The Enlightenment created for many an opportunity to generate substantial amounts of producted goods, of all sorts. Reasoned thinking, coupled with the trend towards individuality, made for a highly successful combination.All this 'surplus wealth', however, could not be ignored for long. The productive, generating wealth far in excess of their ability to protect it, like the Roman farmers before them, looked to a 'segnier' to protect them. With the collapse of the old feudalism, a new aristocracy, based on principles more in line with the new materialism of the modern age, came to the fore. We know them collectively now as the "Left".
The claim of the Left, codified to some extent by the writings of Marx, is a simple one. Whereas the old absolute monarchs claimed justification for their claims to ownership on divine privilege, these modern aristocrats claim same on the basis of the "people's will". All members of the Left, from Lenin's concept of "proletariat dictatorship" to Hitler's "German volk" theory are all offshoots of this basic principle.
Objectivism uses reasoned argument to refute this sentiment. The presumption is that those that make something own it. To a Marxist, this is blasphemy; the very concept of "ownership" itself makes Marxist-style appropriation of the "owned" quite difficult. It is thus that the Left is so adamant at attacking and stamping out this philosophical system, while at the same time declaring it moribund and of little serious concern.
Were the authority of said MArxist more extensive, there would of course be little need for such arguments, as the actions of the appropriate "liquidation committees" Would be most effective in silencing inopportune dissent. This would all be justified in the name of the "people", that materialistic simulcrum of the old medeival Biblical ideology.
(Whoops. I must be praying to the porcelain god again ...)
"Doc" Cruel
