PoliticalJunkie

Rand addresses this exact topic on a Q & A on one of the audio tapes I have. She basically says that the settlers were not immoral to "take over" the land because the American Indians did not recognize property rights, were extremely collectivist (i.e. tribes), and more or less lived like savages.

I agree with the city lights fom the plane idea. I just took a flight a couple weeks ago and was pretty amazed seeing the Florida panhandle from coast to coast at night. Also, on that same flight it was amazing taking off in the rain but then flying above the perfectly white rolling clouds with the sun beaming. I felt like I was in a dream. (Edited to fix grammatical errors)

I just wanted to add my 2 cents in about the tsunami victim situation and whether it is moral for us to send money to the victims. Like stated earlier, morality exists in the context of choice. If my goverment sends money to the victims of the tsunami, I was not given a choice. That money was not "my goverment's" money. It was mine, my family's, my neighbors, and every other citizen who was robbed of their earned money through coercive taxation. We do not have a direct say on specifically where our tax money goes, nor do we have a direct say on how much we actually pay. Therefore, the money is coercively obtained by the goverment and coercively distributed by the goverment. Now let's put this in the context of a very possible but hypothetical situation. Let's say that I have a parent who has a life threatening disease which has no cure. I would want every bit of money that I could spare in order to VOLUNTARILY donate to research that particular disease. This would be moral because #1 I was not coerced and #2 my parent's life is obviously of higher value to me (and rightly so) than any "unnecessary" material objects I would gain by spending my "extra money". However, in reality, a portion of that "extra money" that I have earned has already been coercively taken from me by the goverment. Therefore, the goverment has coercively made a decision for me (in this particular case) that giving money to the tsunami victims is more important (and thus a higher value) than donating to a cause that could potentially save my own parent from dying. Now, there may be situations where someone has "extra" money that would be spent only on pleasure, not on a crucial situation like I described above. But this does not warrant the government taking money coercively and donating it or using it for any "good cause" that it sees fit, ESPECIALLY in light of the fact that this good cause might overrride a good cause that the victim of the coercive taxation would have valued much more. The only fair and neutral and MORAL way to handle such a situation is to allow people to have all of their money and CHOOSE which causes they wish to donate to based on whether or not the cause is a value to their life. (Even if this means that some will not donate at all). If the goverment did not steal our money and use it for situations like the tsunami disaster that doesn't mean that America would not have helped the victims. There would no doubt be plenty of citizens who would willingly send money (which plenty did on top of the money that was immorally coercively sent by the government) and at least it would have been up to the choice and discretion of the individual to choose that cause as a value.

DaveOdden, thank you for the correction. You are correct in what you said and I was not clear enough on that.

The right to bear arms simply assures you the right to defend yourself in the event that you are attacked first. The simple idea of having a gun (or a knife or club or mace or anything else that could potentially hurt or kill someone) in your posession does not mean you are going to use it. I could own a gun for my entire life and not fire it once. However, if I am attacked or someone breaks into my house I may use that weapon in retaliation. In other words, just having a gun is not infringing on someone else's basic right to life. It is only when I use that gun on someone who has not threatened me that I have taken away someone's rights. Therefore it is the government's job only to reprimand the person who initiates force with his or her gun, not the person who simply possesses a gun for protective purposes. If the goverment has the right to deny its citizens gun ownership, why then should it not also have the right to seize steak knives for example, another potentially deadly item. Choosing to make guns illegal when other weapons remain legal (and rightly so) would be arbitrary and irrational. So long as someone is not actively using a weapon to harm someone else who has not initiated force the goverment has no moral right to stop them from owning that weapon. You must remember that the potential to infringe on someone's rights is not equivelant to actually infringing on someone's rights.