Monday, June 29, 2020

On Maintaining the Police and Army

The essential and only proper function of government is to protect its citizens against the initiation of physical force. This means having a police force to protect them against criminals and a military to protect them against foreign aggression.
Any government which disbands its police force or army thereby vaporizes itself and no longer exists as a government. At that point the right returns to the citizens to create a government, to provide for their common defense.
Those legally responsible for the destruction of the previous government should be subject to arrest and trial for having endangered the lives and property of the citizens through acts depriving them of the force(s) needed to protect them.
This means that there are some mayors, city councils, and possibly governors who should immediately be removed from office, arrested, and put on trial for willful endangerment of human life and property.
For more, read Ayn Rand’s essays “The Nature of Government” and “Man’s Rights.” Both are available in her books Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness.
They can be found at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ayn+rand+books&crid=2YSG40JF1I48V&sprefix=Ayn+%2Caps%2C214&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_6_4

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Socialism Is Slavery and Worse


Socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Since all work requires the use of means of production, under socialism the government is a universal monopoly employer. Everyone is forced to work for the government. Everyone is the government’s slave.
Lacking the competition of employers for labor, the natural level of wages under socialism is minimum subsistence. Even if it had the means, a socialist state always has something more important to attend to than the standard of living of its citizens.
The moral ideal of socialism is “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Since ability is limited while need is unlimited, socialism proclaims its ideal world as one of limitless shortages, in which who gets what is determined by arbitrary, brute force.
This includes the determination of who works at what, where, and to what extent. Under socialism, everyone is a passive tool of the government, waiting to be told what to do, how to do it, and where to do it.
The nature of socialism is revealed in its adherence to the proposition that the individual is the means to the ends of society.
Since “society” has no real existence apart from the individuals who comprise it, what this means is that the individual is the means to the ends of society AS DIVINED BY THE RULERS OF SOCIETY.
And what this means is that the individual is the means to the ends of the rulers.
Slavery under socialism is the worst form of slavery. A slave is the property of the state, not of any private individual, who would experience the slave’s injury or death as his loss. Under socialism, the slave’s life and well-being are valueless. So, millions are slaughtered.
Thus, socialism goes from enslavement to mass murder.
When you hear a socialist or talk to a socialist, know that you are dealing with someone seeking to enslave you and who is an accomplice to potential mass murder.
To learn more, read my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics available at amzn.to/2PM19ut.



Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Tuition Refunds for Today's Uneducated Graduates


Most college and university graduates of the last generation or more are essentially uneducated in the nature and values of modern Western Civilization and its leading offshoot the capitalist economic system.
The courses that should have given them this education, namely, the courses in the liberal arts and humanities, did not, despite the fact that in many cases the students not only paid for this education but incurred substantial debt in order to do so.
These students deserve a refund. In the case of private colleges and universities they should be paid to the extent possible out of the endowments of the schools they attended, which in some cases amount to tens of billions of dollars.
For the rest, all government financing, direct or indirect, serving to support education in the liberal arts or humanities should be abolished, including in primary and secondary education, as well as in higher education.
In all cases in which licensing laws require degrees of any kind that contain a liberal arts or humanities component, that requirement should be deemed satisfied upon a statement to that effect from the candidate’s prospective employer.
This would make it possible for new centers of learning to be established that either avoided liberal arts/humanities courses altogether or offered new and different varieties of such courses.
It is time to defund "education" whose product is ignorance and savagery.

Saturday, June 13, 2020

Riots Are Riots Even Though the New York Times Calls Them "Protests"

The New York Times has described the Minneapolis police force as peaceful and non-violent for the most part———OOPS! MISTAKE!!! MISTAKE!!!
The New York Times has described the “PROTESTS” as peaceful and non-violent for the most part (putting aside the mass looting and destruction of stores in major cities across the US, including the US’s best-known department store, Macy’s at Herald Square in NYC).
Insurance companies in contrast have accurately described the protests as belonging in the category “riot and civil disorder event,” which is a category representing at least $25 million in damage.
Here’s an example of the “peacefulness” and “nonviolence” accompanying the protests: https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/72C23D5A-A5CE-11EA-9237-EF7B9133097E
Such destruction was not the result of each and every protest but just of a significant fraction of them, enough to cause not only many millions in losses but also the loss of several lives too.
The reporters and editors of The New York Times are all Marxist-educated and thus unwilling or unable to report the news objectively. They simply do not bother to report much of what they dislike and they twist and “spin” much of the rest.
Indeed, our culture and its educational system have deteriorated to the point that for several generations almost everyone has been taught to believe the teachings of Marxism in economic theory and political philosophy.
If you’d like to start flushing this poison from your brain, you need to read the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. My writings available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ provide a good introduction to their ideas and also present some further contributions of my own.

Sunday, June 07, 2020

What the Protests Are Protesting


The “protests” are not against the death of George Floyd. His connection is no greater than the length of the fuse needed to set off a vast accumulation of explosive hatred for the United States, the capitalist economic system, and rationality itself.
If the protests were about Mr. Floyd, they would have stopped with the filing of murder charges against the officer directly responsible for his death, and with the filing of charges against the three other officers present.
Despite the filing of charges, the protests went on, virtually without skipping a beat. Perhaps if the officers had been dragged from custody and been hung or beaten to death, the protests might have stopped, simply out of shock at what had been done. But not necessarily.
The protests have the flavor of a pogrom incited by a single incident and taken as symbolic of something vastly larger. They have the same character as the vast destruction of Jewish businesses in Germany in Nov. 1938, in response to the killing of a German diplomat by a Jew.
Generations of miseducation, akin more to a process of protracted lobotomization than to education, especially in the so-called social sciences and the humanities, has produced millions of graduates who are profoundly ignorant and barely capable of thinking.
To protect themselves from ever learning anything by listening to ideas that conflict with their dogmas, they shout down speakers. When the opportunity arises, they seek to get professors with alternative views fired, if they’ve managed to be employed in the first place.
The educational system’s graduates are so ignorant that despite the scores of millions of deaths it has caused, they do not know that socialism is a system of slavery, terror, and mass murder, and want to impose it on the United States.
At the same time, they regard the United States, the first country in the history of the world created on the principle that individuals possess unalienable rights that governments are instituted to protect, as though it were a tyranny ruled by evil “capitalists.”
They ignore the fact that to rid the country of slavery and make it true to its founding principle of individual rights, more than 300 thousand Union soldiers died in the Civil War, out of a population 20 million, which toll is comparable to almost 5 million today.
They are so pathetically ignorant that they do not even know what biologically distinguishes men and women and believe that by wishing, they can override these biological differences.
They do not know that freedom is the absence of the initiation of physical force, and that it is secured by the ability and willingness to counter the initiation of force with greater, defensive and retaliatory force, thereby creating personal safety.
They do not know that a police force and army are essentially the one proper function of government, and that in preventing, or, if necessary, overcoming the initiation of force, it secures the freedom of the individual and respect for his rights.
They do not know that the essential problem in securing individual rights and freedom is keeping the government in check. It must be prevented from itself initiating force, which it does any time it makes illegal something that is not the initiation of force.
In an upside down, inside out, total reversal of rationality, today’s protesters in seeking to achieve socialism seek the use of government force in every area of life. Their newly discovered exception is prevention of common crime. They want to abolish local police departments.
Perhaps there is a logic in all this. Namely, today’s looters and fire bombers might serve as “post-police,” enforcing endless regulations, working as spies, and guarding inmates in the socialist state’s concentration camps. There will certainly be no shortage of such monsters.  
There is practically no hope of any serious news analysis from today’s mainstream media. The New York Times, for example, has sunk to the level of urging people to eat insects (https://nyti.ms/2O0ivSS) and to avoid the use of toilet paper (https://nyti.ms/3aPuZs0). Loathsome.
Readers who want serious discussions of leading current issues can start by consulting my Amazon author’s page at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ. The works found there, especially my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, provide references to all the important relevant literature.

Saturday, June 06, 2020

Trump Versus Our Enemies

Retired General Mattis has accused Pres. Trump of dividing the country in a time of crisis.(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/jim-mattis-trump-protests.html?searchResultPosition=2) 
This is a false accusation. The country has been growing increasingly divided for many years. The fundament division is between those who want to preserve the American way of life and the capitalist system and those who want to destroy it.
In the last week or more, the division has manifested itself as between looters and arsonists on the one side and their victims on the other. Pres. Trump stands with the victims.
General Mattis apparently does not know of this conflict. He represents the rare case of a general who apparently does not know that his country has enemies or who its enemies are. Fortunately, President Trump does.