Charlotte Corday

But I have already shown my willingness to give government credit where credit is due by, temporarily, granting that Dubya’s war strategy was the correct one. Still, if we are to compartmentalize, as you recommend (and with which I fully agree), then it must follow that even while we endorse Bush’s actions we must abhor his use of coerced funds to achieve those ends. Otherwise we would have to countenance the vileness of ends justifying means. Therefore, it is appropriate to say, Dubya may pursue his Noble Crusade but, morally, only with the money he has voluntarily raised. In fact, not. I refer you to your statement above that strategically it is best “to compartmentalize the government's actions, and give it credit where it's due.” Now, if you are capable of making distinctions between one governmental action and another, why must you presume such a distinction is beyond the capacity of anyone else? So was it proper for Andrew Jackson kill or engage in the ethnic cleansing of certain ethnic populations in the Southeastern U.S.? It is hardly a lifeboat situation, inasmuch as there is a clear alternative that permits the actor to remain unscathed: don’t drop the mega-ton bomb. QUOTE(Charlotte Corday) This is a lifeboat situation. We don’t construct moral systems on the basis of extraordinary emergency cases. . . . He is guilty of wrong-doing if he initiates force. Saving one's own neck ("just following orders") does not entitle one to take the life of another. People who are drafted should turn the guns on their slave masters. A man about to detonate a bomb is about to initiate force just like a drafted soldier; how do you distinguish the two? Assuming the drafted soldier is followed by armed guards making sure he remains loyal, how is that any different than a man forced at gunpoint to press a button? Oakes: Both are cases of people forced against their will to be an accessory in an innocent person's death, just like enemy civilians who must pay taxes to their government. In all three cases they deserve the same thing: death. If that is the case, then all U.S. citizens deserve to die for the death of Randy Weaver’s wife. Do you think you should die for Mrs. Weaver? QUOTE(Charlotte Corday) It is no different. Citizen A is not responsible for the immoral acts of Citizen B, even if B should hold the office of president. If we citizens are responsible for the immoral acts of “our” government, then you and I should be fined or jailed for “our” government’s persecution of Martha Stewart. Oakes: Again you confuse the difference between judicial/moral judgement, and emergency response. Nobody said the drafted soldier or the potential bomb-detonater are "responsible" for the immoral acts of their captors; neither the court of law nor my own moral judgement would find them so. But they must be killed anyway, in defense of the lives of those targeted. Great. Then, force may not be initiated against those who themselves have not initiated force? In that case, “enemy” populations are let off. QUOTE(Charlotte Corday) So the family of a bank robber or rapist should go to prison along with him for giving him “moral support”? Sounds like totalitarianism to me. Oakes: Now you're just context-butchering. The family of the common criminal normally doesn't even know of the crime beforehand, much less ever has or ever will support it. The same cannot be said of the family of the common soldier, whose son, they think, is out to do a moral duty to his country. So should we assume that ALL soldiers’ families are guilty of moral support? How does that follow? Now what method do you pursue to find a discovery?

Public ownership is a myth. I have been a U.S. citizen for a half century, have paid tens of thousands of dollars in taxes, yet do not own a single square inch of government property. Ownership entails the right to sell or trade one's property. If I were an actual owner (or shareholder) of government, I should be able to sell my share of the local library, the fire station, the high school, the art museum, the coliseum, the hospital and the water works. Yet no citizen is permitted to engage in trading of shares at any level of government. Therefore, the idea that “public” property belongs to all of us is just another beguiling collectivist/statist myth. In reality, government property belongs ultimately to those who, from one election to the next, control the reins of power. And that is precisely why “public” resources are mismanaged: those who are only transitory stewards will exploit that property to benefit themselves in the short run (buying votes), rather than maximize the value of the property over the long term. Therefore, we should cheer any transfer of “public” property into the private sector, as Ayn Rand wisely suggested. Not only will such a transfer diminish the size of government, it will tend to encourage allocation of resources in a rational manner. For example, the Post Office would be far better run if, say, the postal workers themselves owned it (with the power to buy and sell shares) instead the amorphous "public," i.e. politicians.

I don’t know that there is any unclaimed land left out there, but I like the rest of Unskinned's response. His idea is the only way out of the dilemma of running a government while observing Rand's ideal of having all property in private hands. This would give us a very minimalist government indeed. Tanks, submarines, jet fighters and Humvees would all be rented from companies like Hertz, Avis and Enterprise. Soldiers and police would have to be paid well enough to buy their own uniforms and even bullets. Fort Meade, Walter Reed Army Hospital, the White House, the Capitol and the Statue of Liberty would all find their way into private hands. I say, no problem. Private owners almost always take better care of their property than public squatters. I'm not sure how we take care of large, expensive disposable items like missiles, torpedos and bombs. I suppose Hertz could own those too and charge the government whenever one is consumed. Sort of like a hotel mini-bar.

One forfeits rights to the degree that he violates the rights of another. Example: if A robs a bank, A has no rightful possession of the money he has taken. At a minimum, justice requires that A surrender to the bank's owners the exact amount taken. Furthermore, by initiating force, A also loses some rights to the property of his own that he had before the robbery and, possibly, to his freedom if he cannot make proper restitution; A must compensate the bank in full for whatever inconvenience was incurred (damages, judicial/security costs, lost interest, lost trade, etc.). So, to answer your question, the bank robber loses certain rights but not all rights. We would not say the bank robber has a right to his car -- if the bank must take possession of the car in order to be compensated for losses incurred due to the robbery. Nor would we say that the robber loses his right to his life, for execution would exceed the restitution that the bank could rightfully claim.

How can it be immoral to coerce tax money from a person but not immoral not to give it back? If your position is that the government should not have to return money to its looted citizens, then you are saying that it has a right to the money. Which is equivalent to saying it has a right to steal in the first place. If we say that a man (in this case a government employee) may not morally take property that rightfully belongs to another, then what moral law would permit the violator of another’s property rights to keep what he has stolen? If we say no man has the right to steal but that some thieves should not have to return what is stolen, then we are maintaining a contradiction. You said I condemned every government act, but now when I bring up a government act that I agree with, you tell me not to bring it up. Now if it is your position that any action that is voluntarily financed is ipso facto a non-governmental act, then it follows that once we have 100% voluntary financing of public services, there would be no government. Is that your position? What people are you referring to? Any and all people killed by government officials or just some particular ones? What are you talking about? If someone breaks into your locked house, steals your shotgun and kills a bank teller with it, there is only one person morally liable for murder: the man who stole the gun and pulled the trigger. Explain how there can be any other moral resolution to the crime. Explain how holding anyone other than the thief/gunman responsible is the correct “view of retaliatory force.” This is a lifeboat situation. We don’t construct moral systems on the basis of extraordinary emergency cases. He is guilty of wrong-doing if he initiates force. Saving one's own neck ("just following orders") does not entitle one to take the life of another. People who are drafted should turn the guns on their slave masters. It is no different. Citizen A is not responsible for the immoral acts of Citizen B, even if B should hold the office of president. If we citizens are responsible for the immoral acts of “our” government, then you and I should be fined or jailed for “our” government’s persecution of Martha Stewart. So the family of a bank robber or rapist should go to prison along with him for giving him “moral support”? Sounds like totalitarianism to me.

In “The Objectivist Ethics,” Ayu Rand defends “man's right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest.” Nothing in that essay mentions man’s right to exist being suspended in war. But an individual’s rights are not dependent on the values of another. I would not say that Mister Swig loses his right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, merely because he is not valuable to me. In “The Textbook of Americanism,” Ayn Rand wrote, “Individualism holds that man has inalienable rights which cannot be taken away from him by any other man, nor by any number, group or collective of other men. Therefore, each man exists by his own right and for his own sake, not for the sake of the group.” I’d like to see some evidence that Objectivism holds that one man’s right to life is subordinate to another man’s values. But this does not follow. Rand wrote, "There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life." Nothing in “The Ojectivist Ethics” says anything about A losing his rights if B behaves badly. And if, as you claim, “Those who live under a dictatorship cannot claim any rights,” then we cannot morally condemn Stalin or Hitler. After all, they cannot have violated anyone’s rights if no one living under their rule can claim any rights. Again, you’ll have to show that a person’s rights are dependent on another’s values. This claim has not been demonstrated. So if my society does not “man-recognize” my right to keep 100% of my income and to own an assault rifle, then I have no such rights? This sounds like legal positivism, not Objectivism. Well, if “rights are out the window” in wartime, why do Objectivists oppose the draft?

Nothing in the above paragraph supports your contention in Post #78 that "we weren't targeting innocents." Indeed, if, as you say, "The issue was to send a warning to Japan that we had the capability of annihilating them totally," it seems you now agree that we were very much engaged in the practice of targeting civilians -- including those too young, too old and too weak to be considered anything other than innocent. No one has stated that we were targeting civilians for the sheer sake of targeting civilians. Let's review: earlier in the thread, I said, “there is no moral difference in theory between targetting innocents in New York and targetting innocents in Japan.” Your rejoinder was "we weren't targeting innocents." And that is simply untrue. The stated policies of RAF commander Sir Arthur Harris and other British officials make it clear that the destruction of great masses of people (including innocents) was precisely the Allied objective: "In 1938 over 22 million Germans lived in 58 towns of over 100,000 inhabitants. If even half our bombs were dropped on . . . these 58 towns the great majority of these inhabitants (about one third of the German population) would be turned out of house and home. Investigation seems to show that having one’s home demolished is most damaging to morale . . . there seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people." (Advice given to the British government in 1942 by Lord Cherwell, a senior scientific adviser. http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/bombing.htm) Left unstated is the grim fact that those tens of thousands who happened to be inside their homes when they were bombed would be left with neither life nor morale. Yes. Accordingly, the U.S. under Roosevelt and Truman did indeed target civilian populations which inevitably included large numbers of innocents. Interesting but irrelevant to the point you raised in Post #78.

Then why even mention that "The government has appropriated much of scientific research. . ."? What on earth was that clause doing in a message that defended accepting a government-sponsored job on certain conditions -- if the government’s appropriation of the field has nothing to do with the morality of taking a job in that field? Furthermore, how does the fact that someone does not advocate taxation give him the right to accept coerced funds and government employment in a field that the government has no business in? If the government should not be sending rockets to Mars paid for with stolen loot, no government employee should be doing it, least of all people who theoretically oppose the idea.

ARI speakers may do as they wish. The point of my post was to challenge the idea that because the state has "appropriated" some particular industry, one morally may take a government-paid job in that industry. There may in fact be a very good argument for permitting those who oppose big government to accept government jobs in those areas that the government ideally has no business in. However, that argument has not yet been made on this thread. I view bribery as no different than payment of taxes -- so long as the objective of the briber is to expand his freedom (or prevent further encroachments on it), rather than to expand the power of government over the peaceful individual. As a U.S. importer of foreign-made goods, I have paid off numerous petty officials in the Third World -- always at their own behest. Call it taxation or bribery, the objective of most bureaucrats is to expand their own power and wealth at the expense of the productive class.

The claim in Post #2 was that "The government has appropriated much of scientific research. . ." From whom, then, was it appropriated? Another government perhaps? But what government would that be? More likely it was not another government that got its research appropriated but the private sector in this country. And what would the private sector be if not the free market?

I'll amend the final sentence for clarity: "Claiming that someone is entitled to accept a job funded by coercive means on the theory that the job would certainly have existed in the free market sounds very much like a rationalization."

But this logic could also apply to the welfare case worker. We could say: since the government has appropriated much of the nation's charity work, there is absolutely nothing wrong with accepting employment as a government social worker as long as you do not advocate in principle the correctness of the taxation and nonobjective laws which makes government appropriation of charity possible in the first place. More fundamentally, how does the fact that the government became involved in a particular industry or profession justify one's getting on the federal payroll? We have no way of knowing, in the absence of our modern, bloated and unconstitutional regime, what direction the free market would have taken. As Greedy Capitalist suggested, it may be that under laissez faire, there would have been "no private analog" to our 40-year space program. Claiming that someone is entitled to a job funded by coercive means on the theory that the job would certainly have existed in the free market sounds very much like a rationalization.

Yes. And if it is the correct moral judgment, then we must embrace it regardless of whether it is easy or difficult to implement in today’s world. For example, in 1820, there was little likelihood that all the Southern slaves would be set free. Yet, regardless of the difficulty of bringing about that morally necessary change, if we accept the morality of individualism, we would still have to say that even in 1820, every slave should have been freed immediately. First of all I should point out that due to current tax law, some citizens, including a few very wealthy ones, pay little or no income tax. But more importantly, how we achieve justice is entirely a separate question from what justice is. Justice in 1820 demanded that every man, woman and child in bondage be emancipated immediately. We would hardly say that our endorsement of freeing all the slaves must await conversion of the South to a voluntary labor/wage system. Then you are not paying attention. I made it clear early in this thread that Dubya could do as he wished as long as he did it with his own money. For the sake of argument, I stipulated that his war policies were correct. But what I would not allow is the proposition that he somehow had a right to stolen funds in order to conduct the war. Unless one accepts the argument for situational morality, taking a citizen’s property is always wrong even if the thief does it for a supposed “greater good.” No. (See above.) The Statue of Liberty is the property of the National Park Service but its restoration was made possible entirely by voluntary contributions. Ayn Rand wrote, “A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group or lose the rights which he does possess.” (“Collectivized ‘Rights’”) Therefore, by joining the administration of a government, a man does acquire the right to do something that he could not have done as a private citizen. If he cannot take the life of an innocent as a private citizen, then he cannot take the life of an innocent as a president. Yes, for the same reason that you are not guilty of murder if someone breaks into your locked house, steals your shotgun and kills a bank teller with it. I have no idea what you mean.

Not true. Targeting civilian centers was explicit Allied policy in both the European and Pacific Theatres in World War II. Sir Arthur Harris, commander of the RAF, made it clear that civilian targets were as legitimate as military targets: "The primary objective of your operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers." (http://www.bostonreview.net/BR20.4/Forbes.html) In this view, killing civilians 1) deprived the enemy of workers in the munitions plants, 2) diverted enemy resources to tending to the masses of dead and wounded, and 3) produced general terror in the enemy population. In Dresden alone (a city with little military value and one overflowing with refugees from the advancing Red Army), the 135,000 killed by fire-bombings was twice the number of people killed in all of Britain by German air attacks. Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. Major General Curtis LeMay had conducted a campaign aimed specifically at destroying Japanese population centers (as separate from military targets). Toward that end, U.S. B-29's burned out “16 square miles of Tokyo, destroying 267,000 buildings, killing more than 100,000 men, women, and children, injuring one million, and leaving another million homeless.” (http://www.bostonreview.net/BR20.4/Forbes.html) Rather than being incidental casualties, civilian residential areas in Tokyo were primary targets. (LeMay’s assistant at the time, Robert McNamara, discusses the intentional bombing of Japanese civilians in last year’s documentary The Fog of War.) There has been a half century-long debate over the military value of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Needless to say, virtually every Japanese city had some value to the war effort. Yet, regardless of what actual military installations were neutralized by the atomic blast, the weapons used were far in excess of what was needed if military targets alone were the objective.

It would be most helpful if we had, at some point in the discussion, a specific definition of "dictatorship." If it means simply non-democratic rule, then there were very few countries that the new American republic would have been able to trade with in the first few decades after its founding. Even today, refusing to permit trade with any non-democratic country would mean choking off access to most of our current foreign petroleum suppliers. It is difficult to see how restricting imports of vital energy sources would foster national security. Furthermore, does it automatically follow that any and all dictatorships are a threat to American freedoms? Should the president and the Congress of the United States, in say 1900, have forbidden trade with Tsarist Russia? While the Russia of Alexander II was freer than the Russia of Lenin, it was still an autocracy, with a ruthless secret police, torture chambers and virtually no formal protections of human rights. How would American citizens have benefited from being denied the right to trade with Russian buyers and sellers in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution?

No, killing 155,000 innocents is far worse than killing 3,000 innocents. So, I do not say they are morally equivalent. However there is no moral difference in theory between targetting innocents in New York and targetting nnocents in Japan.

Reports like this one make Bush sound more and more like Baghdad Bob.

I agree that one should not trade with government thugs. That is why I have always refused to sell any products to state, local or federal governments. The National Park Service once offered me a handsome price for an antique set of surveyor's tools and I turned them down flat.

Ayn Rand said that in regard to a work of art, "It is the viewer's or reader's sense of life that responds...by a complex, yet automatic reaction of acceptance and approval, or rejection and condemnation" ("Art and Sense of Life," Romantic Manifesto, 35). I find that I can respond as intensely to the object below as to any piano concerto. Furthermore, while I do not own this classic automobile (alas!), it makes a very definite statement about the lucky person who does drive it. Who could get behind the wheel of this beauty and not experience unalloyed delight?

Thank you for your thoughtful and gracious response. It's fine with me if you wish to end the debate here.

I'll be happy to deal with it. If Rand or any other Objectivist thinks that the taking of innocent lives is justifiable, then “The Objectivist Ethics” would have to be revised. Otherwise, one is maintaining a contradiction. Ayn Rand wrote, “Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use” (her emphasis). Now if physical force is justifiable against those who did not initiate force, then the preceding statement is in error and must be rejected. The key point is that you cannot have it both ways. In Post #62 you wrote, “I suggest that you do a search and read the threads on that subject, before continuing with your idea that Hiroshima and 9/11 were morally equivalent acts.” In fact, I said no such thing.

If a private citizen steals or commits murder, he has initiated force and must be held responsible. If a member of government steals or commits murder, he too has initiated force and must be held responsible. Holding elective office does not exempt one from moral law.

Anything less than the immediate return of stolen property to the victim is unjust. Good. If it is coercive, then it is immoral. If it is immoral, it should stop. Any other position is an endorsement of the ends justifying the means. I don’t condemn every act, just the immoral acts. Since taxation is theft, I condemn it. Since stolen money rightfully belongs back in the pockets of the victims of theft, I call for the return of income taxes to the producers of those funds. If a man robs banks but also helps widows and orphans, we shouldn’t condemn him for his charity, but we must still demand that he give back what he has stolen.

Ayn Rand made it perfectly clear in "The Objectivist Ethics" that no man was the means to another man's life. Now if it is your position that some men's freedoms or properties may be sacrificed for another person's freedoms or properties, then the onus of the philosophical argument is on you.

Actually, to the extent there is a private sector, any revenues going to it are separate from those going to the government. Now, how does your point on instilling “proper republican principles in the populace” apply here? It is perfectly all right if you don't want to trade with "murderers and thieves"; I , for one, would suggest a complete overhaul of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, where the chief recipients of U.S. aid are notorious warlords and brigands. But, most importantly, what exactly have trade restrictions against Cuba done to bring down the regime there? What has the embargo done to reverse their stealing of “all of your stuff”? Great. Taiwan and Singapore are not “basically English” and still have managed to produce relatively free market economies. Just what facts are being ignored? Outstanding! Let the individual decide. I’ve decided not to voluntarily trade with the government which committed the murders on Ruby Ridge that killed Randy Weaver's dog, son and wife. Glad you support my right not to trade with the murderers.