Posted by Bill W on December 03, 19100 at 01:24:11:
In Reply to: books posted by Puneet Jain on November 13, 19100 at 04:24:43:
: do you think, unless there is world war III, we could come anywhere close to the stage which rand would have appreciated ?
No. Are you suggesting a third world war would wipe the slate clean and clear the way for a rational world? If you are, I shudder to think of a president of the United States that felt this way. I for one am not prepared to survive a thermonuclear war. Even if I survived, the radiation would "poison" the environment well beyond my lifetime. In a sense we would be giving up the world in a refusal to live with irrational people in power. It reminds me of the slogan "Better red than dead". It proposes a false dilema of either lose the world or submit to your enemies. A better option would be "Better to see the Reds dead". In our situation I would say "Better to see the ideas of Altruism/Collectivism/Socialism dead." It is the way of our enemies to wage war as a means to survive. They initiate the use of force against their own people and justify it to support the initiation of force against other nations. By that I mean they justify their own peoples privations by telling them they are supporting the war effort against their enemies that want to destroy them. A rational nation wages war only in defense of their own freedom. In peacetime we argue over ideas. We don't try to force our ideas on others at the point of a gun because where the gun begins the mind stops.
While using a world war to clear the way may sound appealing as being quick and easy, we must remember that in intellectual terms, the ideas of our enemies are based on nothing and those that hold them are impotent and irrelevent to the tide of history. It is only by the support of the productive that they have power and without that support are doomed to collapse of their own weight--as evident by the fall of the Soviet Union.