| | It is the government we antiwar libertarians oppose, and do so consistently, not the "United States" or America in general.
I have nothing against American culture. I love America. I love that you can walk around and see people of different ethnicities and religions get along better than in so much of the world. I love that you can open a business here easier than in so much of the world. I love that we are a nation of immigrants, that our heritage is the origin of the Bill of Rights, rock music, and Hollywood.
I love civil society in America, and I love living in America. I also love the Western values of due process, individual liberty and peace.
But none of this can be attributed to a government that spends more than $2 trillion every year on programs not authorized in the Constitution, that holds hundreds of thousands of people in cages for crimes that hurt no one, that immorally mandates attendence at government schools or government-approved private schools, that forces workers to fork over 14% of their income to a fraudulant Bismarckian retirement scam, that has at times conscripted Americans to fight against their will, that bombs innocent people in foreign countries, that is destroying the Bill of Rights, the free market, American civil society. Loving country is not the same as loving the government, as the American revolutionaries of the 18th century knew, and as all true patriots know.
By Rand's standards, the U.S. government commits illegitimate and criminal acts all the time, and thus far is a criminal organization. Why, all of a sudden, on the question of foreign policy, is opposing and denouncing it the same as hating America?
I don't "hate America" "for being good." I recognize that the good of the American revolution and Western Civilization has come about from years of struggle of men and women against the governments that ruled them, including Western governments like Britain's that waged imperial wars and survived because they allowed their "own" people to have enough freedom to produce wealth and not become too dissatisfied with the situation. If you were in Britain in 1776, would you consider all those who opposed the war against America to be anti-British and anti-Western values? Would you say that since Britain had more rights than almost any other country on earth (which it did) that its imperial polices throughout the world were beyond condemnation?
|
|
