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http://hotair.com/archives/2011/09/18/my-money-i-deserve-to-keep-it-all/
Yes, look at those words. Someone really imagines that he has made the world, given himself birth, created the regulated and protected environment in which he operates, granted his father and mother the great privilege of giving him birth and spending immense amounts of their time and effort bringing him up, policed the streets so that he could go to work safely, set up the opportunity to work profitably, produced everything involved in the transactions, and, above all, created a regulated and lawful environment in which work could be carried out and its results peacefully claimed without dispute or seizure. Someone, in short, imagines that anything in the world is really "his".
A further depth of delirium lies in the probability that this same maniac also imagines himself to be Christian.
It is not I, it's not even Socrates or any other sage, who answers him - and ought to silence him, if he were sane: it's Scripture. And here I will use text-proofing, since there is no doubt that this passage is at the heart of Christian thought. First letter to the Corinthians, chapter 4, verse 7: For who makes you differ from another? And what do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did indeed receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it? What is Christianity about, if not gratitude: gratitude to God for creating us, but also gratitude to each and every one of the hundreds of people and things to whom we owe debts we shall never repay? Did you make yourself? No. Did you ask to be born? No. In that case, accept that you are a part of a community, of a descent and of a state of public order, to which you owe so much that if it did not exist you would not exist either.
(I will add that if you are insane enough to think that you owe nothing to anyone but yourself, you make yourself incapable of friendship, of companionship, of all the things that humans need as much as they need air and water. But that would be to try to reason, and you cannot reason with a madman.)
This moron argues that the individual comes before the State. That is not only false - no individual predates the society they live in - but stupid: it is a chicken-and-the-egg question. The State and the individual come together, as part of a whole. Every man is born into a community, for otherwise he would not be born at all. Every community has a law and an authority to enforce it, and to which individuals resort in distress or perplexity; nobody, but nobody, does everything by himself. I am willing to bet that our lunatic, if anyone ever did anything that he interpreted as a violation of his rights, would not hesitate a second to race for the nearest lawyer and the nearest court. And yet he claims to owe nothing to the State.
But that would be reasoning, and there is no reasoning with madmen. And thanks to the crazed talk of the Tea Party, who can't imagine why others would see them as near-terrorists, a good deal of the American right is in a state of clinical insanity. I just hadn't seen it stated quite so baldly before.
Yes, look at those words. Someone really imagines that he has made the world, given himself birth, created the regulated and protected environment in which he operates, granted his father and mother the great privilege of giving him birth and spending immense amounts of their time and effort bringing him up, policed the streets so that he could go to work safely, set up the opportunity to work profitably, produced everything involved in the transactions, and, above all, created a regulated and lawful environment in which work could be carried out and its results peacefully claimed without dispute or seizure. Someone, in short, imagines that anything in the world is really "his".
A further depth of delirium lies in the probability that this same maniac also imagines himself to be Christian.
It is not I, it's not even Socrates or any other sage, who answers him - and ought to silence him, if he were sane: it's Scripture. And here I will use text-proofing, since there is no doubt that this passage is at the heart of Christian thought. First letter to the Corinthians, chapter 4, verse 7: For who makes you differ from another? And what do you have that you did not receive? Now if you did indeed receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it? What is Christianity about, if not gratitude: gratitude to God for creating us, but also gratitude to each and every one of the hundreds of people and things to whom we owe debts we shall never repay? Did you make yourself? No. Did you ask to be born? No. In that case, accept that you are a part of a community, of a descent and of a state of public order, to which you owe so much that if it did not exist you would not exist either.
(I will add that if you are insane enough to think that you owe nothing to anyone but yourself, you make yourself incapable of friendship, of companionship, of all the things that humans need as much as they need air and water. But that would be to try to reason, and you cannot reason with a madman.)
This moron argues that the individual comes before the State. That is not only false - no individual predates the society they live in - but stupid: it is a chicken-and-the-egg question. The State and the individual come together, as part of a whole. Every man is born into a community, for otherwise he would not be born at all. Every community has a law and an authority to enforce it, and to which individuals resort in distress or perplexity; nobody, but nobody, does everything by himself. I am willing to bet that our lunatic, if anyone ever did anything that he interpreted as a violation of his rights, would not hesitate a second to race for the nearest lawyer and the nearest court. And yet he claims to owe nothing to the State.
But that would be reasoning, and there is no reasoning with madmen. And thanks to the crazed talk of the Tea Party, who can't imagine why others would see them as near-terrorists, a good deal of the American right is in a state of clinical insanity. I just hadn't seen it stated quite so baldly before.
