"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his."
This is a snippet from John Galt's address to the nation, taken from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. If you haven't yet read this book, I suppose there is no need to anymore - you are living it.
This book should be REQUIRED reading for any human attempting to start a business or hold public office. Most business owners are quite familiar with the concepts expounded in this book, whether they've read it or not. Sadly, it seems none of our elected officials (regardless of political affiliation) seem to have even the slightest grasp of what is important.
This book was written in the 1940s and 1950s. The author's prediction of the future state of the world and the state of this country is frighteningly close to what is happening today in slow motion and what our future holds along our current path.
Posts
4 comments:
we should have never entered the iraq war, agreed
Saddam Hussein was an aggressor who used force. His force was met with force - the only option available when dealing with an aggressor. If you doubt he used force to get his way, perhaps you should ask the families of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens who were murdered or tortured because they didn't agree with Saddam's brand of oppression.
I'm pretty certain that while Galt acknowledges an army is there to protect from foreign invaders, that's the end of his opinion on the military (in this section of text). He's referring to the force the government takes on its own citizens... such as through ridiculous, contradicting rules/ absurdly high taxes on prosperous businesses/ etc.
I'm not sure Ayn Rand would have agreed with the specific policy you described above, Sean. Interesting application.
You may be right, I'll concede.
Post a Comment