Apologies for the delayed announcement. I started it but then got sidetracked. It happens. But we posted the comments, and you voted, and this week’s winner is Ian Underwood.

Ian won the first week we began this way back in February, if I remember correctly (I know it was Ian, it’s the month I’m not sure about). He consistently provides excellent comments, so we sometimes have to exclude him from consideration because, as one commenter observed many months ago, he’d win every week. Well, you picked him this time, so congrats to Ian. I’m not sure what I sent you last time, but send me an email, and we’ll get you something different.

Collcat and Laura Condon tied for second.

Here’s Ian’s winning comment.

Ian Underwood
Rights, or Permissions?

How about consent — which essentially reduces to the Golden Rule — as a shared value upon which to base both society and government? According to the Declaration of Independence, that’s the ideal upon which the need to form a new country is based.

Here are the things I don’t want anyone else to be able to do to me. Therefore, I agree to be punished if I get caught trying to do them to anyone else.‘

That captures all of the things that should be crimes (like murder, assault, and theft), without including the things that shouldn’t be (like smoking pot or paying for sex or gambling). And it eliminates using government as a tool for redistributing wealth.

Or how about Bastiat’s description of government as ‘nothing more than organized self-defense’?
These are the opposite of chaos.

What we have nowis chaos — a situation where 51% of the voters can force their preferences on the other 49% at the point of a gun; where 51% of the voters can treat the other 49% as ATMs, and so on; where every election feels like it could spell the end of the world as we know it, because a handful of voters in the middle could turn everything upside-down overnight.

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While Amil Imani’s policy suggestions may make sense from an Iranian-American viewpoint, they make NO sense from an American-American viewpoint. America has been following policies aligned with his suggestions for longer than most Americans have been alive.

America backed the principal opponent of the “[t]he religious fanatics steering the Islamic Republic” during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussien, for eight years. Our ally killed, on the order of half a million Iranians. That wasn’t enough to topple the mullahs, so we threw him under the bus and switched our allegiance to the House of Saud, who have spent $100 billion spreading their version of Islam, Salafism, around the world.

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Two Gulf Wars later have left the region with Iran as the principal regional power and Iraq as their vassal, at the cost of several trillion dollars and millions of lives. As our twenty-year-long experience of leading the Afghans from the Taliban to the Taliban amply demonstrates, the uniparty’s foreign policy consistently places American interests last, if they are considered at all.

It’s time for Americans to focus on America and let the rest of the world solve their problems on their own.

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