If I know that people are working through and with the state to steal from me, am I within my rights to confront them? For example, let’s say my neighbor doesn’t like the fence I have erected around my yard. Local ordinances say that the “good side” of the fence must face my neighbor. Yes, I build it, and he gets the better looking side of something on my property…
So he contacts “the city” and complains that I have erected this fence with the “bad side” towards him. Now he is using the state to attack my property. He’s using the state to coerce me for his benefit.
Do I have a right to confront him? Has he created the first aggressive move?
I’m beginning to think so.
What is my recourse? Complain to “the city” about the width of his driveway?
Within this line of thinking, a lot of us are being coercive all of the time. Check yourselves.
I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (both by Ayn Rand) recently. I read Atlas Shrugged first, and by the end of the book, I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I did when I began it. I think around the time that Rearden and Taggart go on their roadtrip together, the book starts to lose momentum.
But enough about Atlas Shrugged.
I really enjoyed The Fountainhead. I thought Howard Roark was a great hero, the characters in this book are much more developed, the story actually has a plot that serves the ideology, instead of a plot hastily slapped on an ideology (as I felt it was with Atlas Shrugged).
I recommend both books, although The Fountainhead might be much easier for newbies. I regret sending copies of Atlas Shrugged to the two family members I wanted to encourage toward rational thinking. A.S. is simply too long and ends with a rushed whimper, after what seems like a 30 page speech.
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I’m not going to report the news anymore, I’m not that damn Katie Couric!
But the Canadian election finished up and so-called liquidationist Stephen Harper and his Conservative party got another mandate.
After spending (wasting) $300 million dollars to remind the Liberals that very few trust them anymore, and the NDP that they are 80 years too late, it’s basically business as usual. Again.
Voter turnout numbers are shaping up to be at an all-time low. Of course, a video I watched at the National Post seemed to know who had won, but not how many ballots had been cast yet… hmmm….
The sad part was seeing all of these rosy cheeked kids at a pub, watching the results come in, acting like it was the World Cup of Soccer in Little Italy. Ah yes, the drones of tomorrow. These are the stuffed shirts of the future, who will manage my future health, political, philosophical, material and spiritual needs as I shuffle to and fro my doctor, the polling booth, the supermarket and my retirement hovel.
I tore up my election card. I’ll never vote again. Even if they make it illegal.
On the Mises forum, it’s normal to see a mutualist or left-libertarian protest the use of the word capitalism. The argument goes that instead we should be using “free market” or “market anarchy”.
Why? The reasoning is that too many people misunderstand the word capitalism and think it is the American economic system. It’s not even an argument that the word capitalism means something different than the Austrian or right-libertarian (anyone who is not a left-libertarian apparently) usage, but rather that since a lot of people misuse and misunderstand the word, they now own it. The word is now defined by it’s misuse.
This has already happened with terms like liberal, anarchist, anarchy, laissez-faire, liberalism and libertarianism to name a few.
I refuse to let the lowest common denominator define the language I will use. These are the same people who do not understand, and lack the curiosity to discover why inflation occurs. The same people who vote for the lesser of two evils. The same people who cheer for war when it starts, then cry about it later. The same people who want to bailout Main Street by placing a tax burden on their children, and their children’s children. The same people who worship Reagan and the Clintons. Who think that natural disasters are good for the economy and that America can spread freedom and democracy abroad with the barrel of a gun.
Why would I care what ignorant and loathsome people think? Why would I allow them to frame the debate through their stunted and twisted perception of language?
The answer is, I don’t care, and I won’t allow someone to place limitations upon the debate.
Capitalism. It’s a great thing.
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