You don’t have to dig very deeply into American conservative thought before you come across the Rand Fantasy. This is the dream, explored by Ayn Rand in her Atlas Shrugged, that the talented and strong-willed few, who supply the rest of us with food, shelter, clothing, and such meaning as our lives can tolerate, simply stop working, annoyed by bureaucrats telling them how to run their businesses and taxing the wealth they create.
Rand may not be taken very seriously by academics, but beyond the ivory tower, arguments based on the Fantasy course through American society like the bulls through Pamplona. We hear it over and over again: taxes and government regulations must be kept to an absolute minimum, lest the gifted few—more recently baptized “job creators—” simply stop working, or at least stop working so furiously hard.
Rand famously claimed to find nothing of value in the history of philosophy except Aristotle. This is a bit extreme, given her obvious affinities with Nietzsche and his predecessor, Max Stirner (whose main work was actually entitled Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, “The Individual and His Property”); but there is certainly plenty in Aristotle that prefigures Rand. Much of humanity, he thinks, consists of “slaves by nature:” people who are bright enough to understand and follow orders, but not bright enough to figure out which orders to give (Politics I.5-7). The truly bright people, the “great-souled” ones (Nicomachean Ethics 1107b22-1108a3) have what Aristotle calls “active reason,” which enables them to make correct decisions in life. They do great things, and are entitled to great rewards—the greatest being the freedom to live as they think best.
All very Randian–as far as it goes. For like James B. Conant at Harvard (# 6), Rand did not read her favorite Greek philosopher all the way to the end. In particular, she did not understand Aristotle’s theory of human motivation.
While all humans share the species-nature of “human being,” he believes that different people are fitted, by whether by nature or by habituation, to do different things. Thus, some people are good at drinking; and since you enjoy what you’re good at, they love to drink. Others are good at hunting and love to hunt, others at philosophy and, as its very name implies, love wisdom (Nicomachean Ethics 1172a). Each individual, then, has what I will call a “personal nature.” One’s personal nature is the set of talents and aptitudes, partly natural (like height for a basketball player) and partly acquired (like skill in surgery) that determines what she or he loves most in life, and becomes best at.
Since your personal nature determines what you love to do, it will (like any nature) inevitably manifest itself in your actions. A poet-by-nature, we may say, can no more dispense with writing poetry than a fish could abjure swimming, or a river could flow uphill. Someone whose personal nature makes them love something is willing to sacrifice almost everything else to it—and won’t even regard it as a “sacrifice.”
In such cases, monetary rewards are largely irrelevant. Poets rarely gain significant wealth from their poetry, but they write it anyway. Really gifted teachers often tell me they’d “teach for free,” if they could. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made incredible amounts of money, but that was not their goal (if it were, Gates would not be giving most of his away).[1] They originally set out to pursue a vision; and what I am calling their “personal nature” is what generated that vision.
So what would Aristotle say about someone who seeks to increase their wealth by avoiding taxes?
He would say that such a person is not doing what they do “by nature.” If they can refrain from their work, then they don’t really love it. Which means that they have not devoted to it the kind of uncompromising and single-minded effort it takes to get really good at something in the first place. Such people can be worthy practitioners in their field, but the heights of excellence are reserved to those who love what they do. And if you love doing something, you’ll do it for free. Eisphoraphobia, fear of paying taxes, is for the second-raters.
One benefit of looking to Aristotle here is that we see how issues of tax avoidance differ from issues concerning government regulation. People who know how to do something really well usually don’t appreciate being told how to do it by others, who are almost certain to know less—not by the government, or by their board of directors, or for that matter by their mother. If the constraints placed on them actually change the nature of the work so much that it is no longer what they love doing by nature, one can certainly imagine them quitting. So the ani-regulation argument is more respectable than anti-tax arguments.
More respectable, but not impregnable. There are people, we know, who are really good at torturing and killing other people (some of them, indeed, make quite a bit of money at it). Not all personal natures are meritorious, and some need to be suppressed—by governmental force, if need be.
I don’t know if Ayn Rand thought that a killer-by-nature should be allowed to kill, but I am quite sure that if she did, she would be wrong. It is up go society to decide which activities it should countenance. Only once an activity has been approved by society can those who are really good at it in virtue of their personal natures be left to conduct it as they see fit.
[1] Jobs put it forcefully: “I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important,” Jobs said in 1996 PBS documentary. He co-founded Apple in 1976, as a 21-year-old. “I never did it for the money.”
accessed August 31m 2020