Is the following email typical of the intellectual support for the morality of self-sacrifice? We report, you decide:
Sir,You seem to be of the belief that you own no other person anything yet furthermore others owe YOU the right to leave your "property" and person unmolested.
What utter bullshit.
Put your average adult male on short rations, say 250 calories per day, for a week and he'll knife you for a burrito.
Leave him without shelter for a month of winter while you sit snug in your 4,000 sq. ft mcmansion and he just might decide to burn it down for you just to even the score.
These things have happened before. They are happening today, somewhere. We now have a Maoist Prime Minister in Nepal.
So you can put up with government redistribution of wealth or live with constant tribal warfare.
ALL governments redistribute wealth. No exceptions.
Choose.
p.s. there's no law of physics that says you get to be the leader of your tribe. If the current tribal leader and his cronies want your gear, your wife, daughters and/or sons to play with you have to grin and bear it or be "out-caste." Which really meant you got to play fox for the next hunting party.
p.p.s._ that bitch Ayn Rand died on medicare and welfare. When push came to shove she didn't stand up for a word of her own bullshit either.
One is reminded of a passage from Sidney (of whom, no doubt, our eloquent correspondent has never heard):
our author confines the subject's choice to acting or suffering, that is, doing what is commanded, or lying down to have his throat cut, or to see his family and country made desolate. This he calls giving to Caesar that which is Caesar's; whereas he ought to have considered that the question is not whether that which is Caesar's should be rendered to him, for that is to be done to all men; but who is Caesar, and what doth of right belong to him, which he no way indicates to us: so that the question remains entire, as if he had never mentioned it.
Update: Here's another brilliant answer: Oh yeah?! Oh yeah?! If you don't like it, then you can just leave! (Wouldn't the same argument work just as well in defense of religious tyranny? Or any other infringement of individual liberty by the state?) Oh yeah?! Love it 'er leave it, pal!
Brilliant logic, that.
Update: Reader David Veloz writes,
I don't know about you sir, but I have been convinced by the advocates of self sacrifice that it would be better for government to take away what I've earned and give it to others who didn't earn it. You might call that slavery and morally wrong, just like Frederick Douglass felt about his master taking away what he had earned at the Baltimore docks, but I call it self sacrifice for the common good. After all, if Douglass didn't like the system, he should've left the South......P.S. Keep up the good work.
Thanks! (Of course, Douglass did leave the south. So that made it all okay, right?
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