Monthly Archives: July 2017

When you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957

Last week (Public Safety vs. Liberty, WTE, July 9), we took a short glance at Chairman Mao, the worlds leading mass-exterminator, clocking in at 55 million to 70 million Chinese citizens dead, all for the public safety. I guess when Mao said that before a brand-new social system can be built on the site of the old, the site must be swept clean (Introductory Note to A Serious Lesson, 1955), he wasnt kidding.

While eminently qualifying himself as the reigning HMFIC at the top of the Citizens Exterminated Department, however, Mao was by no means alone in his quest to sweep sites clean of the human chattel he and others found to be such a hindrance.

Joseph Stalin, for instance, another exponent of Marxs communist school of thought, determined 20 million to 40 million of his Soviet comrades needing sweeping out of the way as well, giving him Second Place. Life has improved, comrades. Life has become more joyous, he told the survivors at a Stakhanovite Conference back in 1935.

(Sidebar: And Franklin Roosevelt, by smiling and handing Eastern Europe over to Comrade Joseph back at the end of World War II, sentenced another 300 million people to abject socialist slavery for another 50 years. Its these kinds of moral/philosophical failures on the part of the United States that guarantee an aura of respectability to such regimes they could never acquire on their own merits in the world of ideas. And we wonder where such states come from, as we consider how to or even whether to combat them? But I digress ...)

Finally, weighing in at Third Place, we have the German Nazi thug Adolf Hitler, cashing in his chips with 12 million to 20 million souls slaughtered by his hand, all in the name of the public safety.

Despite his distantly third showing in the mass-extermination arena, however, Hitler proved himself unsurpassed when it came to mouthing the collectivist slogans by which he deluded his enslaved serfs:

Our party, he once declared, is convinced that our nation can only achieve permanent health from within on the principle: The Common Interest Before the Self. (Program of the Nazi Socialist German Workers Party, 1920).

Help for small shops and businesses, improved pensions, land for small farmers and other health and education improvements were all promised by the Nazis to their expectant public (The 25 Points, 1920).

What they gave them was the gas chambers. Actions which should make even the staunchest advocates of the true public safety stop and think twice before being bamboozled by such rhetoric in the future.

Well, thats upwards of 100 million people wiped out, right there, just with the Top Three, and we havent even discussed lesser rank-and-file annihilations such as Castros and Guevaras Cuba, Ho Chi Mins North Vietnam or Kim Jong-Uns North Korea. Masters of the public safety, every last one of them.

So then, just what does the public safety actually mean, anyway? We see clearly that such excuses have led to, and are directly responsible for, the commission of the most unspeakably engaged-in atrocities in mans history. But does such a phrase have any conceptual meaning of its own, independent of such philosophical hijacking?

Yes, if and only if those aggregates are handed down in terms of their constituent elements. That is, down to US, each of us, as individuals, as individual human beings.

The public safety, then, if it means anything at all, can only mean the aggregate total of the safety of ALL the publics members, each and every one of us, as individuals. As a collection, not a collective. Which means the protection of ALL our lives and property.

This is what constitutes the public safety; these are the purposes to which our laws are contrived. That each of us, every last one of us, have the security of our lives, liberty and property.

What are we to think, then, of a government which uses that very principle as a justification for further concentrating its powers? The hanging of us by means of our own ideas ... tactically brilliant. Shouldnt some huge red flags have been going off for several decades now?

There was a time in these United States, Dear Reader and not too many generations ago when an awful lot of us believed the public safety demanded the shooting of Redcoats and other allegedly duly-constituted people of authority throughout the land. (aka the American Revolution).

Perhaps, instead of contemplating the atrocities committed by altruist authoritarians for uncounted millennia, those are the lessons of history we should be pondering instead.

Bradley Harrington is a computer technician and a writer who lives in Cheyenne. Email: bradhgt1776@gmail.com.

Go here to see the original:

Harrington: A collection, not a collective - Wyoming Tribune

by Bud Cothern, Ed.D.

In an interview about the revelation that Trump campaign members met with several Russians in June of 2016 under the promise of providing trash on Hillary Clinton, Congressman Dave Brat (R-VA 07) stated, Everybody colludes.Hey Dave, go piss on yourepistemology.

If you listen to Dave Brat long enough, you will hear him interject into the conversation that he is an economist or that he went to seminary or that he taught ethics. I would submit to you that Dave Brat is grounded in none of those schools, disciplines or principles.

Dave Brats theories and opinions, I submit, are as wacky and convoluted as those of L. Ron Hubbard, the inventor of Scientology. The Georgetown University economist Harry Holzer commented on Brats economic hypotheses: A good journal is not going to publish the kind of statistical work he did because it is so low in quality. Brat believes that the role of Protestantism is the strongest factor in economic growth of a country. He leans heavily on Max Weber, an eighteenth century philosopher/economist who believed the same thing, except Weber thought that religious context was eventually drained away from capitalism. Not so Brat, who believes religion, particularly Christianity, is still the strongest factor in promoting capitalism.

Holzer goes on to say:

[Brats] statistical models are very simple-minded In these small-sample regressions, how do we know that religion or the other variables are really exogenous and not just correlated with other characteristics of countries that are doing well? If Christianity is so crucial, what explains the explosion of growth in China, India and other Asian countries (did they experience an explosion of Christianity that I missed)?

So how does Brat dispute this? By going after his own field of study at the epistemological level. Essentially, Brat argues that economics is not a science at all and that mainstream economics is grounded in moral assumptions that are unexamined. In other words, according to Brat, the science of economics his own profession! is a sham.Hey Dave, go piss on your epistemology.

Not surprisingly, just like Paul Ryan and other far-right politicians, Brat also embraces Ayn Rand, the kooky atheist and literary champion of unfettered capitalism in the 1960s. Rand was not an economist or even a philosopher, but her literary devotees include Milton Friedman, the monetary economist who promoted the shareholder value theory of corporate America. Friedman proposed that employees and customers have no stake in a corporation since all the money belonged to shareholders. The only job of the executive, in Friedmans view, is to maximize profits for the companys investors. In other words, Friedman favored moneymaking and greed at all costs to employees and customers. Friedman was also one of the early proponents of school vouchers as an economic principle. Now we know where devotees like Brat and DeVos are grounded. Hey Dave, go piss on your epistemology.

Brats philosophical and ethical connection to Ayn Rand is probably more grounded in pragmatism than in belief. Ayn Rand was an atheist, unlike Brat, who went to seminary. Rand believed the source of mans rights are derived from observed facts, which is why she called herself an Objectivist.For Brat, in contrast, mans rights are derived from God. Another contrast: Rand was a huge advocate of open immigration, unlike Brat, who made cracking down on undocumented immigration a central campaign issue against Cantor. But both hate government, thats one thing they most certainly have in common. (Ironically, Rand died of cancer and was dependent on Medicare and Social Security in her final days.) I guess for Brat, like Rand, money makes all things palatable. Enter Rand enthusiast, millionaire, John Allison, IV.

Allison, head of the large regional bank, BB&T, was such a disciple of Rand that he gave out copies of her work,Atlas Shrugged,to his executives and everyone he met. Leaving BB&T after the financial collapse of 2008, Allison became head of the Cato Institute (engineered by the Koch brothers) in 2012. True to his economic philosophy of unfettered capitalism, (wait for the irony) Allison took TARP bailout funds just before his departure!

Dave Brat received a $500,000 fellowship from Allison tospread the word of Ayn Rand to impressionable college students.So much for his teaching of ethics. Moreover, Brats political career has been enabled by far-right talk radio host Mark Levin, himself aided by the Koch brothers to the tune of $750,000 to promote him and other libertarian-leaning conservatives. Hey Dave, go piss on your epistemology.

Although Brat has pretended to run against the influence of big corporate money in politics, he has accepted huge donations from corporations and PACs like Altria, Deloitte, AKSM (medical), the Koch brothers, the DeVos family and many others.I am running against Cantor because he does not represent the citizens of the 7th District, but rather large corporations seeking insider deals, crony bailouts and a constant supply of low-wage workers, he wrote in theRichmond Times-Dispatchdays before the primary. Hey Dave, go piss on your epistemology.

In sum, I say to Dave Brat: You are not a scholar or even believe in the validity of your own field of study. Quit saying youre an economist. Quit talking about the value of Western religion. Your callous pursuit of unfettered capitalism to the detriment of less fortunate members of the society and your unwelcoming of strangers make you unfit to even bring up your knowledge of anything taught in the seminary. Stop telling us about that; we know it was an empty education. You taught ethics? Pity the fools! You are just a shill for big money interests and a morally corrupt President. You dont care about people losing healthcare, destroying public education or separating families who have lived here most of their lives. You sir, have no compassion; you are simply there for the highest bidder. In your own words, Everybody colludes. Really? HeyDave, go piss on your epistemology.

Read more from the original source:

Everybody Colludes? Hey Dave Brat, Go Piss on Your Epistemology. - Blue Virginia (press release) (blog)