Last year I listened to a lecture series by Dr. Leonard Peikoff called “The Art of Thinking.”  Among the wide variety of suggestions and techniques was the idea of “thinking in essentials.”  It is something he suggested doing from time to time to get to the root of what is being said.  It is not something he felt can easily be done in every instance as it takes a fair amount of effort to work things out, but that it can be valuable to do from time to time to work on establishing the habit, making it easier to do over time.

I have decided to try doing that here on my blog.  My goal is to pick a news story or more likely a quote from one to think about and work out what it is in essentials to see what is really being said.  Hopefully I will be able to manage this once a week or so, maybe more as I get more accustomed to the mental effort involved.

My first attempt at this will be from a quote that was posted as a Facebook meme recently.  The quote is attributed to Ezra Klein, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, who obviously supports Obamacare.

If Obamacare is just going to be a total debacle, Republicans would let it take effect, ride the catastrophe to huge victories in the 2014 midterms, come back, use their massive Congressional majorities to repeal it…but they don’t want to do that.  Because the GOP’s fear is not that the law will fail, it’s that the law will succeed.

Sadly many of my Facebook friends had positive comments on this quote, apparently focusing on the last part, that the GOP fear the law will succeed and that is why they oppose it and in general how wonderful Obamacare will be.  My attention though was grabbed by the first sentence which struck me as wrong.  The more I thought about it the more I realized how evil it is at its root.

Note that the author does not initially say that Obamacare will succeed.  He simply states that if it were a disaster/catastrophe, then the way for Republicans to achieve their stated goal of repealing Obamacare is to let the catastrophe hit and ride the damage to victory.  The first sentence of this quote is essentially advocating the following: achieve your goals (repeal Obamacare) through disaster, damage, and hardship (allow Obamacare to be a catastrophe).  Or put another way: to get what you want, hurt people.  Given that Congress is the entity that created Obamacare, this is essentially saying :

Force is the means to achieve values. 

As Ayn Rand states in her essay “The Meaning of Money,” :

There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent’s brain an argument—or a bullet.

It is apparent what side of this divide the author, and most Democrats and other statists, ultimately come down on.  They may try reason, but if that fails, there is always force.

Taken literally, such a belief would lead to untold evil.   Sadly, we are already on that road.

• Do you want to get new equipment for your fire department or perhaps be seen as a hero?  Be a fireman and set fire to the firehouse. (This apparently happened in Vermont this year.)
• Do you need money that you don’t have to achieve your goal?  Take it from those who do. (Taxes and theft.)
• Does someone have a piece of property that you want?  Take it from them. (Eminent domain.)
• Do people refuse to act in a way you think is important?  Punish them until they do. (Individual mandate.)
• Do people advocate against your goal?  Investigate and harass them. (IRS scandal.)
• Do people actively oppose your goal?  Kill them. (Russian purges in the 30s.)

According to the strategy esposed by Ezra Klein, all of these are perfectly fine.  After all, force is the way to achieve your values, right?