If humans are the animal that chooses, we must also accept that every choice has ramifications beyond ourselves, and that if we ignore those ramifications, we are interfering with other human's ability to choose. As I first stated in my September 19, 2008 OpEdNews article, "Illuminating Dichotomies ," selfishness and its converse handmaiden, altruism, have no place in our modern society; only fairness--the true opposite of selfishness--will enable us to get to the next stage of our development as a species. In my May 10, 2012 OpEdNews article "A Collective Sigh " I wrote the following statements: [Amplifications and corrections are in brackets--RJG]
"...[A]s I have written elsewhere [--first in my November 24, 2007 OpEdNews article ' The Caesar Factor ,'--RJG ] what the Lord Chancellor of England, writing the decision for the House of Lords (then as now, the UK's Supreme Court) stated in the case of Vernon v. Bethell, Eden 2, 113, (1762), is as true now as it was then: 'Necessitous men are not, truly speaking, free men: but to answer a present emergency, will submit to any terms the crafty may impose upon them.' In other words, the powerful, the dishonest, the cunning, will take advantage of men and women who have been left with no other apparent, realistic choice.
It is my belief that the one dimensional 'individualism' of writers such as [Ayn] Rand and [Robert] Nozick is nothing more than an attempt by those on the Right to justify their escaping from their duties and responsibilities under the social contract which binds all Americans. This contract includes--but is not limited to--the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, as well as the other laws and ordinances of Federal, state and local governments[, and was explicitly stated by Chief Justice John Marshall in the decision for McCullough v. Maryland (1819) --RJG ]. To quote John Kenneth Galbraith ( The Guardian newspaper , London, May 23, 1992), 'The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans association " But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.'
Or as G. K. Chesterton so succinctly put it, 'The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.' ( The Man Who Was Thursday , chapter 11.)"
We cannot legislate others' morality, only their actions; and we must understand the plight of those Americans who live in parts of this country where there is no alternative to "bad employers." Not everyone can just pick-up and move their lives to a different place because their employer isn't worth the price of the powder it would take to blow him to Hell. We are all a part of a greater whole, the United States of America, and we owe it to one another to share our good fortune with all of the people who made our nation and its wealth possible: the people who work for someone other than themselves, who would most benefit from the removal of the master-slave relationship that too many employers think comes with a job.
Let me quote from my May 18, 2011 OpEdNews article " The Four Horsemen of Calumny :"
"Karl Marx wrote of the direction that the unfettered, free market capitalist system was doomed to go (and is now going) almost 170 years ago, four years before he and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto :
'We have started out from the premises of political economy [i.e., free market capitalism]. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property; the separation of labor, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital; the division of labor; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc. From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that, finally, the distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.' 'Human Requirements and the Division of Labor;' Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , p. 48, 1844. [Emphasis added.]
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