According to Boston Globe correspondent Evan Allen, a letter from a government agency says that the family of the brothers accused in the Marathon bomb attacks “received food stamps and welfare when the brothers were growing up….” The Globe also reported that bomber suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, “also received food stamps and welfare benefits from September 2011 to November 2012….” So the question might be asked: If Tamerlan Tsarnaev had been busy supporting his wife, would he have had the time to become a suspected terrorist? Can a terrorist afford explosives and guns if he doesn’t have enough money to feed his family?
Let me propose a modest argument: A man intelligent enough to plan a successful terrorist attack could – if he wanted – have supported his wife. Neither would a person of such determination, in theory, have a problem earning a living. Such dedication as we find in terrorists, such adherence to discipline, such willingness to make every sacrifice, suggests someone with strong will power. But then we read in the newspapers that the suspected terrorist’s wife was receiving food stamps and welfare. And if this proves correct, and if the terrorist suspect is the actual terrorist, does it forever spoil the image of the terrorist for us? – that is to say, the image of a resilient and resourceful killer. Here the economic question intersects with the terrorist question.
Consider, if you will, the morality of the terrorist versus the morality of capitalism. The fanatical terrorist does not respect life. He does not respect property. He is anti-life, and anti-property. And in the last analysis, he is anti-capitalist. Readers should make note of this. Terrorism is opposed, in principle, to real freedom. The bomb-throwing communist and the bomb-throwing Islamist are cut from the same cloth, despising other people’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Do we not find a sense of entitlement here? “I am entitled to blow people up,” says the terrorist. What greater sense of entitlement could there be? Why, therefore, shouldn’t the terrorist be entitled to food stamps for the wife he will not support? For, after all, every terrorist is a superman at war with society. So it is logical for him to let the society feed his wife. Meanwhile, he seeks to change everything, to undo everything. His revolution is total. He accepts no compromise. At bottom, you see, terrorism makes the terrorist into a special person. He gets to decide our fate because he knows best and the rest of us count for nothing.
Capitalist system is based on a different morality than that of the terrorist. It holds that all men are obligated to respect the life and property of other men. That is the fundamental basis of capitalism – an obligation not to harm others. That is to say, we have a duty to live without doing violence to others. The state, which enforces this obligation, is permitted to use violence only under the strict rule of law. Therefore, the state must be ringed about with checks and limitations – like in Bill of Rights where it says, “Congress shall make no law,” etc.
Under the capitalist system each man earns his own bread, and each man decides how his money will be spent. There is no entitlement. There is only obligation. Aside from the obligation to respect the life and property of others there is an obligation to work. But the revolutionary and the terrorist acknowledge no such obligation. Once again, they are special persons who can kill and destroy at will. More often than not the idea is, in fact, “destruction for the sake of destruction.” As Ludwig von Mises once wrote, “The catastrophe [of destructionism] came because, for many decades, hardly anybody ventured to examine critically and to explode the trigger-consciousness of the fanatical desperadoes.” (The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, p. 110)
The terrorist is a destructionist. He is the enemy of freedom. As such, he is a fit object for incarceration or extermination. All of respectable society demands that terrorists be hunted down. And so, we are understandably outraged to find that a supposed terrorist was the recipient of public beneficence. One is led to ask the question: Who are we helping and why?
The principle of the market is to exchange good for good. But this is not the principle of the terrorist. Here we find enmity as repayment for friendliness, bombs and death as repayment for food and shelter. What sort of monster of ingratitude sets off bombs in the country that took his family in as refugees from another country? Thus we are introduced to the problem of the misfit and the malcontent – perhaps the greatest problem facing our society.
I will end by quoting from Gustave Le Bon’s Psychology of Socialism, where he wrote: “This multitude of incapable or degenerate persons is a grave danger to civilization. United in common hatred of the society in which they can find no place, they demand nothing but to fight against it. They form an army ready for all revolutions, having nothing to lose and everything to gain – at least in appearance. Above all, this army is ready for all works of destruction.”
