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Another U.S. presidential election season is upon us. Eight candidates qualified for the first Republican debate, while four others who have thrown their hat in the ring<\/a> didn\u2019t qualify. Former president Donald Trump remained the elephant in the room, which was talked about in his absence. Meanwhile, currently the Democrats have only three in the race, including President Biden.<\/p>\n Should we care?<\/p>\n One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.<\/p>\n Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man\u2019s character as thoroughly as does the precept of\u00a0moral agnosticism<\/em>, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.<\/p>\n \u2014<\/em>Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness<\/em>, p.71<\/p><\/blockquote>\n To answer our question, yes, we should care because these are dire times. Political power matters. None of the candidates are all good or all evil, but they are far from all the same. They invite our judgment as they seek power over us.<\/p>\n Yes, we should care because these are dire times. Political power matters. <\/p>\n As Rand implores us to, it\u2019s time to pronounce moral judgment. Publicly.<\/p>\n But before we judge anything\u2014a work of art, a car, a human being qua politician, a restaurant, an educator\u2014we must have an inviolate standard by which to judge the thing being judged.<\/p>\n Before we judge anything, we must have an inviolate standard by which to judge the thing being judged.<\/p>\n Once a standard is laid down, it must be declared if the assessments are for public consumption, and we cannot let factors irrelevant to that standard affect us. If we wish to be biased toward our friends, we should say so\u2014then we are not misleading anyone. If we are judging a friendship, the friendship itself is under the spotlight and we are unlikely to make public pronouncements. But if we are lecturers judging assignments, we should not let a friendship with a student affect our judgment of an assignment. The road to hell is littered with good intentions.<\/p>\n \u2014Henry Bohn, 1855, A Handbook of Proverbs<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Politicians are capable of great amounts of evil, far exceeding their capacity for good, even when the intent (in their minds) is noble. How so?<\/p>\n Once human beings are capable of introspection, they are potentially capable of autonomy. Autonomous individuals are capable of self-directed thought as well as self-directed action, of crafting a long, well-lived, ethical life. They must be treated as \u201cends in themselves.\u201d Only an ethic that treats all human beings as ends in themselves is universalizable, only such an ethic is morally upright. These judgments are dealt with in more detail in the coauthored book, Modernizing Aristotle\u2019s Ethics<\/em>: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization<\/em><\/a> (Ethics International Press, Fall 2023).<\/p>\n This ethical standard lends itself only to one particular form of government.<\/p>\n In order to arrive at that form, we observe that there are three great dangers to the crafting of a long, well-lived, ethical life.<\/p>\n In a raw state of nature, it\u2019s the length of the life that is under attack by disease, natural disasters, famine, carnivorous beasts, and poisonous plants. But there has been a phenomenal improvement over that raw state by the taming of nature with reason. See, for instance, the early part of Walter Donway\u2019s review<\/a> of Steven Pinker\u2019s book on the Enlightenment. Here\u2019s a sample: \u201cIn two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.\u201d<\/p>\n In a raw state of nature, other human beings can use force, fraud, or deceit, to steal the fruits of our labor, to thwart our self-directedness, even to kill us. Hence, we institute governments to protect us from this second threat. And this threat, too\u2014given our legitimate apprehension of thuggery\u2014has been receding in most parts of the globe.<\/p>\n Today, the biggest threat to liberty in the West is gangsterism by government.<\/p>\n But the body of people that comprise the nexus of government and its cronies have long since realized that there are a variety of means of aggrandizing their power, fame, fortune, and status by trickery and stealth. Even good intentions on their part, as Henry Bohn implies above, inevitably result in outcomes terrible to the wellbeing of their citizens. Today, the biggest threat to liberty in the West is gangsterism by government\u2014institutionalized gangsterism of the sort which is altogether common in China and Russia.<\/p>\n Even in the West, often one major political party is already part of the gang. It\u2019s terribly difficult to fight this process democratically. Large swathes of the population remain unaware of their rights, of the danger of totalitarianism, of the nature of the transgressions by government. A few people are aware of certain transgressions. Even fewer have a complete perspective on all the breaches.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not yet impossible to awaken the general citizenry. If this judgment is correct, we have to steer in the direction of politics to cure political ills. A forthright candidate may not win, but awakening the masses using the public platform of a candidacy can be the whole point of the candidacy\u2014an investment for the future, like in the novel The Frankenstein Candidate<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Hence, we need candidates who are not only \u201cwoke\u201d to the real threats to Western civilization, but courageous enough to tell it exactly like it is\u2014here the difficulty is monumental, it being easy to slip into \u201cthe public is not yet ready for this\u201d appeasement of the establishment narrative to gather more votes. But appeasement will never destroy the hydra.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n If we are to judge a candidate who can tell it like it is, we must specify the \u201cmost egregious\u201d threats. Are they being voiced? Yet, some readers may not even agree that these threats exist, ascribing them to the label \u201cconspiracy theories.\u201d<\/p>\n Some na\u00efve libertarians think that the anthropogenic (caused by humankind) global warming (AGW) is real.<\/p>\n For example, some na\u00efve libertarians think that the anthropogenic (caused by humankind) global warming (AGW) is real (it is, at best, utterly trivial compared to other causes). They argue for \u201cnuclear power,\u201d forgetting that all<\/em> markets, including the energy market, must be left alone. The erroneous belief in significant AGW causes the mistaken people to think of pricing externalities (\u201ccarbon pricing\u201d).<\/p>\n Na\u00efve objectivists, on the other hand, conflate reason and science, and thus assume that anything with a scientific aura (especially in relation to medicine) must be exactly right and virtuous, even though they know that the climate-alarm scam corrupted even the natural sciences, and they of all people were well advised by Rand way back in the sixties as to how the humanities were corrupted by government domination of research funding. Which is exactly the same modus operandi<\/em> used to corrupt other domains\u2014scientists and professors are human, and the allure of fame, fortune, and prestige, combined with the threat of cancellation for speaking truth to power, suffices to convert a majority to the narrative (sometimes arbitrarily quoted as \u201c97% of scientists agree\u201d)\u2014such is the power of the status carrots and the cancellation sticks working in tandem.<\/p>\n Some objectivists failed to perceive the mammoth cover-up and individual-rights annihilation of the pandemic era.<\/p>\n Some objectivists failed to perceive the mammoth cover-up and individual-rights annihilation of the pandemic era. They failed to notice the mainstream media clues\u2014the instantaneous<\/em> dismissal of any potential cheap cure (HCQ, Methylene Blue, Ivermectin, etc.) even when touted by well-meaning professionals; the insistence on the \u201cpangolin origin\u201d hypothesis of the virus as fact; the refusal to question the \u201cgain of function\u201d research, the brutal cancellation of contrary voices; the usage of the pandemic for neo-Marxist causes. Some even failed to object to making mRNA shots a compulsion<\/em>. Many failed to criticize the outrageously anti-free-market blanket indemnity granted to Big Pharma (for the first time in human history) by government (the Trump Administration).<\/p>\n Yet, contrary even to the views of the anti-vaccine lobby, the serious damage done to some mRNA vaccine recipients was the result probably, not of the vaccines themselves, but of the method of injection. mRNA instructions to make spike protein, when injected without aspiration, encapsulated the risk of hitting a blood vessel, and only those unfortunate souls whose blood vessels got pierced may have suffered debilitating lifelong aftereffects. Yet this risk was completely unwarranted. It was solely an outcome of an ideology that ignores the individual in favor of \u201cpublic health.\u201d See: \u201cCould This Be the Most Startling News of the Pandemic Yet?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Fortunately, most people on the real liberty side of the equation have grasped that the market for the price of credit (the term structure of interest rates) should be determined freely in the market, not manipulated by a central bank, and that the market should also be free to determine what to use as money (today, credit can be extinguished with fiat money<\/a>).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Let\u2019s now list the extreme (human-caused) perils that threaten our civilization, our individualism, and the material abundance of our times. For readers unwilling to accept that these threats are existent, we\u2019ve added a few relevant articles under each threat enumerated, as a good starting point.<\/p>\n See:\u00a0\u00a0 The Politically Correct but False Economics<\/a>; and<\/p>\n Why Central Banking Must End<\/a>; and<\/p>\n Why \u201cMonetary Policy\u201d Will Always Distort the Free Market<\/a><\/p>\n See: \u00a0 It\u2019s Time to Confront the Climate Racket Head-On<\/a>; and<\/p>\n Who will Save the Poorest from the Planet Savers<\/a>?; and<\/p>\n Why I Deny Big Climate Alarmism<\/a><\/p>\n See:\u00a0\u00a0 Why the War on Fake News is a War on Free Speech<\/a>; and<\/p>\n \u201cStakeholder Capitalism\u201d Is a Trojan Horse for Fascism<\/a>; and<\/p>\n The Best Vaccination against the Pandemic of Deceit<\/a><\/p>\n See:\u00a0\u00a0 How an Orthodoxy Prejudices Scientists<\/a>; and<\/p>\n Are \u201cGrievance Studies\u201d a Scientific Hoax?<\/a>; and<\/p>\n The Moral Case against Vaccine Passports<\/a><\/p>\n See:\u00a0\u00a0 An American Stasi? The Democrats May Launch One<\/a>; and<\/p>\n A Legal Frankenstein Has Been Unleashed to Get Trump<\/a>; and<\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\nThe Nature of Evil, Today<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Naivete on the Side of Liberty<\/strong><\/h3>\n
The Most Egregious Offences of Recent Times<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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