Blackmoor Vituperative

A couple of hours ago, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the government can take your property at any time with any justification it deigns to provide. In a startling and surprising victory for corrupt governments everywhere (and those which aspire to corruption), the Court ruled that local governments may seize people’s homes and businesses for any reason, such as selling it to land developers to build hotels so that the city will gain more tax revenue. What you own is not yours. Your land is not yours. Your business is not yours. You have no property. You have no rights. You are a serf.

I hope for your sake that no one at City Hall covets anything you think you own.

That’s one more Amendment down, and only three to go. The 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th, and 10th Amendments are all either dead or so horribly mutilated that death would be a mercy. Oh, well.

Incidentally, you sometimes hear about one of the Amendments in the Bill Of Rights “granting” this or that right. They do not. They merely recognize rights which all adults have. The rights, or the infringement thereof, exist with or without the Bill Of Rights. The reason for spelling them out in the first ten Amendments is so that those in the three branches of government could not claim ignorance when they violated those rights, as the Supreme Court has just done.

This is a good time to refer you to one of my favorite science fiction novels, Atlas Shrugged. It deserves a place next to such classics as Lord Of Light, 2001, and Dune as one of the great works of the genre.

Atlas Shrugged is a prophetic cautionary tale, one which grows closer to becoming reality with each passing year. In the world of Atlas Shrugged, society has become increasingly regulated, and the people are burdened with ever greater restrictions on what they can do. The ultimate purpose of this regulation is not to make society safer or more secure — its purpose is to make bureaucrats and their cronies richer and even more powerful.

Eventually, the oppressed begin to rebel by withdrawing from the society of their oppressors, and the stagnant society they leave behind slowly destroys itself.

It’s a long book. If it were published today, it would probably be released as a trilogy. Nonetheless, the plot, characterization, and writing are enthralling, and keep one’s attention from beginning to end. Atlas Shrugged is one of the truly great examples of 20th century science fiction. And if you do not see any parallels between the society Rand describes and the society the USA is turning into, then you simply aren’t paying attention.