Only Capitalism Qua Capitalism Saves the Planet From Equality’s Slavery
Slavery’s equality is achieved when human beings are physically robbed of the rewards of a basic human virtue — productiveness. It’s not only a matter of survival, but productiveness is essential to a morally purposeful life — to produce more than we consume.
However, when force is used to deny people their productive rewards, the effect is broken families, dilapidated housing, violent surroundings, dependency on subsistence living, and emotional despair. This kind of equality is common to both Democratic pre-1860s antebellum plantations and to post-1960s Democratic urban neighborhoods.
To be expected, equality’s slavery is achieved when human beings are spiritually robbed of the basic human virtue of productiveness, including lockdowns. When public service becomes society’s higher moral principle, industry is taken for granted, and the rights of productive individuals are marginalized.
As author Brad Thompson writes to begin Chapter 6, titled The Nature of Rights, of his 2019 book America’s Revolution Mind,
At the most fundamental level, the American Revolution was about the unalienable and natural rights of the individual. The Declaration’s natural rights philosophy was used to mark the end of the old regime. It was the lodestar of the revolutionary movement.
The Nature of Rights chapter also differentiates between the laws of nature and the natural rights of man. Put simply, the ‘laws of nature’ are metaphysical: man’s nature and our relationship with nature. The ‘natural rights of man’ are ethical and political: our relationship with others and government. In contrast, Thompson relates that after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, British Tories believed,
The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty took precedence over fundamental law and rights born of nature. The Americans, by contrast, sought to ground their Anglo-American common laws in the laws of nature, and their traditional English rights in the rights of man.
In 2020 America, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty is taking precedence again, and has been rebranded as the Great Reset. For the government elites who envy the old regime, they call it a Strategic Partnership for Sustainable Development. Formerly known as Agenda 21, it is an agreement of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. And once embodied in America as 2019’s Green New Deal, it’s latest incantation is the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations.
Environmental Justice is the new Nature of Rights. How progressive! Instead of rights derived from the laws of nature, especially causality, Mother Earth derives her rights from men and the laws of their nihilists.
Your rational self-interest has been replaced with duty to others, and your productiveness will belong to the statists who (naturally) produce nothing. All of thisis irrational, and opposite of the principles for living that were won by America’s Revolutionary generation. Thompson explicates,
Individuals are morally self-owning, self-governing, self-regulating, and self-sustaining, which means they must be beneficiaries of their own ideas and actions. The rights of nature are universal and absolute. They are not the subjective creation of human will.
In a remarkable inversion, today’s science-deniers of ‘self-ownership’ and ‘freedom from force’ have politicized science itself. They use it to justify their assault on personal liberty and capitalism, and their weapons are climate modeling, economic interventions, Wuhan virus lockdowns, mass-mail elections, and 2021’s witch trials.
Yet, anyone who challenges their statist prescriptions is ridiculed as the ‘science-denier.’ Even better, if you dare expose the contradictions of their potions and spells, then you are guilty of conspiracy theories. The ultimate progessive remedy for failure to submit is to cancel Thomas Jefferson, and his political philosophy,
That there is a ‘right independent of force,’ and that ‘right’ is connected to freedom of action. This is called justice, which in the words of Witherspoon, ‘permitting others to enjoy whatever they have a perfect right to.’
John Witherspoon was a professor of James Madison at Princeton, and contributed greatly to the science of freedom by teaching,
A right of nature to be rationally discovered moral principle. Rights are morally unalienable precisely because their exercise is necessary to life itself. Rights as such are owned by every individual as a form of moral property.
In Madison’s 1792 essay titled “Property,” he says, “In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may equally be said to have a property in his rights.” This is an essential achievement. Self-ownership, property rights, and ownership of rights are an integrated unit. Only force applied by other people can disintegrate them.
The same is true of the human mind and body. They are an integrated unit, and only the physical force of slavery’s equality, or the spiritual guilt of equality’s slavery, can disintegrate them. In either case, they represent the denial of rational judgment and free-will.
America’s 18th century political philosophers understood human nature quite well, and were determined to enshrine unalienable rights into America’s soul for future generations,
Rights establish limits on human action between individuals in their relations with each other and between individuals in their relations with their government. In this sense, the liberty of each person is expanded and protected.
Here, Jefferson has identified equality as a moral principle in a political context — freedom of rational action. Implicit in moral equality is personal property as an absolute right. “From Adams perspective, the event that triggered the American Revolution was not the passage of an illegal tax but the issuance of an illegal writ of assistance.” In Chapter six, Thompson expands on this subjugation of property,
Even more radically, the long-term consequence of the Revolution was to liberate men from unchosen obligations to each other as they were freed from the arbritary commands of government.
The alternative to the self-evident rights of independence is the animal-like existence of both slavery’s equality or equality’s slavery. While it’s essential for removing these (political) travesities to the ash heap of history, self-ownership has more profound (metaphysical and ethical) implications.
Here, Victor Hugo inspires the spiritual independence that must precede political and economic freedom, in his romantic, 19th century masterpiece, Les Misérables,
Let us fear ourselves; prejudices are the real robbers, vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within ourselves. Let us not trouble about what threatens our head or purse and think only of what threatens our soul.
