| | Not so fast, gentlemen.
Mr. Loberfeld's central point is that the ethical/political justification of neo-objectivists for wars that are non-defensive is that the United States, as a "free country", has the "right" to invade "slave states". As we're all probably aware, this is the explicit moral justification repeatedly employed by heavy hitting neo-objectivist war hawks on this site, and elsewhere.
However, only individuals possess rights, as Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff have themselves realized and discussed. Nations, counties, cities, all are political entities that do not have rights or self interest. Of course, one may refer to the "general welfare" or "national interest" of a country (or city or county) in the broadest sense, meaning that the widest interests of everyone accord with understanding of and respect for individual rights. But this is different than asserting "national self- interest" in a particular government policy, the implementation of which requires the violation of the rights of the clients (or non-clients) that government is supposed to represent.
The contradiction on which Ayn Rand built some of her ideas about proper foreign policy is the inconsistency that Mr. Loberfeld proves in Rand's writing about this, an inconsistency that also turns up in the writing of leading Objectivists. When Rand wanted to support a non-defensive military action of the United States government, she argued that the action was justified because it accorded with our "right" as a nation to invade "slave pens".
However, when she opposed American involvement in a war, for example World War II, she argued that citizens were clients of the government to which they delegated the power to act, narrowly and specifically, to defend their rights from aggressors, domestic or foreign. Further elaborating this line of reasoning, Rand argued that she could not envision that fee-paying clients (as opposed to tax-paying subjects) of a properly constituted government would consent to pay for foreign wars of liberation. In a free society, such fee-paying clients want their government to restrict its activities and expenditures to the responsibility for which they engaged it: their own defense!
As to the endless bloody tragedy of Iraq, it is obvious that trying to control the flow of oil was an unannounced but important objective of both Bush I and Bush II. However, the notion that a military policy of invasion and occupation of Iraq, or eventually all of the Middle East, will assure Americans of less expensive petroleum products is half baked. First, if Saddam Hussein had become a regional power in that area, which the Bush's wanted to prevent, and if he somehow acquired the power to prevent the sale of any oil from that region to Americans, as smart free marketers we know that profit-seeking entrepreneuers from other countries would immediately begin buying and then reselling oil to American firms. Before long, the oil price received by Saddam would be somewhat lower than would otherwise obtain, while the oil price paid by US firms would be somewhat higher, but no higher than the going rate of profit.
And second, if the U.S. were actually a free country, then our "government" (it's really a state) would cease restricting and taxing the production of energy by its subjects. The result would be a great outpouring of energy production and innovation that would, in short order, bankrupt the incompetents and thieves who pose as "shieks", and who have never produced or created anything in their lives. The Arabian oil cartel can command vast revenues only because its potential competitors, primarily American energy entrepreneuers and capitalists, have been persecuted and villified, heavily taxed and regulated. One consequence of this injustice has been an artificial scarcity of energy supplies that has enriched Middle Eastern thugs.
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