Charlotte Corday

Precisely. The government did not solicit my consent when it sent me a bill (backed by threat of jail sentence) for nearly half of my income in 2003. I eschew government jobs or any other positions that make me the recipient of unearned, undeserved and coerced wealth. I suppose I would be able to say the same if I knew of anyone on the “gummint” payroll that had withdrawn his/her support for oppression by refusing to accept wages generated by means of coercion (i.e. taxes). On this statement, we agree 100%. Therefore when the government does coerce me, I am clearly not responsible for the coercion.

Alan Greenspan's magnificent essay “Gold and Economic Freedom” appears in Ayn Rand’s 1967 book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. In the essay, Greenspan argues brilliantly and uncompromisingly for a gold standard and against a central (government) bank: Two years ago gold-advocate Congressman Ron Paul wrote Chairman Greenspan a letter than included the following question: Rep. Paul never received an answer. As Ayn Rand would say, “blank-out.” Well, clearly what Greenspan has prevented is monetary stability and the “commodity of objective value” (Greenspan’s own phrase) that he explicitly recommended when he contributed to Rand’s book on capitalism. What he has prevented, as the chief curator of fiat money, is any possibility that the average citizen could “protect savings from confiscation through inflation” (again Greenspan’s own phrase). If it is your position that the U.S. must make “gold and economic freedom” subordinate to building the war machine against Russia and China, why not return to the gold bullion prohibition imposed by FDR?

. History is not always destiny. Romania has historically been dominated by the Ottomans, the Czarist Russians, the Germans and the Stalinist Russians. Nicolae Ceausescu was one of the worst tyrants in post-war Europe. When Ceausescu was deposed and executed in 1989, the country was a basket-case. Yet today Romania is making enormous economic strides, has swept former communists out of government and is rapidly moving toward privatization. So tell us exactly what have trade restrictions done toward instilling “proper republican principles in the populace”? I guess that given their thousand-year cultural/historical background, there’s little chance of capitalism gaining a foothold in Taiwan or Hong Kong or the predominantly Chinese Singapore! Do we embargo the Fascist Totalitarian types or just the Communist Totalitarian types?

So if a majority in the U.S. want the government to, say, limit the sale of certain weapons, or provide guaranteed health care, or break up "monopolies," or provide “free” housing, what's to stop them? I don't disagree with this, only with your earlier statement that “If the government is ‘by the people and for the people’, and you're one of the people, then calling this government the enemy makes you your own enemy, not to mention the rest of the people.” This notion makes the victims of an oppressive government morally responsible for the aggressions of the government against them. Sorry, but the government does not rule on my behalf any more than a rapist operates on my behalf.

But stealing ideas is precisely what Fred Weiss alleges. Here are his words from Post #3: "he blatantly steals ideas from Ayn Rand." As for Rothbard adopting Rand's "integration, i.e. the complete worldview," I see nothing in Rothbard's memo that would support that conclusion. There is a critique of Rousseauism, but here Rothbard could just as easily have been influenced by Mises as Rand. In Human Action (1949), Mises writes, “The natural condition of man is extreme poverty and insecurity. It is romantic nonsense to lament the passing of the happy days of primitive barbarism.” (p. 165) There is a discussion of man’s capacity for knowledge and the tabula rasa, but very similar views can be found in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). There is Rothbard’s argument against the anti-intellectualism of those who favor primitivism, yet much of what he says echoes Irving Babbitt and Thomas Macaulay’s criticism of 19th century Romantics. There is the concept of scientific ignorance as the basis for irrational superstition, however this was a truism among Enlightenment thinkers. Rothbard discusses problems with the society of caste and status; Mises in Human Action had dealt with the way the caste system retards human progress. Rothbard defends the Industrial Revolution; so had Mises in Human Action. If anyone appears to have been slighted by not getting enough credit from Rothbard, it would have to be his teacher Ludwig von Mises. Yet there is no indication that Rothbard’s memo was in any sense a regugitation of Rand’s or Galt’s words. As I have already shown, the ideas in Rothbard’s memo that Weiss seems to think are uniquely Rand’s have their provenance in Western philosophy predating Atlas Shrugged.

Look, I think that U.S. aid to Stalin in the 1940s was one of the most villainous acts ever taken by our government. And I'm all for restoring wealth to those who were looted by Castro. The problem is that there is no historical argument for using trade barriers to undermine dictators. They just don’t work. In fact, the 40-year embargo has actually helped Castro keep his grip on the Cuban people. Now if it is your position that the U.S. and other free nations should place trade barriers on communist countries, then there would have been no trade with Poland during the Cold War. Yet it was the lowering of trade barriers beginning in the late 196os that gave the Polish people a taste of the West and fueled popular opposition to the communist regime. The countries that have been most isolated by the U.S. are precisely the ones where dictators have managed to retain their power. If trading with a country legitimizes its theft, then we shouldn’t trade with Canada, Britain, Japan or dozens of other countries. After all, they each practice a form of theft called the income tax.

Nope. The government is a creature of the majority, not of all the people. If the majority wants to enact laws that force the productive few to finance the livelihood of the less productive many, they may do so at the drop of a gavel. We can hardly blame the looted rich for the immorality of vote-buying politicians and their clients. Hitler came to power by popular vote. Do we say then the Jews themselves are responsible for the gas chambers and the ovens? This recalls what Ayn Rand said in Atlas Shrugged: “It was like blaming the victim of a hold-up for corrupting the integrity of a thug.” There is no denying that China is run by a criminal gang which practices human rights violations on a massive scale. It is also true the non-state sector has grown significantly since the late seventies and now accounts for nearly three-fourths of industrial output. Based on the comparative histories of Cuba and Eastern Europe, it is easy to see that free trade works better than protectionism and isolation in weakening communist regimes.

Thanks for asking. If we can get back to what we had under the Articles of Confederation, I'll make a generous donation to the U.S. Treasury.

That is not in dispute. What we were discussing is the morality of using money taken from a rightful owner against his will. The issues of whether or not the government is at its proper size or how many people would support a roll-back in taxes may be interesting and important, but they are not relevant to the moral question. Let’s go back to what I wrote in Post #28: “I think Bush should be allowed to spend whatever he wants to on what he calls ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ as long as he doesn't use funds coerced from wage earners.” That you may approve of what the president is doing with tax money and that you may believe that the expenditures fit neatly into what you think an ideal government should be, won’t make the money in the U.S. Treasury any less stolen. On the question of where ill-gotten gains should go, there is only one right answer: to the rightful owner. Call it simplistic if you wish, but there are clear right and wrong answers to the question of killing innocent people. The invasion of Iraq is a perfect example of Hayek’s law of unintended consequences. The idea that you can impose an Arab Massachusetts in the Euphrates River through sheer military power was a foolish notion from the start and will have disastrous consequences no matter how many men and dollars we pour down the rathole.

If, as Ayn Rand says, “Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use” (her emphasis), then it does not matter how lofty or noble your goals are, no man’s life or property is a means to your ends. You are misreading me. Here is what I wrote: “There is no moral difference between bombing innocent people in Hiroshima and bombing innocent people in the World Trade Center.”

Very interesting but all beside the point. My first post in this thread was to demand evidence for Fred Weiss’s charge that Rothbard’s private memo on Polyani had stolen ideas from Ayn Rand. In response, Fred offered up a passage from the Rothbard memo and claimed that it was “virtually verbatim from Galt's Speech.” I replied by citing several ancient and modern philosophers who had taken the same positions as Rothbard on primitivism, epistemology and free will. In short, the ideas expressed in “Down With Primitivism: A Thorough Critique of Polanyi” may not have originated with Rothbard, but they did not originate with Rand either. Now you can employ the ad hominem fallacy and argue all day long with strawmen of your own creation, but the simple fact is that I never said, “Rand created nothing new . . .” etc. Weiss and I were discussing a specific set of ideas which he claimed were stolen from Rand. If you had bothered to read my reply carefully, you should have been able to discern that my contention was not that all of Rand's ideas are second-hand, but rather that the particular set of ideas quoted from the Rothbard essay were a part of the literature of philosophy long before Rand arrived on the scene. So not only are your two messages vituperative and uncivil, they are also completely irrelevant to the discussion going on.

That was a fascinating post, fervent, vigorous, full of ad hominems and providing not a single word in support of of the allegations made by Mr. Weiss.

I've noticed that some conservatives and Objectivists spend more time worrying about what foreign governmentd are doing to their subjects than what the U.S. government is doing to us. I guess altruism is a difficult habit to put aside.

Well, the current president has not declared them an enemy or a country that is off limits for trade. In any case, if the federal government can order a U.S. citizen not to trade with China, would it not have the authority to force people in Pakistan, Japan, Australia, Russia and India not to trade with China? And what do you suppose the Chinese leaders would do with their military when that happened? "When goods cannot cross borders, armies will." No, in fact I think you should stop trading with China immediately. Right this instant. And get your friends and neighbors to stop too. U.S. policy in World War II was to give funds coerced from taxpayers to "good" mass murderers so that they could fight the bad mass murderers. If you think that free trade is the equivalent of giving away the plans of secret weappons, then you are obviously confused about the subject.

The government that takes nearly half my income and gives me a burgeoning police state in return is my enemy. By the way, why do you need the government to do your work for you? Don't like Chinese goods? Don't buy 'em. Don't want your neighbors buying from China? Try persuasion for a change.

This is too funny. You don’t consider Rothbard “important enough to waste time on,” but apparently you do have enough time to post five messages on this thread charging him with stealing ideas. In other words, there is enough time to level a serious accusation but not quite enough time to prove it. Now, Fred, if the “proof is readily available,” why not just put an end to the discussion and state exactly what part of Galt’s 33,000-word speech was unscrupulously lifted without credit? Then you have completely misunderstood Hume, because the very point that he was making is that primitive man, ignorant of the laws of nature, lives in a constant state of terror of capricious gods. In short, the idea that early man’s fears and irrational superstitions were the product of his ignorance of science is not a concept that was newly minted in 1957 but had been around at least since 1755. The same is true for those other ideas that supposedly originated with the author of Atlas Shrugged: the argument for free will over instinctual determinism, the critique of the perfect state of nature myth, and the “tabula rasa” metaphor.

I see. We live in a time when the public would never approve of rolling back taxation. So we must roll back government first, which, of course, the public will have no objection to. What on earth does someone’s protesting or not protesting have to do with moral entitlement to property? If goods are stolen from A, his right to the return of those goods exists independently opinions spoken or unspoken. Then you should not support the current puppet regime in Iraq with its theocratic constitution (“Islam is the official religion of the State and is to be considered a source of legislation”), it’s coercive egalitarianism (“Discrimination against an Iraqi citizen on the basis of his gender, nationality, religion, or origin is prohibited”), and welfare statism (“The individual has the right to security, education, health care, and social security.”) http://www.cpa-iraq.org/government/TAL.html There is no moral difference between bombing innocent people in Hiroshima and bombing innocent people in the World Trade Center. One’s “needs” do not constitute a valid claim to the life or property of another. Saddam or not, the U.S. occupiers have made no attempt to work within existing social/political structures. That is why the overwhelming majority of Iraqis view them as unwanted outsiders. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/20...oll-cover_x.htm It is not obvious at all. The U.S. war to topple Saddam (at the urging of suspected Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi) has accomplished nothing less that getting rid of Iran’s chief enemy and making it easier to set up a pro-Iranian Shiite republic in Baghdad.

When Doris Kearns Goodwin was accused of plagiarism, her accusers did not refuse to provide examples of her word theft; they gleefully cited the original side by side with Goodwin’s text. You, Fred, have alleged a theft of ideas, and then ludicrously assert that it’s up to the person who doubts the claim to prove it. The burden of proof is on you, Fred.

And you seem unwilling or unable to provide a single example of a government that changed its policies as a result of being embargoed. I sell goods made in China. I have met the owner of the factory that manufactures them. He is not a communist. He is not pointing missiles at me. He is not my enemy.

What you have not shown is that the suspension of U.S. trade with China would necessarily produce a reduction in China’s military spending. In fact, it could very well have the opposite effect. The Arab world’s boycott of Israel certainly did not cause the Israelis to slash their defense budget. Fine. It deprived them of income. The vital point is that the embargo did not bring about any reduction in military spending by the Cubans, did not undermine the communist dictatorship there, did not liberate one single Cuban citizen. I recommend Ralph Raico’s essay, "World War I: The Turning Point" in The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories, Edited by John V. Denson, Second Expanded Edition (Transaction, 1999, xxxii + 535 pgs.)

Who gets to decide who is the "enemy"?

I read your original point in Post #8: "My view is that China is a growing threat to the US. One of the biggest things we could do to reduce that threat would be to cut off all trade." Yet I see no reason to believe trade restrictions would have any effect on China's military spending. Under Brezhnev the Soviet Union was economically in worse economic straits than China in 2004 and yet it managed to continue its annual increases in the defense budget. If we are going to adopt a policy, are we not entitled to some empirical evidence that it will work? So just where have trade sanctions against a dictatorship been effective? Did current sanctions against Iran persuade it not to develop a nuclear energy program? What about North Korea? What trade restrictions can "accomplish" is the destruction of international commerce. Bear in mind, World War I was largely the result of the collapse of 19th century free trade and the rise of economic nationalism. As the great Frederic Bastiat predicted, "When goods cannot cross borders, armies will." The same thing that Pepsi got for the soft drinks it sold there: $

No. I’m merely pointing our that U.S. trade embargoes have been notoriously ineffective at bringing down or softening dictatorships. Look how well it has worked on Cuba. By 1991 U.S. annual grain shipments to the USSR were at the $1.5 billion level. That same year Bush I signed a reciprocal most-favored-nation tariff treatment with Gorbachev. China won’t starve if it loses U.S. trade. It will still be able to sell its products throughout the rest of the world. If anything, a U.S. embargo would only strengthen the hand of Chinese hard-liners against those who favor a more open society. What have trade barriers accomplished in, say, Iran?

There is no reason to suppose that China's government would collapse or even become less militaristic following a U.S. trade embargo. History argues the contrary. The Soviet Union didn't fall during the several decades that the U.S. refused to trade with them. It fell when trade between the two countries was flourishing.