The New York TImes Peter Baker reports on the presidents thought process leading up to last Wednesdays speech about returning to war in Iraq. Its a sad illustration of the body blow from unintended consequences when decisions are made on the wrong premise: President Obama believed that Americas actions in the Middle East were the cause of legitimate resentment, and everything would get better if we would just stop bothering everybody. This is an example of how a person can be very smart, and very wrong. The root cause of violence in the Middle East is collectivism, which holds that individuals have no right to their own lives. Collectivism means everything belongs to everybody in the group (whether defined as a nation, religion, sect, tribe, race or political party) and it is up to the leaders of the group to allocate resources and determine who will be sacrificed for the benefit of whom. Under a system of collectivism, the people who most ruthlessly execute the will of the leaders are the ones who succeed and find economic security. A murderer will rise above a thief. The United States is the first nation in the history of human civilization to be founded on the idea that individuals have the right to their own life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness. Your rights dont depend on membership in a group, sect, tribe, race, religion or political party. Your rights dont depend on your family ancestry. Your rights belong to you as an individual. This has been called a society of contract as opposed to a society of status. Governments that protect individual rights offer the world the best chance of peace and prosperity. We will never find the right group of rebels in a collectivist society to arm and train as a strategy for long-term peace. As long as the government owns and distributes all the wealth of the society, people will band together and fight to the death for control of the government. The people who cause the most and worst deaths will rise to the leadership positions. Its the logical, inevitable, historically-demonstrated outcome of collectivism. Collectivism is unlimited government power, the opposite of freedom, which is limited government power. Here in the United States, we have been moving in the direction of more government power, toward collectivism and away from individual rights. President Obama is one of the people who believes this is a good thing. President Obama is wrong.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 16:43:30 +0000
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