"If you collect the money, you disperse the people;
If you disperse the money, you collect the people."

--Chinese Proverb

An Overview of what freedom is...

In his superb classic How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, Harry Browne defines freedom as living your life as you want to live it. He claims that you can enjoy a high degree of freedom right now. He indicates that:

"Hoping to be free, many people engage in continual social combat — joining movements, urging political action, writing letters to editors and Congressmen, trying to educate people. They hope that someday it will all prove to have been worthwhile.

But as the years go by they see little overall change. Small victories are won; defeats set them back. The world seems to continue on its path to wherever it’s going. Until they die, the hopeful remain just as enslaved as they’ve always been.

The plans, the movements, the crusades — none of these things has worked. And so the unfree man continues to dream, to condemn, and to remain where he is.

There must be a better way…

Fortunately, there is such a way…

There’s a way that depends entirely upon what you choose to do. You can live your life as you want to live it — no matter what others decide to do with their lives."

By trying to change others in order to become free you’re always trying to do something out of your control. On the other hand, you can use methods to free yourself that are completely under your control.

There are two basic reasons why most people remain enslaved:

1.      They’re unaware of the many options and alternatives available to them;

2.      They accept without challenge certain assumptions that restrict their freedom.

Harry calls these assumptions traps. As long as you don’t challenge these assumptions, they can keep you enslaved.

If you want to increase your freedom, Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World is must reading. I don’t know of any other book that even comes close to providing you with such powerful self-liberating information. Here I can only present you with a brief overview.

Traps
Identity Trap #1: The belief that you should be someone other than yourself. You need to be true to yourself. Find out who you are; be yourself; do things your own way.

Identity Trap #2: The assumption that others will do things the way you would. You can’t control others, but you can control how you deal with them. Harry Browne says, "you have tremendous control over your life, but you give up that control when you try to control others."

Intellectual Trap: The belief that your emotions should conform to an intellectually preconceived standard. Emotions are best regarded as signals that tell you how you’re doing.

Emotional Trap: The belief that you can make important decisions when you’re feeling strong emotions.

Morality Trap: The belief that you must obey a moral code created by someone else. In order to become more competent (and free) you need to strengthen your understanding of the cognitive links between your actions and the consequences you produce. Morality is basically a set of very general rules concerning what to do and what not to do, generally involving large consequences. Blindly using someone else’s moral code, tends to reduce your competence, because it prevents the forming of proper cognitive links between actions and consequences. To be free you need to create your own moral code.

Unselfishness Trap: The belief that you must put the happiness of others ahead of your own. A world of maximum value is a function of the total of maximum individual value. You know yourself and what you value far better than you know others and what they value. Therefore, you are much more competent to increase your own value than that of others. So, maximum value is achieved by each individual maximizing his or her own personal value.

Because we live in an "expanding-pie" world, it’s possible to maximize personal value while at the same time adding to the value of others. We maximize personal value by creating values for others to freely choose. The assumptions that "selfishness" and "greed" are evil need to be questioned. I recommend two books: The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand and The Art of Selfishness by David Seabury.

Group Trap: The belief that you can accomplish more by sharing responsibilities, efforts, and rewards with others than you can by acting on your own; the belief that anyone can speak on behalf of another.

To overcome the Group Trap organizations can be organized in such a manner that the links between actions, results, and rewards are as direct as possible. For example, instead of hiring additional personnel, work can be subcontracted.

Government Trap #1: The belief that governments perform socially useful functions that deserve your support.

Government Trap #2: The belief that you have a duty to obey laws.

Government Trap #3: The belief that the government can be counted upon to carry out a social reform you favor.

Government Trap #4: The fear that the government is so powerful that it can prevent you from being free.

The above are Harry Browne’s Government Traps. I add the following:

Government Trap #5: The belief that government people can do anything better than other people. Government people don’t have any special magical powers.

Government Trap #6: The belief that governments will produce beneficial results. Because government people essentially collect their income at the point of a gun, they don’t have to produce anything worthwhile to survive. In fact, their incentive is to make all problems worse so they can demand more taxes to "solve" the problems.

Government Trap #7: The belief that government represents the people. Individuals always represent themselves (Unselfishness and Group Traps). To think otherwise is a delusion.

Government Trap #8: The belief that government can conjure up resources from thin air. Everything government has, was essentially stolen at the point of a gun.

Government Trap #9: The belief that government provides protection. Just look at the crime statistics.

Government Trap #10: The belief that certain activities or functions must be done by government. Government consists of people. These people don’t have any special magical powers.

Government Trap #11: The belief that government must or can control people. Because only individuals control the energy that animates their bodies, it’s really impossible for anyone to control anyone else. However, people can relinquish self-control by choice or unwittingly.

Government Trap #12: The belief that you have to do something about solving the problem of government. You are best off solving your own problems. In addition, you may also want to persuade a few others to solve their own problems. If enough people solved their own problems, the problem of government will disappear.

Despair Trap: The belief that other people can prevent you from being free. You are always free to move on and start a new life.

Rights Trap: The belief that your rights will make you free. The U.S.A. is supposed to be a country where certain individual rights are guaranteed by the Constitution and government officials are supposed to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. Yet there are thefts, robberies, rapes, murders, etc. every day. Furthermore, government officials violate individual rights with abandon in the form of taxation, regulation, more taxation, and more regulation.

In choosing your actions, you are far better off carefully considering the consequences to yourself, rather than acting in accordance with your "rights." As Max Stirner said, "Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for "one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right."

Utopia Trap: The belief that you must create better conditions in society before you can be free. You’re far better off and much more powerful if you concentrate on changing and improving yourself — and creating your own personal utopia of freedom and wealth — rather than trying to transform society.

 As Harry writes:

"The world-changers are powerless. They dream of remaking the world; but they can’t, and so they’ve placed their emphasis where they have no power at all.

Free men recognize that they can’t change the world. and so they concentrate on the power they do have — which is enormous. They realize that they can choose not to be involved in situations that don’t suit them.

So they look for situations that do suit them. And they discover far more opportunities for such situations than most people imagine exist.

A free person doesn’t try to remake the world or his friends or his family. He merely appraises every situation by the simple standard: Is this what I want for myself? If it isn’t, he looks elsewhere. If it is, he relaxes and enjoys it — without the problems most other people take for granted.

A free man uses his tremendous power of choice to make a comfortable life for himself.

The power of choice. You have it. But you forfeit it when you imagine that you can choose for others. You can’t.

But you can choose for yourself — from hundreds of exciting, happiness-producing alternatives.

Why not use that power?"

Burning Issue Trap: The belief that there are compelling social issues that require your participation.

Previous-Investment Trap: The belief that time, effort, and money spent in the past must be considered when making a decision in the present. You know the old saying, "Don’t throw good money after bad." Harry Browne says:

"In every case, the question is: With what you have now, what is the best way to use that to get the most in the future?" What you’ve paid to get where you are now is irrelevant; those resources are gone and can’t be retrieved, no matter what you do."

Box Trap: A box is any uncomfortable situation that restrains your freedom. The box trap is the belief that the cost of getting out of a box is too high to consider. The problems associated with maintaining a false image are part of the box trap.

To get out of a box, consider three factors, that is, the disadvantages of the box:

1.      The price you pay for remaining stuck in the box;

2.      The cost of escaping from the box; and

3.      What you could do after escaping the box, that is, the benefits you gain by escaping the box.

Obviously, a marriage could be a box. There’s a very important principle: the sooner you pay the price to get out of a box, the less it costs you. In other words, the longer you stay in a box the more it costs you.

Certainty Trap: The urge to act as if your information were totally certain. Firstly, our perception is limited and subject to error. Secondly, information evolves continuously. Tomorrow we’ll know more than today. Some of what we know today will be proved wrong by what we discover tomorrow.

Because we always act on incomplete or on at best partially correct information, we take risks in everything we do. Harry Browne says:

"The individual who ignores these risks can lose his freedom in three important ways:

1. He’s likely to take risks that would be unacceptable if he were to recognize them; and by acting rashly he can get himself into boxes that restrict his freedom.

2. When things don’t go his way, his previous certainty can turn quickly to despair and depression: after all, he was "so sure." Now that he’s discouraged, his emotions can tempt him to run from his bad consequences into a worse situation. In other words, he’s fallen into the Emotional Trap.

3. By accepting opinions as absolute fact, he can allow his freedom to be restricted by information that may not be true."

Harry Browne identifies five "information principles":

1.      Popularity isn’t proof. The fact "everybody knows" could mean little or nothing.

2.      Be skeptical about new information.

3.      Don’t expect to have an explanation for everything. To some extent, you always have to act in the dark.

4.      You can’t see everything; recognize that you see only part of the picture.

5.      Recognize the risks and liabilities. Action always involves risk.

Harry writes:

"You are the sovereign authority for your life. You are the ruler who makes the decisions regarding how you will act, what information you will accept. You do it anyway — but if you recognize that you do it, you can gain much greater control over your future…

But whether or not you accept it, you are sovereign. You rule one life — and you rule it totally.

You decide which information you will accept or reject. You decide what your next action will be. You decide what moral code you’ll live by…

To be free, you have only to make the decision to be free. Freedom is waiting for you — anytime you’re ready for it."

NOTE:  Mr. Browne, noted author and Libertarian Presidential Candidate is no longer with us.  He passed away in 2006.  His group maintains a site and sells his materials. You can find it at: http://www.harrybrowne.org/

Useful Related Links

http://home.earthlink.net/~cadman777/money_stuff.htm

Interesting reports on the nature of money, government, etc.

National Inflation Association-Data on Investments, Etc.

http://www.inflation.us/

http://www.personalliberty.com/

Bob Livingston’s Personal Liberty Digest-akin to Harry Browne’s ideology; best known for his famous book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (recommended reading)

http://www.trendsresearch.com/forecast.html

Gerald Celente-the trend forecaster guru

Another Powerful Influence

Ayn Rand and her Atlas Shrugged Novel

Ayn Rand -  (1905 – 1982), was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her best-selling novels and for developing a philosophical system called Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand emigrated to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935-1936. She first achieved fame with The Fountainhead (1943), and her best-known work – the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged – was published in 1957.

Rand's political views, reflected in both her fiction and her theoretical work, emphasize individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and the constitutional protection of the right to life, liberty, and property. She was a fierce opponent of all forms of collectivism and statism, including fascism, communism, and the welfare state. She was also an atheist, and promoted ethical egoism (which she termed "rational self-interest") as energetically as she condemned altruism (which she called "moral cannibalism").

Atlas Shrugged

Rand's magnum opus, the 1,100-page Atlas Shrugged, was published in 1957.  Because of the success of The Fountainhead, the initial print run was 100,000 copies, and the book went on to become an international bestseller, with many interviewees citing it as the book that most influenced them. It sells almost 200,000 copies annually. Rand's last major work of fiction, it marked the turning point in her life, ending her career as novelist and beginning her tenure as popular philosopher.

The theme of Atlas Shrugged is "the role of the mind in man's existence––and, as a corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest." It advocates the core tenets of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and expresses her concept of human achievement. The plot involves a dystopian United States in which the most creative industrialists, scientists and artists go on strike and retreat to a mountainous hideaway where they build an independent free economy. The hero, John Galt, describes the strike as "stopping the motor of the world" by withdrawing the "minds" that Rand saw as contributing the most to the nation's wealth and achievement. With their strike, they aim to demonstrate that, without efforts of the rational and productive, the economy, and the broader culture, would collapse and society would fall apart. The novel includes elements of mystery and science fiction, and contains Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction, a lengthy monologue delivered by the strike's leader, John Galt.

In 1951 Rand moved from Los Angeles to 36 East 36th Street (across from the J.P. Morgan Library) in New York City, the city she most loved and admired. From 1965 to her death in 1982, she resided at 120 East 34th Street. In New York, she formed a group (jokingly designated "The Collective") which included future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, a young psychology student named Nathan Blumenthal (later Nathaniel Branden) and his wife Barbara, and Leonard Peikoff, all of whom had been profoundly influenced by The Fountainhead.

The group originally started out as an informal gathering of friends who met with Rand on weekends at her apartment to discuss philosophy; later the Collective would proceed to play a larger, more formal role, reading Atlas Shrugged as the manuscript pages were written and, following its publication, promoting Rand's philosophy through the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), established by him for that purpose. Collective members gave lectures at the NBI and in cities across the United States and wrote articles for her publications, The Objectivist Newsletter and The Objectivist. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through her non-fiction works, and by giving talks at several prominent universities, including Yale, Columbia, and the University of Michigan. "The Objectivist Newsletter, later expanded and renamed simply The Objectivist, contained essays by Rand, Branden, and other associates … that analyzed current political events and applied the principles of Objectivism to everyday life." Rand later published some of these in book form.

Rand saw her views as constituting an integrated philosophical system, which she called "Objectivism". The essence of Objectivism, according to Rand, is "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."^[68]

Rejecting faith as antithetical to reason, Rand opposed any form of mysticism or supernaturalism, including organized religion, and she embraced philosophical realism. Rand also argued for rational egoism, or rational self-interest, as the only proper guiding moral principle. The individual "must exist for his own sake", she wrote in 1962, "neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself".

Rand was an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, holding that the sole function of government ought to be the protection of individual rights, including property rights. Rand saw fraud and the unprovoked initiation of force as immoral, and held that government action should consist only of protecting citizens from criminal aggression (via the police), foreign aggression (via the military), and in maintaining a system of courts to decide guilt in criminal cases and to resolve civil disputes. Her politics have been described as minarchist and libertarian, though she did not use the first term and disavowed any connection to the second. She felt Libertarianism inadequately promotes "liberty" as an abstraction without an explanation regarding its basis and validity which she believed to be crucial.

Rand held that the only moral social system is laissez-faire capitalism. Her political views were strongly individualist and hence anti-statist and anti-Communist. She exalted what she saw as the heroic American values of rational egoism and individualism. As a champion of rationality, Rand also had a strong opposition to mysticism and religion, which she believed helped foster a crippling culture acting against individual human happiness and success. Rand detested many prominent liberal and conservative politicians of her time, including prominent anti-Communists, such as Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Hubert Humphrey, and Joseph McCarthy's methods.

Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, considers Rand one of the three founders (along with Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson) of modern American libertarianism, although she rejected libertarianism and the libertarian movement. She believed Libertarianism divorced liberty from its crucial philosophical justification rendering it a meaningless abstract.

Rand's defense of individual liberty brings to bear elements of her entire philosophy. Since reason is the only means of human knowledge, it is therefore humanity's most fundamental means of survival. Also, thus, the effort of thinking and the scrupulous use of reason are the most basic virtue of an ethics governed by the requirements of human life. The threat of coercion, however, neutralizes the practical effect of an individual's reason, and whether the force originates from the state or from a criminal, the coerced person must act as required, or, at least, direct his thought to escape. According to Rand, "man's mind will not function at the point of a gun.”

To put this conversely: freedom "works" because it liberates human reason. Just as freedom of expression is a prerequisite for a vibrant culture, and the development of science and art, so a free market generates new and ever better products and services, as the range of consumer goods and technological innovations in capitalist societies demonstrates, according to Rand. Thus, she argued for the "separation of state and economics in the same way and for the same reasons" as she argued for "the separation of state and church."

Since reason is "man's basic tool of survival," Rand held that an individual has a natural moral right to act as the judgment of his or her own mind directs and to keep the product of this effort. In Rand's view, this requires that the unprovoked initiation of physical force and the acquisition of property by fraud be banned. She agreed with America's Founding Fathers that the sole legitimate function of government is the protection of individual rights, including property rights. The purpose of objective criminal and civil law is to protect the individual from the coercion of others, while the purpose of a constitution and Bill of Rights is to protect the individual from the coercion of the state (historically the greatest violator of individual rights in Rand's estimation). Government may use force, that is its essence, but to do so legitimately it must never act as the aggressor––it may use force only in response to an unprovoked initiation of force, e.g. theft, murder, foreign aggression. Rand did not believe that a free society, one in which all interaction was thus rendered voluntary, would make anyone rational––rationality cannot be compelled and is an exclusive capacity of the individual––but freedom does allow those who are rational and productive to achieve at their highest capacity.

^{For more information, use following link.  We strongly recommend reading Rand’s books}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

Feel Free to send us links to additional, related material or your thoughts.

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