Reblogged:Government Officials Are Also Human

[Gus Van Horn blog]

One of the big selling points of socialism in our culture is the assumption that human beings are "selfish." Such criticism nearly always comes from ignorance of -- or a desire to suppress the whole idea of -- actual selfishness (i.e., egoism as a rational moral code). Champions of socialism say or conveniently assume that man is incapable of understanding that lying, cheating, stealing, and murder are wrong. This is in large part because these champions themselves see such things as "practical" -- as evidenced by the fact that their whole system is built on theft and necessarily entails repression. Why would they have the ability or motivation to imagine otherwise?

In fact -- as a century of attempts to implement their alleged utopia should amply demonstrate to their audiences -- such measures are actually highly impractical. But socialists have been spreading their misanthropic views through our culture for such a long time that many people already believe or take at face value any claim that people -- particularly in business -- are predatory and need to be kept on a short leash by the government.

Socialists -- blindly or conveniently -- fail to mention that their schemes rely on ... human beings ... for their implementation. Worse, there will be no checks on their behavior once they have been put in charge of everything -- everything except the one thing a government ought to be doing: protecting individuals from the indiscriminate initiation of force by others.

A trip to the airport in Venezuela provides us with some great examples and on many levels all at once:

No matter how routine this might seem, we should never forget what a great achievement this is. (Image by JESHOOTS.COM, via Unsplash, license.)

Crime and safety is another growing concern. Since 2017, security for the airport has been provided by the National Bolivarian Guard, or GNB, Venezuela's highly militarized police force. An investigation from ABC, one of Spain's largest newspapers, reported that passengers on international-bound flights were being extorted by GNB officers at the check-in area before going through any security checkpoint. According to ABC, members of this "military mafia" regularly threatened to deny boarding and demanded foreign currency, tech gadgets, or jewelry from travelers.

Arriving passengers are being greeted with similar treatment. Bands of thieves are said, by several media accounts, to be colluding with customs officers who identify potential wealthy targets entering the country on international flights. The travelers are then stopped at gunpoint on the freeway that links Caracas and Maiquetía. In one heavily publicized incident, a man was shot and killed by a sicario (or hitman) in August 2017 while checking in at an airline counter in front of dozens of people. [links omitted, bold added]

The main article is about the sharp decline in upkeep and flights at the most important airport in Venezuela. Both are due to the fact that the government has been looting businesses and individuals for decades, with the predictable consequences of causing (a) anyone with a grain of sense to avoid doing business in Venezuela and (b) the remaining loot to eventually run out or run down. So the airport is a mess, and most airlines have, very sensibly, bailed out. Furthermore, the whole economy is a mess, and the officials who run it are themselves being impoverished by their own policies, which they never question on a moral or practical level.

Is it any surprise, in light of the desperation they have brought on themselves -- and their own cannibalistic moral code -- that they join the more brutal criminals they have been imitating all along? A saying about the murderer winning over the pickpocket comes to mind.

The fact that officials are part of the government neither sanctifies the stealing they began at the start of their "revolution" nor does it somehow immunize them against the moral failings socialists are so fond of attributing, almost always unjustly, to businessmen.

The only difference now is that the socialists have given actual predators moral cover and free reign to terrorize ordinary people doing what too many of us take for granted as ordinary things -- like walking through an airport unmolested or buying a plane ticket.

We should try doing the opposite of what socialists do: Remember in the positive sense that businessmen are human beings, and in the negative that government officials are, too.

-- CAV

Link to Original

[merjet]

11 hours ago, Gus Van Horn blog said:

actual selfishness (i.e., egoism as a rational moral code).

Aaron Smith of ARI preaches to the choir. https://newideal.aynrand.org/whats-wrong-with-our-notion-of-selfishness/