Triple Collectivist

I celebrated the free market today by having breakfast out. I enjoyed watching the efficiently run restaurant prepare the food fresh and fast. I had scrambled eggs, sausage, fried potatoes and toast. A middle-aged manager, dressed neatly in black slacks and white shirt, supervised the whole operation.

Everything about the place and its happy customers was an in your face repudiation of socialism. Could it all have been done without the profit motive? No! Was there any exploitation involved? None whatsoever! If capitalism is so evil and it's exploiting ordinary people, why was I able to purchase my breakfast for only a few bucks?

I remember reading somewhere once, back before the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics crumbled, about some idealistic young people from the United States who went to the bastion of Marxism and were appalled at the lousy service in their hotel restaurant, with waiters just standing around without any motivation to do their jobs. The young and naive visitors (victims of collectivist propaganda and government schooling, one can only assume) declared themselves "born again capitalists" upon their return. They'd witnessed up close how socialism works (actually, how it doesn't work) and made a reasonable conclusion about how incentives are necessary to any economy.

Out in the parking lot, however, I saw a late model sedan parked in a "handicapped" spot. The vehicle's license plate celebrated the owner's military "service", while inside the car I spotted the handicapped placard hanging from the rear view mirror, and over that a dangling white rosary. What we had here appeared to be a career military taxpayer parasite, who also felt no qualms about participating in another system in violation of private property rights, the handicapped parking rules all businesses are forced to follow (not to even mention the draconian regulations of the evil Americans with Disabilities Act-signed into law, let's not forget, by evil Republican George Herbert Walker Bush). And the pièce de résistance was that rosary with its tiny white crucifix, the whiteness not disguising in the slightest the evil it represents, the evil of sacrificing yourself to a god, whether that god be the State or a religion that claims God as its author.

The message sent is that we must honor without question the hired murderers who wear their government issued uniforms proudly; believe that love requires violating the most basic rights of human beings in the name of "compassion" for the supposed less fortunate; and that the whole justification is "God", the ultimate dictator and destroyer of human freedom. It is all in the name, though, of what a dishonest fool like the owner of that car considers morality, though in fact what he advocates is a false and fraudulent "morality" having no connection to any objective values.