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.As students, the rebels have no greater rights in a state university than in a private one.As taxpayers, they have no greater rights than the millions of other California taxpayers involved.If they object to the policies of the Board of Regents, they have no recourse except at the polls at the next election—if they can persuade a sufficient number of voters.This is a pretty slim chance—and this is a good argument against any type of “public property.” But it is not an issue to be solved by physical force.What is significant here is the fact that the rebels—who, to put it mildly, are not champions of private property—refused to abide by the kind of majority rule which is inherent in public ownership.That is what they were opposing when they complained that universities have become servants of the “financial, industrial, and military establishment.” It is the rights of these particular groups of taxpayers (the right to a voice in the management of state universities) that they were seeking to abrogate.If anyone needs proof of the fact that the advocates of public ownership are not seeking “democratic” control of property by majority rule, but control by dictatorship—this is one eloquent piece of evidence.5.As part of the ideological conditioning for that ultimate goal, the rebels attempted to introduce a new variant on an old theme that has been the object of an intense drive by all statist-collectivists for many years past: the obliteration of the difference between private action and government action.This has always been attempted by means of a “package-deal” ascribing to private citizens the specific violations constitutionally forbidden to the government, and thus destroying individual rights while freeing the government from any restrictions.The most frequent example of this technique consists of accusing private citizens of practicing “censorship” (a concept applicable only to the government) and thus negating their right to disagree.59The new variant provided by the rebels was their protest against alleged “double jeopardy.” It went as follows: if the students commit illegal acts, they will be punished by the courts and must not, therefore, be penalized by the university for the same offense.“Double jeopardy” is a concept applicable only to the government, and only to one branch of the government, the judiciary, and only to a specific judiciary action: it means that a man must not be put on trial twice for the same offense.To equate private judgment and action (or, in this context, a government official’s judgment and action) with a court trial is worse than absurd.It is an outrageous attempt to obliterate the right to moral judgment and moral action.It is a demand that a lawbreaker suffer no civil consequences of his crime.If such a notion were accepted, individuals would have no right to evaluate the conduct of others nor to act according to their evaluation.They would have to wait until a court had decreed whether a given man was guilty or innocent—and even after he was pronounced guilty, they would have no right to change their behavior toward him and would have to leave the task of penalizing him exclusively to the government.For instance, if a bank employee were found guilty of embezzlement and had served his sentence, the bank would have no right to refuse to give him back his former job—since a refusal would constitute “double jeopardy.”Or: a government official would have no right to watch the legality of the actions of his department’s employees, nor to lay down rules for their strict observance of the law, but would have to wait until a court had found them guilty of law-breaking—and would have to reinstate them in their jobs, after they had served their sentences for influence-peddling or bribe-taking or treason.The notion of morality as a monopoly of the government (and of a single branch or group within the government) is so blatantly a part of the ideology of a dictatorship that the rebels’ attempt to get away with it is truly shocking.6.The rebels’ notion that universities should be run by students and faculties was an open, explicit assault on the right attacked implicitly by all their other notions: the right of private property.And of all the various statist-collectivist systems, the one they chose as their goal is, politico-economically, the least practical; intellectually, the least defensible; morally, the most shameful: guild socialism.Guild socialism is a system that abolishes the exercise of individual ability by chaining men into groups according to their line of work, and delivering the work into the group’s power, as its exclusive domain, with the group dictating the rules, standards, and practices of how the work is to be done and who shall or shall not do it.Guild socialism is the concrete-bound, routine-bound mentality of a savage, elevated into a social theory [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]