Youssef Ibrahim states that “America’s war on terror is premised on the rejection of religious tyranny and the separation of mosque and state.” Would that that were true. The sad reality is that our culture at large, including our current president, has lost the ability to grasp the core American principle of inalienable individual rights and its corollary principle of the separation of church and state. As a result, “freedom” for our deeply religious president means the spread of unlimited majority rule—by means of war, if necessary—to a part of the world untouched by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and whose citizens are therefore far more likely to vote for a dictatorship founded on Islamic sharia law than for a republic founded on a constitution that protects individual rights.
Aggression vs. Pacifism vs. Self Defense
By conflating Japan’s right to self-defense with pacifism (“The Limits of ‘Self-Defense’,” October 1) the New York Post creates a false alternative (aggression vs. pacifism) while obliterating the concept of
Just as it is the essence of a statist country’s military policy to use its military to initiate war, it is the essence of a free country’s military policy to use its military to defend itself against the aggression, or the objective threat of aggression, from such countries. As Ayn Rand once wrote, “All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.”
As such, the retaliatory use of physical force is the moral opposite of both aggression (the initiation of physical force) and pacifism (the renunciation of physical force). Does Japan, then, have the right to amend its constitution so as to be able
Bush’s Foreign Policy Betrayals
Bush’s presidency has consisted of one anti-American betrayal after another. After declaring that “you are either with us or with the terrorists,” he invited the fundamental source and sponsor of Islamic terrorism, Iran, to join us as a partner in his so-called “war on terror,” while simultaneously turning a blind eye to its nuclear ambitions. After declaring
Between the capitalism-haters on the left and the religion-lovers on the right, it seems as if there is no party left to champion and
Shackling Businessmen/Taxing Customers
The $27 million in restaurant fines that the Health Department expects to collect this year is essentially a transfer of wealth from the patrons of those establishments to the city government. This to support a regulatory agency that gives passing inspections to rat-infested restaurants while fining clean restaurants $200 to $2000 for such “crimes” as cooking a whole turkey.
Dismantling all of New York’s unnecessary and incompetent regulatory agencies, beginning with the Health Department, would remove the shackles off of businessmen while putting hundreds of millions of dollars back into the pockets of their customers.
Education and Western Civilization (published in New York Post)
[Note: This letter refers to a report that the UK is rewriting its history books to omit references to the holocaust, for the sake of not offending Muslim students.]
England’s decision to teach lies rather than facts, for the sake of not offending anti-Western Muslim racists, may mark a turning point in history.
Western civilization is the civilization where reason replaces faith. It is through the application of reason to human problems that knowledge, science, industry, freedom, prosperity and health come to replace ignorance, superstition, manual labor, enslavement, poverty, sickness and death.
The existence of these values depend on Western civilization; similarly, the existence of Western civilization depends on its intellectual substance being transmitted to the young through the process of education. Far from being guaranteed, Western civilization and its values can and will be destroyed to the extent that this process is brought to a halt. The end of the road of such a process would be a return to the dark ages.
Energy Reduction = Wealth Reduction (published in New York Post)
In “Global-Warming Hysteria,” Philip Stott states “The real crisis for 4 billion people in the world remain poverty, dirty water and the lack of
This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough. As economist George Reisman states in his essay “The Toxicity of Environmentalism,” “Energy use, the productivity of labor, and the standard of living are inseparably connected, with the two last entirely dependent on the first.” In other words, reducing energy use and creating wealth (as well as eliminating poverty) are mutually exclusive aims.
Taken in historical context, the campaign against “global warming” is part of a larger and more fundamental Environmentalist campaign to throttle energy use altogether, a campaign that has effectively eliminated nuclear power and has now set its sights on fossil fuels. As such, it is a campaign to stop, and then turn