I was almost too late. Ron Smith died last night following a battle with pancreatic cancer. It was a mercifully short battle that lasted only a little over two months — he was diagnosed with cancer in mid-October — but it was scant consolation for his many devoted listeners.

It was my son, Steve, who brought Ron Smith to my attention about eight years ago. At that time the Ron Smith Show had the three-to-six afternoon time slot on WBAL, and Steve used to listen to him during his long commute. The war in Iraq was still new, and virtually all conservatives supported former President Bush’s decision to go to war — all except Ron Smith, that is. The fact that Smith, who was so conservative on so many other issues, opposed the war got Steve’s attention and, eventually, his agreement.

Ron Smith’s political views could probably best be described as “paleolibertarian”, but to my knowledge he never called himself that. He had an instinctual mistrust of the use of force to accomplish anything and thus was the perfect person to confront the frequent caller or guest whose solution to every problem can be summed up in the phrase, “there ought to be law”.

Laws, Smith said, seldom accomplish their stated goals, especially when they mandate outcomes. In reality, such laws — and Bush’s No Child Left Behind law is a prime example of this — end up mandating fraud.

By the time I became a regular listener last spring, the Ron Smith Show had moved to the morning nine-to-twelve time slot. I listened to practically the entire show every day — and often found it very depressing. He was very pessimistic about the future of western civilization and believed the United States has had its season in the sun. What made this assessment especially depressing to me is that he based it on facts and logic.

Logic was a weapon Ron Smith used to slay many beasts. I was always amazed at his ability to drill down to the heart of any argument, to marshal facts and reasoning to expose the argument’s unanalyzed assumptions. One of his listeners dubbed him “the voice of reason”, and the label stuck because it was so accurate.

I was also impressed by Smith’s wide-ranging erudition. He was knowledgeable and read widely in many subjects. It was therefore with genuine surprise that I read that his formal schooling ended when he dropped out high school to enlist in the Marine Corps. I should not have been so surprised: no amount of formal education could have given him what he brought to every broadcast.

I will miss Ron Smith. One of the highlights of my short blogging career was a link he posted on his website two and a half years ago to an article I wrote on the suppression of dissent in the global warming debate. But links to my blog posts aren’t what I will miss about him. In the combined cacophony that emerges from the airwaves and the web, his was a voice of reason, and now that voice has been stilled.

— Uncle Ben to Peter Parker

We know approximately what then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary told Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno when he came to Paterno’s house the morning after witnessing the rape of a ten-year-old boy in the football locker room shower. That’s pretty much summarized in the grand jury presentment charging retired assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with that rape and 39 other counts of sex crimes. (You can read the presentment here; be warned, however: it is one of the most sickening documents I’ve ever read.)

What I’d like to know is what Paterno said to McQueary.

There’s one thing I’m sure he did not say. He did not say, “Mike, you have to go to the police about this. Right now. Don’t even think about possible consequences to yourself. I’ve got your back on this. I’ll protect you from the athletic department, I’ll protect you from the administration. But you’ve got to report this.”

How do I know Paterno didn’t say this? Because if he had, McQueary would have gone right to the police. He would not have waited until he was subpoened by a grand jury nine years later.

McQueary has come under heavy fire because he did nothing to stop the rape and did not go immediately to the police. His first response was to call his father, who told him he had to tell Paterno, his boss. While McQueary’s inaction might be hard to excuse, it is certainly understandable.

As a graduate assistant, McQueary was at the absolute bottom of the academic food chain. His first thought might well have been, “If I stop this or report it, it will be my word against his.” This is not an unreasonable worry. Victims of child sexual abuse are often too frightened or embarrassed to testify, so there might be no corroborating witness. And Sandusky, as an emeritus coach, was highly thought of in the Penn State community. McQueary also must have been aware that the local law enforcement apparatus, including the district attorney’s office, treat the Penn State football program with kid gloves. Football is big business in State College, PA, not only generating revenue for the university, but pouring millions of dollars into the local economy.

If McQueary’s charges went nowhere, he would have been up the proverbial creek. He would have been seen as a troublemaker, as someone bringing disrepute on Penn State’s legendary football program, thus endangering the university’s revenue stream. Even if the charges resulted in Sandusky’s prosecution, McQueary could still have found his career hopes dashed. All they would have to say is, “Mike, our budget has been cut, so we have to eliminate your assistantship.”

That’s why it’s important to know what Joe Paterno said to McQueary. Paterno held the real power here. There is no question but that he had the power to protect McQueary from retaliation, and there is also no question but that McQueary was aware of and trusted that power.

So it’s pretty clear that Paterno did not offer his protection to McQueary. And, because he failed to do so, he deserved to be fired. Which leads to the next question: did Paterno in any way try to discourage McQueary from going to the authorities? Did he say something like, “don’t say anything about this to anybody else. I’ll handle it.” If he did, then he got off too lightly.

I said above that McQueary’s response to the situation was “understandable”, if hard to excuse. Personally, I don’t excuse it. What’s his career — which consisted of teaching young men how to move an ellipsoid ball down a field while other young men try to stop them — compared to stopping the rape of a young boy? McQueary’s a big man. It would have been easy for him to pull the pervert off the kid, knee him in the groin, and keep him pinned to the floor until the police arrived. That he failed to do this can only be attributed to moral cowardice.

But McQueary’s moral failure is nothing compared to Joe Paterno’s. Because at Penn State, JoePa, as he is affectionately known, is unassailable. There was no way the athletic department or administration could threaten his career, and it’s not just because he was near the end of it. Had they tried to dismiss him because he refused to cover up a sex crime the resulting riots would have made the ones that erupted Wednesday in the wake of his firing look like a Thanksgiving parade.

Yes, it’s sad that such an illustrious career had to end this way. But it was necessary. Joe had to go.

And I vastly underestimated how long all this would take. Back in April I had guessed that renovating the first floor (except for the floor refinishing) would take me about a month. It took me three. And the basement took more than a month.

The good news is that this renovation project that I began two years ago with the installation of a new driveway, porch and front walk is done (although I still have to put something in my flower beds other than weeds).

The bad news is that it took a physical toll on me. At some point during this process I injured my knee, and the pain is now so bad I can barely walk. For the past month I’ve been going to physical therapy twice a week and doing all the assigned exercises, but there has been little improvement. It appears to be a meniscus tear (I’ll know for sure when the orthopedic surgeon reads the MRI results Tuesday) and it probably will have to be surgically repaired. Hopefully the death panels haven’t kicked in yet and Medicare will cover it.

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t posted anything to this blog since last April. After a full day of work on my house I was too exhausted to do anything at night except plop myself down in front of the TV. A lot has happened since last April and I would have loved to comment on it, but researching and writing about this stuff takes time and energy that I just didn’t have. If there’s any good to come from my knee injury it is that my enforced leisure has given me the opportunity to get back to writing.

I was asking myself these questions last week as I finished rereading the novel for the first time in 46 years. I wrote a retrospective review of Atlas Shrugged, which appears in Sunday’s edition of the webzine American Thinker, and I gave the book low marks, both as literature and philosophy. Such were not my views the first time I read it, and such obviously are not the views of most of those who have commented on my review.

What captivated me most about Atlas Shrugged the first time I read it was how different it was from what the culture was offering. Rand actually viewed businesspeople who were out to make a profit as the good guys! Up to that time, the only work of fiction I had read in which businessmen were treated sympathetically was Sloan Wilson’s novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which gives us a glimpse of the huge personal price that is often exacted from those who build great business enterprises. In Atlas Shrugged Rand does more than just treat businesspeople sympathetically:  she exalts them as heroes and presents them as innovators who are as brilliant and creative as the writers, artists and intellectuals who despise them even while depending on them for their livelihoods.

Another thing I liked about Atlas Shrugged was the way Rand skewered those collectivist clichés I had been hearing all my life and that people seem to regard as almost self-evident. It was hard to take them seriously after they came out of the mouths of ridiculous people like James Taggart, Orren Boyle and Philip Rearden.

Anyway, I was hooked. I read all of Rand’s other writings that had been published up to that time and signed up for the Nathaniel Branden Institute’s course on basic principles of objectivism, the name Rand gave her philosophy. (Branden, who later achieved fame as a pop psychologist, was Rand’s top disciple and her designated “intellectual heir” until she severed all relations with him in 1968.)

Every week I would drive from College Park, Maryland, down to the Albert Pick Motor Lodge in downtown Washington, D, C., and, along with about 50 other people, spend two hours sitting in a smoky meeting room listening to a tape recorded lecture on Rand’s philosophy given by Branden, his wife Barbara, or some other high-level objectivist. Except “lecture” was not exactly the right word. It was more like a sermon expounding life lessons to be drawn from the exegesis of passages in Atlas Shrugged and, occasionally, Rand’s earlier novel, The Fountainhead.

Rand’s literary inspiration and favorite novel (other than the ones written by herself) is Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and the character in the novel she found most inspiring is the student revolutionary leader Enjolras. But the heroes in Atlas Shrugged remind one, not so much of Enjolras, but Javert, the obsessed police inspector who relentlessly pursues Jean Valjean across the years. Except that Javert manages to elicit some sympathy from the reader — after all, he was born in prison and in the end commits suicide rather than return to prison a man who spared his life. Rand’s heroes elicit none.

But to compare any of the characters in Atlas Shrugged with those in Les Misérables is to insult Hugo. His characters are ideal types that are larger than life, but they are still believable as people. The same cannot be said of Rand’s characters. And this violates a cardinal rule of fiction, even fiction of the Romantic school to which Rand subscribes — i.e., the creation of characters and dialogue that induce the reader to willingly suspend disbelief.

The unbelievability of Rand’s characters was especially evident in the behavior of her followers. For most NBI students, objectivism became a substitute religion, with Rand as the deity, Atlas Shrugged as the bible, and the weekly NBI lectures as the worship services. Students of objectivism — we were not allowed to call ourselves “objectivists”; that exalted title was reserved to Rand and the members of the “senior collective” with whom she had surrounded herself — were expected to emulate Rand’s fictional heroes in their speech and mannerisms. The result was a bunch of rigid, humorless Inspector Javerts.

Randians were Javert-like in another way: they were expected to spy on one another. As a result, real friendships with other Randians were difficult because everybody had to carefully guard his speech lest he be reported to the senior collective.

It was a spying incident that led to my break with objectivism just two and a half years after becoming involved with it. A friend of mine had organized an open seminar in Rand’s philosophy and was reported to the senior collective as having publicly misrepresented objectivism. I was also involved in this seminar and knew the charge wasn’t true. We had made it clear repeatedly that we did not speak for Rand or objectivism — we were just discussing the philosophy, not expounding it.

A member of the senior collective and her husband were dispatched to publicly confront the alleged miscreant. They would not identify what my friend had said that misrepresented objectivism. I wanted to ask, but was afraid to. I was taking an NBI course at the time and was afraid that if I asked I would be booted out; I knew this had actually happened to others who had asked inconvenient questions. Not surprisingly, my friend was excommunicated: his subscription to The Objectivist was refunded and he was barred from taking any more NBI courses.

It was not so much my friend’s excommunication that led to my break with objectivism as it was disgust with myself for lacking the courage to ask a valid question when the only consequence would have been not being able to associate any longer with people I didn’t like much anyway.  Even so, for several years after leaving the movement I continued to recommend Atlas Shrugged to friends and family, believing it to be an effective tool for introducing people to the freedom philosophy. I stopped recommending it when, as a result of my studies in economics and game theory, I began to realize that the philosophy it presents is deeply flawed.

Atlas Shrugged seems to appeal mostly to younger readers who have not yet acquired the knowledge and intellectual tools needed to critically evaluate it. And it is such a radical departure from any other fiction they have read — it does have a thrilling plot, even if it takes quite a bit of work to get through it — that its appeal can be irresistible.

Which is why it should be reread, oh, about 46 years later.

At the same time poll respondents say (by a 54-41 margin) that they don’t want to limit the collective bargaining rights of the public workers’ unions. But by a 58-38 margin, they want issues such as tenure, merit pay, and the right to fire incompetent teachers taken off the bargaining table.

I suppose this could be taken as proof of the Arrow impossibility theorem — that there is no voting system consistent with both individual rationality and democratic principles that will produce consistently rational results. Or, more likely, it just shows that people don’t really understand what “collective” bargaining is.

Whatever Governor Walker’s intentions, his proposed reforms amount to union-busting, just as his critics charge. Collective bargaining becomes a sham when there is nothing to bargain about. And it becomes impossible when a union loses the ability to coerce dues out of the workers it claims to represent. So for Wisconsin voters to say they support collective bargaining, while at the same time expressing strong support for reforms that will kill it, is to reveal a profound misunderstanding.

Since Morris is a Fox News contributor and is more or less conservative, his finding that a significant majority of Wisconsin voters support collective bargaining, at least in principle, cannot be dismissed out of hand. Recent nationwide polls conducted by Pew Research and The New York Times returned similar results.

“Collective bargaining”, it seems, is one of those sacred cows to which everyone must pay proper homage. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if a poll were to reveal that a majority of Americans believe it is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Even the conservative Jonah Goldberg, in an otherwise intelligent opinion piece in which he argued for an end to collective bargaining for all government workers, felt obliged to say nice things about unionism in the private sector.

All this shows just how successful generations of union propagandists and leftist historians have been in glorifying unions and demonizing all those who resist them or question the need for their existence.

While unions and their many apologists in academia and the news media try to pretend that collective bargaining is nothing more than workers exercising their right to freely assemble, in reality collective bargaining is based on coercion, which often takes the form of actual or threatened violence. And the ugly truth is that this coercion is directed against those for whom the unions claim to be fighting. In fact, unions would not be able have most of their demands met if they were not able to coerce both their own members and others who would be willing to do the work union members do.

In his seminal work The Logic of Collective Action, the late economist Mancur Olson observed that unions provide a collective good to their members in that benefits negotiated by the union are provided to each member of the bargaining unit regardless of whether that member has contributed anything to the union. Since the worker gets the benefits of collective bargaining no matter what he does, he has little incentive to join the union. In this respect, unions are not unlike governments, which also provide collective goods to their citizens but, because of the nature of the goods provided (e.g., national defense), they are unable to withhold those goods from those who do not contribute. Like governments, unions have to use coercion to compel those who benefit from collective bargaining to contribute. That is why unions demand that a closed shop and dues checkoff be part of their contracts with employers.

A question that might be asked here is: why doesn’t the union just negotiate on behalf of its dues-paying members? That is, why not restrict any benefits won by collective bargaining to union members, and leave others to fend for themselves? It doesn’t take someone with a Ph.D. in economics to figure out that management would love a contract like that. And the reason is obvious: if union members have to be paid higher wages and benefits than non-union workers, then only the latter will be hired from that point on. For a contract to be effective in raising wages and benefits, it has to apply to everybody.

Unions don’t coerce just their own members. To be effective, they also have to coerce non-union workers who are able and willing to do the same jobs union members are doing. This means keeping them from taking the union members’ jobs, especially during a strike, and historically unions have had few qualms about using violence or the threat of violence to accomplish this end.