Nationalised charity?
Sir: Mr Stephen Milligan (Letters, 31 Janu- ary) displays all the worst aspects of the arrogant, hot-handed altruism which has always been current in so much of the Con- servative party.
He completely fails to appreciate what I said in my previous letter (17 January). The moral right to property means that a man has the right to earn property and to use what he has earned; it does not mean that he has a right to what others have produced. The fact of his existence and his professed needs cannot constitute a valid claim on other people's lives and efforts.
Mr Milligan makes an unsubstantiated assertion that a man holds his property partly by virtue of the community in which he lives and that he therefore has certain moral responsibilities towards that com- munity. I am reminded of the following words of Adolf Hitler—`that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual' (1 October 1933). I fail to see how the volun- tary exchange of goods and ideas between men involves the parties in any moral responsibilities outside of their contractual duties.
Mr Milligan's use of the phrase 'organic nature of society' connotes the idea that society is a living entity of its own, that it is something different from and superior to the sum of all the individual persons of which it is composed. Again I would quote Herr Hitler: 'Once the whole nation has really succeeded in grasping the fact that these measures call for a sacrifice on the part of each individual, then they will lead to something far greater than a mere lessen- ing of material needs, from them will grow the conviction that the "community of the nation" is no mere empty concept, but that it is something which really is vital and living' (30 September 1934). If by denying this view I am no longer 'a true Conserva- tit•,e', so be it.
For my part I prefer to follow that intellectual tradition of individualism espoused by Cobden and Bright, Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, than ally myself with the collectivist philosophy common to Mr Milligan, Lord Shaftesbury, Mazzini, Bis- marck and Hitler.
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