Humanitarian with the Guillotine - 3

Posted by mshupe 1 year, 2 months ago to Government
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Chapter XX, Excerpt 3 of 3
The Humanitarian With the Guillotine

The power already exists; if there can be a right to tax people for armies, navies, local police, road making, or any other imaginable purpose, sure there must be a prior right to tax people for the preservation of life itself. There is only one way . . . the use of political power to its full extension. The source of the relief can only be the means of those who are not in such need. The good people give him the power he demands because they have already accepted his false premise.

The political official is tolerable well paid, risking nothing himself. The sweatshop employer hadn’t much capital. He risked the little he had in hiring people. He was accused of doing them a horrible wrong, and his business cited as revealing the intrinsic brutality of capitalism. Politicians get the votes out of distress; humanitarians land lucrative jobs for themselves distributing relief funds; producers, both capitalists and workingmen, have to take the abuse and pay the shot.

They do not think over time and space, as civilized men must think. Forgetting the American axiom that government itself is not self-existent, government has no rights. Innumerable speculative thinkers, inventors, and organizers have contributed to the comfort and happiness of their fellow men – because that was not their objective. The philanthropist, politician, and pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others.


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  • Posted by VetteGuy 1 year, 2 months ago
    I was reading the discussion of "sweatshop" owners and workers in GOTM immediately after reading an article about the UAW strike.

    In a true free market, I wonder what the average UAW workers wage would be? How much value does he actually contribute? Or put another way, what wage would the auto manufacturers have to offer to get an adequate number of workers?
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  • Posted by j_IR1776wg 1 year, 2 months ago
    TGOTM was published in 1943 and the concepts expressed are still as fresh. Joe Biden named Penny Pritzker to lead the economic recovery of Ukraine. https://www.breitbart.com/national-se...

    Who is Penny Pritzker? Forbes gives her a Philanthropy score of 3 whatever that means. She’s worth $3.3 billion today. I wonder what she will be worth when Ukraine has recovered?
    https://www.forbes.com/profile/penny-...

    And, then there’s the Clinton’s revival of their Clinton Global Initiative. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politi...

    Did you catch that “…new-humanitarian-aid-to-ukrainians…”

    Ayn Rand thought that Isabel Paterson’s book would change the world. It is extremely frustrating that it has not. They, the humanitarians, never go away. It almost makes one want to contemplate revolution.
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    • Posted by VetteGuy 1 year, 2 months ago
      I have had similar thoughts while reading TGOTM. Paterson had all this stuff figured out in 1943! How has this knowledge gotten lost in today's society!
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      • Posted by j_IR1776wg 1 year, 2 months ago
        One can approach any idea in only one of three ways:
        Agreement, disagreement, or indifference. My guess is that those Intellectuals whose job it was to act as transmission belts were antithetical to those who championed Individualism, Capitalism, and limited Government and, therefore, Rand, Paterson, Von Mises, et alia were ignored unto extinction. The Cretins were victorious. No politician in my adult lifetime, as far as I can recall, has ever uttered the phrase Individual Rights.
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  • Posted by 1 year, 2 months ago
    Of what does this sentence, "Innumerable speculative thinkers, inventors, and organizers have contributed to the comfort and happiness of their fellow men – because that was not their objective" remind you?
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  • Posted by 1 year, 2 months ago
    The false premise was presented in the first of these three excerpts: the good is collective. Of course, the political operators have no skin in the game. In Ayn Rand's fictional masterpiece, The Fountainhead, there were three main characters who existed for, through, and by others: Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey, and Gail Wynand.
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