Showing posts with label property. Show all posts
Showing posts with label property. Show all posts

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Destroyer.

I haven't been writing much lately, and although the new job has something to do with that I'm beginning to recognize the other main contributing factor, and that is what I'm focusing on today.

Basically I'm feeling politically disenfranchised, which is to say that the harder I look at society, the accepted system of morality and state of government the more it upsets, disgusts and alienates me.

As much as I believe that a properly constrained government is achievable, I am more sure each and every day that such a thing can not be created within or upon the current framework of any western democratic state. The Keynesian economic morass, corrupt political principles, moral bankruptcy and culture of entitlement both within these governments and within the general population makes the dream of building a laissez faire "purse" out of this "sows ear" a practical impossibility.

The whole mess needs to be destroyed, wholly and utterly destroyed. But more than the real and actual act of destruction is required, it must all be tied explicitly to the flawed premises that predicate the need for destruction.

In economics the boom and bust of our Keynesian economies must be explicitly tied to the idiocy of fiat currency and deficit spending, while at the same time the strength and self-correcting nature of a free market must be championed. The lunacy of handing economic control to elected but clueless officials or government bureaucrats should be writ large in the blood and sweat of the failures of that system. The businessman should take his rightful spot as the champion of the economic world and the politician and the bureaucrat should be relegated to purely political issues.

In politics we must kill the idea that government is an institution responsible for providing anything except a framework within which our individual rights (life, liberty and property) are protected from the initiation of force. It can not accomplish that goal by promising to serve any but the interest of the singular individual. No man, no group and no interest, however seemingly noble can ever be championed over the individual. There can be no law upholding the "rights" of women, or gays or consumers or blacks, or the poor, as each and every one of these demographic groups is explicitly consumed by the term "individual" and to rule in the favour of a single group is to destroy the rights of every individual outside of that group.

Our morality needs to be tied to this world, to our lives and to our purpose. This world is where we need our morality and what we need our morality for is living, not some absurd promise of an afterlife, or as some cosmic balancing act. Once that simple principle is recognized it is quite easy to see that the moral object of our lives is in the living, and that living with joy, and purpose is the good. All moral acts are those that serve us individually in the true achievement of our own happiness and our own goals and our own purpose.

Morality is not a floating abstraction that can be summarized in a few simplistic edicts. We exist as thinking rational individuals and as a result our morality must be based on the situations we find ourselves in. To declare "thou shall not kill" as a moral imperative, is an abuse of thought that demands that every moral man submit and become subservient to any immoral brute.

Perhaps the cornerstone of all of this is the need to recognize that the mere act of mortal existence, which is to say, drawing a breath as a human being entitles us to nothing. Even the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property must be secured somehow. Nature does not grant the right to live, only the ability to seek to live, nature will not give us liberty, only the ability to create liberty and nature will not bestow upon us property of any sort, only the will to create it in our own name for our own use.

The world as it is, as we have made it (thus far) is one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with reason, nature and the facts of reality. Our current societies (all of them) are a perversion of misguided morality, incorrect economic theory, corrupt politics and undeserved rewards. It all needs to be destroyed. It must be destroyed, before it can be replaced with;
  • a moral code based on mans life and the living of it,
  • an economic system based on and working in coordination with markets and market forces,
  • politics based on and in service to individual rights and only individual rights and,
  • the rational and selfish rejection of entitlement in favour of self-reliance and productive effort in all aspects of our individual lives, whatever our ability.

Monday, June 28, 2010

The Face of Anarchy

There seem to be a lot of young people who sing the praises of anarchy. Anarchism advocates;

“a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. It seeks to diminish or even abolish authority in the conduct of human relations.”
*

The Anarchist will tell you that it is the state or capitalism or the world bank, or some conspiracy of rich and powerful that is responsible for the woes of modern society. They will tell you that if we were all just free to act as individuals without the confines of state or multinational corporations with their laws and force, money and power we would all be better off.

Right.

Last weekend Toronto got to see what anarchy really breeds. It’s not peace, it’s not freedom, it is brutal, mindless violence and destruction. It is the law of the pack, and as an individual you are one with the pack or you are its prey.

Now I do not hold a Hobbesian view of man. I do not believe that a man must completely subordinate himself to a “sovereign” (state or king) or face a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”, but I do believe that there is a proper place for the state as a protector of unalienable rights and those rights alone can make individuals sovereign.

The Anarchist dismisses the role of the state, and while they lay claim to some notion of rights they rely on the individual alone to assert his own individual sovereignty, they call for each man to be his own law. The result of course is that if one man's “law” is stronger than another's, by hook or by crook, with no one to counter their will or force, then the brute will win, and the weaker man will loose.

Now the Anarchists involved with the G20 protests would probably tell you that they only vandalized the apparatus of the state - police cars and the like - or the establishment - multinational corporations and banks. What is more they would claim that this vandalism is in keeping with their view of sovereign individuals, but those attacks are a dire warning to any real individual.

The small businessman ought not to heave a sigh of relief at being spared this weekend but he and everyone else ought to consider that under anarchy, the moment the mob recognizes you or your life’s work as established (and by definition, of the establishment) then you are doomed. Any right to property or person that you may have had while the mob’s focus was elsewhere is gone, suddenly you are not a person; you are not of the mob. You don’t matter.

Dog eat Dog is a euphemism often used in conjunction with capitalism and capitalists but I’ve yet to see a businessman operate with the sheer animal violence of the Anarchists. So when you watch TV tonight and you see the businessman cleaning his ruined storefront and when the news flashes the images of black clad hoodlums smashing burning and destroying bear in mind that you are seeing both the true face of capitalism (productive effort) and Anarchism (mindless destruction).

Friday, November 27, 2009

Peace? Order?? Good Government!?!?

"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." Ayn Rand

This travesty stems directly from a pragmatic (and cowardly) approach to law enforcement.

The fact that a massive operation would have to be undertaken by police to secure the Brown's rights and that native bands across the country would respond with force and violence means that the Browns are left without any rights.

That is the compromise here, a festering standoff, masquerading as "peace" for the rights of an innocent family.

Disgusting.

Monday, November 2, 2009