A Randian criticism of the Window War.

Received this forwarded from an Irregular, authored by the "pragmatist" who writes the blog Walls of the City. The Irregular wrote in preface:

1) I notice he won't link directly to SSI, but instead through Tony Martin's site.

2) He managed to leave out the part where he vows to shoot people for resisting in a way with which he disagrees.

Odious little toad.

As you will see from his argument, all property is sacred, in all circumstances, regardless.

Mike
III

the substance of things

I was a quasi-/semi-objectivist before I had even heard of Ayn Rand (I thank my parents for that), so this next statement probably will not be that much of a surprise: just as there is no difference between “property rights” and “personal rights” (in that the former is a subset of the latter), there, too, is no difference between “property violence” and “personal violence”.

All of the various materials and items we human beings view as “personal property” did not simply materialize into existance, with your ownership of them stamped on their molecules. No, each and every single one of those items and objects was gathered, bought, traded for, procured, created, fabricated, or otherwise generated through your work or someone else’s. Oh, there might be money involved, but, after all, money is nothing more than a physical and outward sign of someone’s efforts – you worked to receive that money, did you not?

For the sake of argument, let us consider a pane of glass, mounted in some office’s wall. That pane did not simply leap up out of the ground, mount itself in the wall, and remain there until otherwise instructed. Rather, someone had to take the time to figure out how to properly process silica, someone had to perform those actions, someone had to perfect both, someone had to develop the mass production capabilities to crank it out, someone had to work those mass production facilities, someone had to purchase that glass, someone had to install it, and one last someone had to pay for all of that work, all of that effort, all of that “blood, sweat, and tears” necessary to put that one, unassuming pane of glass into place.

Now break that pane of glass – toss a brick through it, take a bat to it, whatever. What have you done? You simply destroyed a piece of material, right? There is hardly any harm in that, right? A new one will be in place tomorrow, and no one will care… right?

Yes, that is part of the answer… but just the beginning. You see, in the act of destroying something, you are stealing something from someone else – something that they can never reclaim, something that they can never recover, and something that they can never replace. You are stealing their time – in effect, you are stealing them. By intentionally and maliciously destroying something, you are robbing that object’s owner of the time it took for him to accrue the money necessary to buy it. By willfully and malevolently demolishing something, you are robbing that item’s creator of the time it took him to take it from bare, unformed, raw materials to the finished object you just shattered.

By sending a brick through a glass window, you are, in effect, retroactively enslaving those who created, installed, bought, and maintained that glass… all for your own personal satisfaction.

That, dear readers, is pure, unadulterated violence, both in terms of the “swift and intense force” necessary to break the window, and in terms of the “unjust and unwarranted exertion of force of power” you are committing to those responsible for the ownership and fabrication of the glass.

As regular readers here have already figured out, I chose my hypothetical item carefully and with malice aforethought – to wit, those who would rationlize this unquestionably-violent, inflammatory, and instigatory “Window War” by playing semantic word games have already exposed how weak and tenuous their position truly is. Worse yet, those who are engaging in this campaign of personal violence at the behest of one individual in particular are making liars out of all parties involved.

Individual rights either extend to the property that individual owns in its entirety, or they do not. I have no use for self-centered, self-righteous fools who would fecklessly suspend such essential notions when that abrogation is convenient to their own pet causes.