Comments on Anything That's Peaceful (continued)

I'm limiting myself to a half an hour, actually twenty nine minutes, to write down comments slash highlights from the remaining seventeen chapters of Leonard E. Reads book, Anything That's Peaceful, so let's not hold this to high standards, but here we go:

In Chapter 2, Read explains how our country was founded on the principles of liberty, but since has strayed and morphed closer and closer to socialism. The "rock on which the American miracle was founded" was articulated in the Declaration of Independence: "all men... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The essential aspect of this idea is that the state is not the endower of man's rights; the state is not sovereign (God is). Government cannot decide that all its citizens should have the right to security, welfare, and prosperity, and then take from some citizens and give to others in order to enforce those rights. No, instead of turning to government, American citizens turn "where they should - to themselves" or to their neighbor through community.

But since the beginning of our country, specifically since the New Deal, government has grown and grown, used inflationary tactics to fund more and more welfare warfare spending, intervened in the private sphere, and in general limited the creative freedoms of Americans.

In Chapter 3, Read begins with the premise that aggressive acts of force, as opposed to defensive acts of force, are inherently, morally wrong and unjustifiable. He then explains how we have gotten to the point at which we take it for granted that the government commits aggressive acts of force all the time, violence that is written into our laws. Any law is aggressively violent, and therefore immoral, if it "takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime".

If we believe that our rights are endowed by the Creator, not by the state, than all state-enforced aggressive coercion is unacceptable and unnatural. Read finishes the chapter with the following blunt truth that strikes the matter to the core: "Man is free to torture himself until he sees that his methods are not those of his Maker" (Gerald Heard).

Finishing these comments within a half-hour was clearly a fail, so again, To be Continued...