Pass Labs

If a business can convince a person to exchange his money for a product who should care but the two parties involved in the transaction?

In a purely economic sense this statement would only be true in an economy with unlimited resources.  It doesn't really apply to a crowded small rocky planet circling a medium mass star.  And then there are the moral questions.  Should a 13 year child be able to sell their bodies to adults for sexual purposes?  It only effects the two parties, right?  If one dictator wanted to sell weaponized nerve gas to another dictator, is it still viewed as a closed, private party transaction?  Why can't cocaine and other narcotics simply be sold on street corners?  If someone wants to buy it and someone wants to sell it, it should be okay with everybody else?

We all have a stake in what each other does.  It's the basis of family, community, nationality and ultimately humanity.  No man's an island.

Stalin, Mao and Hitler were all mass murderers, but there is an important distinction.  Stalin and Mao both won and Hitler lost.  Germany was utterly destroyed at the end of WW2 with 8 million dead and another 1.5 to 2 million to die in the immediate post war era.  Upon his death Stalin left the Soviet Union as the second largest economic and military power in the world.   Mao took a nation that had been totally shattered by decades of civil war and Japanese invasion/occupation and turned it into a productive, nuclear armed power.  Essentially he laid the groundwork for China's explosive economic growth in the 80s and after.  History "likes" winners.  Was Julius Caesar any less of a mass murderer than these guys?

Actually, the South has won the battle of history.  "The Birth Of the Nation" and "Gone With the Wind" sealed the deal.  True, it's not popularly called the War of Northern Aggression, but for generations the cause of the war -- the continuation and geographic expansion of slavery -- was obscured by arguments about states rights.  Just this past week our President made statements minimizing the importance of slavery in the conflict.  To this day there are more U.S. military bases named after confederate leaders than Northern generals.

Genghis Khan is generally considered the worst mass killer in history, but Caesar's Gaul campaigns probably put him over the 1 million killed milestone.  I don't know for a fact, but as a percentage of the population that may actually put him "ahead" of the big league 20th century tyrants.

How come Emperor Hirohito gets a pass.  Military deaths, war crimes and starvation in the Pacific/SE Asia war area approach 10 million and that doesn't include their actions in China.