This letter is aimed directly at the morality that motivates much of the world, including Tim Davis and most of the (Iowa State) Daily editorial staff.

Your morality demands that the haves be sacrificed (in whole or in part) to the have nots.

Its practitioners self-righteously assert that they (have) the right to force individuals at the point of the government’s guns to give up what they have earned.

This morality is called altruism, and it is accepted either in whole or in part by both today’s liberals and conservatives.

The liberals typically want to sacrifice people to the poor and the “downtrodden.”

The conservatives are worse, they want to sacrifice people for the sake of their religion, which includes worshipping the microscopic bits of protoplasm in every pregnant women’s womb.

Liberals typically pass laws that call for the guns of government to be used to rob individuals of their wealth in order to support every kind of welfare scheme imaginable.

The conservatives claim to be for smaller, less intrusive government while simultaneously telling us what we should be allowed to read, what we can look at on the Internet, and what a woman can do to her own body.

How are laws made effective? They are enforced. Notice the root word is force.

If you don’t pay your taxes because you don’t support the current government trying to enslave your mind (as under conservative republicanism) or steal your wealth (as under the democrat’s liberalism) you will be either forced at gunpoint to pay or dragged at gunpoint to jail.

Do you now start to understand the difference between government power and the power of the private sector?

The power of the government is the power of a gun. The power of the private sector is economic power, it is the power of production and trade.

As novelist Ayn Rand made perfectly clear in her bestseller “Atlas Shrugged,” the only purpose of a just government is the protection of individual rights.

All of us have the right to live unmolested by any thugs. Whether the violence is initiated by the government’s police, or a private Mafia, or just a plain mugger, the act is the same; it is a violation of your right to your own life.

I do not recognize the right of any man or woman or of any group to violate my right to my own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

This refusal to condone such violence extends to all people everywhere, including those that think they know what is good for me or what would be in the “public interest.”

The “collective good” has been used throughout history as a justification for robbing and killing, and I am here to say that “social justice” or the “public interest,” or whatever name you give to your calls for legalized robbery is no excuse for the initiation of physical force.

If you are sick and tired of the lame excuses of both the left and the right, and their insistence on using blatantly ad-hominem arguments to defend the indefensible (Tim Davis, Al Franken, and Rush Limbaugh all spring to mind), contact me.

If anyone out there has any more questions or comments about the ideas expressed in this letter, feel free to contact my organization, Objectivists at ISU by e-mailing me or attending one of our meetings starting in the fall.

My e-mail address is [email protected].

Scott Johnson

Junior

Philosophy

Vice-President

Objectivists at ISU