Honorable mention goes to Ben O'Neill for "Peace and the 'Peace Prize'" :There prevails in the writings of many contemporary authors the disposition to represent every extension of governmental power and every restriction of the individual's discretion as a measure of liberation, as a step forward on the road to liberty. Carried to its ultimate logical conclusion, this mode of reasoning leads to the inference that socialism, the complete abolition of the individual's faculty to plan his own life and conduct, brings perfect freedom. It was this reasoning that suggested to socialists and Communists the idea of arrogating to themselves the appellation liberal.
...
A state or a government is an apparatus of coercion and compulsion. Within the territory that it controls, it prevents all agencies, except those that it expressly authorizes to do so, from resorting to violent action. A government has the power to enforce its commands by beating people into submission or by threatening them with such action. An institution that lacks this power is never called a government. ...
The government says to the citizen, Pay taxes or my armed constables will imprison you. The baker says to the prospective customer, If you want me to serve you and to bake bread for you, then you must reward me by doing something for me. In the opinion of Professor Hale there is no difference between the two modes of acting. Both are coercion, both are government of men over men, both are infringements of other people's liberty. The baker coerces the dentist by selling him bread and the dentist coerces the baker by filling the cavities of his teeth. Wherever you look in this worst of all thinkable worlds you discover restrictions of liberties. But fortunately paternal government steps in to salvage liberty. It saves liberty precisely by curtailing it. ...
...
Now, millions of people in this way "threaten" the jewelers of Fifth Avenue; they "threaten to deny their money to them." Yet those "threatened" do not furnish them with bracelets and necklaces. But if a holdup man turns up and threatens the jeweler in his own manner, by brandishing a gun, the outcome is different. It seems therefore that what Professor Hale calls threats and coercion comprehends two entirely different things having entirely different features and consequences. His failure to distinguish these two things from one another would be deplorable in a nontechnical book. In a presumably juridical book it is simply catastrophic.
Real peace is the absence of aggression, whether on an international scale or localized within a small area. Real peace requires not merely the absence of large-scale military conflicts, but also the absence of aggression in domestic affairs concerning individual citizens.
...
Peace should also not be restricted solely to the prevention of killing. It applies just as much to conflicts involving tax collectors and the appropriation of private property as to conflicts involving helicopter gunships and the killing of people.
...
Unfortunately, many of the so-called "peace activists" celebrated for their opposition to wars are hostile to the very social system that would ensure a genuine and lasting peace. In fact, these "peace activists" are not in favor of peace at all. They are merely opposed to certain large-scale military operations.
Such activists are often quite happy to lend their support to the initiation of force against domestic citizens, to plunder them of their property for the purposes of redistribution, or to enslave them under the watchful eye of government bureaucracies. In these smaller-scale conflicts, many allegedly "peace-loving" people routinely support statism and aggression as the means to achieve their domestic policy goals.
In the case of many of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, the apparent requirements for the accolade could not be more topsy-turvy if they were penned by Orwell himself. Our newest laureate routinely advocates statist programs that initiate violence against massive numbers of people to rob them of their property and submit them to forcible government control in more and more aspects of their lives.
...
As with killing, the initiation of force against the property of domestic citizens does not become any more morally legitimate or "peaceful" when it is done under the direction of political leaders. Notwithstanding their alleged "representation" of the people, it is just as absurd to assume that political leaders can remove the rights of their own domestic citizens as of foreigners [in war].
...
Without a principle against aggression per se, there is no logical basis for any agreement on the level of violence that is legitimate. There is no logical basis to say that this much violence is okay, but that much is too much. And so, inevitably, once the principle of nonaggression is tossed aside, people are led on a path to statism and destruction, upping the ante until full-scale war is the result.
No comments:
Post a Comment