It’s never a surprise when a political act turns out to be a bitter mockery of the humanitarian values it’s supposed to serve.

So the news that civilians in Libya are being bombed by NATO, which intervened in the Libyan civil war to protect civilians, elicits little more than a world-weary sigh from our Roving Eye War Reporter.

REWR, having sent the news but no detailed dispatch home, refers readers to two posts of ours (find them through the research slot):  The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011, in which it is explained that R2P stands for Responsibility to Protect, a UN declaration which provided NATO’s pretext; and A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011. They trace the idea of invoking that piece of lethal self-righteousness to three women in the Obama administration:

• Samantha Power, Senior Director of Multicultural Affairs at the National Security Council
• Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the United Nations
• Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State

To show just how NATO action in Libya is making a mockery of the R2P, we quote from a report by Mike McNally at PajamasMedia:

The fighters of Libya’s National Transitional Council, the rebel movement turned temporary government, have launched what they say is a “final assault” on Sirte — hometown of ousted dictator Colonel Gaddafi and one of the last redoubts of his supporters. 

Thousands of civilians have fled the town, but thousands more are trapped inside, unable or unwilling to leave. The Red Cross reports that conditions inside Sirte are deteriorating, with people dying in the main hospital due to shortages of medical supplies, fuel, and water; food is also said to be in short supply.

There are no reliable casualty figures, although pro-Gaddafi forces — not surprisingly — are reporting hundreds of civilian deaths caused by both NTC fighters and NATO airstrikes. …

Even if rebel forces aren’t intentionally targeting civilians, the ramshackle nature of the rebel forces and much of their equipment suggests that much of the shelling and rocketing is indiscriminate. Red Cross workers have reported rockets landing among the hospital buildings. …

You could be forgiven for wondering what the NATO forces who are still engaged in Libya plan to do about the situation in Sirte, given that UN Resolution 1973, under which they’re operating, authorizes them to take “all necessary measures” to protect “civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack”.  …

But far from defending the civilian population of Sirte, NATO warplanes were as recently as Sunday still conducting airstrikes in and around the town in support of the rebels. “Why is NATO bombing us?” asked one man who had fled with his family. It’s a fair question.

NATO had already put a highly elastic interpretation on its mandate under 1973, transitioning swiftly from protecting anti-Gaddafi protesters to flying close air support missions for the rebels.

And adding effective contingents of NATO soldiers to the feeble rag-tag rebel militia for the assault on Tripoli – a fact that NATO has tried to keep under wraps. (See our post Letting Arabs lie, August 24, 2011.)

But even if one takes the view that NATO’s actions from the start of its involvement up to the fall of Tripoli were legally and morally justified, it’s hard to argue that the Gaddafi loyalists besieged in Sirte and elsewhere present an imminent threat to the civilian population in areas now under NTC control. Far from protecting civilians, NATO now finds itself in the position of abetting a humanitarian crisis. Civilians in Sirte face a choice between enduring the shelling and the all-out assault on the town that’s likely within the next few days, and fleeing the city if they’re able. The Red Cross estimates that some 10,000 have fled, but that up to 30,000 more may still be trapped.

So why are NATO and the American, British, and French governments that were so eager to take charge of the “humanitarian” intervention, not doing more to ensure their safety? And where’s the media outcry, along the lines of the reporting which helped to persuade the West to get involved in Libya in the first place? …

At the very least NATO … could arrange the delivery of food, water, and medical supplies …

This is a civil war, and the only crime most of the civilians trapped in Sirte have committed is being on the losing side. Are they now to be denied the protection of the “international community” which a few months ago proclaimed itself so concerned at the loss of innocent life in the country? What happened to the UN’s much-vaunted “Responsibility to Protect”?

Commentators on both left and right raised doubts over NATO’s Libya mission, myself included. The removal of Gaddafi is of course to be welcomed, but while a stable and democratic regime that poses no threat to Western interests may yet emerge, recent events have suggested that outcome is still in doubt.

In doubt? A stable democratic regime in Libya? As in any other Arab country, it’s one of the most unlikely things in the world.

A meeting of the Black Panthers

Obama with the Black Panthers

Obama marching with the Black Panthers

Andrew Breitbart found the photos and published them at his website Big Government.

He writes:

New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.

The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.

In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.

The images … also renew doubts about the transparency of the White House’s guest logs–in particular, whether Panther National Chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is the same “Malik Shabazz” listed among the Obama administration’s early visitors.  …

Shabazz [is] the Panther leader who was one of the defendants in the voter intimidation case that Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed. Also present was the Panthers’ “Minister of War,” Najee Muhammed, who had called for murdering Dekalb County, Georgia, police officers with AK-47’s …

The photographs show Obama sharing the same podium at the event with the Panthers.

In the first image, Shabazz stands at the podium, surrounded by uniformed Panthers, including Muhammed. In the second photograph, Obama commands the same podium.

Commenting on the photos, Bryan Preston writes at PajamasMedia:

This is the current president choosing of his own free will to accept support from and appear with some very radical and racist figures, during his rise to power. The New Black Panthers’ militant radicalism and racism are impossible to ignore. A “Malik Shabazz” (not exactly a common name) has appeared numerous times on White House visitor logs since Obama’s inauguration; the White House has insisted that it’s not the same Malik Shabazz who leads the New Black Panther movement but has not produced the alternative Malik Shabazz. …

It’s close to impossible to overstate how noxious a character Shabazz is. Among other things, he led the NBPP’s protests at the Danish embassy in Washington DC during the Muhammad cartoon controversy, siding with the extremists who falsified some of the cartoons and turned those cartoons into a cause for violent riots.

We are not in the least surprised that Obama made common cause with these rabidly racist terrorists. Didn’t he attend the church of America-hating Jeremiah Wright for twenty years?

We are glad that there is such vivid proof of it.

Will the mainstream media ignore the proof, or try to disparage it into insignificance?

Breitbart’s article informs us that –

Tomorrow, J. Christian Adams, the Department of Justice whistleblower in the New Black Panther Party case, will release his new book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery).

The book exposes Obama administration corruption far beyond the Panther dismissal, and reveals how the institutional Left has turned the power of the DOJ into an ideological weapon. …

Injustice has these photos and more, including one of  Shabazz and the Panthers marching behind Obama with raised fists in the “Black Power” salute.

The mainstream media might ignore it, but that is one for the history books.

Iran and Syria: push one and both will come tumbling down.

So Michael Ledeen tells us. He writes at PajamasMedia:

The future of the Middle East (and perhaps of most of the world) depends on the survival or downfall of the tyrannical regimes in Syria and Iran. We need to do everything possible to ensure their downfall. This is the right policy for all the good reasons:

– Strategic: Iran is our major enemy and the leading killer of our people;

– Moral: Iran visits unspeakable horrors on its own people and wants to export this system worldwide;

– Regional: there is no hope for peace in the Middle East so long as this regime remains in power.

And so? What the hell are we waiting for? And why is there not a single candidate who will give voice to it?

The chief thing we’re waiting for is a new commander-in-chief.  And it’s a useful thing for him to know that the Iranian and Syrian regimes survive or fall together; that if one is knocked down the other’s done for.

Can we agree that Iran and Syria now constitute a single strategic problem? Surely Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, thinks so. Otherwise he would not have ordered the Revolutionary Guards to conduct a policy of all-out military, financial, and intelligence support for the Assad regime …

The Syrian crisis is only one very dark cloud in the terrible storm that has descended upon the Iranian regime.

That is why the current announced policy of the Obama administration — “Assad must go” — is incoherent. … If Assad must go, so must Khamenei. They are fused at the belly button, part and parcel of a strategic alliance that is responsible for thousands of American deaths and tens of thousands of American casualties.

Ledeen stresses and illustrates the rottenness of the Iranian regime, and praises “one of the world’s truly heroic figures, the Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi, imprisoned for more than six years and subjected to severe torture.” While we are dubious that an Ayatollah can be a world-class hero, we gather that this one is better than the others in the club.

Amazingly, he has continued his campaign from within Tehran’s grim Evin Prison. No charges have ever been brought against him, although it is obvious that he has been singled out for advocating separation of mosque and state, toleration of minority religions, and respect for the civil rights of the Iranian people. In recent days he has suffered a heart attack, but has been denied medical attention. If he dies, perhaps the winged troika of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, and their many admirers, will mourn the death of this fine man, whom they have judged unworthy of American support.

The three harpies, we call them. They cawed about the need to interfere in Libya on the grounds that civilians needed to be protected, so Obama and NATO helped sharia-loving, black African-hating rebels to oust the tyrant Gaddafi and set up a brand-new oppressive regime including al-Qaeda terrorists. For some reason they do not explain, the harpies and Obama are more concerned for Libyan than Syrian or Iranian civilians.

This administration has always shrunk from speaking the truth about the Iranian regime, which is now engaged in a “killing spree” at the expense of the Persian nation. There have been so many executions and arrests of late that it’s very hard to keep track of them all, ranging from movie directors to Baha’is, from Christian converts to peaceful Sufi dervishes, and on to political protesters and those unlucky enough to be in the area when the security forces are unleashed. This frenzy of repression — more a bloody orgy than a spree — bespeaks enormous insecurity as well as the great evil about which I have been warning for so long.

And it is as corrupt as it is malevolent. …  Recent stories have highlighted huge financial losses, the true dimensions of which are considerably larger than those reported so far.  The corrupt mullacracy has exported a lot of money, and the first glimmerings of their methods are only surfacing now because of the enormous tensions within the regime. …  The Islamic Republic is a system of mutual blackmail, and whenever one of the components feels threatened, it typically responds by firing a warning shot across the others’ bows. The corruption is not just personal graft and fraud, although there is plenty of that to go around.  The major part is systemic. … Iran’s currency continues to crash…

So Khamenei is entitled to be very worried, and we are entitled to give this tottering edifice the little push required to put it out of its misery.

But the easier one to topple is Syria.

The Syrian resistance probably needs material support including weapons and perhaps some training … they will need to fight it out, at least for a while.

We are all for the smashing of the two regimes, but not for an attempt to turn either country into democracies – not because we wouldn’t like them to be real democracies, but because where Islam dominates democracy cannot thrive. (Turkey seemed an exception for the last ninety years or so, but is now reverting to the darkness of sharia.)

There should be no more hearts-and-minds campaigns.

In connection with which Ledeen quotes President Lyndon B. Johnson:

 “If you’ve got them by the balls, the hearts and minds generally follow.“

We’re not fans of LBJ, but we like him for that.

According to Penn Jillette, writing in the Los Angeles Times, non-believers may be more numerous than adherents of any particular religious sect in America:

Atheists are growing way fast, from under 2% to about 8% just in this century. If you throw in self-labeled agnostics and those who identify as not religious, you’re getting up to around 20%. Evangelicals are about 26%, Catholics about 23%, Jews, 1.7%, Mormons also 1.7% — if you start breaking Christians up into their smaller groups, nonbelievers come close to being the dominant religion, if you can call no religion a religion, like calling not collecting stamps a hobby.

We hope it is true, and we think it may be. We also suspect that a great many individuals who claim membership of this or that denomination are privately skeptical about the beliefs it teaches.

The main theme of Penn Jillette’s article is conjecture as to why politicians compulsively declare themselves generic “Christians”, preferring not to name the particular sect they belong to; with special reference to presidential candidates Bachmann and Perry:

When I was a kid, politicians wanted to avoid talking about religion if they could. John F. Kennedy couldn’t duck the issue, being Catholic and all. So how did he address it? By reminding Americans that religion shouldn’t be an issue, that he was concentrating on big things like poverty and hunger and leading the space race. When he finally got around to talking about religion, here’s what he said: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Can you imagine a presidential candidate talking that way today?

“Freethinkers,” a great book by Susan Jacoby, explained that the modern use of the word Christian was pushed to fight Roe vs. Wade. The anti-choice people wanted a big-tent word for the religious objection to abortion, and that meant they had to bring all the Protestants and Catholics together if they wanted to claim God for their team. The word Christian did that.

Since then, religion and politics have gotten ever more entwined. Jimmy Carter happily identified as born-again, and that phrase and the magic word Christian started to be used more and more. One American president who mentioned religion constantly and seemed to appear in a different church every time you blinked was Bill Clinton. Slick Willy really rammed home the idea of Christian. He was a church slut, not caring what church he appeared in as long as he was seen at a church.

And, now, we come to Bachmann and Perry.

I’ve used pornographic images, obscenity and poetry to try to make even the most doubtful blush, but I’ve never come close to Bachmann’s insult to the gentle, honest faithful when she said the suffering and casualties of natural disasters were her God’s message to wayward politicians. What she said was disgusting …

And stupid.

Bachmann was a longtime member of the Salem Lutheran Church, a small denomination that has some odd teachings. But even in the broadest definition of Lutherans, there are only about 13.5 million, and that’s not enough to elect you president. Now Bachmann has moved to Eagle Brook, an evangelical church, but even if she wins all the evangelical vote, that gives her only 26.3% of the American people. With those percentages, you need to shut up about religion. …

Perry is the same deal. Perry has moved away from his Methodist background … and moved to the Lake Hills Baptist Church, which went on to drop the word Baptist to be more inclusive. When Perry did his big apolitical political rally in August, he was very careful to call it nondenominational. It was Christian. Now let’s watch Mitt Romney as he works on trying to convince Americans that his sect, with its magic underwear and its belief that the Garden of Eden was in North America, really is just another Christian offshoot.

All interesting stuff. Fatuous beliefs promoting or hampering serious political purposes.

But what we find most interesting in the article is the possible numerical predominance of atheists and agnostics*.

Most of them are likely to be on the political left, but among so many there must be a fair number of conservatives.

May they find our site!

*Agnostics: atheists wearing an intellectual condom? 

(Hat tip Frank for the link.)

Questions:

To what extent are Iran’s foreign policy and nuclear program owned by Ahmadinejad?

If he fell from power, would there be any significant change in Iran’s relations with America, or in its determination and effort to become nuclear armed, and to annihilate the state of Israel?

Do the mullahs, whose authority continues while presidents come and go, intend any changes?

We may learn the answers if this report from DebkFile is true:

Ahmadinejad … is on his last legs as president. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stripped him of most of his powers and shut the door against his having any political future. …

His loyalists have been deserting him in droves since he went to New York to deliver an address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 23. The Supreme Leader used his absence for the coup de grace: The removal of the president’s loyalists from the list of 4,000 contenders running for seats in parliament (the Majlis) next March.

That was easily arranged: Khameini handed his orders to Ayatollah Mohammad Kani, head of the Assembly of Experts, which In the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for screening all contenders for office. He was told to disqualify all the president’s associates. So, in the next Majlis, Ahmadinejad will be shorn of a loyal faction and any buddies sticking to him when his second presidential term runs out in May 2013 will be out of a job. …

If there is to be change, it may not be for the better. Ahmadinejad’s probable successors, according to the report, are “hardliners”. But could they be even worse than Ahmadinejad? Can a plan be devised more aggressive than nuclear war?

Frontrunners for future president most mentioned recently are two hardliners, Majils Speaker Ali Larijani, a former senior nuclear negotiator with the West, and ex-foreign minister Ali Akhbar Veliyati, who is a member of Khamenei’s kitchen cabinet as senior adviser on international relations.

They will have to be patient.

The betting in Tehran is that the Supreme Leader will not actually sack Ahmadinejad but let him last out his term as yesterday’s man, lame duck in political isolation.

So we in the West, and the people of Iran, must also wait patiently for May 2013 to enjoy the downfall of Ahmadinejad, for a fleeting moment before the unimaginable worse becomes apparent.

The comments facility for the post immediately below – Another al-Qaeda leader is killed, but Islam is winning – was accidentally closed.

It is now open and comments are welcome.

Today the estimable Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, commenting on the just assassination in Yemen of the American-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, said on Fox News that “we are winning” the “War on Terror”.

Great news, if it were true. But the US, the West, the non-Islamic world are not winning.

For one thing, it is not, and never was, a “war on terror”. It is a war of defense against Islam. And Islam is winning. Terrorism is winning. The West is allowing it to win.

Islam’s terrorist tactic is proving hugely powerful and has gained victories that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It has cowed all the governments of western Europe, and innumerable authorities at all levels in the US. Islam is advancing day by day. Its terrorism is not practiced continually in all target countries, but the threat of it, and the memories of what has been done and could be done again at any moment, are always there. Because authorities are afraid, Islam creeps on.

Day by day, in Western countries into which Muslims migrate in ever-growing numbers, Islam gains its concessions, its privileges: here a mosque; there a partition of a public swimming pool for Muslim women; here a prayer room in a government building; there the removal from a public library of famous children’s books with pictures of pigs in them; here (in Britain for instance) the allowing of sharia courts and the upholding of their rulings by the state; there entitlements tamely paid to multiple Muslim wives by a welfare state with laws against polygamy; and here and here and here the establishment of faculties of Islamic studies, or even whole colleges, with immense grants of money from the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Chunks of history, such as the Holocaust, are omitted from school courses because they might offend Muslim students – let truth be damned. Defense contracting companies in the US fall under the ownership of Muslims, who divert a part of the profits – and what defense secrets? – to the Muslim Brotherhood. In places of hot battle, Iraq is plagued with terrorist attacks day after day; and in Afghanistan the Taliban is undefeated and undefeatable, and ready to re-assume its despotic rule when the coalition soldiers have departed. In Libya an al-Qaeda leader has seized a position of power. And all the while, the mullahs of Iran are preparing to attack the West with nuclear weapons.

True, there have not been any more planes flown into buildings in America, but smaller plots of destruction and mass murder are constantly being laid. True, some of them are foiled, but some are attempted (such as an underwear bomb in a plane over Detroit) and some carried out (such as the massacre at Fort Hood), and the motive behind all of them remains: jihad, the holy war of Islam, perpetually waged one way and another for the conquest of the world by successive generations of Muslims, and coming closer to success now than ever before in history.

If the West does not capitulate totally and abjectly – which it might – the fiercest battles are still to come.

Jillian Becker   September 30, 2011

A report in the Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune describes how a child in Pakistan was beaten and expelled from school for making a spelling error in writing about a poem that praises Muhammad:

Faryal Bhatti, a student at the Sir Syed Girls High School in Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF) colony Havelian, erroneously misspelt a word in an Urdu exam while answering a question on a poem written in praise of the Holy Prophet .. The word in question was ‘laanat’ instead of ‘naat’ – an easy error for a child to make, as the written versions of the words are similar.

According to the school administration and religious leaders who took great exception to the hapless student’s mistake, the error is ‘serious’ enough to fall within the realm of blasphemy.

Faryal’s Urdu teacher was collecting the answer sheets from her students when she noticed the apparently offensive word on her pupil’s sheet. The teacher, Fareeda Bibi, reportedly summoned the Christian girl, scolded her and beat her. Her punishment, however, did not end here. When Faryal’s class fellows learnt of the alleged blasphemy, the teacher brought the principal’s notice to the matter, who further informed the school management.

In the meanwhile, the news spread throughout the colony. The next day, male students of the POF colony school as well as certain religious elements took out a rally, demanding the registration of a criminal case against the eighth-grader and her expulsion from the area.

Prayer leaders within the community also condemned the incident in their Friday sermons, asking the colony’s administration to not only take action against Faryal but her entire family. In the wake of the increasing tensions, Managing Director POF Colony Havelian Asif Siddiki called a meeting of colony-based ulemas and school teachers to discuss the situation. The girl and her mother were asked to appear before the meeting, where they explained that it was a mere error, caused by a resemblance between the two words. The two immediately apologised, adding that Faryal had no malicious intentions.

In a move that was apparently meant to pacify the religious elements clamouring for action against the teenage ‘blasphemer’, the POF administration expelled her from the school … Faryal was not the only one who got in trouble for her spelling error, however, as her mother, Sarafeen Bhatti, who was a staff nurse at the POF Hospital Havelian for several years, was immediately transferred to POF Wah Cantonment Hospital.

The reporter asked the opinion of some grand panjandrum who said that although he was unclear about the intentions of the girl, the word she had used was sacrilegious.

It would be true to form if they put the word on trial, and condemned it to some dire punishment, such as total extinction from the language.

All religions are absurd; some are more cruel than others. Since Christianity stopped burning people at the stake, has Islam any rival as the cruellest?

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World simply erased hundreds of huge glaciers from their maps, substituting the white of the ice with the green of a mythical unfrozen shoreline.

The once highly respected Times Atlas got it wrong! How did it happen?

Was it  a result of extremely bad research on the part of a whole team of geographers and cartographers?

Or deliberate fraud? And if so why, when the professional reputation of each one of them was at stake?

It seems they dumbly chose to believe the propaganda put out by the unscientific, thoroughly discredited, “report” (actually fiction) of  the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rather than find out the truth for themselves. If so, they thoroughly deserve to lose their reputations as scientists.

We quote from an article by Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary-contentions:

A number of researchers are complaining the most recent edition of Britain’s Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World contains misleading information about alleged melting of Greenland’s ice-capped shores. A news release issued by the publishers and echoed in much of the media asserted that the atlas illustrates how Greenland has lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover. Maps in the atlas show significant portions of the large island’s shores are ice-free. The only problem is, as scientists — who are not warming skeptics– point out, it isn’t true.

The error stems from a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has since been discredited. As the Times reports, for the claim of a 15 percent ice loss to be true that would have already raised sea levels around the world by three to five feet.

In fact, Greenland has only lost one-tenth of one percent of its ice. …

The publishers of the atlas initially claimed they stood by their data but are now said to be studying the problem and thinking about a revision. But their effort to correct this error seems, as the article pointed out, to be as slow as the actual rate of melting in Greenland.

The problem here is not just that a publisher made an error. There is a strong suspicion every time something like this happens it is the result of a deliberate effort to exaggerate the extent of warming so as to scare the public into backing measures that global warming activists support. That was the lesson of the Climategate e-mails. That story revealed the cynical efforts by some in the scientific community to fudge data in order to come up with results that might exploit the public’s fears about warming. Many researchers now understand the tendency by some to hype this issue with implausible and unsubstantiated claims of imminent catastrophe, such as those put forward in Al Gore’s lamentable film “An Inconvenient Truth,” do more to damage the credibility of climate science than anything else.

The scandals indicate that thousands of scientists are more emotionally and intellectually invested in left-wing activism than they are in science.

And that is a chilling thought.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

So quoth Elizabeth Warren, attorney, Harvard professor of law, US Senate candidate, communist, and erstwhile Methodist Sunday School teacher, recently appointed Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Ari Armstrong at PajamaMedia argues cogently against her assertions:

To hear Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren tell it, successful business owners get rich off the efforts of taxpayers and contribute nothing in return until they pay a hefty tax bill themselves. Warren gets the story exactly backwards.

Productive business leaders create the wealth that enables us to thrive, seek employment, and on the side pay for governmental services. Such producers typically work long hours, often for years with little pay, risking their own time and money to bring their vision to life. They turn metals, gases, plants, and other natural resources into valuable commodities, and they direct others’ labor to more prosperous ends, expanding our quality of life.

Some say business leaders should “give something back.” But those operating on a free market never took anything from anybody, except in voluntary and mutually beneficial trade. Instead, they produce the goods and services — the computers and cell phones, the health care, the books and movies, the automobiles, the plumbing pipes — than enrich and extend our lives. …

Great producers deserve our gratitude and respect, not the ugly, envious sneers so often directed at them by today’s political left. Above all these business leaders deserve a government that protects their rights, including their right to produce wealth and use the resulting profits as they judge best.

Warren invokes the “social contract,” but if that means anything sensible it is to protect individuals from the violence, fraud, and plunder of others. In seeking to peacefully pursue our own lives and interact with others on a voluntary basis, we agree to respect the equal rights of others. We institute government to protect those rights for everyone.

Warren argues that business owners use the roads and education system, the “police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” Warren ignores the fact that the most productive already pay the lion’s share of the tax burden. … The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes … The wealthy also pay more in state and local income, sales, and property taxes (where applicable). In other words, the wealthy pay for most of the governmental services that others use.

Business leaders succeed by intelligently working hard to provide the things their customers want. They succeed despite the onerous taxes and controls of government, not because of them.

Notably, the core governmental services that protect people from harm — the military, police, and the courts — constitute a sliver of the budget of federal and state governments. Most political spending goes toward entitlements at the federal level and welfare or union-dominated education at the state level.

Moreover, businesses directly pay for many of the services that Warren mentions. Businesses pay for their road use through gasoline taxes. Any given business faces a miniscule risk of a large fire breaking out, because businesses provide their own sprinkler systems, alarms, and other fire-prevention infrastructure. Private firms hire more security guards than the total number of police officers in the country. Regarding education, not only do many business leaders finance schools and scholarships, but businesses spend large sums training and educating their employees. …

Warren presumes that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington can spend the wealth created by business leaders better than they can manage themselves. … Warren contends “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” In a sense she’s right: people get rich by providing enormously valuable goods and services to others who willingly pay for them. Warren and other politicians should not be able to dictate what “hunk” of the earnings of others they forcibly seize. Any social contract consistent with justice recognizes that legitimate government does not loot “the rich” (or anyone else) but instead protects people’s rights, including their rights to their earnings.

In Pictures of the Socialistic Future, a prophetic novel written by Eugene Richter in 1893* about a state turning socialist and so ruining the people, there is this passage (Chapter XXX):

Socialism … never contemplated giving to each labourer in his special field the full reward of his work in that particular sphere of labour. It promised the nation as a whole the full reward of the labours effected by the whole people. Whatever these mechanics might turn out of their shops and mills, it was quite clear that the things turned out were not the result purely and simply of hand labour. Expensive machines and tools were equally necessary to their production. In a no less degree were large buildings and considerable means indispensable. All these accessories had not been produced by the workmen actually engaged at the time being. Seeing then that the Community finds all these buildings, plans, and means, it was assuredly only just that the Community should appropriate whatever remained after paying a certain wage calculated at one uniform rate for all persons in the country.

In the story, the hungry, angry mechanics refuse to swallow this absurd argument, and they rise in rebellion against the socialist state that has brought the country to poverty and despair.

The novel was written more than twenty years before any country in Europe tried the experiment of socialism/communism. If  the Russian, German, and Hungarian revolutionary leaders, the communist ideologues who brought disaster on their nations with their long-lived or short-lived revolutions after the First World War, had read it, might they have hesitated to do what they did?

It is interesting to play the game of “what if?” with history, because in human affairs nothing – to contradict Karl Marx – is inevitable.

* To be found at the website of our reader and commenter Don L, to whom thanks for bringing the book to our attention.