[The following letter was sent in response to a writer who expressed confusion as to why the Democrats, who “are the ones who stand up for the little guy” would, in a recent Supreme Court decision, vote away the little guy’s rights to keep their own homes whenever a private company can allegedly demonstrate that seizing their land for its own use would better serve “the public interest.”]
The essence of the political left is not that they “stand up for the little guy.” Modern liberalism is built on the philosophic foundation of altruism, the moral principle that the individual should sacrifice his values to others, and collectivism, the social and political principle that the group, not the individual, is the standard of value. In other words, the left believes in a moral and political imperative to sacrifice of the rights of the individual to the interests of any group, whether ethnic, national, sexual, or, in this case, economic.
The antidote to the political left is not the modern political right per se—as most modern conservatives are also exponents of altruism and collectivism—but rather, the doctrines of rational egoism and individualism, as espoused by novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, and their political corollary, the original American doctrine of individual rights, including property rights.