To Bob at #203: Your call for collaboration among Objectivists and Christians in fighting for freedom is a noble one that indicates the kind of benevolence that will one day return when the protection of individual rights is restored and perfected.
Unfortunately, however, your dream is not a possible one. If tomorrow, you could “wave the magic wand” and return the US to it’s constitutionally limited republican form of government with full recognition of the Bill of Rights, what would prevent the last 120 year’s descent to statism from occurring all over again? The answer is nothing would prevent it. This is why the Libertarians, for example, who advocate political freedom as the primary, are ineffective.
Politics is the branch of philosophy that studies how men should live together in society. Issues of politics cannot be addressed, however, until we first have addressed the questions of how should man live qua man and what is the good. Those questions are the task of the branch of philosophy called ethics. And ethics in turn depends on epistemology (the nature of knowledge) and on metaphysics (the nature of the universe).
Only a new ethics of rational egoism is capable of grounding the Founding Fathers’ magnificent achievement of individual rights in politics. Until that new ethics takes hold in the culture, the politics of individual rights cannot defend itself against the altruists’ attacks. Those claiming that “You are your brother’s keeper” and that wealth must be “spread around” will retain the moral high ground, and Christians and conservatives will continue to concede the leftist’s root political premises because they share the leftists’ underlying ethics.
Put another way, as long as Mother Theresa remains the moral ideal, the profit motive and businessmen will continue to be tolerated only as necessary evils that require the regulation by “higher men” like the McBamas. And because no society can survive as half wealth and half loot, we’ll continue our precipitous decline into full statism until more people understand why each man’s (and woman’s) need to think and act and keep the fruits of his or her actions is a moral absolute by an objective standard – the natural requirements of man’s life as the conceptual, volitional being he is – whether alone on a desert island or among others in society.
So the battle is a philosophical one and must be waged primarily in the universities – to show young minds that there is a rational alternative to the mysticism/altruism/statism of the left and right, and to create generations of “new intellectuals” who will train future leaders who advocate reality/reason/egoism/rights in all fields. That battle is well underway and making significant advances. See www.aynrand.org
