Walter Hinteler wrote:
I've read some dozen sites so far (google books offers quite a few sites).
I must admit that I stopped on page 26:
I don't take someone serious who minimises the the cruelety and horrors of what the Nazis did.
Saying that the policies ofLenin, Stalin et al were as cruel and inhumane and even more far reaching and resulted in more suffering and death than even those of Hitler IS NOT minimizing the cruelty and horrors of what the Nazis did. In fact it is using one of the most graphic examples one could think of as comparison for something horrible. It does require reading Walter Williams with an open mind and understanding what he is saying to understand that.
)Are Americans Pro-Slavery?
by Walter Williams
(June 11, 2008)
Summary: At what point should we consider ourselves a quasi free American -- when government takes two-thirds or three-quarters of our earnings?
Let's do a thought experiment asking whether Americans are for or against slavery. You might say, "What are you talking about, Williams? We fought a war that cost over 600,000 lives to end slavery!" To get started, we might find a description that captures the essence of slavery. A good working description is: slavery is a set of circumstances whereby one person is forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor.
The average American worker toils from January 1st to the end of April, and has no legal claim to the fruits of his labor for that period. Federal, state and local governments, through the tax code, take what he produces. A small portion of the fruits of his labor is used to provide for the constitutional functions of government. Most of what's taken, up to two-thirds, is given to some other American in the forms of farm and business subsidies, Social Security, Medicare, welfare and hundreds of other government handout programs. As in slavery, one person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of another person.
You might ask, "Williams, aren't you a bit off base? Slavery means that you are owned by another person." Who owns a person is not nearly important as who has the rights to use that person. In other words, a plantation owner having the power to force a black to work for him would have been just as well off, and possibly better off, not owning him. Not owning him means not having to bear medical expenses and loss of wealth if the slave died. During World War II, Nazis didn't own Jews, but they had the power to force them to labor for them. Not owning Jews meant that working and starving them to death had little cost to the Nazis. The fact that American slaves were owned, with prices sometimes ranging from $800 to $1,300, meant that owners had a financial stake in the slave's well-being and they were not worked and starved to death.
You might argue that my analogy is irrelevant because unlike American slaves and Nazi concentration camp inmates, we can come and go as we please, live where we want, buy a car, clothes and other things with the money left over after the government gets four months' worth of our earnings. But, does that make much of a difference?
During slavery, visitors to the South often observed "a great many loose negroes about." Officials in Savannah, Mobile and Charleston and other cities complained about "nominal slaves," "virtually free negroes," and "quasi free negroes" who were seemingly oblivious to any law or regulation. Frederick Douglass, a slave, explained this phenomenon when he was employed as a Baltimore ship's caulker: "I was to be allowed all my time; to make bargains for work; to find my own employment, and to collect my own wages; and in return for this liberty, I was … to pay him (Douglass' master) three dollars at the end of each week, and to board and clothe myself, and buy my own caulking tools."
There are some benefits to being a quasi free person such as Frederick Douglass. There are two ways U.S. Congress might force me to serve the purposes of another American. They might force me spend a couple of hours each day actually working, without compensation, for another American. Or, they might forcibly take a portion of my earnings so that American can hire someone. I see myself as being better off with Congress doing the latter -- taking a portion of my earnings and giving it away.
Some might be put off by my thought experiment and consider it an illegitimate use of the term "slavery." At what point should we consider ourselves a quasi free American -- when government takes two-thirds or three-quarters of our earnings?
http://www.capmag.com/articlePrint.asp?ID=5199
Think back to the 1930s when the Japanese murdered an estimated 3 million to 10 million people in China, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines and Indochina; and on December 7, 1941 when they attacked Pearl Harbor, killing over 2,400 Americans. I'm betting that most of Japan's at-the-time 60 million population were peace-loving people and would have wanted nothing to do with the brutal slaughter in China and the attack on the U.S. In formulating our response to the attack, should President Roosevelt have taken into account the fact that most Japanese are peace-loving people ruled by fanatics? Should our military have only gone after the Japanese pilots and their naval armada? I'd also wager that most Germans were peace-loving people and not part of the Nazi sadists wanting to wage war on their neighbors and exterminate the Jews. Again, should Roosevelt and Churchill have taken that into account in their response to German militarism? My answer is no and thank God it was their answer as well. Whether most Germans, Italians or Japanese were peace-loving or not was entirely irrelevant in formulating the Allied response to their militarism.
Horrible acts can be committed in countries where most of the people are peace-loving and simply want to be left alone to attend to their affairs.
I imagine that described most of the people in the former Soviet Union; however, that did not stop the killing of an estimated 62 million people between 1917 and 1987. The same can be said of the Chinese people, but it didn't stop the killing of 35 million of their countrymen during Mao Zedong's reign. Whether most people of a country are peace-loving or not is not nearly as important as who's calling the shots.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/walter-williams/peace-loving-muslims.html
The pursuit of social justice probably accounts for most human misery. What’s more, throughout history, one form of injustice has usually been replaced by another that is far worse. Russia’s 1917 revolution expelling the Czars and their injustices ushered in Lenin, Stalin, and a succession of brutal dictators who murdered tens of millions in the name of the proletarian revolution. The injustices of Chiang Kai-shek were replaced with those of Mao Zedong; Castro’s ousting of Batista and Ayatollah Khomeini’s toppling of the Shah of Iran produced regimes far more brutal. After Africa became independent the injustices of colonial powers were replaced with those of brutal dictators.
The slaughter of nearly 200 million poor souls, not including war deaths, during the twentieth century was a direct result of the pursuit of visions of social justice, such as income equality, the common good, and the various alternatives to the so-called evils of capitalism. As if by design, measures taken to produce what was seen as the good society lowered both the common man’s human-rights protections and his standard of living.
By contrast, after the American revolution, we laid the groundwork that produced the world’s freest people. However, for most of the twentieth century, we have been losing ground. If you ask which way are we heading"away from totalitarianism or toward it"there is no question that, by tiny steps, we are heading toward totalitarianism and arbitrary governmental abuse and control.
Some Americans are naive enough to think that the oppression seen in other countries can’t happen here. But let’s not forget that the country that gave the world great men like Goethe, von Humboldt, Beethoven, Bach, and Schiller also gave us Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka. Also keep in mind that it was German-Americans who helped create the underground railroad to assist runaway slaves, and it was German-Americans who had the best reputation for getting along with the Indians. Let’s also not forget that pre-Nazi Germany provided Jews with one of the most hospitable climates in Europe, so much so that during the early 1900s, in nearly one-half of all Jewish marriages, one of the spouses was a German gentile.
If social justice has any operational meaning at all, it is that the purpose of law is to prevent one person from violating another person’s fight to acquire, keep, and dispose of property in any manner so long as he doesn’t violate another’s simultaneously held fights, In other words, laws should be written to prevent force and fraud. Laws that force one person to serve the purposes of another are immoral. These values, expressed in our Declaration of Independence as the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, guided the framers in the writing of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Today, our government has become increasingly destructive of the ends it was created to serve. Americans have become increasingly hostile and alien to the liberties envisioned by the framers. We have disregarded the inscription that graces the U.S. Department of Justice: "Where the law ends tyranny begins."
