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Objectivist Standards for Rating Presidential Candidates

By Vinay Kolhatkar

September 14, 2023

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Another U.S. presidential election season is upon us. Eight candidates qualified for the first Republican debate, while four others who have thrown their hat in the ring didn’t qualify. Former president Donald Trump remained the elephant in the room, which was talked about in his absence. Meanwhile, currently the Democrats have only three in the race, including President Biden.

Should we care?

One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.

Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.

—Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, p.71

To answer our question, yes, we should care because these are dire times. Political power matters. None of the candidates are all good or all evil, but they are far from all the same. They invite our judgment as they seek power over us.

Yes, we should care because these are dire times. Political power matters.

As Rand implores us to, it’s time to pronounce moral judgment. Publicly.

But before we judge anything—a work of art, a car, a human being qua politician, a restaurant, an educator—we must have an inviolate standard by which to judge the thing being judged.

Before we judge anything, we must have an inviolate standard by which to judge the thing being judged.

Once a standard is laid down, it must be declared if the assessments are for public consumption, and we cannot let factors irrelevant to that standard affect us. If we wish to be biased toward our friends, we should say so—then we are not misleading anyone. If we are judging a friendship, the friendship itself is under the spotlight and we are unlikely to make public pronouncements. But if we are lecturers judging assignments, we should not let a friendship with a student affect our judgment of an assignment.
 

The Nature of Evil, Today

The road to hell is littered with good intentions.

—Henry Bohn, 1855, A Handbook of Proverbs

Politicians are capable of great amounts of evil, far exceeding their capacity for good, even when the intent (in their minds) is noble. How so?

Once human beings are capable of introspection, they are potentially capable of autonomy. Autonomous individuals are capable of self-directed thought as well as self-directed action, of crafting a long, well-lived, ethical life. They must be treated as “ends in themselves.” Only an ethic that treats all human beings as ends in themselves is universalizable, only such an ethic is morally upright. These judgments are dealt with in more detail in the coauthored book, Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization (Ethics International Press, Fall 2023).

This ethical standard lends itself only to one particular form of government.

In order to arrive at that form, we observe that there are three great dangers to the crafting of a long, well-lived, ethical life.

  1. Nature
  2. Other human beings
  3. Our protectors themselves

In a raw state of nature, it’s the length of the life that is under attack by disease, natural disasters, famine, carnivorous beasts, and poisonous plants. But there has been a phenomenal improvement over that raw state by the taming of nature with reason. See, for instance, the early part of Walter Donway’s review of Steven Pinker’s book on the Enlightenment. Here’s a sample: “In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.”

In a raw state of nature, other human beings can use force, fraud, or deceit, to steal the fruits of our labor, to thwart our self-directedness, even to kill us. Hence, we institute governments to protect us from this second threat. And this threat, too—given our legitimate apprehension of thuggery—has been receding in most parts of the globe.

Today, the biggest threat to liberty in the West is gangsterism by government.

But the body of people that comprise the nexus of government and its cronies have long since realized that there are a variety of means of aggrandizing their power, fame, fortune, and status by trickery and stealth. Even good intentions on their part, as Henry Bohn implies above, inevitably result in outcomes terrible to the wellbeing of their citizens. Today, the biggest threat to liberty in the West is gangsterism by government—institutionalized gangsterism of the sort which is altogether common in China and Russia.

Even in the West, often one major political party is already part of the gang. It’s terribly difficult to fight this process democratically. Large swathes of the population remain unaware of their rights, of the danger of totalitarianism, of the nature of the transgressions by government. A few people are aware of certain transgressions. Even fewer have a complete perspective on all the breaches.

But it’s not yet impossible to awaken the general citizenry. If this judgment is correct, we have to steer in the direction of politics to cure political ills. A forthright candidate may not win, but awakening the masses using the public platform of a candidacy can be the whole point of the candidacy—an investment for the future, like in the novel The Frankenstein Candidate.

Hence, we need candidates who are not only “woke” to the real threats to Western civilization, but courageous enough to tell it exactly like it is—here the difficulty is monumental, it being easy to slip into “the public is not yet ready for this” appeasement of the establishment narrative to gather more votes. But appeasement will never destroy the hydra.

 

Naivete on the Side of Liberty

If we are to judge a candidate who can tell it like it is, we must specify the “most egregious” threats. Are they being voiced? Yet, some readers may not even agree that these threats exist, ascribing them to the label “conspiracy theories.”

Some naïve libertarians think that the anthropogenic (caused by humankind) global warming (AGW) is real.

For example, some naïve libertarians think that the anthropogenic (caused by humankind) global warming (AGW) is real (it is, at best, utterly trivial compared to other causes). They argue for “nuclear power,” forgetting that all markets, including the energy market, must be left alone. The erroneous belief in significant AGW causes the mistaken people to think of pricing externalities (“carbon pricing”).

Naïve objectivists, on the other hand, conflate reason and science, and thus assume that anything with a scientific aura (especially in relation to medicine) must be exactly right and virtuous, even though they know that the climate-alarm scam corrupted even the natural sciences, and they of all people were well advised by Rand way back in the sixties as to how the humanities were corrupted by government domination of research funding. Which is exactly the same modus operandi used to corrupt other domains—scientists and professors are human, and the allure of fame, fortune, and prestige, combined with the threat of cancellation for speaking truth to power, suffices to convert a majority to the narrative (sometimes arbitrarily quoted as “97% of scientists agree”)—such is the power of the status carrots and the cancellation sticks working in tandem.

Some objectivists failed to perceive the mammoth cover-up and individual-rights annihilation of the pandemic era.

Some objectivists failed to perceive the mammoth cover-up and individual-rights annihilation of the pandemic era. They failed to notice the mainstream media clues—the instantaneous dismissal of any potential cheap cure (HCQ, Methylene Blue, Ivermectin, etc.) even when touted by well-meaning professionals; the insistence on the “pangolin origin” hypothesis of the virus as fact; the refusal to question the “gain of function” research, the brutal cancellation of contrary voices; the usage of the pandemic for neo-Marxist causes. Some even failed to object to making mRNA shots a compulsion. Many failed to criticize the outrageously anti-free-market blanket indemnity granted to Big Pharma (for the first time in human history) by government (the Trump Administration).

Yet, contrary even to the views of the anti-vaccine lobby, the serious damage done to some mRNA vaccine recipients was the result probably, not of the vaccines themselves, but of the method of injection. mRNA instructions to make spike protein, when injected without aspiration, encapsulated the risk of hitting a blood vessel, and only those unfortunate souls whose blood vessels got pierced may have suffered debilitating lifelong aftereffects. Yet this risk was completely unwarranted. It was solely an outcome of an ideology that ignores the individual in favor of “public health.” See: “Could This Be the Most Startling News of the Pandemic Yet?”

Fortunately, most people on the real liberty side of the equation have grasped that the market for the price of credit (the term structure of interest rates) should be determined freely in the market, not manipulated by a central bank, and that the market should also be free to determine what to use as money (today, credit can be extinguished with fiat money).

 

The Most Egregious Offences of Recent Times

Let’s now list the extreme (human-caused) perils that threaten our civilization, our individualism, and the material abundance of our times. For readers unwilling to accept that these threats are existent, we’ve added a few relevant articles under each threat enumerated, as a good starting point.

  1. The greatest scientific fraud in human history—Keynesian economics!

See:   The Politically Correct but False Economics; and

Why Central Banking Must End; and

Why “Monetary Policy” Will Always Distort the Free Market

  1. The second-greatest scientific fraud in human history—climate alarmism.

See:   It’s Time to Confront the Climate Racket Head-On; and

Who will Save the Poorest from the Planet Savers?; and

Why I Deny Big Climate Alarmism

  1. The erosion of free speech and the capture of mainstream media and big corporations under a deceitful banner (“stakeholder capitalism.”)

See:   Why the War on Fake News is a War on Free Speech; and

“Stakeholder Capitalism” Is a Trojan Horse for Fascism; and

The Best Vaccination against the Pandemic of Deceit

  1. The capture of science and knowledge by monopolizing research grants, and the appropriation of “expertise” to obedient cronies.

See:   How an Orthodoxy Prejudices Scientists; and

Are “Grievance Studies” a Scientific Hoax?; and

The Moral Case against Vaccine Passports

  1. The misuse of the legal process to target opponents and elections, and to subvert

See:   An American Stasi? The Democrats May Launch One; and

A Legal Frankenstein Has Been Unleashed to Get Trump; and

Are We All “Domestic Terrorists” Now?

Notice that “wokeism” and “transgenderism” are not among the top five concerns. Not that encouraging pre-puberty children to mutilate their bodies in pursuit of an unattainable change in gender is a good thing; nature permanently sets the chromosomal composition (XX or XY) for life.

Russia and the Ukraine war did not make the list either. Nor did China and trade. Most definitely not immigration and the building of walls. Even the Roe v Wade reversal did not make the list, because besides individual states continuing to grant the right to abortion, there is a better way to get it federally. See: “The Ninth Amendment, Self-Ownership, and Abortion Rights.”

Restated, the five primary perils to our liberty are:

  1. The destruction of the economy via endless deficits and spiraling, out-of-control borrowing facilitated by fiat money, and the price of credit (interest rates) forced away from their natural, market prices.
  2. The destruction of energy by a climate racket hell-bent on a needless and catastrophic war on fossil fuels.
  3. The subversion of free speech by government regulation, the cancel culture, and illegal intrusion into private markets, and the outright capture of large corporations and mainstream media into falsehoods designed with ulterior motives.
  4. The capture of science, knowledge, and expertise by controlling the careers of those who dedicate their lives to research.
  5. The creation of laws in such multitudes and complexity that every citizen can be made a criminal, and the usurping of the legal process to indict any opponent of the establishment. Furthermore, rioters with a neo-Marxist slogan backing them are allowed to destroy property and commit arson, but law-abiding people merely expressing contrary opinions can be incarcerated as “domestic terrorists.”

 

The Standards for Judging Presidential Candidates

In summary, the most violent of the rights-abrogating actions of government are the steady subversion of money, energy, free speech, science, and law & order.

Even this behemoth is only the tip of the iceberg.

Presidential candidates must talk the talk first, and, if elected, walk the walk. They must actually comprehend the totality of the hazards, of their philosophical roots, and be courageous enough to voice the jeopardy instead of indulging in meaningless platitudes, which are all too common in political “debates.” For the candidates who have a track record, we can check if they have walked the talk. But they are unlikely to have even talked the talk in the first place. When was the last time you heard a prominent head of state call the climate racket a “dogma”? Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013, said so in 2010. Donald Trump did not have the guts to say it.

For others with no baggage of experience, it’s only the talk for now.

Contrary to popular opinion, talking the real talk is not easy, because it requires a sophisticated understanding of the status quo.

Contrary to popular opinion, talking the real talk is not easy, because it requires a sophisticated understanding of the status quo, of where we are and why we are there. Most candidates, especially the politically experienced, have a fractured comprehension (or none), or they are unprepared to be blunt. Either way, it disqualifies them.

One need not have served in the armed forces or in Congress or the bureaucracy or been a governor of a state. One need not be “a family man,” or “a mother who raised four children on a single income.” None of these are crucial, albeit they’re often touted as “qualifications.”

Ask yourself how John Galt would conduct his candidacy if he stood for president.

The thing that matters the most is an intellectual understanding of the game played by the neo-Marxist elite currently dominating the West, a knowledge of what is required for liberty, and a commitment to be utterly intransigent. Ask yourself how John Galt would conduct his candidacy if he stood for president.

So how will the current crop of Republican presidential candidates fare against these standards? Not very well. Not one fully comprehends the true nature of the hazards.

But all that judging is for Part II of this essay. Part I has declared the standards. Part II will abide by them.

 

 

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