Capitalism, A victim to the pragmatic age. By Jason Knavel

For centuries, the battle for Capitalism has been in a flux of social, political, and practical contention. Manny raise questions like, Is Capitalism still practical? Does it work? Does it serve the public’s best interest? Throughout history the vast majority of individuals have pursued the answers to these questions by focusing solely on the correlation between Capitalism and its effect towards the “public good.” From Glen Beck’s programs and the propositions from conservatives; to economists ranging from Adam Smith to Thomas Sowell; they all engage in a struggle aiming to prove that the overall practicality of Capitalism gives promise to greater prosperity and a better society.
Today, it is generally concluded that Capitalism, has positive and prosperous results towards the good of the public, but sadly this seems to be Capitalism’s only defense.

With practicality as the only standard of value, Capitalists today are either inadvertently or purposely proclaiming that free markets are virtuous only if they assume the duty of upholding the “public good.” One example is the idea that private property is simply a trusteeship for the benefit of society, or that property rights ought to be protected, unless of course there is a national emergency of essential need. These ideas however, represent a massive betrayal to Capitalism’s own principles.

Because the right to life is the source of all other rights, for without life no other rights would exist. And because a man cannot survive by wishes or by physical movements alone; one must rely on his mind and his work in order to survive i.e. man must support his own life through the product of his own effort. Ergo, if man cannot dispose of the product of his effort as he pleases, he cannot dispose of his life. Therefore, without property rights, no other rights can be practiced. (Rand 18) By granting validity to the claim that free markets i.e. private property, exist for the publics good, one therefore grants the public permission to concede “need” as a gateway to property; thereby sanctioning a mystic morality in which men deal with one another not as traders, but as parasites. A morality where a man is not an end in himself, but is an asset to the needy, a catalyst to the public good, a means to any looters end, a sacrificial animal. Although most Capitalists would never openly support such an altruist morality, they continue to indulge in doublethink by supporting free markets, because they seem to give way to greater prosperity; while evading the stipulations that Capitalism requires to survive.

Capitalists today are either unable or unwilling to fight for the proper justification of the most profound economic system in history, and as a consequence Capitalism is quickly disappearing from our world. This historical phenomenon of pragmatic epistemology and of intellectual abnegation can be accredited to Capitalism’s very supporters. Historically, almost every proponent of Capitalism has evaded the fact that its expediency is only the result of its practice. There is a reason for their evasion; it’s because most individuals fail to integrate a proper philosophical foundation into their support of Capitalism. However, there was one philosopher who did not indulge in such an evasion, she rose wielding a radical and appropriate defense for Capitalism, a double-edged sword per se, of philosophical integrity and moral validity. The philosopher was Ayn Rand, the sword was Atlas Shrugged.

In 1957 Ayn Rand’s masterwork Atlas Shrugged, presented a philosophy for living on earth. It approached the justification of laissez-faire-Capitalism in a way that had never been done before. The first fundamental difference was that she supported Capitalism with a philosophical foundation. She then revealed that the justification of Capitalism was not in the popular claim that it is the best way to achieve the “public good” but because it’s a moral ideal. She showed that Capitalism is the only politico-economic system that emulates the proper role of government, that it’s the only system parallel to a human’s rational nature, and that the ruling principle of Capitalism makes it the only moral system ever to exist.

Because politics is based off of three other branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics; any attempt to skip these components in the process of supporting Capitalism only dams its progress. In Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand presented the moral-philosophical foundation that Capitalism could not survive without. Ayn depicted a reality of objectivity; with reason as an absolute; and where ones own happiness is the only moral purpose of ones life. It is these three components: objective reality, reason, and self-interest, that Capitalists today fail to recognize. However, if acknowledged, this philosophy then reveals the proper justification of Capitalism, its morality:

Rand, through the character “John Galt” explains to readers that of all the things that are open to disagreement, there’s one thing that isn’t: the initiation of physical force on individuals. She also explained that the only way mans rights can be violated, is through the initiation of force. Thus, because no individual has the right to initiate force against another, the same is true concerning a collective, in any private or public context. Seeing as it’s immoral to initiate force against an individual for any reason, it’s also immoral to initiate force for reasons of the public good. Any attempt to benefit the “public good” is an immoral effort to provide an advantage to one collection of individuals at the cost of another. In a free society i.e. one that practices Capitalism, no individual’s profit comes at the expense of another. In this type of society, the proper role of government is to protect individual rights. In order to do this the government does not allow citizens to use physical force against each other, and the Law prohibits the government from using force against citizens, except in retaliation against those who unjustly initiate its use. This would be ensured by means of the police, the military, and in the event of any private disputes, the courts. Capitalism therefore ensures the essential components of freedom and morality: the protection of individual rights. This ensures a code that guarantees every man the right to be fully free to act on his own judgment and for his own sake. In this type of free Capitalist system every man is able to interact with his fellow beings by means of reason, through voluntary consent and contract; each according to his own rational judgment, with his own happiness and pleasure as his motivation. (Biddle, 2009)

The reason the proper role of government is as such, is due to Capitalisms core and underling principle: Justice. The man, who works to sustain his own life by means of the product of his own effort, is and should be entitled to any profit he makes in his process of production. Under Capitalism, and only under Capitalism, is he is entitled to his profit. It is ones moral right to produce a value and to trade that value for value, and enjoy the fruits of ones labor, not because one is entitled to that enjoyment, but because one has earned it, and therefore, entitled to enjoy its benefits. Capitalist societies allow man the freedom to dispose of his property in any manner he chooses, because the very essence of ones work is the selfish and moral pursuit of ones own pleasure and profit. Some treat these virtues—pleasure and profit— as shameful fixations. These men evade the fact that a skyscraper does not erect itself by magic; that an engine does not run on wishes; that food will never make its way from the fields to ones plate by itself. They evade the fact that man’s mind is the root of all production. They disregard the fact that the profit one earns through ones own blood sweat and labor is Justice.

Perhaps the most important validation of Capitalism is the fact that it is the only system in existence that is primed to the life of a rational being. The most basic motive of Atlas Shrugged was to introduce the nature of mans mind, of its proper place in the realm of existence, and its proper role in reality. Rand explained that man is a rational being, and that his rational faculty is his only means of survival, and that production is a moral aspiration. She taught that reason is the only source of granting knowledge to any thinker. The only means by which one can perceive reality; reason is the only process in which one is able to make judgments concerning ethics, art, politics, and therefore ones only channel to action i.e. his only channel to live. Reason is a man’s most basic need for survival. However, the ability to exercise ones rational facility is not an automatic process, and because thinking, and action are properties of the individual, the men who think must be free from the interference from those who evade that effort. Capitalism grants this freedom. (Rand, 17)

In Atlas Shrugged, Capitalism is depicted as an ideal so superlative, that only the books heroes were noble enough to grasp its true meaning. In Galt’s Gulch, their Capitalist society granted the heroes protection from the whips, the guns and the orders of the irrational brutes, from the violation of their most precious rights, from the theft and fraud of the moochers and looters, and most importantly, their right to ones own reason, or in other words their right to live. Capitalism’s infallible morality—of freedom, and justice— are the crux of it’s justification; prosperity, wealth, and the “public good”. . .these are only it’s consequences.

Work Cited

Rand, Ayn. (1957). Atlas shrugged. United States: Random House.

Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. CENTENNIAL EDITION. NY,NY,USA: SIGNET, 1967. 18, 17. Print.

C. Rick Koerber , . "Re-Launching Free Capitalist Radio." The Free Capitalist Radio. Free Capitalist Daily, January 21, 2010 . Web. 28 Aug 2010. .

Biddle, C. (2009). Capitalism and the moral high ground. The Objective Standard, 3(4), Retrieved from http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2008-winter/capitalism-moral-high-ground.asp#_ednref17

Healthcare Part I: How did we get here?

As a brief introduction I will let my readers know that this is the first of five posts that will be aimed at analyzing the current issue of Healthcare. These posts are primarily for my own pleasure, for the purpose of elucidation and crystallizing my own opinions. Informing anyone who reads this is only a secondary consequence.

Anytime a person gets sick or infected it is important to diagnose—before a remedial process can begin— what the sickness is, and how it came into existence. It is no surprise that the same is true when analyzing the problem of our current healthcare system. Therefore, the first and initial procedure in this investigation is to discover how our nation got into a Healthcare catastrophe in the first place:

However, today this step is being seriously evaded.

It is ironic that today, millions of citizens are rioting at town-hall meetings and at tea-party’s all clamoring that they don’t want Washington bureaucrats intervening in their health care—without realizing just how much the bureaucrats already interfere.

Today, everyone seems to have a different take on how to solve America’s healthcare problem. But notice that every solution offered involves some elaborate new system of government controls. Different proposals include a “public option,” mandatory insurance for individuals, government-supported health-care exchanges, government-sponsored “efficacy research,” government-supported co-ops, and as many other ways of dictating consumer and producer behavior as can fit in a 1,000-page bill.

However more regulation will not fix our Healthcare problems.

Currently, everyone has failed to see that the reason our healthcare system does not work is because The U.S. government has had its hands in every aspect of the system for decades—regulating and dictating everything from the insurance we receive to the drugs available to us.

With the vast amount of already existing regulation showing its true colors-of failure--More government controls, we are told, are necessary to solve problems such as skyrocketing health-insurance prices, lack of competition among insurance companies, the inability of workers to keep their insurance policy when switching jobs, etc.

Really?

If more controls are necessary to stimulate good business, Then why do giants of the computer industry like Google, Microsoft and Apple compete vigorously without a “public option”? Why do we have such plentiful, affordable food without a government “food insurance mandate”? Why does laser eye-surgery, which is not covered by Medicare or government insurance laws, get better and cheaper all the time, while the price of health services the government is most involved in, skyrockets?

The answer is that these other markets are (comparatively) left free--while health care has been manipulated by government “solutions” for decades. Thus, our healthcare discussion should focus, not on how government controls can solve our problems, but on how government controls have caused our problems:

First consider the general phenomenon of skyrocketing prices for health insurance. The ways in which the government drives up prices are essentially endless, but here are a few. [By Alex Epstein, ARI]

• State insurance-mandates force companies and individuals to buy policies covering all sorts of expensive treatments they wouldn’t otherwise buy coverage for: chiropractic care, psychiatric care, prenatal care. Every such “benefit” means higher costs. Those who would prefer just to purchase insurance against medical catastrophe and pay for everything else out of pocket are prohibited from doing so.

• More broadly, since the 1940s, on the idea that health care is a “right” (I’ll focus more in this issue in Part III of this series) that others must provide, the government has made Americans collectively responsible for each other’s health care, whether through collectivized employer plans or through Medicare; thus, on average, “every time an American spends a dollar on physicians' services,” explains health economist John Goodman, “only 10 cents is paid out of pocket; the remainder is paid by a third party.”

People consuming medical services on other people’s dime consume a lot more. Prices are further driven up by numerous restrictions on the supply of medical professionals, such as protectionist licensing laws that prevent doctor’s assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, and paramedics from competing with doctors on services they are well qualified to perform (fixing minor bone breaks, diagnosing the flu, etc.).

When supply is artificially limited, and demand artificially increases, prices explode. (Any system promising “universal care” experiences this--the much-vaunted “affordable” European system just deals with it by severe rationing.)

In addition Here are four major governmental healthcare problems, brought up by Jeff Scialabba, a writer for the “Voices for Reason”, an affiliate with the Ayn Rand Institute, and the Ayn Rand Center for Individual rights. [Note: these next four points are not my own]

1. To begin, let’s take a look at one of the prominent features of our health care system: employer-sponsored health insurance. Businesses large and small struggle with the cost of providing health insurance for their employees. Employees begrudge a lack of options and volatility in coverage caused by employers looking for cheaper plans. People everywhere fear losing their job—or alternatively, feel trapped in jobs they dislike—for fear of losing coverage. So why do we have employer-sponsored health insurance? Employers don’t pay for our car or homeowner’s insurance, so why does over 60 percent of the population—including over 90 percent of the privately-insured under age 65—rely on their employer for health insurance? Essentially, it is because the U.S. government has incentivized and forced that outcome for more than sixty years.

Employer sponsored healthcare is a phenomenon that was institutionalized beginning with the Stabilization Act of 1942. This bill, which remained in effect throughout World War II, gave the government enormous control over the economy and imposed sweeping wage and price freezes across the U.S. Although it forbade wage increases, the law did not prohibit the expansion of employee benefits, and businesses began to offer health benefits as a means of attracting and retaining employees. In a country with a workforce depleted from the war, offering health benefits was a way of circumventing the wage freeze to gain a competitive advantage in the battle for scarce labor.

A further incentive for employers to provide health benefits came in the form of a 1943 tax court ruling, later codified in the Internal Revenue Code in 1954. This ruling stated that insurance premiums made by employers on behalf of employees were not taxable, meaning it was now economically advantageous for businesses to offer tax-exempt health benefits in place of taxable wages. Such an exemption, however, was not—and never has been—extended to individuals purchasing health insurance on their own. Thus through tax policy, the U.S. government created not only a strong incentive for employers to offer health insurance as a benefit, but also a strong incentive for individuals to seek insurance through their employer.

These tax incentives, perhaps more than any other government intervention, have ensured that employer-sponsored insurance has become the fixture of the U.S. health care system that it is today. But they alone are not the whole story. Where these incentives are not enough to induce a business to offer health benefits, legislation often forces businesses to provide them. Such legislation includes federal laws such as the Taft-Hartley Labor Relations Act of 1947, which requires businesses to negotiate with unions for health benefits, and state laws such as those in Massachusetts, where businesses are fined unless they provide coverage for their employees.

2. Another important feature of health insurance in the United States that has been fueled by government intervention is the fact that it is almost always comprehensive.

Contrary to other kinds of insurance, which typically cover only catastrophic expenses, our health plans cover routine care such as annual check-ups. Homeowners insurance covers fire damage but not your monthly electricity bill, car insurance protects us against the cost of an accident, not an oil change. Yet health insurance pays for our physicals and basic tests. How come?

In the 1930s, the United States was mired in the Great Depression and the health insurance market was still in its infancy. Out of fear of bills going unpaid, hospitals and doctors formed their own insurance companies. These companies, which would later become Blue Cross and Blue Shield, offered pre-paid plans that provided comprehensive coverage of services provided by any hospital or doctor within the network. The U.S. government laid the groundwork for this comprehensive model to become the U.S. standard by granting non-profit status to the Blues, which exempted them from taxes and insurance regulations. In the emerging health insurance industry, this made the Blues’ model of comprehensive insurance profitable and gave them a huge advantage over other insurers, who were compelled to offer, at great expense, the same kind of comprehensive insurance package to remain competitive. Unsurprisingly, the Blues experienced explosive growth, covering 59 percent of the insured by 1945. The government further served to entrench the comprehensive model as the U.S. standard when it established Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, and adopted it as their basic mechanism.

Thus, thanks primarily to government interference, about 95 percent of the insured population in America—roughly 240 million people—is covered by comprehensive health insurance provided by a third party. While there is nothing inherently wrong with comprehensive or third party-provided insurance (provided the third-party isn’t the government and provided these features are voluntarily offered and voluntarily chosen), the fact that this form of insurance has come to dominate the insurance market through government intervention is a major cause of our current health care crisis.

3. A big source of the problems currently plaguing our health care system is the fact that most of us—as consumers of medical services—are completely cut off from any concern with (and often from knowledge of) their prices. All we ask, typically, is: “Is it covered?” As I discussed in points 1 and 2, government intervention has led to a system where 95 percent of the insured population in America—some 240 million people—have comprehensive health insurance provided by a third party (either their employer or the government).

With insurance covering all kinds of medical services and the premiums paid by someone else, Americans have little financial incentive to curtail doctors’ visits for minor ailments, to question whether a test is worth its cost, or to seek out cost-effective care. Before we buy virtually anything else, we ask ourselves whether it is worth its price and whether there might be a better deal elsewhere. When we go to the doctor, we don’t even see the price until it shows up on the invoice—with all but a small co-pay or deductible (relative to the total bill) paid by the insurer. History has shown that this system increases demand for health care, encourages wasteful consumption and ultimately increases costs for third-party insurers.

The results of this model are plainly evident today. Medicare and Medicaid cost hundreds of billions of dollars each year and are projected to consume ever-greater swaths of the federal budget in the decades to come. In the private sector, where businesses provide health insurance to 158 million Americans, premium increases force employers to cut staff, reduce wages or drop health benefits altogether. Businesses locked into labor contracts risk bankruptcy. Laid-off workers struggle to purchase health insurance on their own, as they must now replace the untaxed health benefits they received through their job by purchasing individual insurance on their own that is not tax-deductible and—thanks to 70 years of the government’s favoring third-party insurance at the expense of individual insurance—more expensive and more limited in coverage than employer plans.

Supporters of the proposed reforms believe these problems can only be solved by expanding government’s role in health care. But this argument ignores the role that government already plays in ensuring the dominance of third-party, comprehensive insurance in United States. Moreover, as we’ll see in part 4, it ignores that government expansion has been tried time and again as a solution to perceived problems in the health care system—and time and again those efforts have only made things worse.

4. We see that many of the problems in our health care system are the result of the dominance of third-party comprehensive insurance—a dominance which has arisen from decades of government interventions favoring this kind of insurance. But as these interventions are not new, neither are the problems we are presently facing. On the contrary, our government has been attempting to solve our health care problems for as long as it has been creating them—and time and again these “solutions” have left our health care system worse off.

In recent decades, for instance, state governments have increasingly looked at insurance mandates as a means of expanding coverage to groups that have difficulty obtaining it. Broadly, mandates are requirements—backed by government force—that insurers cover specific medical expenses (e.g., chiropractors, treatment for lyme disease) or patient populations (e.g., continuing coverage for laid-off employees). Mandates are an extremely myopic political tool: they force insurers into a money-losing endeavor, who respond by increasing insurance premiums or decreasing coverage in another area—creating another problem for politicians to solve by passing more mandates.

Unfortunately, mandates have proven irresistible to politicians, who disingenuously portray themselves as righteous crusaders for the cause of a suffering group (who just happens to have a strong lobby), while blaming the lack of coverage on “greedy” insurance companies, one of their favorite political whipping-boys. With the detrimental effects of mandates hidden from view, a veritable mandate armada has descended upon the health insurance industry. The number of state mandates has steadily increased from 7 in 1965 to more than 2,100 today. Some states have imposed such an onerous slew of mandates that hordes of insurers have packed up and left the state, as for example, in Kentucky, Maine and Washington.

Among the hardest hit by mandates are the young and healthy who are either unemployed or in a job that does not provide health benefits. This is a low-income group that would benefit most from insurance that provided coverage only for catastrophic events and carried a high deductible and a low premium. In large part because of mandates, however, this type of insurance is virtually nonexistent. These individuals must purchase high-priced insurance that covers medical services which will likely never be used, or go uninsured, as many do.

We now face the perverted end result of mandates and other interventions having priced so many out of the market for health insurance: the idea that an “individual mandate” must be imposed to force the uninsured to buy government-chosen insurance regardless of what they judge to be in their best interest. And one of the biggest supporters of the individual mandate is the insurance companies. While this may seem ironic, this sort of thing is, as Ayn Rand observed, the routine order of business when government intervenes in the economy:

When government controls are introduced into a free economy, they create economic dislocations, hardships, and problems which, if the controls are not repealed, necessitate still further controls, which necessitate still further controls, etc. Thus a chain reaction is set up: the victimized groups seek redress by imposing controls on the profiteering groups, who retaliate in the same manner, on an ever widening scale.” (“The Cold Civil War, in The Ayn Rand Column)

This is just a fraction of the story of how government has mangled the market for health care--a story any honest discussion of health care needs to study and learn from.

Intellect, is it possible?

A group of Internet acquaintances and I were discussing the problem of education in our society. The discussion progressed, through much debate, to a point in which one individual admitted that, there were some out there who did not want to learn, and that intelligence was disappearing in our society; others agreed, as do I.
They all demanded a logical solution to this problem One man admitted that he would write an essay on the subject.

This is my response:

P.s. Much of the logic I use was founded by the Philosopher, Ayn Rand. If I'm not mistaken, all of the points are hers, the conclusions are my own.
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The problem is that you want to education people, in a society that does not allow for that process to be completed…. Try and follow this logical syllogism:

I will begin with to axiomatic definitions:

• Knowledge” is . . . a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation.

• Reason is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Therefore, Man’s essential characteristic is his rational faculty. Ergo, Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—his only means of gaining knowledge . . . .

1. The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life—by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past—and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

Conclusion: Education is aimed at arming a student with the essentials he needs in order to grasp knowledge. Knowledge is impossible to grasp without the application of Reason. And Reason is impossible to have without volitional cognitive thought i.e. reason is impossible without people choosing to think……

This is where your problem occurs: “How do we get people to think?” “To want to know things?”.. . . . This is the question you are asking now…. The answer is to free man’s mind: By restoring intelligence and intellect to our society:

2. In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature. The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.

Humans survive by means of man-made products, and . . . the source of man-made products is man’s intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to grasp the facts of reality and to deal with them long-range (i.e., conceptually).

Conclusion: In order to survive, to produce, and to educate people, intellect must be present, but today it isn’t! Right now your saying, “Jason, we already knew this, what’s your point? My point is Intelligence is impossible to spread in today’s society:

3. Intelligence is the ability to deal with a broad range of abstractions. Whatever a child’s natural endowment, the use of intelligence is an acquired skill. It has to be acquired by a child’s own effort and automatized by his own mind, but adults can help or hinder him in this crucial process.

However, Intelligence is not an exclusive monopoly of genius; it is an attribute of all men, and the differences are only a matter of degree. If conditions of existence are destructive to genius, they are destructive to every man, each in proportion to his intelligence. If genius is penalized, so is the faculty of intelligence in every other man. There is only this difference: the average man does not possess the genius’s power of self-confident resistance, and will break much faster; he will give up his mind, in hopeless bewilderment, under the first touch of pressure.

On the axiom of the primacy of existence, intelligence is man’s most precious attribute. But it has no place in a society ruled by the primacy of consciousness: it (intelligence) is such a society’s deadliest enemy, and is therefore sought out and destroyed.

Conclusion: We life in such a society ruled by the primacy of consciousness; this initiates a criterion of morality that is destructive to mans mind: and therefore intellect is destroyed. How is mans mind being destroyed? Through force:

4. Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.
To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.
Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no “right” to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.
To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument—is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him in a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life—and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.
Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: “Your money or your life,” or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: “Your children’s education or your life,” the meaning of that ultimatum is: “Your mind or your life”—and neither is possible to man without the other.

Conclusion: Force is immoral, and it destroys mans mind.

5. As men continue to learn, and produce, in order to sustain their own lives… an all out war is being waged in hopes of destroying that process:

Today, our society deems it moral, or appropriate to punish success by taking from the rich and giving to the poor, to damn intellect by taxing overwhelmingly the successful, to destroy the men of the mind, by deeming it acceptable to initiate force upon the minds of men…. Thereby destroying the mind.

Conclusion: The mind is being destroyed by the initiation of Physical force upon individuals….
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Final Conclusion to the syllogism:

Mans mind is the key to reason, which gives way to knowledge, which grants intellect. Through the initiation of force upon individuals, mans mind is being destroyed; Thereby slowly destroying everything that follows.

Today, intelligence is neither recognized nor rewarded, but is being systematically extinguished in a growing flood of brazenly flaunted irrationality, of malicious force, and of irrational brutes. The freedom of mans mind has been compromised, and we are now feeling its disastrous consequences.
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*Solution to the original question: “How do we get people to think?” “To want to know things?”:

In this type of society i.e. the one we live in today, there is no solution to the problem: “How does one restore intelligence?” It is impossible to do so… The Question we should be asking is “How do we free mans mind?” Because only then can intelligence be saved.

In order to fix this, an entire philosophical renaissance is required... A return to Reason! To Freedom! To Life!

How can this be accomplished?......... Who is John Galt? [That was a Hint]

Read Atlas Shrugged! Begin to live a Rational life, and urge others to do so… Protect freedom and Capitalism… Protect mans mind! Only then will you be able to restore sanctity to the intellect that men deserve!