Part 47 (1/2)

It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to ”preserve” private property-with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.

[”The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” CUI, 211.]

The gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes....

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the ”hidden” confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

[Alan Greenspan. ”Gold and Economic Freedom,” CUI, 100.]

Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hards.h.i.+ps for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next. (How else are unachieved rewards to be provided?) There are two kinds of need involved in this process: the need of the group making demands, which is openly proclaimed and serves as cover for another need, which is never mentioned-the need of the power-seekers, who require a group of dependent favor-recipients in order to rise to power. Altruism feeds the first need, statism feeds the second, Pragmatism blinds everyone-including victims and prufiteers-not merely to the deadly nature of the process, but even to the fact that a process is going on.

[”A Preview,” ARL, 1,23, 1.]

[A] real turning point came when the welfare statists switched from economics to physiology: they began to seek a new power base in deliberately fostered racism, the racism of minority groups, then in the hatreds and inferiority complexes uf women, of ”the young,” etc. The significant aspect of this switch was the severing of economic rewards from productive work. Physiology replaced the conditions of employment as the basis of social claims. The demands were no longer for ”just compensation,” but just for compensation, with no work required.

So long as the power-seekers clung to the basic premises of the welfare state, holding need as the criterion of rewards, logic forced them, step by step, to champion the interests of the less and less productive groups, until they reached the ultimate dead end of turning from the role of champions of ”honest toil” to the role of champions of open parasitism, parasitism on principle, parasitism as a ”right” (with their famous slogan turning into: ”Who does not toil, shall eat those who do”).

[Ibid., 2.]

In business, the rise of the welfare state froze the status quo, perpetuating the power of the big corporations of the pre-income-tax era, placing them beyond the compet.i.tion of the tax-strangled newcorners. A similar process took place in the welfare state of the intellect. The results, in both fields, are the same.

[”The Establis.h.i.+ng of an Establishment,” PWNI, 207; pb 170.]

See also ALTRUISM; CHARITY; COMPa.s.sION; FASCISM and COMMUNISM /SOCIALISM; GOLD STANDARD; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INFLATION; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); LOBBYING; MINORITY RIGHTS; PITY; POVERTY; PRAGMATISM; PRINCIPLES; PROPERTY RIGHTS; RACISM; ”REDISTRIBUTION” of WEALTH; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; STATISM; TAXATION.

Whims/Whim-Wors.h.i.+p. A ”whim” is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.

[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 3; pb 14.]

Automatic omniscience [is what] a whim-wors.h.i.+per ascribes to his emotions.

[”Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 23; pb 19.]

What does it mean, to act on whim? It means that a man acts like a zombie, without any knowledge of what he deals with, what he wants to accomplish, or what motivates him. It means that a man acts in a state of temporary insanity. Is this what you call juicy or colorful? I think the only juice that can come out of such a situation is blood. To act against the facts of reality can result only in destruction.

[”Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 6.]

What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue -of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill-is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: ”How?”-they answer with righteous scorn that a ”how” is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is ”Somehow.” On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wis.h.i.+ng.

And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality-is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish.

[GS, FNI, 185; pb 149.]