?? Jan 98 

To:
Letter to the Editor
USA Today

Love thy neighbor?

After reading your article “Pope denounces U.S. in Cuba farewell,” I could not help but marvel at how the concepts of justice, rationality, and morality have been inverted our time.  For the pope to denounce the U.S. trade embargo as “ethically unacceptable” and for Castro to compare it to the Holocaust is a slap in the face of justice.  What this means is that we are not supposed to place blame on the dictator who destroyed the standard of living of his people.  Instead, we are supposed to place the blame on a country which shows, by example, the proper economic system under which people should live.

The pope then stamps his foot at reality when he condemns “capitalist neo-liberalism which subordinates the human person to blind market forces.”  By saying this, he first ignores the fact that market forces are determined by the “human person.”  Secondly, he ignores the fact that these forces do not exist under communism in Cuba. [Therefore, how can they be to blame for the situation in Cuba?]  Only in the free market--i.e., laissez-faire capitalism--do such forces exist.  Do either the pope or Castro give credit to the U.S. for the economic prosperity that the “human person” enjoys under capitalism?

Ultimately, what is at stake here is the fact that the U.S. is being asked to sacrifice its interests for those of its enemies.  We are being condemned, not because we starve our neighbors, but because we do not feed our enemies. 

This just goes to show that Christian morality and communism are not compatible with American principles.  In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand recognized that faith and force are corollaries.  If we did not have concrete evidence of this before, we sure do now.

 If the U.S. is to defend itself against these irrational and unjust attacks, it must defend capitalism.  To defend capitalism, it must defend its right to its own self-interest.  To defend its self interest, it must adopt a moral code that does not accept sacrifice--neither of one’s self to others, nor of others to one’s self.  It must denounce both mysticism and statism.

 Eric J. Lakits
Westland, MI