Sirs
I notice that Bruno Walther seems to think my name is "The Tea Party Movement", yet I am quite certain each of the three letters recently published by me were not undersigned so. Nevertheless I am delighted to have caused Mt Walther to erupt in gay hilarity - what with his oppressive global warming/cooling/fiddling-under-the-spread-sheet nightmares.
Although Mr Walther is quite correct to assert the simplicity of my equation that the free market is good and government is bad, it is almost as though, in his thrashing about the "necessities of civilized society", he didn't actually understand the derivation of these equations. Doubtless however, this is wrong since Mr Walther can trumpet himself as a "Visiting Associate Professor of Environmental Science at the College of Public Health and Nutrition, Taipei Medical University" and I ... well... I'm just a plain old banjo "Mr".
Yet astonishingly, this academic luminary seems to have missed my point. The free market is good and government is bad for several reasons, but most importantly it is that where action in a free market always takes the form of a voluntary exchange of values among equals, government action is always predicated upon the threat of overwhelming violence.
In the freedom of the market, a human being may make full use of her distinctive method for survival - her mind - in the production of economic value. Applying our human minds to the problem of survival is the distinctive mark of our species, and so, if we are to continue to survive as individuals among each other in society, then we must enjoy as much freedom as we can possibly obtain from the arbitrary violation of our nature as creatures with minds of our own.
Under the coercive violence of government however, such attempts to survive and take care of ourselves and our families are increasingly subject to the will of men arrogant enough to presume not only the ability, but the right itself, to dictate the terms of this survival. The mechanism of democratic elections disguises this presumption with some small illusion of "representative legitimacy", but this illusion fades the more control over our little exchanges in the market place the government inevitably seeks to assert.
Though such men and women of government - from all parties - may use soothing, caring language, enjoy widespread public sympathy and even have their names bedecked by the jewelled suffixes of academia, they are all nonetheless men and women whose sole operative political principle is the power of violence: a principle which has always run contrary to that of the free exchange of values, which alone is essential for civilized life.
Sirs, I would think that, if Mr Walther may, with impunity, cast his aspersions so low as to suggest Somalia as an example of my ideal society, then it is surely only fair to suggest that it can only be because he himself dreams of succeeding Kim Jong Il to the pleasures of dictatorship in North Korea.
Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.
(Sent Monday June 21st 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)
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