Random Nuclear Strikes

If one wishes to advocate a free society – that is, capitalism – one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so-called “conservatives�.

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Ayn Rand: Man’s Rights – 1967

Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men. Private citizens are not a threat to one another’s rights or freedom. A private citizen who resorts to physical force and violates the rights of others is a criminal – and men have legal protection against him.

Criminals are a small minority in any age or country. And the harm they have done to mankind is infinitesimal when compared to the horrors – the bloodshed, the wars, the persecutions, the confiscations, the famines, the enslavements, the wholesale destructions – perpetrated by mankind’s governments. Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is man’s deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against government actions that the Bill of Rights was written.

Ayn Rand, Man’s Rights

Last week I paraphrased a statement made by Ayn Rand in a post about “Planet New Fundamental Rights� that was recently rediscovered by socialist mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco when he declared that internet access was a ‘right’.

Well now y’all are screwed because the replacements to my Rand book collection lost many moons ago to the fire suppression system at a storage unit I was renting are starting to arrive. The first of which was 1967’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (where I pulled last week’s paraphrase from). I immediately went into the appendix and found her essay “Man’s Rights�.

Re-reading that essay after all these years was like getting kicked in the balls with a lightning bolt in its attention grabbing qualities and I have decided to feature paragraphs from that essay in a new daily series here at RNS. The paragraphs will not be in any particular order, most certainly not in the order they were printed in the essay, but will be tossed up for the reading pleasure of the folks who stop by RNS and for any criticism folks want to toss their way. I will move on to other essays of hers when we complete that one.

Rand is a somewhat of a controversial figure in the world of philosophy, mostly due to her unapologetic nature and the fact that she would stomp a mudhole into the ass of just about every collectivist philosophy instructor alive today, the vast majority of whom can only fault her philosophy by misrepresenting it during their presentation. I don’t fault them too heavily in their misrepresentations, it is easy to do that to something they’ll never understand.

I by no means believe or believe in every single thing she writes, but I do hold her in higher esteem than the great number of fools out there who are trying to tell me that I need to be a giver and not a taker. Nor am I posting these to try and influence or change anyone’s mind. It is your right to believe what you want.

I have a sneaking suspicion that most RNS regulars will be nodding their heads when they read the quotes, however.

It’ll also mean that even when I’m busy there will be content here other than just a post telling you all how busy I am.

So anyway, to start; I present the quote that I was wanting to pass on last week:

If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.

Any alleged “right� of one man, which necessitates the violation if the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.

Ayn Rand “Man’s Rights�

(BTW I am typing these in by hand as I have been unable to find this essay reprinted anywhere in the web. Any typos are mine, but I’m planning to have zero typos here)