Just so we’re all clear;
Such is the state of today’s most critical issues: political rights versus “economic rights”. It’s either or. One destroys the other. But there are, in fact, no “economic rights,” no “collective rights,” no “public-interest rights”. The term “individual rights” is a redundancy: there is no other kind of rights and no one else to possess them.
Those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.
Ayn Rand – from the appendix “Man’s Rights” in her book “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”
If you don’t have a copy, get one. The first copy I saw had every other sentence or paragraph highlighted by the owner. It’s that kind of book. It was written back in the 1960s, though it seems to be directly addressing our current crop of idiots, moonbats, loons, thugs, bounders, cads, hucksters and charlatans in Washington (to say nothing of the Democrats).
I think most people would appreciate the Constitution much more if we had laissez-faire capitalism. I am reading Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”. It was written in 1951 and is also relevant in regards to the current crop of nutbars. There really is nothing new under the sun.
Another Rand quote expressing much the same thought:
The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!”
–Ayn Rand
April, 1946
Quoted from “Author’s Forward” to her 1937 novel, Anthem
Blackwing; I take no pleasure in saying it, but that pretty well describes the Republican Party.
Heh, I just bought this book a few days ago. I’m only about 50 pages in so far and the whole thing is quote-worthy.