We are good people living under a bad government in a time of war. Objectivists have argued, properly, that if our government was bad, in the sense of being an aggressor in war, then we should be prepared to suffer the consequences when another country acts in self-defense. However, here our government is not the aggressor, it’s the appeaser. Do we similarly have to sit back – in the name of the rule of law – and let ourselves be wiped out as collateral damage? One argument that has been made is that, because we’ve allowed our government to go down this path, we have to be prepared to accept the consequences. But note that the argument is not that we have to accept the consequences in order to preserve the principle of property rights; instead the issue, as I see it, boils down to the preservation of the rule of law. So what can be said about that?
