The legal treatment accorded to actual criminals is much superior to that accorded to businessmen. The criminal’s rights are protected by objective laws, objective procedures, objective rules of evidence. A criminal is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty. Only businessmen – the producers, the providers, the supporters, the Atlases who carry our whole economy on our shoulders – are regarded as guilty by nature and are required to prove their innocence, without any definable criteria of innocence or proof, and are left at the mercy of the whim, the favor, or the malice of any publicity seeking politician, any scheming statist, any envious mediocrity who might chance to work his way into a bureaucratic job and who feels a yen to do some ‘trust-busting’.

From a lecture given by Ayn Rand at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 17th, 1961

If I were asked to choose the date which marks the turning point on the road to the ultimate destruction of American industry, and the most infamous piece of legislation in American history, I would choose the year 1890 and the Sherman Act, which began that grotesque, irrational, malignant growth of unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable contradictions known as the antitrust laws.

Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. If he complies with one of these laws, he faces criminal prosecution under several others. For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly, or, rather for a successful “intent to monopolize�; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “unfair competition� or “restraint of trade�; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for “collusion� or “conspiracy�.

From a lecture given by Ayn Rand at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 17th, 1961

What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principal that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. The difference between political power and any other kind of social ‘power’ between a government and any private organization is the fact that government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

The difference between economic power and political power is that economic power is exercised by mean of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; whereas political power is exercised by means of a negative, the threat of punishment , injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values, the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.

From a lecture given by Ayn Rand at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 17th, 1961

A disastrous package deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as “A hungry man is not free� or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or a bureaucrat�. Most people accept these equivocations, and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer that the richest commissar in Soviet Russia.

From a lecture given by Ayn Rand at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 17th, 1961

Whenever, in any era, culture or society, you encounter the phenomenon of prejudice, injustice, persecution and blind, unreasoning hatred directed at some minority group, look for the gang that has something to gain from that persecution, look for those who have a vested interest in the destruction of these particular sacrificial victims. Invariably, you will find that the persecuted minority serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its own goals to be known.

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

From a lecture given by Ayn Rand at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 17th, 1961

From a lecture given by Ayn Rand at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 17th, 1961

Every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen. For instance, consider the evil of condemning some men and absolving others, without a hearing, regardless of the facts.

Today’s ‘liberals’ consider a businessmen guilty in any conflict with a labor union, regardless of the facts or issues involved, and boast that they will not cross a picket line ‘right or wrong’. Consider the evil of judging people by a double standard and of denying to them the same rights granted to others.

From a lecture given by Ayn Rand at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 17th, 1961

From a lecture given by Ayn Rand at the Ford Hall Forum, Boston, December 17th, 1961

Another current statist catch phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into the “Haves� and the “Have-Nots�. Observe that the “Haves� are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the “Have-Nots� have not.

Ayn Rand: The Roots of War – 1966

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And this finishes out the set of quote I’ve taken from her essay ‘The Roots of War’. Tomorrow we’ll start in on her essay ‘America’s Persecuted Minority’. I think you’ll be surprised at who she is talking about.

Or maybe not.