Leftist ideas counter free state

Matthew Kennard’s “Leftists must unite and
fight” (April 7) is full of contradiction and hypocrisy. He
either fails to identify or evades the root causes of social ills,
but then proceeds to make outlandish proposals for their
rectification.

Appropriately, he calls his collective “the left.”
After all, the word “liberal” is derived from the Latin
word for “free,” and the left is anything but liberal,
what with its constant demands for more government control over
private, consensual behavior.

Freedom requires individual autonomy, not edicts from a majority
or a dictator. Kennard and his hippie brigade fancy themselves
champions of freedom, liberty and social prosperity, but their
naivete causes them to believe these goals can be achieved by the
initiation of government force or by the passivity of our
government in response to foreign threats.

At least he’s consistently inconsistent. Internationally,
his suggestions of compromise, negotiation and appeasement of
terrorist nations whose clerical tyrants vow to destroy us ““
“Iran, anyone?” ““ will result in the loss of life
and liberty of even more Americans.

Domestically, Kennard denies the freedom of producers to keep
their income. He denounces their “socially destructive
greed” by evading the fact that greed has actually created
prosperity by driving the economy, and then hypocritically calls
for the seizure of the results of that so-called evil through
higher taxes.

He wants to unjustly punish success and curtail the production
of the very wealth he wants to thieve.

While alleging that American capitalism is becoming
“increasingly untrammeled,” Kennard is blind to the
increasingly untrammeled implementation of all sorts of government
controls ““ by both the right and the left.

“But the government must protect the weak,” the left
cries ““ and through giving undeserved benefits to “the
weak” because they “need” them, the rights of the
successful are denied.

This results in mutual disadvantage, extending from minimum-wage
laws (which increase unemployment and limit future investment) to
Social Security (which disproportionately steals from the
successful to then yield low returns for all Americans).

Kennard laments “the murderous tyranny of the Soviet
Union,” but overlooks the fact that a mixed economy (where
economic and political power are intertwined) gives rise to such
systems.

When the government engages in the imposition of regulations on
private, otherwise uncoerced behavior, it results in exactly the
sort of pressure group warfare, lobbying, special favors, corporate
ties and political pull that both the right and left engage in (and
then complain about when they’re not the gang in power).

If the government were disentangled from the economy altogether,
it would be unable to grant corporations (or any other private
interests) the use of political force.

It is the pollution of capitalism with these “moderately
collectivist beliefs” that is the root cause of all social
ills.

Real capitalism protects individual rights absolutely by banning
the initiation of force (which means that each party to an economic
transaction views it in his own best interest).

The other extreme, communism, subordinates the individual to the
will of the state or unlimited mob rule.

There is no excuse for compromise, the end result of which can
only be the devolution into full-fledged communism or an outright
totalitarian regime ““ just open a history book.

And what of peace? Kennard avoids the fact that the more free
(capitalist) a nation is, the less likely it is to engage in an
armed conflict with another capitalist nation. He supports
“internationalism,” but then quickly condemns the
growth of capitalism.

He admits that the United States has done much to arm nations
that have since turned into enemies, but proposes that we now do
nothing ““ which ultimately encourages and emboldens terrorist
elements.

Peace is not achieved through pacifism ““ it is achieved
through confidently declaring one’s right to self-defense and
annihilating the threat. The initiation of violence begets more
violence, but the uncompromising retaliation to it serves as a
powerful incentive against its future use (for example,
post-Hiroshima Japan).

Comrade Kennard is correct that “leftists must unite and
fight,” but the fight should not be against the propaganda of
the right ““ it should be against their own backward,
contradictory, statist “ideology.”

Whatever criticism the right deserves (and it deserves a lot!),
let the left first earn the title “liberal” before it
suggests its own solutions to social ills.

Lechtholz-Zey is a fifth-year mathematics of computation
student and chairman of L.O.G.I.C. E-mail him at
[email protected].