The Kindness of Mister Rogers

You may have seen the following video floating around Facebook recently:

Our newest contributor, Morten Rolland, has some thoughts on the matter.


“It’s amazing what you can accomplish when kindness and the happiness of others is your goal.”

Right. It’s amazing what you can accomplish, when the goal is to plunder your neighbors and force others to fund your own goals in life…

Although as far as Mr. Rogers goes, this video just shows him as a good man with a wrong opinion.

It’s hard to fault him for wanting to find funding for his show, since a portion of that specific market was being claimed and de facto monopolized by the state. Also, what he essentially did was finding a way to get back some of the tax money, that was stolen from him, his loved ones and the parents of the children he created the show for, and finding a more rational use of those tax dollars.

At the end of the day – in this case, the moral blame lies with the politicians who legislated the theft of other people’s money, in order to fork it out to whomever they please, like in this case:

$20 million dollars

Those $20 million came from someone, but that was of no worry for this Senate Subcommittee member. He seemed not to care so much about the amount and where they came from. That was of no relevance to him. After a few minutes, he was ready to throw them in a stranger’s face.

And if you take the analysis a little further, the fundamental blame lies in ordinary people’s support of the system, by voting big government statists into office and having them plunder everyone’s neighbors. As such, people get the system they deserve, and as a libertarian you must play with the cards you’re dealt.

This means it’s everyone’s self-interest and legitimate option to take what they can, when they can, because if not, you can be certain your pockets will be emptied by the next day.

That is the socialist system, by which the resources of society are pooled together into a massive tragedy of the commons. You’d be “altruistically stupid” to only be the victim of plunder and never try to defend your own livelihood…

It’s true, you can’t morally support the system. That’s why you must always seek to stop the public plundering of resources, thereby upholding your morality, but as long as might is right in this socialist world, you better also defend yourself as much as you can!

Mr. Rogers openly endorsing public funding might have crossed the moral line from self-defense to support of the system, and that was his wrongdoing, but in his context it’s certainly easy to understand and rationalize why he did so.

Leave a Reply