In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Without trying to justify the demand for unconditional surrender, I believe any solution that could achieve the same end with fewer casualties would be preferable.
ReplyDeleteSince there was a surrender dialogue in progress, why didn’t Truman give the Japanese a little demonstration of the bomb’s potential, and at the same time threaten a much larger population?
After a demo of what “little boy” can do, I think the dialogue would have gone like this:
US: Unconditional Surrender or it’s Tokyo, downtown…
Japan: You wouldn’t!
US: Have you seen Dresden?
Yeah, you know, Eisenhower and MacArthur both thought the bombing was unnecessary -- hardly peaceniks, you know.
ReplyDeleteThe decision to drop the bomb had nothing do with the war with Japan. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were used to scare the living crap out of Stalin.
ReplyDeleteExcellent article. Interestingly, at the time, conservatives, including ex-presdient Hoover, the Chicago Tribune, Henry Luce and National Review, criticized Truman for dropping the bomb(s). That's progress for you I guess.
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