Johnfloyd6675

The first one accidentally got lossily compressed on a flash drive and I lost the good version, so its grainy.

Reality is as chronological as it is physical. Anarchy precedes government, government precedes order, and order precedes rights. The nature of each new establishment denotes the reality over which it will preside. In a communist order, rights to life and liberty (irrespective of abstract deontology) do not exist; rights to other people's stuff do. The order defended by the state is the provisor and guarantor of rights. The philosophical architecture of capitalism does not reveal the One True Way; it just constructs the best way possible.

Atlas Shrugged shows what happens to organized humanity when the looters assume a monopoly of violence. Without coercive statecraft that defends the capitalist order, the entirety of civilization collapses under the weight of top-down parasitism. Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan predicts such degeneration in the absence of a government with absolute sovereignty over its subjects. A Lockean state, of the classically liberal flavor that Rand asserted would be based in "self-ownership", implies a population composed of individuals who, in their state of nature, would be peaceful and productive; the state is perhaps useful but not essential, and by implication, anarchy is a viable alternative to coercive government. Looters, Locke implies, would not run roughshod over the creators. This is nonsense. States necessarily commit themselves to the preservation of a certain order for their societies; in the case of an Objectivist-led administration, that order is capitalism. A state cannot commit itself to the defense of "inalienable rights" and then assert that inalienabilities are forfeit with the commission of a crime. The Objectivist state, as an agent of the capitalist order, is not a "necessarily evil" but an indispensable servant. Your family and a murderous gangster are kept separate not by mutually respected, inherent priveleges, but by the guns of the police force. Is it immoral for the state to violate a criminal's right to liberty by imprisoning him? Of course not; hauling a destructive barbarian away from the stuff he wants to destroy is a legitimately violent affirmation of the capitalist order by the agents of that order. As long as our heroes stand tall enough that smaller men may hide in their shadows, we shall need a state, and we shall need to make sure that state is powerful enough that all the looters in the world could not smash what capitalism has given the world.