I guess I was naïve in those days, but I had the notion that a person doesn't get to be President of the United States by being stupid. Cunning, manipulative, or even evil, but certainly not stupid. Looking back on it now, maybe I was wrong about that. If the majority of the people are stupid, why wouldn't they elect one of their own to be president? Or maybe there is something about being president that makes people stupid once they're in office. I wonder if the water pipes and the heating ducts in the White House have ever been checked for stupid germs.
Also looking back at it now, maybe the Cold War was a sham to begin with. Maybe the leaders of both countries got together and cooked up the whole thing to help them both keep their people in line. If so, it's a wonder that some hot headed kid like Blanton, of my story "The War That Never Was", didn't make an honest war out of it by accident.
Sure Nixon ended the Vietnam War, by surrendering, but anybody could have done that. I wonder why he ended up with the job.
I don't know whether or not the Tea Party people "cling together seamlessly". I do know that there are numerous independent Tea Party chapters with no central leadership so, if they're all so clingy with each other, there must be a reason.
Now when you say "Property is theft", what exactly do you mean by that? It doesn't seem likely that property itself is a thief, so I think you mean that the people who own property are thieves. That is certainly true about some property owners, as it is for the general population, but I think that most property owners today came by their holdings fair and square. Of course, if you trace it back far enough, most property was originally stolen from someone because, before the invention of money, that was about the only way you could transfer property from one owner to another. Well, I mean real estate, because personal property can more easily be bartered or given as a gift. I suppose you could do the same thing with real estate, but I don't think it happens as often as it does with personal property.
I understand that John Locke believed that the most important job of government is to protect property rights. I think the reason for that was, if people do not feel secure about their property, they might not work so hard to acquire it. If you can steal my stuff, then I can steal your stuff, so where's it going to end? Before you know it, we're right back in the Middle Ages, which is also called the Feudal Era. Edward Gibbon said that famine and disease commonly follow a war because everybody is too busy fighting to cultivate crops, and starving people generally get sick a lot. In modern times, the same result can come about if all the supermarkets get bombed. And who is likely to invest in building a new supermarket if they expect that it also will get bombed some day?
This reminds me of a story. Stop me if you've heard this one: An Irishman, who was fishing on a riverbank, was approached by an Englishman who told him that he was not allowed to fish there because it was private property. The Irishman said, "Now who might be the owner of this private property?" The Englishman said, "I am the owner." The Irishman said, " And how exactly did you come to be the owner of this private property?" The Englishman said "Well, I got it from my father, and he got it from his father, who got it from his father before him. Now that I think of it, I suppose that, if you trace it back far enough, one of my ancestors must have originally gotten it by fighting for it." The Irishman replied, "Fine, I'll fight you for it then."
No comments:
Post a Comment