<"Objecting to having my life siphoned from me at gunpoint,"

That's a joke. At best. Or pathetic.



It is literal, if you're talking about Mugabe's right to tax me. Every word. Show me where it is wrong.

The slavery reparations are an example of what will happen if there is a large underclass which feels disenfranchised. The French Revolution was another. What's happening in Zimbabwe right now is another. The Russian revolution, the rise of Unions in the US, examples are all over the place.

Slavery reparations are bullshit. You know they are, I know they are, and the gang trying to sell them know they are. They are counting on the philosophical opposition being so disarmed by their leftist barrage that they will somehow get away with the shakedown. I think they are in for a rude awakening.

France was a noncapitalist monarchy, as was Russia. Zimbabwe is committing suicide, and the unions are largely irrelevant in our modern society except as funding sources for the Democrats.

For this world to work, there cannot be a large disparity between rich and poor, between the haves and have-nots. Period. The Truman (Democratic) sponsored Marshall Plan is an example of enlightened self-interest trying to get more folks involved.

The Marshall Plan was not a giveaway, or the welfare program it is often historically rewritten as, but an attempt to help nations rebuild working economies based on free market principles, with the idea that they would become full trading partners in the future. A case can be made that it may have been more hinderance than help, but that's another story.

And conservatives never seem to learn. Never.

What am I supposed to learn? That if I don't cough up blood money to every knuckle-dragging mindless troglodyte that demands it for the simple reason that I have it and he doesn't, that I'm somehow evil? That if I keep handing over my wallet, that someday the thug will decide that maybe he shouldn't be a thug anymore?

Doesn't matter if you think Third-world folks should do what you do, and get off their asses, scrawny as theirs are because there is nothing to eat, get an education as schools which don't exist, and go to work for companies which don't have any business.

Or maybe they can do something which is actually useful, like cutting the throats of the collectivist goon leadership which keep them hungry, uneducated, and poverty-stricken, and sticking their heads on spikes so tall that the crows will need supplemental oxygen to go up and eat their eyeballs out. Then they can look at the countless examples of nations where people actually are free, prosperous, well-fed, employed, and educated, and adopt the free-market, individualist system that actually works to deliver all the things that socialism has promised for half a century without result.

But then, we have all those nice Greenies who would complain about them getting electricity and flush toilets, and maybe forgetting all the nice dances that they do when the Greenies fly in to take pictures of them and their swollen-bellied kids with their digital cameras. And we have all the nice leftists filling their heads with the idea that capitalism is to blame for all their troubles and if only they would let the nice leftists run things--preferably from that nice palace over there--everything would be swell.

These people are not lazy, or stupid. They have been sold a bill of goods by socialists, often educated in Europe or the U.S., who have convinced them that a centralized economic system that has ravaged every nation it has ever touched is just what they need. That they buy this bill of goods doesn't make them stupid, just ignorant. God knows enough supposedly smart people in our own country buy it.

And I'm sorry, but giving the thugs running these prison camps a license to loot me endlessly is not going to get these people fed, educated, or employed. Countless billions of dollars have already gone down this rathole. Why should more money make a difference? Other than to swell certain Swiss bank accounts?

It's "enlightened self-interest" to make sure these nations develop into advanced, free nations, and their people develop into productive citizens who will produce wealth that will enhance everyone's life, and be customers for what we produce. Do you honestly think that capitalism has anything to gain from keeping people poor? If so, then you have no idea at all how the system works.

And I don't know where the hell "oil interests" come into this discussion. There is no goddam oil in Zimbabwe, which imports it from whatever remnants of technical civilization are still left in South Africa.

Greed? Which is a better example of "greed:" businessmen seeking to buy and sell goods on a free market, with no force involved, or a leader of an African country looting the property of others to keep for himself, or distribute to his cronies?

You're on the wrong side of this argument, pal, and you're smart enough to realize it.