 Early this year a book appeared which is very devoted to individual liberty and it's very libertarian in its allegiance so that inevitably it invited comparison with Rand's book Atlas Shrugged. It was published by a virtually unknown publisher, Accurate Press in St. Louis and as far as I know it hasn't had any fanfare. I bought the book through SIL. I checked a number of bookstores in Los Angeles. Not only did they not have it, they didn't have it on their list of new or forthcoming books. As far as they were concerned it didn't exist and yet it impressed me a good deal when I read it. The author John Ross, St. Louis, is very aware of the significance of his theme. He says in a sentence in the introduction he says he gives a whole bunch of historical parallels, legislative acts that were supposed to have great consequences and had unintended bad consequences. His examples of the initiation of World War I and the Versailles Treaty, a whole bunch of things and he says today in America honest successful productive people are once again being stripped of their freedom and their dignity and having their noses rubbed in it. The conflict has been building for over half a century and once again warning flags are frantically waving while the instigators rush headlong toward the abyss and their own doom. It is my hope that these people will stop and reverse their course before they reach the point where such reversal is no longer possible. Now that could well have been an introductory statement for Atlas Shrugged as well. However, a few points of comparison. Both novels have somewhat similar themes. Atlas of course is an extended argument for freedom and especially a free economy. So is unintended consequences but its special focus is the gun laws and the gun culture. Both novels are quite long. Atlas is a little over 1100 pages long and unintended consequences has about 900. I take it he took the name from Hayek although I don't think it was actually original with Hayek either. Anyway both novels have interlocking plots of some complexity. Atlas as you know has a number of plots going at the same time but they all feed into each other and that's roughly true of this one also. It's a little bit off-putting at the beginning. You have a couple of hundred pages in which you get acquainted with one set of characters and then you get another set of characters after all the thing begins in 1906 though most of it is today and you don't exactly know where you are though it's it all has a definite goal. Wait a little bit and that all makes sense but it doesn't necessarily do so immediately. Both novels have fascinating characters but in both cases the characters are more mouthpieces of ideas than characters in their own right. I think it's fair to say that that's true of Atlas. There are a few characters that live and breathe on their own like Reardon but for the most part the characters are symbols of ideas and that's why they're having such a tough time getting a script for the movie of Atlas Shrug because I don't know exactly what words to put into the mouths of the characters nothing seems natural. And the same is true here there's one main character in unintended consequences in Henry Bowman who is groomed throughout the first part of the of the book and who is the main character for the remainder of it and but even that character is not exactly what you would call three dimensional not even quite as three dimensional a character as Reardon was in in Atlas. I think even in Atlas although it's a tremendous book as far as characterization is concerned I don't see any such full-fledged characterization as you have in for instance Iran's favorite novelist Victor Hugo or in her favorite 20th century novelist Joseph Conrad with whom I discussed many things with Rand not with Conrad. So a couple of other brief points of comparison there's quite a few scenes of passion and sex in both novels but the sex in unintended consequences is a lot raunchier than it is in Atlas and the language used is such as Rand herself would would never use in her books but both novels contain and this is the most important feature powerful and eloquent speeches which go on for quite some time but are really riveting Francisco's speech about money is paralleled by the number of other distinguished speeches that occurs in Ross's book moreover in Ross's book we are tremendously involved in the affairs of today there are there's a passage on Vincent Foster for example there both the branch Davidians and the people on Ruby Ridge appear very briefly as characters in the novel I mean so there's there's no doubt about its contemporary impact I'm going to read a few passages and then make some general comments and go into my main theme which is the ethics of revenge which is it seems to me the primary motif of this book maybe not the primary motif of the primary motif is has to do with getting the government out of the gun business and a little more widely than that though that's the main thing alright no I can't give you the flavor of this by describing it I have to give you a few passages in one scene a friend of the main character Henry is returning is a lawyer returning from South Africa after 30 years and he has a lot of guns and other things to bring back and to his great surprise he hasn't been in the US for 30 years and now all his guns are all impounded on their contraband even though they're his he can't prove that he bought them 30 years ago one of them has a little ivory tip ivory's prohibited that makes it contraband and everything gets confiscated and that's just the beginning of a number of similar things maybe just the nuisance above laws now one or two passages do not hope says Henry to the returning South African do not hope that police officers will resign instead of carrying out the orders that they dislike they will not the state police did not resign 30 years ago instead they use gas billy clubs and German shepherds on civil rights marches federal police in Waco last year did not resign instead they used machine guns and tanks on a group of people they suspected had not paid a $200 tax and they burned all 86 of them alive in Los Angeles St. Louis and Chicago the police are not resigning instead they are conducting warfare regard in public housing projects they're seizing guns that have not been stolen they are seizing them from people who do not have criminal records and so on the so-called crime bill contains a message a measure to hire thousands of Hong Kong police why because these officers are already highly trained in confiscating arms from Chinese and they won't resign when they're ordered to confiscate material and a number of other data some of which was an unfamiliar to me a lot of this and the returning American from South Africa says why why and Henry says well cheer up he says socialism's dying all over the world but Washington just wants to give it one more try I hope it doesn't kill him first said Henry this is a slight foretaste of things to come a couple of other passages to give some idea of how this idea how it proceeds my grandfather said Henry grew up in a farming family at the end of the last century his family never got a nickel from the government which I know is exactly the way he thought it should be he worked his way through college in law school and saved through his earnings from his law work in the 20s a man came to him who had designed a better plow disc compare this with some paddlers and passages in endless he was looking for backers grandpa knew something about plowing so he watched the man demonstrate his design and helped him get the financing some of the money came from grandpa's savings enough to where he owned about a seventh of this start-up business then came the crash in 29 and they were still in the black and they had no debt and since they were a private firm no one had bought stock on 10% margin or gotten caught in a short squeeze the big agricultural products companies were all being hit by this raft of farm foreclosures and they took notice of this private company that was still enjoying decent sales and making money and it turns out what was the name of that company it was the John Deere company now John Deere after they paid all their corporate tax they almost always declare a chunk of what's left afterwards guess what the money got taxed again then he goes through a long litany of the various taxes on almost every asset that is being that the man has so in the end there's really very little left so he concludes I figured it out a year ago says Henry totaled up the taxes I paid to date on earned income not didn't count those on dividends or interest the total was six times the taxes on all the sources of income paid by the president of this country and his wife added together I've never lied about my income or knowingly wronged any person and you know something I've paid every one of those taxes without complaint even when the president announced that people like me were in paying our fair share I've been a damn good sport and you think the government would leave me alone to make money so that they could continue to take half of it but instead they pick on the one thing I really like to do something that's a fundamental right supposedly secured by our Constitution and they do everything they can to take that away from me Henry shook his head and Ray suspected that his friend was not quite finished I've never said this out loud but you know all those hours I've spent developing my shooting skills and all the money I've spent on ammunition and club membership and my private range here and all the time I've spent training other people to protect themselves including lots of women in police department always for free I think the government ought to say hey Henry Bowman good job we want people to be skilled we want them to be safe with guns we want them to be able to protect themselves from harm we want everyone to be self-reliant we wish we had more people like you with good gun skills and a lifetime of experience to pass along to others keep up the good work but instead they have treated me and others like me with utter contempt they have confiscated our property and put people like me in maps maximum security prisons over ownership of offender washers or claiming that they were unassembled silencer parts or pieces of muffler tubing they haven't shot a man's they have shot a man's wife in the head because his guns but stock was too short they beat another man's pregnant wife until she was carried over a gun collection on which the guy had done all the stupid paperwork and the things the ATF wanted they burned 90 people alive over a disputed $200 tax if you believe you have the right to buy own and shoot small arms in a safe manner as much and as often as you can and you exercise this right regularly our government has branded you as the enemy they will pursue you more relentlessly and attack you more severely than they do the people who pick up teenage runaways in the bus station and torture them to death on camera for black market snuff films these status thugs are zeroing in on the most important thing in my life being able to exercise my right to buy guns and shoot them is more valuable to me than all the millions of mind that they have taken what you are describing is much worse than anything I saw in South Africa said Ray Ray stared at his friend his mind went blank when he said there was nothing he could do about it 16 years ago he said to himself I watched this man face down a stampede of buffalo with a bolt action rifle because he thought the herd was going to trample one of my trackers and he did it with a smile now he feels beaten by his own government well when you get to where you start shooting them give me a call Jesus where did that thought come from he said and that's almost finished with that part gradually the idea of what to be done is to be done about it germinates in his mind okay one more quick item we think the culture is important and we're willing to pay for our part of it the people in the gum culture have above average educations above average incomes almost nonexistent criminal involvement we in the gold gun culture offered to buy the government surplus guns and instead they have them cut up the people in the gun culture have a better safety record than any police department in the nation but several states actually prohibit us from using gun guns even for self-protection we in the gun culture played by their rules but if they even suspect we've ignored a $200 tax process all together on the guns that where the wood and the steel is too long or a little bit too short they'll spend over a million dollars watching us for months and then they'll shoot our wives and children or burn us alive and when the public gets outraged by these actions the government issues letters of reprimand and sends the guys who did the killing on paid leave in the decades that the feds have been raiding and killing people in the gun culture over suspected non-payment of $200 taxes not one federal agent has been fined a single dollar or spent even one night in jail let me stop for a moment and took another drink are you and you know something else that's never happened to this day not a single person in the gun culture has dropped the hammer on one of these feds not once then after these status bastards have done all these things they grin and tell us how they like to hunt ducks and how they only laws that they want to pass our reasonable laws I know Sidray everything you say is true I still can't quite believe it what do you think is going to happen one of two things Fleming said with the sigh one of the political parties is going to wake up smell the coffee and start restoring and reaffirming all the articles in the Bill of Rights the second fourth fifth tenth amendments and if that doesn't happen Sidray gently he took several moments before he spoke although it was obvious he knew exactly what he was going to say then he said we're going to have a civil war now the latter part of the book is about this war I don't can't go into detail about it I wanted to make a few comments they're not the first clear what to do what can they do usually one takes the lawful route but here it is the law itself that's corrupt so what can they do to correct the situation what you're telling me Ray is see that guy over there waiting for the bus the one wearing the suit a little more wrinkled than yours yeah that's the one he's an ATF agent last week he inspected the inventory of a local gun store he found a single shot 22 with a 16 and a half inch barrel and he looked at it close and so it was a smooth bore made for a 22 shot and he called a supervisor 16 inches is the limit for rifles and so on illegal possession store owner and his employees are now in jail trying to raise $250,000 bond charged with violating the National Firearms Act conspiracy to violate fire firearms laws violating Rico the entire contents of the store as well as the building itself have been seized under the new forfeiture laws the agents about to go to the bank's parking garage now what do you do with him I say pop him in the back of the head with a 22 when he fiddles with his car keys and then just walk away all right that turns out gradually to be the preferred solution in this novel I want to discuss that briefly I'm first going to compare this with a couple of other works in the novel the main character starts out by well he doesn't mean he wants to get even he doesn't know exactly how to go about it but he's trapped on his property by some federal agents and law enforcers and so in self-defense he kills them and word gets out to others and then the killing starts on various fronts throughout the United States always of federal agents some occasionally of people who have made gun control laws so here you have the the get even motif and before I evaluate that in the case of this novel I want to very briefly compare this with a couple of other contemporary works which you may not have heard of there is a futuristic novel that came out about two years ago called hear the cradle song by Gunnerson and it's set about 30 or 40 years in the future very briefly it has again the revenge motif but with a different kind of issue it's about an issue that people who are not in Southern California have perhaps heard very much about in the novel the illegal aliens have multiplied they have come over the border and they've gotten lots of free welfare medical care which of course arouses the ire of Americans because a lot of the Americans couldn't get the same thing even though they needed just as badly and to make a long story short in about 30 or 40 years there is warfare between them and you have in the conclusion of the novel the battle of Beverly Hills which has however lost by the Native Americans the what's done the the illegals win and they take over California which they say belong to them already to begin with and they did the same thing to the European whites that the European whites did to the original American Indians a hundred years ago here was a novel of revenge not as well written but it's a pretty dramatic one there was but it's a revenge for a different reason for it on a different topic there is another novel that some of you may have heard of by the French author Jean Raspel called the camp of the saints it's about the invasion of France by illegals from Algeria and then other parts of Africa and finally other parts of Asia and it's in the end it is a losing fight by the French citizens they lose their houses they lose their lands most of them lose their lives and French culture goes down the drain this is now according to the author of this futuristic novel but again get him violence that's the theme one more example of this before I return to another book that I can't help compare with these not a novel though but a historical book by John Sack just a couple of years ago called an eye for an eye and this book it's about revenge measures or retaliatory measures taken by the inmates of Dachau and the other concentration camps in Poland when they were released by the Russians they roam the countryside and kill anybody who is German regardless this is not very well known little piece of history but this book documents and dramatizes very very well what I'm talking about is really not that book I want to compare it but it's it is a tale of retaliation in the extreme many of the same tortures that were inflicted upon them in Dachau and other concentration camps are inflicted upon the Germans who happened to well who had for a long occupied East Germany and part of what was ceded to Poland in 1945 after the war and this was done regardless of who they were there were many many of them were just farmers tradesmen but they were killed tortured some of them drowned some of them simply caged and then left to die of starvation or thirst and this happened on a massive scale on October 17 1945 the president of Poland decreed that the Germans who were not already in prisons must be thrown out of Poland and all Poland administered Germany and to the peeling of bells the Polish police were rounded them up and herded them millions of them onto trains enforcing the biggest migration in all human history and Winston Churchill in that same month announced to the House of Commons he said enormous numbers of Germans are utterly unaccounted for it is not impossible that a tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain and another member of the House of Commons said is this what our soldiers died for now you have again a massive attempt at revenge all these are in some ways similar but in some ways different the justification of such retaliatory violence first of all against whom should it be directed well as libertarians we have one clear answer to that at any rate only against those who are guilty of the offense not against their friends not against their relatives not against their fellow countrymen that's what is so distressing from our point of view about war that in war you kill people who haven't done anything to you I mean the Frenchman and German on opposite side of the trenches each killing each other although none has any personal grudge against the other that represents a threat at least to that nation maybe not to that person clearly the libertarian view is if not guilty then no action is called for no collective punishment no collective guilt collectivism of all kinds is opposed but especially this kind of collectivism collectivism is still very popular racism as a perhaps as Ryan Rand said that's the that's the worst form of collectivism but there it is doing things to people because there of a certain race because there of a certain nationality because of a certain gender now this is to a large extent what was done in an eye for an eye I hadn't been aware of all those facts before just because their nationality they were Germans who have occupied with East Germany and a part of Poland after part of East Germany was ceded to Poland in 1945 just because of their nationality they were killed tortured drowned starved in massive numbers and mostly the Western world never heard about this of course a great deal had been done to them the people who did this they had suffered in the concentration camps and they felt that nothing no punishment would be too great except they didn't always get the right people now in and intended consequences they began surely by inflicting punishment only on the people who had done something on the people who on the regulators on the people who were responsible for enforcing the gun laws and sometimes on the members of the legislature who had enacted gun laws a whole bunch of those were killed throughout the novel they're simply wiped out there were and it was done with verb and enthusiasm it was done with gusto the author apparently also after this listing of all the things all the offenses by the gun enforcers is quite obviously enthusiastic about the kind of punishment that was needed out so anyway so my first point is apparently an obvious one only the guilty deserve it nobody else only those who have done it not their fellow countrymen of course there is some disagreement about who is guilty who should be considered guilty that is a troublesome point I remember during my first candidacy for Libertarian Party president back in 72 my campaign manager dr. Jack Willis said anybody this associated with the government should be killed and he said that's that's where the libertarian principles take us and I said well here's the postman who delivers the mail every day I mean you know you're gonna kill kill yeah kill him kill him that'll show them to to work for a corrupt and evil organization like the government that he he thought everyone else including me were very inconsistent in stopping short of this extreme measure so at any rate there are differing views as to who is guilty the next of course a related question is how much retaliation is called for in atlas shrugged what happens to the orange boils of the world the wicked people who the villains of the novel as far as I know nothing except they're out of a job I they're not killed they don't die as far as I know what happens however in unintended consequences is much more savage in their minds at least it was deserved but pretty savage they were the author revels in description exact of exactly what the guns do to various parts of the victims body and extracted confessions from the federal agents before they die things of that kind it the novel is it's strong stuff to read when you get to those passages in the letter letter half of the book so we said the question of how much how much should be exacted again opinions differ on that the some say only as much as was done in them some I for an eye others say no the only general principle is someone of proportionality you the more has been done to you or yours the more you're entitled to do back to them but it's sort of vague and there's certainly a lot a lot of disagreement as to the extent of that and then the final question about this raise is what is the rationale for it anyway as you may know if you've had any course in ethics there are different views about the justification of punishment not only punishment by the law but individual punishment what for what one person has done to another outside the law the popular views today are not the views of either I'm rend or the author of any intended consequences popular views they're sort of corrective views the purpose of punishment is to make the person better the person who did it so we won't do it again that's the clockwork orange theory there are other another view is deterrence well we do it simply to deter other people from doing the same kind of crime there are a lot of problems about determinants they can't get into here one of them is that it doesn't demand that the person be actually guilty it you deterrence can be equally effective if Israel wrote it and there are many other things about it like using a person as a means to other people's end thus violating famous Kantian principle deterrence in one respect was pretty affected in unintended consequences because at the by the end of the novel there's nobody who wants to be a federal agent again but all of these these are in general future looking or as we call them utilitarian reasons we should punish in order to achieve certain good effects or to avoid certain bad effects that doesn't seem to be the operative theory in any of these novels it the operative theory seems to be retribution retribution we punish him not in order to cause good effects we punish him because of he has committed a crime or he's committed an evil deed and he should be punished not in order to promote some effects or because it might influence somebody else for the better but simply because he did it he did it and he deserves it that's why this is called the desserts theory of punishment this theory in general is called retributivism and Rand was a retributivist and when I once mentioned to her how a manual can't was the arch retributivist and I said you're you're quite can't genine and since can't was the philosopher above all that she hated she didn't exactly like this remark but it was true so she sort of let it pass at any rate punishment is not in order to but because of the test briefly of whether you're a tributivist or not you could say is is this Bertrand Russell once suggested that all killers be condemned to be shipped to some fertile South Sea island where they could easily continue to exist and then we don't have to do anything to them we don't have to make him suffer why do you want them to suffer just let them do what they what they're going to do there and when I mentioned that to I ran she thought this was terrible I mean this this showed the corruptness of modern philosophy there that a philosopher like Russell should say a thing like that because precisely in her view the idea was to make him atone for his deed to make him suffer for the deed that he has committed it wasn't in any in order to it was strictly a because of that also it seems to operate in in the unintended consequences novel however there's one little problem one little problem that has sort of haunted retributivism it's not the fear itself but things that it's so easy for it to get mixed up with let's draw let's say you punish him because he's done a certain deed you punish him no more than he deserves but you punish him by what he deserves and now here's the problem consider a person who's been tortured in the Nazi concentration camps is that person interested in justice justice means getting people getting what they deserve the deserts theory of punishment is the justice theory of punishment is he interested in justice or is he interested in revenge they're very quite different things justice means setting things right getting giving each person what he or she deserves no more no less revenge may no no limits and it can keep on going a revenge against be and be revenge themselves against a's relatives and a and turn on bees and so on can go forever with justice it's tried and there's a stop to it so there's a difference but but it's very different it's very difficult in an actual practical case for the person who has suffered a lot to know which it is that he or she is after as he's interested in justice or in revenge now a person may think that what he wants is justice from someone who's done something like murdered a member of his family when what he really wants is just to get even and this is very difficult to to sort out and people who are accustomed to being very honest with themselves and very unbiased find great difficulty with this because you can't convince them that what they really are after is justice and not just vengeance it's difficult in practice to draw an exact line between the impulse to justice which is impartial and the impulse to revenge and that's the sort of I in general empath sympathize with the retributive view but it's very difficult to get this sort of things sorted out I could present a lot of problems and difficulties with this that I don't have time to do I just wanted to present the view and how this turns out and what the rationale is both in in an Rand and in unintended consequences let me conclude with this who you want punished depends upon who your favorite enemies are as a rule let me present another favorite favorite enemy mine well there's a couple of them and what question about what should be done my own chief target of venom when I listen to the nightly news is first of all that these people don't appreciate the evil of government the waste of government they don't realize that they that if we weren't for this massive amount of waste and this massive amount of corruption we could probably have all the things that the commentators say are either or that is either low taxes or less social security or whatever but not both I suspect I'm not only suspect I'm quite sure that they would both be possible if only the if it weren't for the tremendous bureaucratic waste and management which the public is just not aware of I'm most aware of and so the that's a part of the scene that you never see the commentators don't talk about that they say it's either or either the one or the other what are you going to do I don't think it is and the commentators are wrong why I think it comes back to the educational system enough has been said about the corrupt system of public education I don't need to say any more about it here that system however is deteriorated so badly in the last 30 years that retaliatory action of some kind is called for on the whole that's I'd say as in Atlas they don't kill them and punish them what you do is to just get them out of office get rid of the huge educational bureaucracy get rid of these people that that demand increased lobbies doing in the lobbying is increased every year in Sacramento and other places to require every student in college to take more education courses if she wants to be a teacher there are useless courses and it keeps them from taking the substantive courses why is it my last target journalism this it's a special right within the educational I noted I'm teaching at USC for 20 years I wondered why I went over the records about the people who did worst in my classes regular the year after year where the education majors and the journalism majors why they just why did they not pass my tests well they didn't have a concept in their heads they couldn't keep two things straight even though it would maybe obvious to an eight-year-old and they'd still get it all mixed up and this would make me angry impatient it called them in and they still didn't didn't get it straight so I thought here what do the what's the typical journalism student he comes into college he's not particularly adept either at the sciences or the arts and so what does he or she do they major in journalism they get they learn a special language for writing in the paper called journal ease and some of them even become newscasters they become the Dan Rathers and the Tom Brokovs of tomorrow whom people watch avidly and think they're getting a good view of the news some of these newsmen are not even explicitly aware of their own status bias they've been grown they grew up in the welfare state the educational system has never taught them anything about the bill of rights or about limited government and so of course they don't pass it on since so they'd be thanks to these people whom millions of people in America constantly watch the ideas that prompted the American Revolution are lost through not being mentioned they're unbeknownst and unmoored and most Americans never hear of it and these are the very people whose future depends on knowledge of these very same principles now what is the proper punishment for the destruction of a culture is it death to the traders against liberty surely they have ruined more lives than most murderers have then the gun controllers who are the special target in unintended consequences maybe instead of killing them maybe they could just dig dishes are doing some useful for a living let them watch the news as presented by those whom they tried regularly all these years to exclude that's not death but something that may or may not help them at any rate it would help us perhaps they deserve greater punishment than this but I'm quite sure they don't deserve less thank you very much