Charlotte Corday

You mentioned a county, a city, a neighborhood and a block. You responded to a post in which I wrote, “The secessionists might argue, with good reason, that their own breakaway government would be more vigilant and effective in preventing crime. In such a case, there is no reason why the larger state should not wish to let the dissident territory go its own way. . .” So the question I am raising is, why can’t a territory secede on the grounds that its own government could more efficiently and effectively protect individual rights? Your conclusion does not follow from the premises. It is entirely conceivable that a central government could formally embrace Objectivist principles but (because men are not infallible) provide services that are less than satisfactory or too costly. As for changing the philosophical premises that exist in a culture, I think that’s a splendid proposal. I’d like to teach the world to sing in Objectivist harmony. But changing the culture will not miraculously result in the perfect performance of all government officials. And while we’re waiting for their performance to improve, why can’t our province go its own way? But history shows that people have been able change the rate at which they are taxed and the structure of their government without a cultural revolution. Accordingly, I see no reason why redressing specific political grievances must await an Objectivist kingdom come. In my lifetime, the draft ended and abortion and the ownership of gold bullion were legalized. I was active in all three political struggles. Was it wrong to push for those changes while the culture remained predominantly altruist-collectivist-statist? As I have previously explained, some provinces may be tax cows for the rest of the nation: they would provide a larger portion of the tax revenue but not receive a proportionately greater amount of services. This is not hypothetical; it is the very case in the county where I reside. The northern, mostly suburban part of the county literally wants to secede because even though it is not densely populated, it provides ¾ of the property taxes collected yet does not receive a proportionately larger share of county services (including police protection). Would a belief in Objectivism necessarily persuade the majority in South County to give its rich neighbors proportionately greater police services? Perhaps. But if it didn’t, shouldn’t we uphold the right of the minority to form a separate, more cost-effective government?

I'm not burning the whole man, just the part of him that was a hypocrite. Because slavery is inherently inhuman, the only way a slave-holder can treat his human property well is by releasing them from bondage. George Washington treated his slaves well; Jefferson did not. Simply this: for all his high minded talk about the evil of slavery, Jefferson granted freedom to only a handful of the hundreds of men. women and children he owned. On the other hand, slavery did end for those on Washington's Mount Vernon plantation. I didn't evade it. Nor do I take issue with it. I was responding specifically to the claim that Jefferson treated his human property well. Great. Someone should have gotten the word out to the people in bondage at Monticello. Paul Finkelman and Conor Cruise O’Brien have both cited Jefferson’s own words in his letters and journals on the necessity of whipping runaways. You are, of course, free to imagine something entirely different, including the idea that Jefferson let his chattel go free. This is a strawman argument. I have made no statements about the “essence” of Jefferson. I would suggest that you add Notes on the State of Virginia and Jefferson’s letters to your reading list. In Notes, Jefferson states his belief that manumitted slaves could not survive in the United States. "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances" made freedom within Virginia impossible. Jefferson also feared a "mixture of colour here." Instead, Jefferson favored “extirpation”: "If a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another." Jefferson supported colonization even though he knew that the cost of transporting so many people to Africa made it "impossible to look at the enterprise a second time." However, "expatriation to the governments of the W[esr] I[ndies] of their own colour" was "entirely practicable and greatly preferable to the mixture of colour here." In any case, Jefferson himself never took advantage of this option. As Paul Finkelman points out, “Jefferson could have freed any of his slaves by sending them out of the state, or he could have freed the slaves he took to Europe and the North. Moreover, Jefferson’s correspondence shows that while in France he advised other Americans there how to retain their slaves in violation of French law. He wrote, no doubt from personal experience, of ‘an instance where a person bringing in a slave, and saying nothing about it, has not been disturbed in his possession.’" (Letter to Paul Bentalou, Aug. 25, 1786.)

So has our embargo of Cuba made the problem go away?

The threat not to trade if put into effect does mean the use of force -- against Americans who attempt to trade with a foreign nation under ban. And that sort of bullying often has a result opposite to the desired effect. How successful is the four decade-old U.S. trade embargo against Castro's Cuba? Rather than weakening him, the embargo allowed Castro to convince his subjects that the U.S. was their mortal enemy. Indeed, it is not Castro but the Cuban people who are currently suffering most from U.S. trade restrictions.

Stephen is right to suggest that you start with Rand's own words on the subject. Then, for an alternate view see Roy Childs's essay, "An Open Letter to Ayn Rand" at http://www.dailyobjectivist.com/Extro/OpenLettertoRand.asp Here is an excerpt: "It is my contention that limited government is a floating abstraction which has never been concretized by anyone; that a limited government must either initiate force or cease being a government; that the very concept of limited government is an unsuccessful attempt to integrate two mutually contradictory elements: statism and voluntarism. Hence, if this can be shown, epistemological clarity and moral consistency demands the rejection of the institution of government totally, resulting in free market anarchism, or a purely voluntary society."

Then Thomas Jefferson the Emancipator was fighting none other than Thomas Jefferson the Slave Owner. In the end, Jefferson the Slave Owner won. At his death, Jefferson’s human property remained unfreed. I suppose that’s the reason why he whipped runaways. He didn’t want them to end up in one of those awful Yankee free states. In truth, Jefferson was a spendthrift whose lavish lifestyle wildly exceeded his means. He didn’t free his slaves for the simple reason that he refused to give up his books and fine wines. For example, he financed a shopping spree in France, by selling 85 slaves -- to other slave-holders (Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. Armonk, N.Y. and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1996, p. 150). The claim that it was illegal to free slaves is utterly fictitious. Jefferson’s fellow Virginian George Washington freed his slaves and not a disparaging word was heard. On the contrary, I’m using Jefferson’s own words against him. He said he regarded slavery as evil, yet did nothing to end it at his own doorstep. What’s the word for someone who doesn’t practice what he preaches? Ergo, slavery did exist in America in the 1600s -- British North America. The point is that the existence of slavery prior to Jefferson's time does not make Jefferson exempt from moral judgment, any more than prior centuries of witch burning made the judges of Salem, Mass. morally exempt.

Tell me, if the government is doing such a splendid job protecting individual rights, why on earth would so many regions and so many people want to secede from it? Is that a problem? I don’t know of any government which has had a policy of refusing to renew union with a repentant breakaway province. I would like to see some proof for this assertion. Why is mere inefficiency not grounds for secession? After all, if the central government is failing at the basic task of protecting rights, then the secessionist province would be justified in sundering its ties on the basis of self-defense. Furthermore, why should electoral politics be regarded as a more “rational mechanism” for change than secession? I need not point out that secession can be accomplished peacefully. In 1905, Norway seceded from Sweden without bloodshed. Very well. What is the intellectual and moral foundation for denying the people of a province the right to establish a separate and freer government?

Not true. By his own account, Jefferson flogged slaves. And the flogging was especially severe when it was applied to the backs of runaways. Jefferson was also responsible for writing the slave code of Virginia, which put those who engaged in miscegenation outside the laws of the commonwealth, making them fair game for lynching. See http://slate.msn.com/id/3126/ So? Prior to Jefferson, Britain also forced the quartering of armed troops in private homes. Yet somehow the new republic managed to get rid of that practice. Really? The Virginia colony formally recognized slavery in 1661. See http://www.ipl.org/div/timeline/

Recognizing reality also means acknowledging moral truths. Apparently, it is your position that Objectivists elected to office should to some degree maintain the current welfare state -- for the benefit of the class of tax parasites. Of course, government doesn’t create wealth; it merely takes it from someone else. So would it be proper for Objectivist office holders to continue the practice of imprisoning people who refuse to give up a portion of their income to the state? And perhaps you won’t mind answering the question I posed earlier: If Nazi Germany had been liberated in 1938, would it have been appropriate for the new German government to maintain the existing concentration camps on the grounds that freeing the inmates would glut the labor market? I’m afraid that this does not clear up the issue. What if a certain province complains that the central Objectivist government is not doing a good enough job protecting individual rights in the province? The secessionists might argue, with good reason, that their own breakaway government would be more vigilant and effective in preventing crime. In such a case, there is no reason why the larger state should not wish to let the dissident territory go its own way – unless it was purely the desire to continue to milk the province for its tax revenue. And why is it necessarily the case that this matter must be decided through the electoral process in the larger political entity? It may well be that relative to the other provinces, the dissident province contributes a larger portion of tax revenue but gets fewer government services in return. In such a case the electorate of the larger state would be net tax consumers and have little incentive to vote to give up a valuable tax cow.

Really? What part of the Constitution says that? Fine. But if Badnarik or someone of his beliefs should gain the presidency, it certainly would suggest that belief in laissez faire was not limited to a small portion of the electorate. I didn't know that placing limits on the number of entrants to the job market was one of the proper functions of government -- especially when those limits are enforced by keeping thousands of innocent people in prison. If Nazi Germany had been liberated in 1938, would it have been appropriate for the new German government to maintain the existing concentration camps on the grounds that freeing the inmates would glut the labor market? We may also be ignoring an important economic truth here: it is very costly for the government to keep thousands of people in prison. The money it takes to incarcerate drug offenders is ultimately diverted from the private sector, which would otherwise have put the money to work providing people with the goods and services they actually want -- and thereby creating job opportunities for thousands.

Is it your position that keeping unemployment statistically low is more important than freeing people from unjust imprisonment? Why not let the poor slob rotting in jail worry about his own livelihood? Better yet, why not say to him, "Say, if you caan't find work in the marketplace, you can always come back and live here at taxpayers' expense!" Which is worse: massive pardons once a week or massive arrests of innocent people every week?

How does government enforce its monopoly without initiating force? Why should a group of men who impose a monopoly on the use of retaliatory force not themselves be considered a gang or statist regime? How does government’s enforcement of its monopoly on the use of retaliatory force qualify as “defensive force”? A citizen who uses appropriate retaliation independently of the government has not initiated force against the government and therefore cannot be considered a proper target for the use of government force. How does that differ from the status quo? We have a government now, and private thugs still initiate force every day and in every part of the nation. Actually, prohibiting a citizen from engaging in proper retaliatory force is a violation of that citizen’s right to self-defense. Thus, there are moral grounds for objecting even to minimalist government.

But surely prohibitions on secession allow the larger nation-state to immunize itself from accomodating the preferences of dissident regions -- including those which are pro-freedom (like the late Republic of Biafra). May we assume that you would have no objections to secession if it meant a net increase in the liberty of the residents of the breakaway territory? If the state in question were something other than "a truly free, Objective government," would you then support the right of secession? And what if the state merely claimed that it was "a truly free, Objective government," but in fact was not? In a dispute between a self-described “free Objectivist government” and secessionist Objectivist rebels, why should we necessarily side with those in power? Consider, also, the possibility of a state which acts in a moral fashion (i.e. according to the Objectivist ethics), but is run foolishly or inefficiently or imposes unreasonably high contract fees (or whatever else its means is of raising revenue are). Why shouldn’t secession be permitted in such circumstances?