The Proximity Police

As America has moved from agrarian to urban, people rub more elbows, observe more differences, become more exposed to a panoply of lifestyles and careers. This, unfortunately, has let loose the proximity police (PP) – those who obsess about disparities of wealth and business “power” after being in close quarters with all classes of urban society. There is, they say, the underclass and the uberclass. These “progressives” then insist on “redistributing” the wealth of the ubers and “regulating” the power of uber-businesses as a means to “leveling the playing field.” They are uber-wolves in hippie clothing. They disdain the rugged individual for the effete intellectual’s infatuation of the “helpless.”

They refuse to see that wealth in a free society is created by offering a product or service to other free citizens that is valuable and that the wealthy person truly earned his wealth without harming another. The PP can only see the poor, the crippled, the sick and the homeless. They have an emotional reaction that, when coupled with a lack of philosophical grounding in individual rights, causes them to self-righteously insist upon these “downtrodden” to be taken care of via the bank account of the wealthy person, who has done nothing wrong in the earning of his money and yet must endure this supercilious grand theft.

The same immoral principles of the PP apply to businesses that have grown large by developing superior products and services to their competitors. The PP views this as “power,” when the only true power in a free society rests with government, which has the proper privilege granted to it by its citizens of using force against those who coerce or attempt to coerce others and the improper capacity granted to it by its citizens in modern America of committing wholesale robbery of citizens for altruistic ends. A very big and wealthy business has absolutely no power over other citizens. The business can rightly refuse to sell its products or can change its products whenever it wishes or raise or lower its prices at whim, but the consumer always has the right to not use the product or use a competitor’s product. The business has no more power than the consumer.

The obvious irony in the above is that the PP elite say they are attempting to limit “power,” but they are in fact aggrandizing power via inflated government, making of it a monster who tramples the rights of free people – usually the most productive and creative people in America.

The PP’s latent fascism, of course, probably wouldn’t rear its ugly head as much in a simple agrarian society, where most everyone does the same work and capitalism’s glorious smorgasbord of opportunity has not allowed the best and brightest to rise to the top – where, like tall poppies, they become visible victims of the Proximity Police. The stumping proximity policeman could not emotionally point to the rich and famous in an agrarian society because the R&F would be few and not nearly as visible. Their demagoguery works best when they have many alleged victims to trot out for public display and many affluent “tyrants” to burn at the stake of “progressivism.” And so now we watch these unctuous larcenists smirk and grin in a megamaniacal self-righteousness unequalled this side of Jesus.

The real reason for the PP’s existence is philosophical, of course. 18^th century immoral philosophers began the tide against reason, and it was swallowed whole or in part by many “thinkers” for the last two centuries, and this has trickled down into academia, public officials and the public. The only antidote is Ayn Rand’s objective philosophy and a visceral understanding of morality and individual rights.

The fight between good and evil began with Rand’s publishing of great Atlas Shrugged, 51 years ago. We’ll see who wins this battle: the fascist PPs or great-souled Objectivists. My bet’s on the latter.