Lindsay Perigo
Editorial - Getting It
No, this is not — at least not directly — about achieving a more satisfying sex life. It is about the most important article in this issue being on page 18: "Why People Don't Get It" by Robert White. This article explains an exasperating spectacle, all too familiar to freedom fighters, of seeming to be advancing in this or that particular battle while losing ground in the war itself — a spectacle well chronicled by Deborah way back in TFR #11 in her article "Look What Nanny Did When Our Backs Were Turned," recalling how we celebrated the ending of various repressive regulations post-1984 only to find that new, more insidious violations of personal & personal rights had been legislated while we were sleeping off our intoxication. It explains why, in the war against the disease of tyranny, we seem to be lopping off cancers only to see new ones surfacing before we've sown up the wounds from the old ones. For the fact is that while we are absorbed in the removal of individual tumours, certain Dr Deaths are continuing to inject a potent carcinogen into the patient — and unless we stop them and it, all our localised surgical efforts will ultimately be in vain.
A case in point: the battle against the NaZis On Air tax has suddenly become mainstream — fashionable even. The government is rumoured to be about to reduce the tax in its forthcoming budget; Labour has promised to review it; and ACT has climbed on the bandwagon with Muriel Newman's private member's bill that would abolish the tax outright. But observe what has happened here. Remember that the battle was started by me & Deborah on Radio Liberty in 1995. It was a battle against the tax itself — and against the principle that any broadcasting or any anything should be funded by money acquired by force. It was a battle rejoined by me late the following year on Radio Pacific, and by we Libertarianz, with our kits & our Adolf Goldfish bumper stickers. Then the Churchillian Ned Haliburton , a curmudgeonly 75-year-old with a harrumph to send the Richter Scale spastic, entered the fray, and, aided by weekly appearances on my Politically Incorrect Show, established the formal campaign against the tax. This campaign has seen a dramatic increase in the number of non-compliers & in the cost of collection for the NaZis — $11m is now spent in collecting $120m!
All along, however, I have been sounding the alarm about losing sight of the principle here. Ned himself would be content to see the tax abolished & the $120m drawn from general taxation, & it is obvious to anyone with an ear for that unhinged, nasal, whining quality characteristic of the voices of Alliance Retards that many of the participants in the campaign are Alliance Retards — people(?) who in all other matters are enthusiastic devotees of the forcible extraction of money from other people for purposes they deem to be worthy (such as the welfare benefits they live off). This sort of "thinking," I fear, has now lethally corrupted what was once a principled campaign.
For what shall it profit freedom-fighters to have the forcibly-extracted specific tax abolished, only then to have National Socialist Radio, Concert FM, sundry Politically Correct documentaries & the NaZis themselves (& their aesthetically unappetising lawyers) funded by equally forcibly-extracted general taxation? What, in principle, will have altered? If this campaign doesn't get significant numbers of people thinking about that — which I conceived as its purpose all along — as opposed to whinging about the number of repeats on television, then in my view it will have failed.
Especially bankrupt in principle, though entirely predictable, has been ACT's rationale for Muriel's private member's bill: the inefficiency of spending $11m to collect $120m! (How often have I said that the only reason ACT would oppose the gassing of Jews is the cost of the gas?!) No mention here of the immorality of government theft, or of the impropriety of government dictation of "cultural" values by means of that theft. Quite the contrary - Richard Prebble said to me on air just a few weeks ago that the promotion of "culture" was a good & desirable government function. (He also said that taxation per se is not theft.)
So the cancer that is the NaZis On Air tax may well be removed — but the patient will continue to become more & more cancer-ridden. Let us now ask ourselves, as Robert White's article would have us do: why? What is the carcinogen that continues to be injected, & who is injecting it?
The toxin in question is the ethic of self-sacrifice; its injectors are its beneficiaries, they who would eat our flesh when we have become too weak to resist. The nobility of self-sacrifice is drummed into us from birth by Left & Right, by the religious & the atheistic, by conservative & modern "liberal" alike. We have no right to live for our own sake, they all tell us — our bodies, our minds, our earnings, our possessions, exist for the greater good of society & we must surrender them up as & when society demands. Only generations of people raised on such an atrocious ethic could acquiesce to the sorts of horrors so vividly documented elsewhere in this issue; only a concerted attack on this ethic will finally put paid to these horrors once & for all. And this means a literate, proud, defiant chorus of people echoing with full, conscious conviction, Fulton Huxtable's & Bernard Darnton's article titles, "It's My Money," "It's My Body" — and, need I add, "It's My Life" — right in the faces of the peddlers of self-sacrifice.
Who are they exactly? Obviously, in part they are the politicians & bureaucrats who live off our forced sacrificial offerings; but in the scheme of things, these are small fry. The most potent toxin-spreaders are the philosophers who have dominated the history of thought for the past two millennia — and their modern lickspittles in present-day philosophy departments who, by such instruments of torture as modern "logic," have gone one step further & destroyed their students' ability to conceptualise this fact. How is this manifest? Read "Why People Don't Get It."
If and when people ever do "get it" (and for this to happen the study of Objectivism is essential) & spurn the academic Dr Deaths & their carcinogenic injections — then we shall be poised for the "rediscovery of freedom" so eloquently foreshadowed in David Adams' article of that name on page 26; and then we may look forward to a metaphorical new millennium far more historic than the imminent literal one.
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