Accountability

There’s been a lot of talk recently about making the police more accountable. There’s some legitimacy to that. But what about making mayors, city councils, governors and state legislatures, Congress, and the whole government more accountable?

Shouldn’t the mayors of Seattle, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and elsewhere be held accountable for the additional murders in their cities that they had to know would occur as a result of the inadequate police presence that they caused?

Given their decisions and knowledge of the consequences that would follow, it seems to me that these mayors deserve to be charged with manslaughter.

Mayors who allow things to reach a point where 911 calls cannot be responded to and who have not called their state governors to provide the assistance of the National Guard, should automatically be fired and replaced through a new election for the office.

To create a high barrier against unjust prosecution of the innocent, citizens left on their own to defend their lives and property should be immune from prosecution for any acts they commit in the course of doing so that are held to be less than first-degree murder.

July 6, 2020,  Nature 

While “Nature” may often be beautiful, it is also, very often, just one thing eating another alive. Nature needs lots of improvement. The primary improvement is Civilization.

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

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.