HOW DO YOU FEEL…

… ABOUT THE POLITICAL TREND OF THE US AND THE WESTERN WORLD?

Timely excerpts from the “Mike Wallace Interview” ABC-TV with Ayn Rand 1959

Wallace: How do you feel about the political trend of the US and the Western world?

AR: The same way everybody feels – except more consciously. I think that the trend is terrible, […] and that we will continue to move towards disaster until and unless all those welfare-state conceptions are rejected. […] We are now moving toward complete collectivism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody. And we are moving that way only because of our altruist morality.

Wallace: You say “everybody is enslaved to everybody”. Yet this came about democratically. Free people in a free country voted for this kind of government. Do you object to the democratic process?

AR: I object to the idea that people have the right to vote on everything. The traditional American system was based on the idea that the majority would prevail only in narrow political affairs and that the majority’s power was limited by inalienable individual rights. Therefore, I do not believe that a majority can vote away a man’s life or property or freedom. I do not believe that a majority vote makes the decision right.

Wallace: Then how do we arrive at action? How do we arrive at our leadership? Who elects? Who appoints?

AR: We arrive at decisions by the Constitutional process, as we once had it. People elect officials, but the powers of those officials are strictly limited. […] We should not permit the government to initiate force against people who have not themselves used force against anyone. We should not give government, or the majority, or any minority, the right to take the life or the property of others. The original system was based on that principle.
Quote of the day:
“…there exists in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery, to inequality in freedom. (Alexis de Tocqueville “On Democracy, Revolution, and Society” 1831)