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Criminals and Human Progress

By Gordon F. Corbett

 

    Our developing abundance results from human freedom.  Human freedom results from respect for individual's rights, which, together, form a zone of ethical sovereignty protecting every person from human predation.

    Man lived in filth and penury for so long not only because he was ignorant, but also because tyrants took a great deal of his earnings and forbade him from thinking.  The resultant poverty and poor medicine limited human life-spans.

    Or, viewing the same situation from a moral standpoint, man has lived in mental and physical pain for so long because criminals public and private took his freedom and his money and kept him ignorant.

    Some humans will always be criminals, and they must be kept in the closest confinement for the greatest time.  Such confinement can be above ground in a prison, or below ground in a grave.  Either solution protects honest people who do not initiate force or fraud against their fellows.

    Other humans will always be aggressive.  They will push and shove their way to the front of lines, speak harshly without just cause, or disregard normal etiquette designed to reduce hostility.  These people are boors, and they deserve ostracism for their boorishness.

    Still more humans will always be geniuses.  Geniuses are two-edged swords.  They create wonderful ideas and machines, but those things, like all new things, can be used for evil.  Their danger lies in the fact that they have few peers who can understand what they are doing well enough to warn them off bad paths.

    Learning is the source of efficacy.  Efficacy produces abundance.  Abundance allows leisure.  Leisure induces creative thought.  Creative thought produces inventions tangible and intangible.  Inventions produce more learning, efficacy, abundance, leisure, creative thought, and, strangely, more inventions.  The prerequisite of them all, the thing that allows ethics and love to illuminate and to gentle human lives, is freedom.

    Freedom, in turn, results from respect for individual's rights.  Rights are the foundation of human progress.  Because they violate individual's rights, criminals are its destroyers.  Criminals come in two varieties, private and public.  Private criminals murder, steal, and terrify individually or in small gangs.  Public criminals do the same things in large gangs, dominating huge areas, taking huge amounts of wealth by terror and by stealth, and by fighting gangs of fellow public criminals for their territories.  We call these public criminals "strongmen," "rulers," and "dictators."

    Deny freedom to all criminals, public and private, and you guarantee human progress and assure in every human heart a place for love.

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