The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
What exactly are the rights which are being denied? Is she referring to the Bill of Rights? Who is doing the denying? Could it be the socialists in government? Are they abrogating the Bill of Rights? I believe she is writing about the hypocritical approach of putting minority interests on pedestals. All of us our citizens and all of us have the same rights. In a free society there should be no special class of citizens like in an aristocracy.
Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals -- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government -- that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.
Who is obliterating this point? The Constitution sets up a form of government where the elected representatives will pass laws, and those laws will prescribe the conduct of individuals. Our laws don't construct the Constitution, but the Constitution determines how our laws will be constructed, and if even they can be constructed at all - through the Supreme Court's decision on constitutionality. The one obliterating this point is big government and unions. The Great Experiment started by Jefferson has all but failed.
"The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead." Thomas Jefferson
"To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." Thomas Jefferson
"We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country." Thomas Jefferson
They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself . . . . They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the
world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.
So we have of more of the 'they'? Again, are these socialists? If I don't know exactly who 'they' are, how will I begin to assess their motivations. I don't know anyone who hates existence, or wants everyone to die, or who might be the essence of evil. Do you? All this is useless rhetoric intended to inflame and incite, or the ravings of a paranoid individual with anger issues against socialists. How about if someone provides some examples at some point? I'm sure she had her own personal reasons to have anger issues against communists.
She may have been referring to people like Immanuel Kant rebirthofreason.com
or perhaps Skinner sntp.net
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.
This is possible, I suppose, but how many of these examples to I need to see? Do I need to see it just once, or does it have to be pervasive in society. As one person, I can only witness a small number of the total cases in the society. If someone says to me "once you see enough people murdering each other, you may know that your society is doomed." I would agree, but I would want to know how much is 'enough.' I also know that plenty of societies are NOT doomed if the murder rate is low enough. How about Gibson Guitars as an example.
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Or this pop and daughter operation.
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Solyndra made with your tax dollars and now gone up in smoke.
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Obama bankrupting coal as part of his agenda.
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You didn't build it so we can take it from you and give it to some that also didn't build it but who we like more.
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So yes, sometimes people need permission to produce. Before you build a house, you typically need a housing permit and submit to inspections in order to prevent some cheapskate from building substandard housing. This is true even if he wants to build it for himself and wants to sell it later. I don't know that artists or sculptors or writers need permission to publish works, except with employment clauses like the with the CIA. This could have been true in the
Soviet Union. Should we be enraged when told that we need building permits?
I see men getting rich by graft AND by honest work. Maybe Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Larry Ellison got rich through graft, but I haven't read about that. Burnie Madofff and Allen Stanford might have gotten rich through graft in trying to protect their Ponzi schemes, but they got what they deserved. I hope Jon Corzine gets indicted soon, FWIW. No one wants an unqualified builder to build a house and Ayn Rand didn't mean that anyway. She was advocating a marketplace free of government controls. If you're going to build a $10,000 shack on a $500,000 lot you will soon go out of business. aynrandlexicon.com
Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?
What nation in the history of the world had completely law-abiding citizens? Was there a real
possibility of this ever happening? If not, why the hypothetical question? If the phoney war on drugs were to be won an entire industry would go out of business, countless law enforcement, customs controls, lawyers and judges would be redundant not to mention the big business of constructing prison and detention facilities. The same goes for seat belts, once seat belt use was common they went after cell phones and now that most people are not drinking over the legal limit most jurisdictions are dropping the legal limit from .08 to .05. Crime pays big-time for the enforcers and I feel sorry for the ones footing the bill.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
The government has the power to enable scholarships and GI benefits, and try rehabilitation programs on criminals, and reduce the economic forces that produce criminals. Government can declare itself God and by legislation force you to worship it. It can reward bad managers at the expense of good ones and in the process dilute the entire country's money supply. The crony capitalism of today has nothing to do with the type of Laissez-faire capitalism advocated by Ayn Rand and the way the country is being managed today has very little to do with the ideas of its wisest founder Thomas Jefferson.
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