CAPSULE COMMENTARY: “North Korean Embargo Lifted”

“President Clinton has unilaterally lifted a 50-year embargo on North Korea, permitting Americans to import goods from North Korea and export goods and send money there. Now, let me see if I have this correct. The reason that Americans have been unable to trade with a nation whose people have been starving to death is because one man — a U.S. president — has not previously given them permission to do so? Isn’t freedom a right endowed in us by God, not a privilege granted by government officials? Yet, here you have U.S. rulers controlling the economic decisions of the American people in retaliation of North Korean rulers’ controlling the economic decisions of their citizenry. What North Koreans permit their government to do them is one thing. But why should the American people continue to permit their rulers to trash the revolutionary principles expressed in their own Declaration of Independence?”