Among the issues most commonly discussed are individuality, the rights of the individual, the limits of legitimate government, morality, history, economics, government policy, science, business, education, health care, energy, and man-made global warming evaluations. My posts are aimed at intelligent and rational individuals, whose comments are very welcome.

"No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it." Ayn Rand

"Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." Ayn Rand

"The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice', but integrity." Ayn Rand

For "a human being, the question 'to be or not to be,' is the question 'to think or not to think.'" Ayn Rand

30 October 2012

The Election Choice: Is Another Human Being a Burden?

If, as the Progressive Elitists say, we are all our brother's, neighbors, and unknown countryman's keeper and that keeping is to be performed by government using mandatory taxation and forced labor, then every newborn baby is an added burden to everyone.  In this view, the needs and the wishes of each new person become the command that forces each of us to act to satisfy those needs and wishes.  With no regulating principle to limit which needs and wishes will be satisfied, these needs and wishes will make very heavy demands on limited resources.  This perhaps heightens the tendency of Progressive Elitists to see each new human as a threat to the Earth, to nature, and to the environment.

Indeed, instead of the effort required by a man to produce what he needs and wants in voluntary cooperation with others in the free market being the limit on the use of resources, the Progressive Elitist is required to find other means to place limits on both the requirements for action on the part of others and upon the use of resources.  There are two major such limits:

1)  Political power and the jockeying of factions for control of government, whose monopoly on the use of force to compel action by others to satisfy the needs and wants of controlling factions is fought for with warlike intent and ferocity.  This vicious fight for power to control always limited resources is rarely acknowledged by more gentle supporters.

2)  Claims, commonly exaggerated, that the resources of the Earth are limited justifies limits on demands on the government to compel too much effort from others to satisfy greedy demands.  Protection of the Earth, nature, and the environment are to become regulators of greed which the Progressive Elitists refuse to allow free associations for purposes of cooperation in the pursuit of values in the private sector to pursue.  This is also used to argue against the efficiency of the private sector and Capitalism in providing for individual needs and wants with the claim that the private sector uses too many of the Earth's resources and violates nature.  Nature is seen as excluding mankind.  These limits seem more amenable to gentler souls than do those of the raw exercise of government power for special interests or factions, yet these limits become added tools for warlike factions in control of government.

Whatever the limits on efforts to satisfy the needs and wants of each of our countrymen by these two Progressive Elitist principles, each person is an added burden.  Each newborn child has a long future of educational expenses from Kindergarten through the 12th grade and then perhaps in college.  Any sickness or genetic defect is a burden on everyone else.  If the adult does not prove ready to be productive enough to produce a large stream of tax revenues for the governments, then the adult is a burden on all.  Inevitably, no matter what, each person is a strain on the Earth and Mother Nature.  Each person presents complex needs and wants, with critical differences in the timing of these needs and wants, which lawmakers and bureaucrats cannot understand and provide for.  The individuality of each person must be suppressed and modeled out of existence for such a state to function.  The problems that result make each individual a sore spot to be resented by the lawmakers, bureaucrats, and voting Progressive Elitists.

In a rich and vibrant private sector with a highly limited government only protecting individual rights, individuals choose their own values based on their own assessments of their needs and wants.  They then arrange their voluntary associations with others to make trades of time, effort, money, and favors to pursue their values.  These trades are made only as each participant sees some kind of advantage in cooperation for himself.  All such relationships contribute to the value we see in one another.  Aside from a few murderers and street thieves, everyone has at least some positive value to us as an actual trader, a potential trader, or just someone in the incredibly complex hierarchies of trades and interactions that infuse our society who is almost certainly productive at some level.  In such a society, we come to see everyone as a value to us.  Those few worthy people down on their luck for a time or really, really unfortunate in the chance of genetic problems or disease, we want to help care for voluntarily because they are still a part of our society of valued individuals.

Not so in the society of the Progressive Elitist.  The characteristic ObamaCare program is already rationing medical care in Medicaid and Medicare by refusing operations and expensive drugs to those over 70, who are seen as an excessive burden to society.  After all, not only do such people burden society with their medical costs, but they also take Social Security money.  They produce little in the way of a tax revenue stream now.  Similarly, newborn babies with severe problems are to receive less care in the frank acknowledgment that they will burden society with many years of education expenses before they will be generators of a tax revenue stream.  Progressive Elitism robs us of our joy in the lives of others.  It rubs the fact of our being forced to serve them in our faces.  It forces us to become sullen slaves to their needs and wants.  It forces us to become angry combatants for our own needs and wants.  Among our own needs and wants is the avoidance of having to provide for the needs or wants of others if only because the hours of our own days and lives are limited.  The Progressive Elitist society is suffused with stress and resentment.  Everyone else becomes a burden upon us.

In the election on 6 November, we will be faced with many choices to either choose to enthusiastically embrace the Progressive Elitist viewpoint of society as Obama and Biden do, or to make a choice that recognizes at least a substantial part of the value of a limited government and private sector society more consistent with the American Principle put forth in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution as Romney and Ryan do.  We all need to decide whether we want to live in a society that makes nearly everyone else a value to us or one which makes nearly everyone else a burden to us.  We need to decide whether we want to cooperate with others or whether we want to fight others for government power or for the limited resources of the Earth.  This is the nature of the conflict between government limited to protecting our rights and socialist government which is supposed to provide for everyone's needs and wants.  This is the nature of the rich and vibrant private sector choice and the big government choice.  We must choose to recognize the fact of a complex and highly differentiated individuality or to refuse to see it.  We have to decide whether we are pro-human or anti-human.

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