versus Having Money

In Atlas Shrugged, the heroes want to “make” money while the villains want, on the surface at least, to “have” money. What is the difference between these two views of money? Explain your answer by reference to actual events in the novel.

 

The conflict in attitudes that the heroes and villains have about money comes from their differing views on the nature of wealth. First, “wealth” must be defined properly. The measure of a person’s wealth is the usefulness that he finds in the products and services in his possession; “wealth” does not merely refer to cash and credit. The usefulness of any unit of currency comes from the fact that it can be exchanged for the goods and services that comprise wealth. As Francisco d’Anconia explains at James Taggart’s wedding: “Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them” (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957, [New York, New York: Signet, 1985 mass market paperback edition], 387).

John Galt notices that the villains do not consider the source of the world’s wealth (968); they are only aware that it exists, and they fuss over how they would like for it to be distributed (132). By contrast, the heroes understand that wealth is not something that automatically emerges into existence, independent of human initiative. The heroes recognize that all the wealth that exists, and has ever existed, was created by individuals who applied their volitional capabilities, first to discover the laws of nature, and then to utilize their understanding of such laws to convert natural materials into useful products.

The mere existence of crude oil, for instance, cannot be of immediate use to anyone while that oil remains stuck miles beneath the earth’s surface. It takes a capable entrepreneur to coordinate the activities of men and machines in an effort to bring this oil aboveground. That is precisely what Ellis Wyatt does, keeping other industrial concerns alive by reliably supplying them with oil (17). After Wyatt vanishes from public life, and after the government responds by placing further controls on the oil industry, there are no entrepreneurial individuals left who can competently organize oil-drilling endeavors. Resultantly, the country experiences a petroleum shortage (325). This demonstrates that wealth is conditional, that no one may have it unless there is someone willing and able and free to use his mind to create it.

When a man invents a new product that provides advantages that older products cannot, the new invention brings about an increase in wealth. Before Hank Rearden invented Rearden Metal, Dagny Taggart purchased steel for the reason that there was no better substance available for casting the rails for Taggart Transcontinental’s lines. Once Rearden brings his Metal into existence, it opens up previously untapped opportunities. Dagny observes that Rearden’s alloy is “tougher than steel, cheaper than steel, and will outlast any hunk of metal in existence” (28). Accordingly, a dollar that Dagny spends on Rearden Metal today will bring her greater benefit than did a dollar that she spent on steel in the past. This net benefit — this improvement in the quality of Taggart Transcontinental’s tracks — is new wealth that Rearden’s Promethean initiative has brought into reality.

Furthermore, two independently creative individuals can take advantage of one another’s creativity by making voluntary trades with each other, giving “value for value” (387). Rearden provides Dagny his Metal for her rails, and she provides him the service of shipping his Metal to his other customers (86). This trade is not executed through barter; Dagny and Rearden each pay one another with money, as money makes trading simpler in a society in which businesses perform specialized tasks. Dagny purchases cigarettes from a newsstand (64-65), but if all she had to trade for cigarettes was her railroad’s transportation services, then the newsstand owner would not agree to the trade if he had no desire to transport anything via rail. Money makes trading easier because it is a tool used specifically as a common medium of commercial exchange. Dagny can offer rail transportation to her customers in exchange for their money, and she can then offer some of that money to the newsstand owner in exchange for cigarettes.

Money is therefore the material representation of the product of one’s own effort, which one can then “exchange for the product of the effort of others” (387). To “make money” is to earn money in a two-step process: first create useful goods or services, and then trade them to willing customers in exchange for their money. Ergo, to “make money,” one must be a wealth-creator. A moneymaker is a producer.

Though wealth is created, the villains obtain it by means other than production and trade. Another way to acquire wealth is to receive it as a gift. The persons that primarily obtain their wealth not from working, but through alms, are those whom Francisco identifies as “moochers” who gain the product of your work “by tears” (387). Philip Rearden lives off of his brother Hank in such a manner (441). An even worse tactic of acquiring wealth is to engage in extortion or other forms of robbery. Those who employ this method are “looters,” who seize your wealth “by force” (387). As a case in point, in his unwillingness to try to persuade individuals to finance his scientific research consensually, Dr. Robert Stadler asks the government to confiscate money from citizens forcibly and have it redistributed to his State Science Institute (178, 183). Such moochers and looters often take money and have it, but they do not make any new wealth and therefore do not make money.

When an extortionist steals from his victim, most of society evaluates the extortionist as strong and the victim as weak. However, if strength is the ability to live as a rationally proud human being, then the productive victim is stronger. The victim survives by his own effort. By contrast, the extortionist is a parasite that lives off of its victims and will perish in the absence of victims.

Following Wyatt’s disappearance, for example, the government gives the State Science Institute full access to Wyatt’s oil fields. However, lacking the acumen to produce the same results that Wyatt did, the Institute fails to put the fields back into production and therefore fails to mitigate the petroleum shortage. To keep its building adequately heated, the Institute relies upon the oil that the government rations to it, but this quantity proves to be insufficient for satisfying Stadler’s needs (325-26). Rather than take any constructive action, Stadler simply laments that the temperature in his Institute’s building recently dropped so low that he “nearly froze to death” (325). Producers like Wyatt can survive without looters like Stadler, but looters like Stadler suffer when they no longer have producers like Wyatt around to produce for them.

If everyone in the USA lived as a productive individual, creating wealth and trading it with other wealth-creators, then the nation would flourish just as Galt’s Gulch does (652-756). Conversely, a society in which everyone was a moocher or a looter would inevitably destroy itself. The moochers and looters would find that the quantity of wealth available for consumption constantly shrinks when there are no moneymakers present to create new wealth. There would be no competent entrepreneurial efforts to generate electricity (1075), as there would be no one left to mine the coal that could supply it. The world would descend back into poverty (273), technological primitivism (1080), famine (869-870), and civil war (1029). Society would vanish “in a spread of ruin and slaughter” (390).

A particularly important principle is revealed when, just as the American economy falls into deprivation and chaos, Mr. Thompson — the nation’s Head of State — tries to coax John Galt into becoming the country’s economic dictator by offering him cash: “Want a billion dollars — a cool, neat billion dollars? . . . ...I mean straight out of the public treasury, in fresh, new bills . . . or . . . or even in gold, if you prefer.”

In reply, Galt asks rhetorically, “What will it buy me?” (1023). When there are so few quality goods and services being produced, a billion dollars will fetch very little value for its owner. To quote once again a statement of Francisco’s that was quoted in this essay’s beginning, the value of any sum of cash is predicated upon the fact that there are still “goods” being “produced and men able to produce them” (387). As the productivity of these men ceases to exist, so does the usefulness of any currency, and so it is the productive men “who give value to money” (387). The producers’ economic power comes not from merely possessing cash, but from making the wealth that gives cash its meaning.

Galt rightfully appraises Mr. Thompson’s bribe as pitiful, for having money is meaningless in a world in which there are no longer any men around to produce the goods and services that the money is supposed to purchase. That is the idea behind Francisco saying, “Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money” (387). In the final analysis, the money that one has can only retain its value as long as — and to the extent that — men still make their money freely.

On Thursday, April 8, 2021, I added the photo that my mother took of me holding a copy of the hardcover Atlas Shrugged and the certificate from the Ayn Rand institute. My mother took that photo on December 23, 2009.

Jean-Baptiste Say in Favor of Liberalized Immigration

Stuart K. Hayashi

 

Jean-Baptiste Say was a pioneering Enlightenment-era economist to whom I have previously referred on this blog and elsewhere. He articulated an important principle in political economy.

 

What Makes Him Special 

Prior to the Enlightenment, most people believed that private property rights are nothing more than a tentative method for the State to suspend disputes over who gets to control which scarce resource. Most people, at least on a subconscious level, hold that attitude still.

But as I have written before, Say provided a much more sophisticated understanding of private ownership. John Locke and Adam Smith explored this idea earlier, but Say delved deeper and explained it better. Say showed that, for the most part, most economic value is not a given provided by the wilderness as some default. Instead, most economic value is created by inventive, entrepreneurial, human choices.

And, to that point, the institution of private ownership is about more than resolving fights over scarce resources. Those scarce resources gained their value mostly as a consequence of invention and entrepreneurship. For that reason, private ownership over such economic value is about the inventor and entrepreneur retaining control over the value she created. The institution of private ownership is vehicle for enabling individuals to enjoy the consequences of their creative choices.

And one such form of creativity involves the choice of impoverished dark-skinned people to migrate to new lands where they have more opportunity to employ their skills in the building of wealth. Appreciation for the right to immigrate is the logical extension and implementation of the free enterprise that Say studied and championed. Sadly, this insight is often lost on people who claim to venerate this man. Thomas Sowell wrote an appreciative book about Say, but on this topic takes the retrogressive position of Say’s opponent Rev. T. Robert Malthus.

 

 
Anti-Immigrationism in the Name of Say 

 There is also a Twitter account going by Say’s name and using the man’s portrait as a profile picture. The Twitter account’s opinions, at first glance, seem similar to the real Say’s in that it gives lip service to commerce and deregulation. Yet the Twitter account, for the most part, just repeats the same old talking points of “anti-SJW” Twitter accounts and YouTube channels like those of Carl Benjamin/Sargon of Akkad. At least the Twitter account’s owner is honest in admitting, “I contain platitudes.” Unfortunately, the account’s owner not only holds those platitudes internally, but provides the rest of Twitter the disservice of divulging them.

Among the rightwing clichés this account spouts is that the State is right to take action against dark-skinned immigrants. The rationalization is that the Twitter account’s owner presumes Third-World immigrants or at least their children all vote for Democrats and the welfare state. For the Twitter account’s owner, that is justification enough for the armed federal agents to obstruct dark-skinned immigrants from entering the West peaceably. 

 Ayn Rand Institute chair Yaron Brook notes on Twitter, “Most illegal immigrants work. Most immigrants don’t take welfare, because at the federal level and in most states it's denied for illegal immigrants.” 

 To this, the Twitter “Jean-Baptiste Say” snaps, “That’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that most immigrants vote for welfare. Stop defending the importation of statism.”

Maybe if immigrants don't support our values we have to make a more compelling case for our values 🤷‍♂️.

— Anton Chigurh (@buddybakerAM) July 15, 2020

Dr. Brook implores people to consider the immigrant’s situation.

Think of a mother who struggles to get to America because she wants her child to be free. In any other context, you would admire that woman. 

 What could be more heroic than that?

Dr. Brook challenges his readers to consider why they scorn immigrants “instead of admiring them.”

To that, Jean-Baptiste Say’s imposter cracks,

Because statistically she’s a Socialist who didn’t come here for freedom, she came for a job. And statistically most of her children will be as indifferent to freedom as their mother and vote the way she does.

Can you please show me the statistics that indicate this?

— Brian Robert Harris (@BrianRHarris) July 20, 2020

I have already disspelled these bigoted clichés. Therefore, I want to address something else. There is a sad irony in someone expressing this hostility to immigration freedom while using Say’s name and likeness to do so. And it is an irony that I doubt will be spotted by left-wing people like Vadim Newkwist who, lumping together all their political opponents, conflate anti-immigrationists with “Koch-funded libertarians” as if those two categories are in agreement rather than at odds. This is something about which I learned from the financial writer John Tamny. The irony is this: the real Jean-Baptiste Say approved of liberalized migration policy.

 

Letting the Real Jean-Baptiste Have His Say 

 In his Treatise on Political Economy, Jean-Baptiste Say writes, 

One nation cannot take from another the revenues of its industry. A German tailor, establishing himself in France, there makes a profit, in which Germany had no participation. . . .

A nation, receiving a stray child into its bosom again, acquires a real treasure...

Interestingly, in an endnote to the English translation of his work, one does find some fretting over the prospect of immigrants coming to a country to go on welfare. 

...defective human institutions may convert a benefit [such as immigration] into a curse; as where a poor-law system gives gratuitous subsistence to a part of the population, capable of labour, but not incited by want. In such case, every additional human being may be a burthen instead of a prize; for he may be one more on the list of idle pensioners.

However, that endnote came not from Say himself but from the English translator Charles Robert Prinsep.

The line of Say’s beginning “A nation, receiving a stray child into its bosom again,” might be interpreted as not a strong endorsement of immigration for several reasons. Although this section of the work is largely in defense of the right to migration, the sentence is preceded by a discussion of expatriates returning to their country of origin. Therefore, the “receiving a stray child into its bosom again” could be interpreted as saying that it is only a “treasure” when a native-born citizen repatriates to his country of origin, not so much when a non-native comes to the country. 

 Adding to that interpretation is this implied condescension toward non-natives: “...I reckon that a native Frenchman in quitting his country, robs it of an affectionate attachment, and a spirit of exclusive nationality, which it can never look for in a stranger born [resident alien in France].”

Yet there is another passage of this work that is unambiguous in its approval for immigration: “A stranger [immigrant], that comes into a country to settle there, and brings his fortune [productiveness] along with him, is a substantial acquisition to the nation.”

The real Jean-Baptiste Say does not delve into tirades about how would-be immigrants holding opinions on public policy contrary to his own is sufficient reason for armed government agents to bar their entry into the country.

Using Say’s face to spout the old canards against free immigration is an embarrassing attempt to co-opt the image of a great man who delivered the opposite message.

All ‘Economic Migration’ As Financial Arbitrage

Stuart K. Hayashi

Screen shot from the motion picture Born in East L.A.,
prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987).

There is an important term in finance and investing: arbitrage. This means that you notice a resource fetches a very low price in Market A and fetches a high price in Market B. Therefore, you start by removing the resource from Market A, usually by purchasing units of the resource in Market A. You conclude by moving that resource to Market B, where you are paid much more for it. That difference in prices is your profit margin.

 

Case Studies
Here is a basic example. You notice that in Country A, oil fetches 37 U.S. dollars per barrel. Yet you notice in Country B, parties are willing to pay 100 U.S. dollars per barrel. Therefore, you purchase barrels in Country A and then resell them in Country B. You make a profit of $63 per barrel. This business method is called arbitrage, and the one who practices it is an arbitrageur.

Here is another example. Maybe I want to find an old collectible or toy, maybe one Godzilla-related. But I only know of the big online vendors, such as Amazon and eBay. Perhaps an arbitrageur is more familiar with many smaller, lesser-known online vendors. The arbitrageur spends hours scouring the websites of the various online vendors. That is how she finds the collectible for sale for 40 US dollars. The arbitrageur purchases it for that price and then asks $55 for it on a bigger website with which I am more familiar. If I purchase it from the arbitrageur, that is a $15 profit before the bigger website takes a commission.

Arbitrageurs such as those described above have long been reviled as parasites. The implication is that the arbitrageur should have simply told me about the sale on the obscure website. Then I could have purchased the item at the lower price. What goes overlooked in that the arbitrageur did perform a valuable service for me. The arbitrageur was willing to spend time and effort keeping tabs on the various lesser-known vendors. By contrast, I was not. The additional $15 I pay to the arbitrageur is for the service of doing this legwork I was not willing to do myself.

The same applies to the arbitrageur who buys oil from Country A and resells it in Country B. The arbitrageur is performing the service of taking oil from where it is wanted less and redirecting it to where it is wanted more. Absent of the arbitrageur, parties in Country B who desperately wanted oil barrels at the lower price would have to do the hard work the arbitrageur did for them. They would have to travel to Country A themselves to make those purchases.

The principle of arbitrage is always as follows. Because there is relatively small demand for a resource in Market A, it fetches a low price there. Because there is greater demand for that same resource in Market B, that is where it goes for a higher price. The arbitrageur profits from the difference by removing the resource from the smaller-demand market and repositioning it in the greater-demand market.

 

Bible-Age Arbitrage
Ignorant hatred for this practice goes back at least as far as the Bronze Age. Merchants would purchase items in City-State A and travel many miles across the Middle East to resell those items in City-State B. These merchants would were said to be cheating the citizens of City-State B. Overlooked was the fact that those merchants performed a valuable service to citizens of City-State B by making those items more accessible to City-State B than they otherwise would be. If not for those merchants, the citizens of City-State B would only be able to access those items by themselves making the long trek to City-State A.

Fortunately, Jean-Baptiste Say understood the nature of such transactions.

The carrying trade, as Smith calls it, consists in the purchase of goods in one foreign market for re-sale in another foreign market. This branch of industry is beneficial not only to the merchant that practises it, but also to the two nations between whom it is practised; and that for reasons which have been explained while treating of external commerce.

Moneylending is another form of arbitrage. That, too, has been reviled since the Bronze Age, this time being condemned in the Bible and Koran. At this very moment, I am in urgent need of 100 U.S. dollars. My demand for that $100 is so great that, in order to access it by tonight, and I am willing to pay you $115 for it in one month’s time. By contrast, you have much lower demand for your own $100 — you are not willing to pay any more than $100 for it. Hence, we make an agreement. You hand me the $100 this moment. In turn, a month from today I pay you $115.

For most of recorded history, many people have condemned that $15 profit as something you stole from me. It is actually a payment to you, once again, for a valuable service. It is valuable on two counts. First, you make 100 dollars’ worth of resources accessible to me much sooner than they otherwise would be. Second, you yourself have to go a whole month without that $100. The equivalent quantity of resources will not be so accessible to you for that month. Instead, for that month you have turned over your control of that quantity of resources to me.

This is how you, as a moneylender, are an arbitrageur. The resource in question is the $100 at this very moment in time. My custody at the very moment is the market where the resource is in greater demand. Your own custody is the market where there resource is in smaller demand. At this moment, you need the $100 less than I do. A month from today, though, you might need that $100 more than I do. By handing me the $100 today, you remove the resource from the market that has smaller demand for the resource. By selling $100-at-the-moment to me for the price of $115-a-month-from-today, you relocate the resource to where it is in greater demand.

 

“Economic Migration” As Arbitrage
Any time a person changes countries for the purpose of making more money than she otherwise would, that is a form of arbitrage. That principle applies even in the unlikely instance of someone actually immigrating to a new country to go on welfare.

Suppose an impoverished woman makes zero dollars in her country of origin. It’s seldom the case that such a person has zero marketable abilities. She does have marketable abilities. The reason why she is not being paid is that, in the village where she lives, there is not sufficient infrastructure where her abilities could be put to a lot of use. She could be very productive in a factory. But, in her village, there are no factories.

Suppose this woman illegally enters a rich country and gets a job. Now she is making more money. She is an arbitrageur, and her laboring ability is the resource she has relocated. In her country of origin, there was small demand for her abilities. Hence, she moved her abilities to a new country — a new market — where there is larger demand for her abilities. Hence, her abilities fetch her more income in the new country than the old.

I have previously disputed the old accusation that impoverished dark-skinned immigrants come to the USA and the West just to go on welfare. As a theoretical exercise, though, I will explain how even such an act would be arbitrage in practice.

In my country of origin, no one pays me anything for my presence. Hence, there is very small demand for my presence. Then I move to a rich country where I collect welfare. In this instance, I make more money than before because there is much greater demand for my presence in the new country than in the old — even if the consumer demand comes from the State officials claiming to act in the interest of the public.

Rage Toward Tax-Funded “Economic Migrants” As Misdirected
Even aside from the fact that this phenomenon is less common than presumed, there is another reason why it’s unfair to single out Third-World immigrants as if they were the only group to profit this kind of arbitrage. If I find any type of item for a low price and then resell it to the government a profit, it is a form of arbitrage where the choices of the buyer (government officials) are likely at odds with those of the taxpayers who funded the purchase. As Christopher Cerf noted in the 1980s, arbitrageurs often take advantage of defense spending in this manner. Defense contractors purchase tools that would be priced at a few cents at a hardware store and resell them for $80 or more to the Pentagon.

Insofar as the reader disapproves of any immigrants or their children collecting welfare, the proper solution is to agitate for reductions in welfare in particular and, more importantly, reductions in government spending in general. The act of immigrating, by itself, is not a violation of anyone’s rights. It is especially not a violation when someone whose services are less-valued in her country of origin then moves to the USA where her services are more sought-after and therefore better-compensated.

On Saturday, October 10, 2020, I added the quotation from Jean-Baptiste Say.

‘Circumstance Does Not Make the Man; It Reveals Him to Himself’

Stuart K. Hayashi 

“Private schools are for weaklings,” an older relative of mine liked to say. She continued, “When I gave my presentation to kids at Iolani School, I noticed they leave their backpacks and laptops out unattended. Any schoolmate could swipe their stuff. Remember the public schools we went to? We and everyone else there knew better. If I have kids, that’s why I’m sending them to public school. That’ll toughen them up.” 

 The implication of this rant greatly offended me. I wanted to say, “Would you also get drunk and beat them up? By your logic, that’ll really make ‘em tough!” 

 Sadly, while very few people would choose government schools over private schools for the reason my relative gave, many people do agree with a particular pernicious philosophic premise of hers. Most people believe that your personality as an adult — including how tenacious you are — is determined by circumstances entirely external to your conscious choices. 

 That is the premise behind the very term “Nature vs. Nurture debate” — what gave you your personality were either environmental circumstances in which you grew up, which were beyond your choosing, or some inborn biology that was beyond your choosing. With “Nature” (meaning inborn biology) and “Nurture” (meaning environmental circumstances) presented as the only two possibilities, your own choices are not even countenanced as a possible factor in making you who you are. Incidentally, it is not an accident that the very expression “Nature vs. Nature” was coined by Francis Galton, the biological determinist founder of eugenics. 

 My older relative’s rant was a manifestation of the “nurture” side of that false dichotomy. The implication is that the degree to which you are tough as an adult was mainly a consequence of unpleasant circumstances being imposed on you. The assumption is that if you were in pleasant surroundings as a child, it would make you soft and weak. By contrast, the assumption goes, if some unpleasantness is imposed on you, it will make you strong. In this interpretation, you are a passive receptacle. Further in this interpretation, it is your environmental circumstances that are active, actively molding you.

The reality is far different. The very same difficulty can be thrust on two different people who grew up in the same sort of environment. They might even be blood relatives. Despite these similarities in genetics and environment, one of these people may rise to the challenge while the other may not. The reason is simple. Difficult circumstances are not the main factor in making anyone tough; it’s the person’s choices. Insofar as you rise to some challenge in circumstances, the approach you took and even the lessons you drew were primarily up to you. 

 Toughness is not a passive response to circumstances; it is a proactive choice. And, to a large extent, a tough person doesn’t have to have difficulties imposed for him or her to undertake creative projects that require discipline. For that reason, a child does not need for adults to impose harsh circumstances upon him for him to learn discipline. All he needs is to be encouraged and supported in following through on the goals he set for himself. 

 In 1903, a member of the New Thought movement, James Allen, published a self-help book titled As a Man Thinketh. It emphasized that your well-being as an adult is mostly the result of your own choices. It was too harsh for my taste in saying that if you are poor in the USA, it is your own fault. However, the book also provided some wise words that are most pertinent to this discussion: “Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.” 

  As pointed out to me by Maus Merryjest, Epictetus understood this as well. The Stoic philosopher put it, “It is circumstances (difficulties) that show what men are” (Discourses, Bk. 1, Ch. 24, lines 1–2). 

  Also helpful are some ponderings from yet another Stoic philosopher, the emperor Marcus Aurelius: 

 You need never believe that anyone who depends upon happiness [to come from circumstances external to the self] is happy! ...that joy which springs wholly from oneself [one’s own choices] is legal and sound... All things that Fortune looks upon become productive and pleasant only if he who possesses them is in possession also of himself...

 For men make a mistake, my dear Lucius, if they hold that anything good, or evil either, is bestowed upon us by Fortune; it is simply the raw materials of Goods and Ills that she gives to us — the source of things which, in our keeping [choices], will develop into good or ill... ...the upright and honest man corrects the wrongs of Fortune...

On Friday, September 10, 2021, I added the quotation from Epictetus about hard times showing what men are. 

More Than Ever

Stuart K. Hayashi



On September 2, under these political circumstances and especially the current dysfunctional U.S. President, this passage is even more eerily relevant than before.

Capitalism ‘Versus’ the Pursuit of My Dreams

Stuart K. Hayashi

“Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” c. 1818, 

by Caspar David Friedrich, a Romanticist painter

“I hate capitalism!” the lament often goes. It comes from someone young. She is in her late teens or early twenties. When this gripe is spotted online, too often people who think of themselves as defenders of free enterprise — utilitarian economic libertarians and Objectivists — are too quick to assume that, by capitalism, this young person uses that word with largely the same definition as they. They immediately seek to explain to this young person the error of her anti-capitalism.

The economic libertarian, likely most influenced by Milton Friedman or Ludwig von Mises, says,

So you hate capitalism? What do you have against the allocation of economic resources being organized from the bottom-up? Why is this worse than some central planner presuming omniscience and trying to organize the economy from the top-down? Under capitalism, individuals are free to make their own choices in their business.

You as a vendor don’t have to know everything about everyone’s needs. You only need to gain knowledge of your specific customers’ needs and expectations. The same applies to every other vendor. This is the division of labor. The alternative to the market is central planning of the economy by the State. Apparently, that is what you favor. The central planner presumes to know more about everyone else’s needs than do the people themselves.

Yet the central planner is supremely ignorant. He doesn’t even have as a direct a pipeline to learning about his citizens’ needs as a vendor does with her customers. That is why the Soviet Union and other centrally planned economies fail. That is what your hatred for capitalism brings you.

The Objectivist usually reacts more angrily. “So you hate capitalism?!” he yells.

There are only two methods whereby human beings can deal with one another. They are either by rational persuasion or by force. Under capitalism, people interact through rational persuasion. I can’t force you to buy my wares. I have to offer you something of value that appeals to your rational judgment. The alternative to this is socialism or some other system of government force. For socialists to get me to do what they want, they have the State threaten to fine or imprison me if I don’t do as they command. And when you reject capitalism, such force is the one alternative. That is what you want. Why do you want to threaten force on me? Why do you insist on robbing me of my freedom?

In both instances, the young person is genuinely baffled by such a response. “I said that it’s capitalism that I hate,” the young person replies sheepishly. “Why are you changing the subject?”

There is a miscommunication. When young people mope about what they hate, what they mean by “capitalism” and even “free enterprise” is often only superficially similar to what avowed ideological free-enterprisers mean by these terms. The upshot is that the usual defenses provided for capitalism — such as the two given above — do not actually address the young American’s primary misgiving about unregulated commerce.




What Do They Mean By “Capitalism”?
For many — possibly most — young Americans, “capitalism” vaguely refers to any activity where both of the following conditions apply.

1. Someone is paid money to do something.
2. This person probably would not have done it if not having been paid to do it.

That definition, by itself, seems straightforward. Yet in many respects, it prejudices the people who adopt it. The premise behind it also leads them to form various convoluted conclusions and invalid inferences.

The implications of this interpretation are as follows. When we take an action without having been paid to do so, the value in that action must have been intrinsic to the action itself. By contrast, when we are paid to take an action, our motivation in performing it was necessarily extrinsic to the action. Eventually, too many of our actions are those that are not worth taking for their own sake. The introduction of money payments, then, has a corrupting influence over our process of deciding which actions to take.

Suppose someone yearns to be a great guitarist as a career. Yet his parents discourage that. They warn him how irregular it is for an up-and-coming musician to get gigs. He cannot realistically expect this to be a source of steady income. At his parent’s urging, this young man goes to business school and lands an office job. He is terribly bored. His prior dreams of making it big as a guitarist become nothing more than a memory. And when this man reflects on it later years, it triggers in him feelings of regret and shame.

For many young people, this is the image that immediately enters their thoughts when they hear “capitalism” and “free enterprise.”

They also think of it as supremely capitalist if, placed in desperate straits, someone sacrifices her personal morals to acquire the cash she needs. To them, if someone pays a hit man to bump off a spouse, the exchange of cash renders this the prime example of capitalism, free enterprise, and laissez faire. The same applies to the slave trade.

Stigmatization results from the premise that what is integral to “capitalism” is that someone would not have found an activity worthwhile in the absence of monetary payment. If your action is conditional upon having been paid for it, then in most instances it must be tedious at best and reprehensible at worst. In either case, the person being paid did not have his heart in the activity. After all, had his heart been in it, he wouldn’t need to be paid to do it, now would he?

Naturally, we free-enterprisers mean something very different when we say capitalism, free enterprise, free markets, laissez faire, and liberalization. What we want is a society in which people are free to do anything that’s peaceful. Because most efforts at government control over peaceful behaviors are over economic matters and are done with an economic rationale, many of our arguments for freedom overall turn into arguments about commerce. That is how our arguments for freedom in general come to be misconstrued as being narrowly about financial freedom only.

Yes, we vigorously defend the right to profit by peaceful means. There is nothing wrong with that. And we understand that whether or not someone profits is not the central issue over whether an activity should be legal. The issue is over whether an action is violently coercive or not.

Etymologically, then, the expression free enterprise relates more strongly to our political priority than capitalism does. Capitalism alludes to “capital” as in financial capital — the resources that people invest into a business concern. In that respect, though, the term “capitalism” does fit with these young people’s notions about what it means. The “capital” in capitalism usually takes the form of money. “Capital-ism” translates to “money-ism.” And the prospect of human actions becoming primarily driven by the promise of monetary rewards is exactly what these young Americans revile most.

By contrast, “enterprise” simply refers to activity more generally, an endeavor. Free enterprise amounts to the freedom of action, the freedom to endeavor and venture, the freedom to enterprise. This, again, includes anything that is peaceful, regardless of whether financial profit is the stated objective.

I take it that most of my readers are already familiar with how anti-capitalists who object to my definition do so by equivocating the distinction between economic power and political power. I will therefore avoid that discussion in favor of one I think too often goes overlooked by Objectivists and libertarians. What makes it particularly galling that this goes overlooked is that Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead implicitly addresses it. In fact, a common reaction to this book by a number of its young admirers is what helped me consider the issue.

Besides the equivocations about “economic power” and “political power,” there is something else that prejudices many young people against capitalism. It is that they are hung up on conflating it with actions they consider wholly undesirable — actions that, being unpleasant or unethical, they believe no one would take if not having been paid to take them.




How Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead Is Interpreted As Anti-Capitalist
Let us say you want to start a charity that is of great priority to you. You judge that, based on the nature of the activity and the circumstances involved, it makes more sense for you and others to think of it as a not-for-profit operation. That is literally free enterprise — it is an enterprise in which you are free to engage in. Yet, to many young people, this is not free enterprise and definitely not capitalism. That you would do this without having been paid precludes it from being such.

Let us imagine something else. Someone wants to be a magnificent guitarist. This is something that this man would do even if no one paid him to do it. In fact, if this young man found very few opportunities to do so otherwise, he might even be willing to pay others to let him serenade them. Yet, on account of a combination of luck and a steadfast commitment to his craft, this man discovers methods whereby he can monetize this obsession. He realizes a great financial windfall doing something he would have done anyway.

The pertinent question is this: isn’t this young man gaining a fortune from his passion an exercise in free enterprise and capitalism? Exactly to the very degree to which they do approve of this guitarist’s financial success, many of our young people who moan “I hate capitalism!” reply that the answer is no. No, this guitarist’s success is not capitalism. The consideration that this man still would have wanted to be a guitarist in the absence of remuneration precludes that possibility. But if this man’s success was not capitalism, then what was it? The answer from young people is that this was an example of the greatest foil to capitalism: it was someone pursuing his dreams.

Even among many young people who get a rebellious thrill out of labeling themselves “socialists” or “Marxists,” very few of them truly believe, on a deep level, that the great conflict of our age is that of “capitalism versus socialism” or “the market’s bottom-up division of labor versus top-down central planning of the economy.” For them, it is:

Capitalism Versus the Pursuit of My Dreams

It can also be phrased as:

The Right to Property Versus the Right to the Pursuit of Happiness

Upon my making this point before, some persons sympathetic to Objectivism brushed this off and said, “Well, then those young people should just get their definitions straight.” For them, that was the end of it. But for those of us who would like to enlighten America’s youths, it is not adequate to be so dismissive. Upon understanding why young people interpret capitalism and its opposition as they do, we can be better-equipped in edifying them.

Something that helped me confront this was a startlingly common reaction to The Fountainhead I have heard from many young people who have gushed to me that it was a great inspiration to them. They informed me, without sarcasm or knowing irony on their parts, that they greatly appreciated the authoress’s clear and successful intention on indicting the conformity and corruption of motives that is an inherent byproduct to capitalism. In brief, they cherished this book for its always having meant to be anti-capitalist.

More than that, they fell in love with Howard Roark for being the ultimate rebel against corporate greed. As far as they were concerned, the perfect representation of someone striking a blow against this system was not Che Guevara or Leon Trotsky or Jesus whipping the money changers. It was Howard Roark.

This is how they explained it to me. The two characters whose behavior was most consistent with what they expected of archetypal capitalists were Peter Keating and Gail Wynand. For Keating, the customer is always right and the customer is king. He gave his clients designs that were both popular and sub-par because his heart was not in the work. Architecture, as such, was monotonous to him. He pursued this career to obtain money and prestige and to hold onto his mother’s approval. Consequently, he employed manipulation and office politics to rid himself of potential rivals for promotion within the firm. When free-marketers speak of “competition,” Keating’s sort of intra-company backstabbing inadvertently comes to mind.

But, for the young readers, Wynand even more closely matches what they predict the quintessential capitalist to be like — mostly because he was even richer than Keating. His cynicism was of especial import. Wynand held his own customers in contempt. He promulgated yellow journalism he thought to be beneath him for the sake of money and clout. These actions made him the wealthiest character in the story. Wynand’s worst personality traits are exactly what young Americans imagine of real-life billionaires in the mold of Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos.

By contrast, these young people said, Howard Roark was not a capitalist by any conventional understanding of the term. I naturally agreed with that part, except that my interlocutors meant that if someone was a capitalist by any conventional understanding, that person could not be a capitalist at all. They remember the various instances of Roark foregoing lucrative commissions for the sake of seeing that his buildings be constructed precisely according to his designs. I asked these young readers if this meant, then, that they thought Roark was some sort of socialist or communist. They replied, “Of course not.” Instead, he was the true opposite of a capitalist: someone who pursued his passions and lived his dreams.

And even among young readers reluctant to go as far as calling Roark anti-capitalist, it was still the majority opinion that Wynand was the much more consistent representative of what it means to thrive under free enterprise. Some readers in their thirties added that they surmise that while Roark represents Ayn Rand’s ideal conception of free enterprise, Wynand more accurately represents how it functions in practice.

This is what many young Americans really mean when they say they “hate capitalism.” What they actually mean is that their great fear is of committing the next several decades of their lives to a career that they know will not provide them fulfillment. They lose sleep over the worry that they will do this out of capitulation. They would resort to it to meet their material needs and to cave in to pressure from their elder relatives, à la Peter Keating’s appeasement of his mother. Their idea of what it means to be a capitalist is ultimately influenced by the imagery of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, even if they have never heard of this title directly.

Coming across so many young Americans who admire The Fountainhead as anti-capitalist is far from unique to my own experiences. I know that because Ayn Rand herself encountered such fans. In 1945, she received a letter from one who at least partially agreed with this interpretation. In a reply dated March 4, she explained to him,

You’re completely wrong on Wynand. Wynand is not the symbol of free enterprise — Roark is. (If you wish to call it a symbol.) Free enterprise was not made by those who catered to the masses, as Wynand did, but by the originators and innovators who went against the masses, against all public opinion, against all “trends” and “currents.” Wynand — if you want to look at him in one of his lesser aspects, in the narrow, “journalistic” sense of contemporary events — represents the men who are destroying free enterprise today... [“To O. W. Kracht,” Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner, (New York: Plume, {1995} 1997 trade paperback), 224. Emphases hers.]

The anti-capitalist interpretation was also held by Nathaniel Branden upon his first complete reading of it.

The Fountainhead, a novel by Ayn Rand. . . .

There are extraordinary experiences in life that remain permanently engraved in memory. . . . Reading this book was such an experience. . . .

[Cousin] Allan [Blumenthal] introduced me to a novel by Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, which deals with the life and struggles of a musical genius. It reinforced a conviction already forming in me, especially after I read The Fountainhead, that a hero is one who perseveres. . . . On an impulse...I decided to write her [Ayn Rand] a letter, care of a publisher, inquiring about her political convictions. What did she believe in? “Certainly not capitalism,” I wrote her confidently. [My Years With Ayn Rand, (New York: Jossey-Bass, 1999 revision), 8, 13, 30.]

As a teenager, Branden put The Fountainhead and Jean-Christophe in the same category for an unsurprising reason. The protagonists were both dedicated dreamers who pursued their creative visions being more inspired by the challenges of the craft than the financial rewards of it. That is why Branden, as with so many young readers today, could not fathom that Roark, not Wynand or Keating, was the free-enterpriser of the novel.




Why the Dichotomy Is False
Of course, the sort of success realized by our imaginary guitarist from is far from exclusive to persons who have gotten rich through their art. Such figures in biotechnology as Genentech cofounder Herbert W. Boyer and human insulin inventor David Goeddel were primarily interested in gratifying their scientific curiosity. Yet they found methods of monetizing their own intellectual excursions, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.

The same applies to many great entrepreneurs who’ve monetized their childhood obsessions. William Scholl was a very strange little boy who, upon meeting new neighbors, reportedly insisted on inspecting their feet. Fortunately, his parents let him indulge in this fetish. He carried around the skeletal remains of a human foot everywhere he went and named it George. Consistent with this quirk, he became a podiatrist. Treating his patients, he noticed that many of the bunions and other problems with their feet resulted from their shoes not being very ergonomically designed.

Scholl decided to rectify this. He earned over a hundred patents on his improvements, developing new orthopedic shoes. This was the beginning of Dr. Scholl’s. He made a fortune by inspecting strangers’ feet — something he had done repeatedly as a child when not having been compensated for it and likely would have continued to want to do had he never been compensated.

Scholl here followed a pattern that is actually common to most famous entrepreneurs. They start off as eccentrics who nurture a particular obsession of theirs. Only years later do they discover a means by which they can profit financially from their own obsession.

Richard Branson, for instance, sounds completely sincere when he says that money was always just the secondary motivation for him as he started his music production and airline. His deepest interest was in the challenge itself.

That success as an entrepreneur is seldom ever in opposition to doing what one enjoys is often lost on young people. They are fixated on the cartoonish stereotype of businessmen all looking alike, thinking alike, behaving alike, and being perpetually bored by their jobs. They can more easily recognize examples in arts they admire. They know that only a tiny minority of artist working in any medium become household names and millionaires.

But they do know that such people exist. Examples such as Howard Roark and our hypothetical guitarist remind them of this. But because they know that such artists are often tempted to sacrifice their long-term creative ambitions — that might yield greater financial windfalls in the future — for the sake of more immediate monetary gains, even these successful people are thought not to be examples of capitalism but some subversion of it.

It is for this reason that you can find indie hipster artists who, in the same breath, tell you they despise capitalism and that they rooted for Howard Hughes when they watched The Aviator. It is also why you can find indie musicians on YouTube and Twitch who rail against capitalism soon before professing their love for The Greatest Showman and proclaiming “A Million Dreams” to be among their favorite songs. And it is why the Nation Institute — the foundation behind The Nation magazine, known for its consistent editorial policy against capitalism — co-published an adulatory biography of Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax. This biography even mentioned very approvingly the fact that Gygax got rich from this creativity and built his own business empire. 

 You can say to these people, “The protagonists of both of these stories were capitalists, were they not?” You will often get the same reply: insofar as these entrepreneurs were doing something that they enjoyed enough to do even if they were not paid, they were not acting in the capacity of capitalists.

Indeed, they are wont to rationalize, as long as our hypothetical great guitarist makes money doing just what he believes in, he has not yet become a capitalist. Rather, he only becomes a true capitalist when, coming to prioritize big bucks instead, he lets the quality of his art decline as he churns out one album after another.

One twentysomething, the up-and-coming YouTube vlogger XanderHal (short for Alexander Haley), articulates that position:

As a leftist — as an anti-capitalist — I do have to acknowledge that there are times where capitalism does benefit the Progressive cause. . . . For example, when corporations market to LGBT people in order to make money. It may be insincere, and that’s obvious. But, regardless, when they do that, they contribute to normalizing LGBT people in society. . . . So while capitalism is shit, there are times where it gets stuff right — where some good comes out of it. Now, funnily enough, conservatives will only ever criticize capitalism...in those small instances where it ends up doing some good for some particular marginalized group like LGBT people.

Why is it “obvious” to XanderHal that corporate executives are “insincere” in professing concern for the well-being of LGBT people? It is that, as they do so, these corporations “make money.” If these executives were sincere about wishing to improve the lives of LGBT customers, they would not be charging them money, would they?

The reality that is glossed over too frequently is that someone can indeed do something she genuinely enjoys while hoping that she is rewarded for it monetarily. There is a very simple reason for this. It is that when someone partakes in her favorite creative activities, it usually requires that she use up a lot of her own material resources.

This is visible with the cottage industry of people video-streaming themselves on Twitch as they paint their pictures. As they will attest, they love their painting, but if they painted full-time and never received any remuneration, they would run out of paints and canvases. Then they would have to stop. Admirers paying money to these artists is the same as restocking these artists’ supplies.

The same principle applies to other creative endeavors. To pay a filmmaker is to cover her costs. That, in turn, helps her make more movies. The same applies to compensating an inventor monetarily. To pay him royalties is to cover his expenses. And to cover his expenses is to restock the supply of the resources he needs to proceed with more R-and-D in the future.

Such psychologists as James Carlsmith and Leon Festinger have noted a phenomenon. If parties A and B perform the same task, with party A being paid and party B going unpaid, party B is likelier to take more pride in the very performance of the task. Psychologists theorize that when members of party B do not receive an extrinsic incentive, they feel more motivated to tell themselves that they must have considered the value in their actions to be intrinsic to the task itself.

In that respect, the introduction of monetary rewards to a long-running project of mine can indeed influence my judgment of the project itself. For years, I have been drawing and not being paid for it. There may come a day when I start to accept payment for my art. When that happens, that may change my motivation. There is a risk that I may feel tempted to take my style in a particular direction more to appease my patrons than to satisfy my own personal tastes.

Should that happen, it does not follow that the money itself had a corrupting influence. Rather, this is a private psychological issue for me to work out on my own. It is up to me to weigh the values of mine that seem to be in competition for the top spot on my list of priorities. Insofar as painting streamers on Twitch can maintain their love for their craft as they obtain payments for more supplies, this is not to be reproached as a form of selling out. It is to be applauded.

The truth is that no specific actions — not even ones we enjoy without having been paid to take them — have value in themselves. Whether or not we are paid — whether or not we find them fun — all of our actions should ultimately be in service to a greater end. That greater end is our overall quality of life and lasting happiness, our eudaemonia. If I peaceably perform an action that bores me for the sake of a large payment, it may still be worth it if it provides a net gain to my happiness overall. And if doing something fun without payment also provides a net gain for my life, it is worthwhile as well.




Why the Conflation Between Free Enterprise and “Grudgingly Doing Something Only Upon Being Paid”?
It is true that if you press these young Americans on specific issues, they will probably start regurgitating clichés about how business owners always exploit their employees and of the need for raising the minimum wage. But I suspect that these clichés are likely rationalizations added on, ex post facto. First, these young Americans come to associate capitalism with the prospect of selling out one’s dreams for the sake of a more “safely” lucrative and conservative career. But that seems too selfish a reason to hold reservations about capitalism. Hence, they pin on these other grievances that sound more altruistic and civic-minded.

As I will mention again later, I doubt that most young persons who declare their revulsion toward capitalism genuinely aspire to toil on communes every hour of the day. But as they associate capitalism with actions being performed for nothing but payment, it is not difficult for them to hold up those commune dwellers as having the moral high ground over CEOs. If people on communes do what they do for reasons other than riches, it is assumed, it must be because their heart is in it. It is for similar reasons that so many young people who started off hating capitalism out of fear of a thankless career eventually give lip service to socialism.

Yet the false dichotomy of “capitalism versus my dreams” is influenced less by Karl Marx than by his contemporaries in the philosophic Romanticist movement. This is a manifestation of the false dichotomy that pits emotion and morality and idealism on one side, and reason and utility and practicality on the other. And for all of the illogic and faults of him and his followers, Marx touted himself as being squarely on the side of cold reason and practicality. By contrast, the general impression by the Romanticists was that human beings were happier in their state of nature, frolicking in the wilderness. This is the sort of happiness a child experiences before having to grow up and go by the humdrum routine of big business.

Then the Romanticists’ equivalent of Original Sin occurred. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau bemoaned, someone thought of considering a patch of land to be private property. The happiness of frolicking was ruined when, through the use of cold reason, human beings adopted stodgy civilization in general and industrialization in particular. Unwittingly applying the old general ideas of philosophic Romanticism to their own lives, young people conclude that they must choose whether they are to surrender to the uptight and proper grind of the corporate machine or if they are to reclaim the wild and unsullied mirth of their childhood aspirations.

Greatly contributing to this attitude is the manner in which parents are woefully inadequate in explaining to their children why “capitalism” is better than “socialism” and “communism.” It starts when a child asks why she should have to go to work one day as an adult and why should she have to pay money for anything instead of just get it free. After all, she got everything free as a baby.

Child: “When you go to the store, why did you have to give them money? Why doesn’t the store just give us what we need?” 

Parent: “Everyone would rather just get everything free. But we can’t all just go around demanding free stuff from everyone else, can we? We wouldn’t get anywhere. We would all be telling everyone else what we want from them. And no one would get what he wants. That’s why the best that we can do is trade. I go to work to get money. Then I use the money to get what I want from the store. Then the people at the store use that money the same way. And one day when you’re old enough, you too will have to go to work to get money.”

Child: “I don’t wanna to go to work. You told me it’s boring. It sure looks boring. I’d rather just play all day.” 

Parent: “Well, that’s not how life is! So too bad! What we have is capitalism. Some people would rather be like you and just demand that they get stuff. That’s called socialism or the welfare state. But it does not work in the end. It doesn’t work because we’re all too selfish. You can see that because we all wish we could just have free stuff.” 

Child: “But I don’t wanna go to work and be bored. I wanna play!” 

Parent: “Too bad! What we have is capitalism. I wish we could have something better, but everything else is worse. We’re stuck with it. That’s reality, and reality is harsh.”

The attitude of the parent in the hypothetical conversation above is hardly going to enthuse our young Americans about capitalism. I wish I could say that our conservative Republicans provide defenses that are more sophisticated. But they don’t. Thomas Sowell’s writings on the topic are more erudite in their phrasings and case studies, but the underlying meaning of what he says is actually the same.

If everyone were sweetness and light, socialism would be the way to go. . . . Maybe some day we will discover creatures in some other galaxy who can operate a whole society that way. But the history of human beings shows that a nation with millions of people cannot operate like one big family. . . .

The rhetoric of socialism may be inspiring, but its actual record is dismal. . . .

While my desires for a better life for ordinary people have not changed from the days of my youthful Marxism, experience has taught the bitter lesson that the way to get there is the opposite of what I once thought.

Now, I do think that the Objectivist case for capitalism is more sophisticated and correct. I don’t have any qualms about the argument itself. And the Objectivist defense of the profit motive, so distinct from Adam Smith’s, is of especial importance.

But as stated at the essay’s beginning, I do think it’s the case that, too often, upon coming across someone on the internet who proclaims, “I hate capitalism,” too many Objectivists are too quick to launch some verbose lecture about the superiority of free persuasion over force. They do this under the assumption that the young person already agrees with them on their definitions. And, insofar as they know that the young person holds a different definition for capitalism, too often Objectivists will bossily tell her their own definition and expect her to accept it right then and there.




Upon Asking What Is Meant By This “Capitalism” That One Hates So Much
Although many — probably most — young Americans will, upon being prompted to do so, begin reciting the clichés about capitalism exploiting workers and destroying the Earth that their teachers and popular culture have taught them, I still think that is usually not their most fundamental objection. I say this because very few of them actually want to sacrifice their happiness and material comforts to toil in subsistence agriculture on some commune.

And although most of them cling too strongly in their civic indoctrination to consider how preferable laissez faire would be to their mixed-economy regulatory entitlement state, most of them do nurse some vague desire for fulfillment in a career that is lucrative and where they have a lot of autonomy. They don’t know it consciously, but if they took this vague desire of theirs to its logical conclusion, it would be what many of us recognize as a form of entrepreneurship.

Many will convey that they hate capitalism both because of the usual accusations about it in general, and also because of their personal dread that participating in a commercial economy will result in their sacrificing their risky ambitions in favor of a “safer” vocation. When you converse with someone long enough and regularly enough, however, it becomes easier to detect when the latter reason for professing her hatred for capitalism is also her predominant reason.

Therefore, if they wish to engage the next time they hear a young person mope “I hate capitalism,” I recommend to Objectivists that they start with something other than talking immediately about the superiority of freedom over coercion. Instead, I implore them first to inquire to this young person exactly what she means by capitalism.

She might initially get huffy and say, “How can you even ask that? Everyone older than fourteen already knows what capitalism is.” You can point out that not all adults place the same amount of emphasis on the features that they believe define capitalism. Some believe that all commercial activity, such as contract killings and slave trading, count as capitalism, whereas by this word other people are referring simply to the removal of government controls from economic activity. Perhaps after this clarification is offered, the young person will start to answer.

I concede that the answers initially given will probably be vague and equivocal. The first answers will probably include a recitation of our culture’s litany of grievances about capitalism being exploitative and evil. I also recommend asking the young person, “Regardless of what word is used for the ideal society you would like — ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’ or whatever — is there a special passion project you would wish to pursue?”

If the answer to that is yes, and the young person explains that she would pursue this project even if she were not paid for it, she can be asked, “But if you could also gain in material comforts by pursuing this, would you? Would that be bad? Would it be good if, in our ideal social system, you could pursue this passion while simultaneously be paid in resources for it?”

Even upon being amenable to our asking them about the pursuit of their ambitions, the young American will still probably be equivocal. The young American may concede that someone getting rich from doing the art that he enjoy is not contrary to capitalism, but still insist someone being paid to do something he hates is still a much purer expression of it. But when that happens, the conversation is going in a better direction than it otherwise would have.

When every member of the conversation is in agreement that it is valid for people to follow their dreams peaceably, we have reached a milestone. Here we can start to show young Americans that the freedom of enterprise is actually the perquisite to their pursuing and realizing their dreams. We can help them confront what we know. Free enterprise is the pursuit of one’s dreams.

Sure, it is common for many aspiring artists and scientists to believe that the prerequisite to realizing their dream is not their own freedom to act but a governmental intrusion upon others. Namely, they feel helpless unless they can secure taxpayer funding for their projects. Yet this is contrary to having a social system that maximizes everyone’s freedom to pursue her own dreams peaceably. For the government to confiscate resources from other people in order to provide those resources for my own project in art or science is to make victims of others. The taxpayers from whom those resources were confiscated now have fewer resources at their own disposal with which they can pursue their own dreams.

This is the moment in the conversation where it becomes productive to point out that the crucial distinction of free enterprise is not whether or not someone enjoys what she is paid to do, but whether people cooperate with one another through peaceful consent or instead call upon government power to impose their own wills upon others. Here, they will probably concede that the taxpayer funding that they want comes at other people’s forcible expense, but defend that by saying that wealth is a zero-sum game no matter the type of political system. They presume that this applies in both capitalism and socialism, in both the night watchman state and the regulatory-entitlement state.

That misapprehension adds another wrinkle to how they interpret what the ramifications would be if they indeed achieved their dreams through entirely consensual means. Their happiness about this would be tainted by some remorse over their belief that their attainment of their dreams deprived of other people of theirs. Here we can then educate these young people about how freedom of enterprise is a positive-sum game.

We can inform them that the incentive is to create more economic value for everyone. Insofar as people are free from force, the entrepreneur incurs the cost of every input of labor or natural resources. For that reason, the entrepreneur downsizes her costs and upsizes her profits insofar as she can employ new and improved methods of producing greater economic value from ever-smaller and ever-fewer inputs of labor and natural resources. That is in large part the explanation for gains in energy efficiency. In the year 1900, it took ten pounds of coal to power a 100-watt light bulb for an hour. By 2002, it took less than a pound of coal to accomplish that same task.

Clearly, even after we have shown America’s youth that freedom of enterprise is the precondition to their realizing their dreams to the utmost, our work will be far from finished. There will still be thousands more misconceptions of which we can disabuse them. But as so much anti-capitalism stems from the false premise that capitalism stands in opposition to their dreams, helping young people see that the freedom of enterprise is what they need to fulfill their dreams is a major victory.

For this reason, the next time any of us observes a young person proclaiming her hatred for capitalism, any effort to enlighten her on the matter should begin with asking her for clarity on what she means by this word.

On Monday, November 9, 2020, I added the point about Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax.