The Freedom Fighter's Journal: Good Intellectual Ideas Cost Dollars

ANNOUNCEMENT

The passage of the health care bill has made the current political environment more serious and urgent than ever before. The vote on that bill demonstrated that it is not enough to mobilize massive public opposition to statism—that the Democrats will push it through anyway, with contempt for the views of the governed. They will do it because they regard opposition to their agenda as passing, temporary, and ultimately ineffectual. They believe they can shove through this legislation—and more, in whatever time they have remaining—and that once it is in place, it can never be rolled back.

If we don't prove them wrong, we are in very big trouble.

Just how big is demonstrated by the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, because she brings to the forefront the main issue of Barack Obama's presidency. As I wrote in the May 13 edition of TIA Daily:

This year, we are called upon to decide the most important political issue there is: are they any limits on the power of government?
We saw this in the health care debate, when Democratic congressmen were quizzed on the constitutionality of the law and answered with a collective shrug of indifference….
And now, with Elena Kagan, we discover that even the First Amendment is not safe, that Congress may also claim the power to censor our speech, should the "general welfare" dictate that the benefits of our freedom are outweighed by the "costs to society."
If there is a single theme to Obama's term in office so far, it is his attempt to break the last of the bonds that used to limit the power of government.

At the same time, however, there is also a lot of reason for hope. The primaries and special elections that have been held so far this year have been a bloodbath for incumbents, for the party establishment—of both parties—and especially for the appropriators, the politicians who are on the committees most directly responsible for runaway government spending.

I have also written about the "radicalization" of the right in response to the Obama administration. Commentators like Tony Blankley have been advocating the abandonment of the Republicans' previous caution, and this year's congressional candidates are some of the most radical pro-free-marketers we've ever seen. There has never been a large-scale campaign to repeal any major addition to the welfare state—but that is precisely what we're seeing in response to ObamaCare. And a lot of the congressional candidates I've talked to are willing to go much farther.

Recently, I've noted that we will likely have a radical Tea Party Caucus in the next Congress, and even a small, unofficial Atlas Shrugged Caucus of congressmen influenced by Ayn Rand.

This all adds up to a year in which we can accomplish more for liberty than at any other time. And since the ObamaCare vote, I have been doing a lot of work and a lot of thinking about how to push our current advantage to the maximum, not just to get the best results in the midterm election, but to make sure that this has a beneficial long-term result in re-shaping the political debate.

And here's where I need your help. You may have noticed that the word "money" is in the title of this special edition of TIA Daily, and I'll get to that part in a moment. But first let me tell you what I plan to do.

The most important thing I can do to influence this year's political debate is to get the ideas in TIA Daily out to a larger audience. As it is, I am producing a large volume of very good content—which goes out only to a relatively small group of readers, my subscribers. I have a few conduits which allow me to send occasional articles to a much larger audience. Some, like RealClearPolitics, can inject those articles straight into the middle of the national political debate. But they don't do this as frequently or as reliably as I would like.

So for the next six months, from now until just after the November election, I will send out a substantial portion of the material in TIA Daily for free. There will still be exclusive content for paid subscribers, of course, but I will be sending a slightly shorter version of TIA Daily that will be posted on our website at TIADaily.com and will go to our full e-mail list. That means that it will be going out to an additional 5,000 to 10,000 people right away. And I want to encourage you to recommend this to your friends. Send them to the sign-up box on our website, or just have them send an e-mail to editor@tiadaily.com.

By aggressively pushing this shorter version of TIA Daily as a free newsletter, I aim to increase the number of readers by another 10,000, or 30,000, or more. I think there is a potential for much more.

Now here's where the money comes in. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the effect of the Internet on publishing and political advocacy. The best thing about the Internet is that is has knocked down all barriers to the transmission of ideas. In the old days, if you wanted a large audience, you had to go through the gatekeepers at the established media organizations—the big newspapers and magazines, the radio stations, the television networks.

Today, you just start a blog. I'm serious about that. I recently saw the news that one of the big cable news channels has hired Erick Erickson as a regular commentator. Who is Erick Erickson? He started the RedState blog, which became widely read and influential on the right.

The worst thing about the Internet, though, is that you can knock down all barriers—so long as you don't get paid. The "cost" of spreading ideas on the Internet is that you have to give them away for free.

So far, TIA Daily has occupied a middle ground, sending a relatively small amount of content for free to a large audience, while producing a large amount of content for a small audience of paid subscribers. But that keeps us too much on the sidelines in this extraordinary year.

So I am asking for your help to make it possible for us to send out much more content to a much larger audience. My goal is to raise at least $50,000 in your donations to cover the expenses and any lost revenue for this effort. Go to www.TIADaily.com/support, or send your donation to PO Box 8086, Charlottesville, VA 22906.

The latest political fashion in this round of elections is the "money bomb," in which a political campaign sets a specific date on which they aim to raise a large sum of money—say, a million dollars—from online donations. What I am proposing is a money bomb for ideas. My goal is more modest—"only" $50,000, an amount that wouldn't make much difference for a political campaign but will make a big difference for us. And the timeframe is going to be a little more generous: our money bomb drive will start today and go through next Monday, June 7. But donate for the same reason you might give to a good political campaign: to make a difference in defense of liberty. And instead of getting just one politician elected, our goal is something with a much wider effect: to get the right ideas interjected into the political debate at a critical time when people are ready to hear them and when they can make a real difference on the agenda of the next Congress.

I have set $50,000 as the immediate target, but I could usefully spend three times that much in the near term. (And over a somewhat longer time frame, I could usefully spend ten or twenty times that amount.) My wider goal, to which this effort is the first step, is to build a media platform for the transmission of Objectivist ideas. I am drawing on what has proven to be the most powerful model: the daily must-read. This is already the function TIA Daily performs for its subscribers. Many of you have told me how much you look forward to it every day as a guide to the world's events. Imagine having it perform that function for a much larger number of people—many of whom will not know, until they begin reading it regularly, just how much they need these ideas.

My specific target for larger distribution is the Tea Party movement. In the past year, there have been two powerful new pro-liberty trends. The Tea Parties, and the explosive growth in the sales of Ayn Rand's novels. One of my goals is to use TIA Daily as a bridge between these two phenomena, bringing the power of Objectivist ideas to an eager and receptive audience in the Tea Party movement.

I've already brought up this idea in discussions with a few friends and supporters, and the only objection I've heard is that politics is too superficial, that we should focus on intellectual activism on a deeper, more philosophical level. I think this is a false alternative. Political advocacy—or at least, the kind that we practice—is philosophical. It has to be, because there's no other way to understand or influence what's going on in the world.

In fact, I think politics is the primary arena in which most people encounter and think about the big philosophical questions. It is an arena where there is a giant, constantly raging debate between opposing ideas and world views, and people can see that this debate has enormous practical consequences, that it is literally a matter of life and death.

And boy is there ever scope for the deployment of philosophical ideas in the political debate. As just one small sample—regular readers will be used to this sort of thing—see my recent article on the implosion of the Greek welfare state.

(Incidentally, Objectivists may note the extent to which Ayn Rand used politics as a medium for the transmission—and development—of her philosophy. She debuted her ideas in novels with political themes, while much of her non-fiction was commentary on political events. One of my favorites among her essays is "'Extremism,' or the Art of Smearing." It is a commentary on the 1964 Republican National Convention—in the process of which she presents a new discovery in the field of epistemology.)

There is no conflict between writing about politics and spreading new and important philosophical ideas. And never has that been more true than this year, when the issues and stakes are becoming more explicitly ideological.

When I mentioned these plans to a friend recently, he told me not to be shy about asking for money. I take that seriously, because he then sent TIA $2,500, an amount I didn't know he could afford. So I'm not going to be shy. TIA has demonstrated a proven success, on a very limited budget, in being able to have an impact on the wider political debate. With more resources, we can accomplish a lot more.

Again, go to www.TIADaily.com/support or send donations to PO Box 8086, Charlottesville, VA 22906. This year—and especially this next six months—will have a big impact on the future of liberty. So dig deep and help us get launched quickly with our Money Bomb for Ideas, now through June 7.

If you can't afford to give money, consider giving some of your time. I have about a dozen administrative tasks, most of which can be done over the Internet, for which we don't have the manpower. We're looking for a few good volunteers who are willing to give a little bit of their time and effort.

Sometime during the political battles of last year, when things were looking particularly desperate, a subscriber sent me a saying that has since become one of my favorites: "That which is necessary is possible." It is necessary for our survival to reverse the slide toward unlimited government and begin to roll back the welfare state. So it is possible—if we take vigorous action as intellectual activists spreading the right ideas. Please help us lead that effort.—RWT

Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of "The Intellectual Activist (TIA)" and contributor to "The Freedom Fighter's Journal"