Raison D'être

I was talking to another Airman about the price of oil and his final point to me was this: People need gasoline just to work, so it should be cheap. Of course, as he told me this, he was living well over 20 miles from base and driving some kind of Pontiac YankTank... Yaris, anyone?

Well, well, well...

Nobody should exist for the sake of another. That is tragic. What is criminal, though, is that people expect others to exist for their sake. This is not an attack on selflessness or charity, mind you, but states the basic premise of individual liberty. Selflessness and charity can be practiced by anyone at anytime, but it must be voluntary.

Oil companies do not exist to serve anyone but those who are the company. They have a good, they want money for it. No money, no good. How else would you have it? Oil is not refined by goodwill. It is not transported by charity. Fuel is not an entitlement.

The minute that anyone or anything (like a company) is forced to exist solely to serve another, that entity will wind down, becoming inefficient, producing poor goods, doing sloppy work... at best. And why not? Why should the slave be proud of his work? Why should he do more that the barest minimum? At worst, the entity will simply fade away, producing nothing, serving nobody.

Existance for another's sake is slavery. It destroys the spirit of a person, and it guts a company, reducing production and quality. There is also another name for this, the source of my knowlege of what could happen: Communism. Look at the Soviet Union: Companies were told what to make and prices were fixed by the government. There were constant shortages, quality was poor, and in the end, everyone came up short.

You must be true to yourself, whether you are a person or a group of people who form a corporation. You should not exist for the sake of anyone, and it must never be that anyone exists for your sake.