Below are my opening and closing statements from an Oxford-style debate hosted by the NYC Political Forum. Roberto Guzman and I argued against the proposition and won. (Reading time 8 minutes.)
Continue reading “Debate: “Economic inequality is unjust and harmful.””The Communist Manifesto: Philosophic and Economic Ideas/Historic Consequences
Karl Marx claimed that economics determines history and that one’s economic class determines one’s ideas. Ironically, he proved himself wrong, in a deadly way. The twelve-thousand-word propaganda tract written by Marx in 1848 and known as The Communist Manifesto was a concise summary of many ideas that Marx himself created. These ideas proceeded to shape the history of the twentieth century, including its political and economic history, as well as the ideas of most twentieth-century intellectuals. This history included approximately one hundred million innocent citizens slaughtered by Marxist governments, millions more enslaved by Marxist governments, international conflicts on an unprecedented scale, and an intellectual tradition that, at present, is thoroughly entrenched in the humanities and is in the process of destroying the ideas and ideals of the West. There have probably never been fewer words that have caused more misery and destruction than those written by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto.
Continue reading “The Communist Manifesto: Philosophic and Economic Ideas/Historic Consequences”South Africa vs. Cuba
It is neither “bizarre” nor “ironic” that Jesse Jackson and George McGovern, who once argued for the use of economic sanctions to topple the government in South Africa, oppose the use of economic sanctions to topple the government of Cuba. For what troubles such advocates of statism is not political oppression (which is necessitated by statism), but group inequality.
As a result, such collectivist mentalities did not object to apartheid on the basis of its vicious political oppression of individuals (as would an advocate of individual rights), but because of the fact that apartheid divided South Africa into collective groups of “haves” and “have-nots.” Thus, while these mentalities might consider Castro’s dictatorship impractical in terms of production, since a Marxist slave-state leads to poverty, by their premises they must hold that it is moral in terms of distribution, since Marxism eliminates the “haves,” and thus inequality, by means of forcibly redistributing wealth “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The alternative to Marxist egalitarianism is the justice that results from the constitutional protection of individual rights, which allows individuals of any race to rise as high as possible according to their effort and ability. In other words, the alternative to the philosophy of the Left is the philosophy of the Founding Fathers and its ideological result: laissez-faire capitalism.