The Influence of Ayn Rand on American Society...

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Yew
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14 Dec 2014, 8:40 am

aghogday wrote:

Yew wrote:

I wonder what Ayn Rand would say if she could see the world of today.

She was such an admirer of creativity, innovation and hard work, so how would she react to the way the financial sector has gone out of control ?

Where greed and deregulation has created a class of unproductive looters, essentially taxing and stifling the real productive economic through debt slavery. Governments, businesses and families alike.
I really think she would revise some of her opinions, clearly this was not wat she had in mind.

I read the Fountainhead and I find her writing and ideas very intelligent and entertaining although I disagree with many of her views.

Interesting fact: she was a long term amphetamine user just like Hitler.

There are many dark parts of culture today, but there is greater opportunity for FULL creativity, INNOVATION and HARD WORK for the common man in art; particularly, per online avenues of CREATION activity like YouTube, where almost anyone with TRUE INNATE TALENT, no matter how isolated or poor they are, can be a human STAR of talent once they BREAK THROUGH to others in the 'herd'.

I'm sure Ms. Rand would be proud of folks, like 'PSY', who have gained over 2 Billion views on YouTube doing whatever the hell he wants, even in South Korea.

There was also a historical man viewed, as the MOST WICKED man to ever walk the earth, Aleister Crowley, who still inspires similar human liberty in the greatest art OF GOD AKA Mother Nature TRUE that is human.

Yes, sometimes it takes a zealous view to get a point across to the 'deaf and dumb' sheep among us.

And in every dark there is at least some light possible, even with the negative parts of Ms. Rand's life philosophy that was simply separated from the greatest of human evolved potential both in classical evolution and change per culture in Empathy and Unconditional Love.

That's the part of GREATEST OF POTENTIAL IN HUMAN NATURE she FAILS in life, yes, miserably, and most likely why she turned to drugs, as materialistic goods alone can never fill the heart, or even sex, or excitement for that matter.

And that is only the science of the mind per the state of the art of science that tells us NOW THAT, as Oxytocin can be extinguished by a heart that IS never TRULY NURTURED AND LOVED in childhood, or a heart that dies later in life through repression or oppression of the nature of HUMAN EMPATHY that ALLOWS human being TO POTENTIALLY have the 'STRENGTH OF 10 GRINCHES' OR MS. RAND without amphetamines, simply high on Love and LIFE, THE greatest 'human opiate' and 'STEROID' of strength.

And yes, I can PROVE WITH IRREFUTABLE SCIENTIFIC DOCUMENTED EVIDENCE that this LOVE EXISTS and WORKS LIKE THIS.

SOME FOLKS call IT GOD PER THE interrelationship of ALL THAT IS, as WELL.

AND IF MS. Rand lived IT her life could have been TRULY HUMANLY SUCCESSFUL, in all of what Human life CAN potentially BE.

But JUST in MY opinion, of course.

So now, not only does Atlas Shrug, AT LAST, ATLAS, LOVES AS WELL, IN ALL OF WHAT HUMAN CAN BE IN a WIRED HIVE OF HUMAN CREATIVITY AND Unconditional LOVE, per THE INTERRELATIONSHIP OF ALL THAT IS aka GOD

YES, IN THE full scope of HUMAN life, PER TRUE LIBERTY AND FREEDOM, Ariana's philosophy of life, TOO, WORKS MORE FULLY THAN Ayn's, for those FOLKS who can see more than SKIN DEEP.

I love your optimism, I want to be you

And yes, we do live in interesting times.

You have made me imagine Ayn Rand dancing to the Gangnam style, a real mood lifter :lol:

aghogday
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14 Dec 2014, 9:34 am

^^^

Thanks! :) That reAlly makes feel good and even more optimistic about here, as you too seem more fully alive. :)

Where there is WILL and HOPE there IS WAY. :)

It sounds to me that you are on A path THAT WORKS. :)

YOU ARE A STAR and tHere IS only ONE STAR that is YOU. :)

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14 Dec 2014, 9:24 pm

luan78zao wrote:

LKL wrote:

There are times when individuals can only gain rights or privileges, or improve their standard of living as individuals, by banding together as a group. Individual employees have virtually no power to change their terms of employment when arguing with a large employer, who can easily replace them or load their work onto others if they quit. Only by banding together can the playing field be leveled.

There's sort of an implied straw man here. Free enterprise is not about everybody building his own shack in the woods and living in isolation from everybody else. It is about voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit. Workers have the right to organize, but not to coerce others nor to seize or damage others' property.

There are a lot of people who say that collective bargaining (though not the threat of an individual being fired) is coercion.

Quote:

Likewise, large public works (interstate highway systems, Great Walls, etc) can only be accomplished by the coordinated work of many.

If they truly benefit all – which roads do, and the Great Wall probably did not – they can be accomplished without coercion.

Again, there are a lot of people who claim that taxes to build public works - even things of obvious mutual benefit - are coercion. There are always people who are not only willing to freeload off of the works of others, but willing to loudly proclaim their right to do so. For example, 'I don't use that bridge, so I shouldn't have to pay for its upkeep.' or 'I don't visit national parks, so I shouldn't have to pay for their upkeep,' or 'I'm not interested in space, so I shouldn't have to help fund the space program.'etc, ad nauseum.

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When the Framers stated that certain powers would be granted the government in order to further the "general welfare" they did indeed mean the welfare of all. They would have been horrified by the notion that some individuals must be sacrificed in order to benefit the collective.

Oh, ok. In that case I largely agree.

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Sometimes a slippery slope argument is correct.

In this case, it's a fallacy. There are a hell of a lot of very stable regulatory paradigms between 'Laissez-faire' and 'Gulag.'

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One man's rights are delimited by everybody else's. Sometimes honest men can disagree, and it is necessary to bring in the law to determine where the line should be drawn between your right to swing your arm and my right not to be harmed or menaced by someone's arm-swinging. This does not mean that our rights clash, or conflict, or cancel each other out. I don't believe it's ever proper to throw out the principle of rights. Law without rights is arbitrary at best, despotic at worst.

I did not mean to imply that laws should somehow function in the absence of rights. Even the term, 'The Rule of Law,' implies the right to be treated equally under the law. Problems arise when socioeconomic status allows some to escape the rule of law.

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14 Dec 2014, 9:30 pm

luan78zao wrote:

Ninety-nine percent of attacks on Ayn Rand and Objectivism include some kind of straw man. You two have gone beyond straw man into bizarro fantasy. None of the above bears the slightest resemblance to Rand's ideas.

This is a woman who found a paragon of manliness and objectivism in a man who abducted, raped, and cut into pieces a teenage girl. I don't think that it's a straw man at all.

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14 Dec 2014, 10:40 pm

LKL wrote:

There are a lot of people who say that collective bargaining (though not the threat of an individual being fired) is coercion.

Really? Who? It's not coercion – not a threatened initiation of force – if the threat is merely to walk off en masse. (It is coercion if the threat is to destroy property, assault people who show up to work, and so on.)

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Of course taxes are coercive, backed by the full power of the state. Try not paying them, and see how long it takes before men with guns show up, possibly to kill you if you resist. As we've just seen played out in dramatic fashion, to advocate a tax on something is to accept that a certain number of people will be imprisoned or killed in the enforcement of that tax.

Economists have written whole books on how government might be financed in a free society. I'm interested in the principles, not the mechanics, but I'm confident it could be done. A lot of people don't realize that there was no federal income tax until 1913.

Quote:

Sometimes a slippery slope argument is correct.

In this case, it's a fallacy. There are a hell of a lot of very stable regulatory paradigms between 'Laissez-faire' and 'Gulag.'

In the real world, there aren't. Every "mixed economy" in the world is in a constant state of flux, with the general motion still being in the direction of ever greater statism. Is there a national government anywhere that doesn't churn out thousands of new regulations every year? When you hear of a limited move in the other direction, it's usually due to financial constraints and not principle. Just look at what's happened to the US in the last fifteen years, the open assault on privacy, the restrictions on freedom of speech. I wouldn't call it "very stable."

Quote:

This is a woman who found a paragon of manliness and objectivism in a man who abducted, raped, and cut into pieces a teenage girl.

Not really. I can discuss that at further length if you want.

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15 Dec 2014, 12:47 am

luan78zao wrote:

LKL wrote:

There are a lot of people who say that collective bargaining (though not the threat of an individual being fired) is coercion.

Quote:

Sometimes a slippery slope argument is correct.

In this case, it's a fallacy. There are a hell of a lot of very stable regulatory paradigms between 'Laissez-faire' and 'Gulag.'

Quote:

This is a woman who found a paragon of manliness and objectivism in a man who abducted, raped, and cut into pieces a teenage girl.

Not really. I can discuss that at further length if you want.

So... the ideal society is where the government has no power to collect taxes - meaning that from the military, to social benefits, to public works don't get financed; and that workers have no right to voice their interests, leaving them completely at the mercy of their employers who are motivated only by profit margins? If that's utopia, then I want nothing to do with it.

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LKL
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16 Dec 2014, 8:17 pm

luan78zao wrote:

LKL wrote:

There are a lot of people who say that collective bargaining (though not the threat of an individual being fired) is coercion.

One hears it quite often from corporatist politicians, especially with regard to public employee unions. They speak as though walking off the job en masse IS destruction of property, in the form of lost potential revenue.

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If you don't accept that level of coercion, how do you propose getting any large-scale projects done? Or should we just abandon large-scale projects?

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I'm confident it could be done. A lot of people don't realize that there was no federal income tax until 1913.

True, but there were plenty of other taxes, fees, tariffs, etc. That's why we have the Coast Guard.
Is it only the income tax that you find onerous?

Quote:

In the real world, there aren't. Every "mixed economy" in the world is in a constant state of flux, with the general motion still being in the direction of ever greater statism.

All I can say to that is that I disagree and think that it's ahistorical. Civilizations have risen and fallen, grown more and less free, and if anything a lack of rules disintegrates into anarchy before a plentitude of rules solidifies into totalitarianism. The former is a hell of a lot more common, historically, than the latter.

Quote:

Is there a national government anywhere that doesn't churn out thousands of new regulations every year?

A lot of those 'new' regulations are re-writes that supersede the old ones, not just more volume on top of the pile.

Quote:

When you hear of a limited move in the other direction, it's usually due to financial constraints and not principle. Just look at what's happened to the US in the last fifteen years, the open assault on privacy, the restrictions on freedom of speech. I wouldn't call it "very stable."

...the deregulation leading to electrical collapse in California, the deregulation leading to economic collapse on the global level...
...the unregulated products coming out of China, poisoning dogs & cats, releasing toxic fumes when homes burn...
...the absence of regulations (and lack of enforcement of those that existed) leading to catastrophic building failures in Haiti after a relatively mild earthquake, the level of which has been ridden out before and since by countries with better building codes...
etc, etc, etc.

Quote:

Not really. I can discuss that at further length if you want.

Yes, really. You can try to justify it, but when you look at the whole event it's hard to say that she comes off as clean unless you give her such a halo effect that you think she sheds filth like a duck sheds water.

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16 Dec 2014, 11:44 pm

LKL wrote:

Well, whoever they are I'm not responsible for them. From where I stand, corporatist politicians (of both parties) are all too eager to buy off public employee unions with other people's money.

Quote:

If you don't accept that level of coercion, how do you propose getting any large-scale projects done? Or should we just abandon large-scale projects?

Why do you assume that such projects can only be accomplished with government financing?

Quote:

True, but there were plenty of other taxes, fees, tariffs, etc. That's why we have the Coast Guard.
Is it only the income tax that you find onerous?

"Plenty" is an exaggeration. The tax burden was quite low; even the income tax initially fell only on the top 10%.

I'm really not interested in hashing out the details of voluntary government financing. As I said, people have written whole books on the subject. Chop the State back to its proper, Constitutional size, and finding noncoercive ways to fund it will not be a problem.

Quote:

'A lack of rules disintegrating into anarchy' only occurs following civil war or other catastrophe. I don't believe there has ever been a peaceful, prosperous, rights-respecting country which gradually dismantled its government until it got to anarchy. Many of the explicitly Marxist countries have liberalized somewhat, rather than starve, but in the West the overall trend is still toward an ever-more-powerful State.

Quote:

A lot of those 'new' regulations are re-writes that supersede the old ones, not just more volume on top of the pile.

And a lot aren't. Talk to any businessman (outside certain fields such as telephony or brewing). In the US the regulatory burden is much greater now than even a few decades ago.

Quote:

...the deregulation leading to electrical collapse in California, the deregulation leading to economic collapse on the global level...

If the economy is more regulated in a hundred ways, and less regulated in a single small area, don't point to that one area and say 'This is responsible for all of our problems'. Few fields are more thoroughly controlled by the government than electrical power and banking.

Every major boom-and-bust in the US, every panic, recession, depression, has been caused by government interference in the economy. There is nothing inherent in people voluntarily cooperating with one another for mutual benefit which could cause such distortions.

Quote:

...the unregulated products coming out of China, poisoning dogs & cats, releasing toxic fumes when homes burn...
...the absence of regulations (and lack of enforcement of those that existed) leading to catastrophic building failures in Haiti after a relatively mild earthquake, the level of which has been ridden out before and since by countries with better building codes...
etc, etc, etc.

You're looking at authoritarian China and kakistocratic Haiti and blaming their problems on free enterprise? Seriously? That's the one thing they've never had.

If you want to debate an anarchist, ask around; maybe you can find one. What I advocate is not an abolition of government, but a government confined to the role of protecting individual rights.

That's enough for now. I'll deal with Hickman later.

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17 Dec 2014, 2:09 am

LKL wrote:

One hears it quite often from corporatist politicians, especially with regard to public employee unions.

I don't know about coercion, but it is certainly corruption when a public sector union can influence the election of the very people with whom they'll be "bargaining" over wages and benefits, which somehow goes right over the heads of people who scream about corporate money in politics. The other evils enabled and perpetuated by public sector unions, police and teachers specifically, deserve a thread all to themselves.

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18 Dec 2014, 4:06 pm

Rand did not object to charity, but did not believe that anyone who needed help deserved it. She was a firm believer in the concept that absolutely everything she had she earned 100% and no one else deserved any credit. She also believed that once you get something, you have zero obligation to even consider helping another person.

That being said, she is often misrepresented (by both her fans and her critics alike). In Atlas Shrugged, the main foe was the group of entitled privileged elites who were born into money and power, not the poor. But she also quite clearly shows no sympathy for those harmed by both the protagonists and antagonists in the story. The biggest example of her disdain for empathy being the hard-working and devoted assistant to the lead lady who loses everything and is left behind by the boss he is completely loyal to (not a happy ending or a cheerful message for anyone who actually likes working hard for someone else). His major failing was that he depended on someone else instead of being one of the several dozen elites in the story that somehow manage to set up an isolated utopia despite the fact that they didn't invite any manual laborers.

The Virtue of Selfishness posits that putting others before yourself is detrimental, but at the same time, she does not insist that everyone should be that way. She does at one point go on about how it may be better to be incredibly selfish now so that (at some undetermined point in the future) you may be better positioned to help others if you so desire. Really it breaks down simply to a belief that being selfish is not evil in and of itself and has many advantages. I would personally admit that this is probably her best and most well thought out piece of work. While I disagree with many of her conclusions, I do agree with parts of her line of reasoning and found this piece to be much less condescending and damning of those big bad "evil socialists" that seemed to be hiding under her bed all the time. If you are looking for the most representative piece of work on her philosophy, this is probably your best bet.

Anthem is a bizarre dystopian future tale where socialism will destroy all possibility of creative thought and really has almost no actual substance to it. It pulls out a lot of her objectivism ideas, but then fails to actually develop the concept in any substantive way. Amusing read if you like fiction, particularly those who enjoy a good "the future will be horrible" story, but not worth your time if you are looking for something in the more philosophical/political realm.

Fountainhead is a mixed bag. In parts of the story, she advocates the advancement and reward of those who do the best achieve the most, but then goes on at great length trying to paint someone who is unsuccessful as being better despite less popularity thanks to the stupid masses. I'd recommend giving this one a miss. It is disjointed in thought and inconsistent in message, with a lackluster plot and flat characters. It isn't terrible (for fiction), but it irritates me. I think this entire book is a reflection of her perceptions of persecution at the time of its writing. She was (at the time) convinced that the public didn't like her very much because she was the victim of a smear campaign and that was the only reason the entire population didn't put her on a shiny high pedestal. While there is some merit to her persecution paranoia (she took a lot of flack for her atheism), when you are very vocal and completely open about your extreme bigotry, it's kind of hard to win over the public.

I have not read We the Living, or January 16th (her other fiction works). I have read the rest of her nonfiction, but find little that goes beyond The Virtue of Selfishness. If you hate liberal ideas (as defined in the 60s-70s, not today), then you may enjoy The New Left. It is fairly well written, but comes off more as a sky-is-falling, liberals-will-destroy-us-all rant.

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21 Dec 2014, 6:42 pm

Ayn Rand's Objectivist take on Ronnie Reagan and his administration...

At one point she thought he was a true statesman in the Edmund Burke mode,
but she became upset with him as he looked more and more like a politician. He
did not live up to her litmus test, she was often more comfortable with the stances
taken by the Libertarians. The GOP to her was the lesser of two evils, in our two
party system. Usually third parties are how we protest and express discontent.

http://www.openculture.com/2014/10/in-h ... -1981.html

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21 Dec 2014, 7:26 pm

luan78zao wrote:

Of course taxes are coercive, backed by the full power of the state. Try not paying them, and see how long it takes before men with guns show up, possibly to kill you if you resist.

Ah, "men with guns"...

Nobody will be confronted by "men with guns" over unpaid taxes as long as they don't behave like a petulant child and respond to warnings sent to them.

The fact is, any system can be ruined by people acting without responsibility. People can act like petulant children when they don't want to hold up their half of any contract. Unless there is some kind of legal system to discourage that behaviour, then these people will just keep doing it forever.

Of course, eventually people will establish a reputation for being unreliable and people will refuse to trade with them, but then all they need to do is move to an area where they are unheard of.

Ultimately, a system backed up with coercion by "men with guns" is necessary to make society work.

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21 Dec 2014, 8:31 pm

luan78zao wrote:

Economists have written whole books on how government might be financed in a free society. I'm interested in the principles, not the mechanics, but I'm confident it could be done. A lot of people don't realize that there was no federal income tax until 1913.

They didn't needed income tax because they were selling lands stollen from amerindians. (Look at 3 minutes time in the video.)

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22 Dec 2014, 1:51 am

Walrus wrote:

Ah, "men with guns"...

Nobody will be confronted by "men with guns" over unpaid taxes as long as they don't behave like a petulant child and respond to warnings sent to them.

So, adulthood and maturity consist in meekly submitting to whatever the local laws might be? Do I have to list some grossly unjust laws that have obtained in various times and places?

And did Eric Garner deserve to be killed over cigarette taxes?

Quote:

The fact is, any system can be ruined by people acting without responsibility. People can act like petulant children when they don't want to hold up their half of any contract. Unless there is some kind of legal system to discourage that behaviour, then these people will just keep doing it forever.

Of course, eventually people will establish a reputation for being unreliable and people will refuse to trade with them, but then all they need to do is move to an area where they are unheard of.

Somebody else looking for an anarchist to debate. Good luck, but it's not me, and it sure isn't Ayn Rand.

Quote:

Ultimately, a system backed up with coercion by "men with guns" is necessary to make society work.

You are conflating coercion and self-defense. Coercion is the initiation of force or the threat of it. If you voluntarily contract with me to deliver 10,000 widgets, and you blow my down payment on an Aston Martin instead, it is you who have initiated force (fraud is indirect force) and when the police come knocking it will be in defense of my rights as the injured party and not to coerce the innocent. Put more crudely, the bank robber who points a gun at a teller is engaging in coercion; the guard who shoots him is not.

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22 Dec 2014, 8:59 am

luan78zao wrote:

Walrus wrote:

Ah, "men with guns"...

Nobody will be confronted by "men with guns" over unpaid taxes as long as they don't behave like a petulant child and respond to warnings sent to them.

No, some laws are unjust, but income tax isn't one of them and tax as a concept isn't one of them.

And of course nobody deserves to be killed over cigarette taxes. That's also a pretty blatant spinning of a situation to suit your agenda...

Quote:

Somebody else looking for an anarchist to debate. Good luck, but it's not me, and it sure isn't Ayn Rand.

Good. Glad to hear that you like having men with guns around.

Quote:

Ultimately, a system backed up with coercion by "men with guns" is necessary to make society work.

I think it is hard to say that someone who lies on a contract has "initiated force" and that coercing someone to uphold a promise is therefore "self defence". Seems pretty Orwellian.
What meaningful difference is there between me breaking my agreement with you (I give you widgets, you give me money) and you breaking your agreement with the government (you pay taxes, they provide services)?

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22 Dec 2014, 10:37 am

The_Walrus wrote:

No, some laws are unjust, but income tax isn't one of them and tax as a concept isn't one of them.

Money has been taken from people who earned it (working at Ford Motors, say) and given to their competitors who did not (at GM, say). Money has been taken from those who earned it and given to political cronies and brothers-in-law of every kind. Money has been taken from me and used to drop bombs on people who posed no threat to me. I don't call any of that "justice".

Quote:

And of course nobody deserves to be killed over cigarette taxes. That's also a pretty blatant spinning of a situation to suit your agenda...

It is a dramatic illustration of the fact that even the most innocuous-seeming laws are backed by force. To say that 'the government ought to regulate X' is to accept that a certain number of people will be arrested or even killed in the enforcement of that law. If you're going to have laws like that, you're going to have incidents like that.

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Good. Glad to hear that you like having men with guns around.

At times I have been a man with a gun. There is a world of difference between aggression and self-defense.

Quote:

I think it is hard to say that someone who lies on a contract has "initiated force" and that coercing someone to uphold a promise is therefore "self defence". Seems pretty Orwellian.

I don't find it either hard or Orwellian. If you obtain money or other value from me under false pretenses, there is indirect force in the fact that you physically hold what is mine and I cannot easily regain it.

Suppose I try to make a purchase in your widget shop. I hand you money, you hand me a bag of the right size and weight. As I walk out, though, I open the bag and find not a shiny new widget but a double handful of dog turds. I turn to confront you, but not only do you stand there grinning at me, an armed guard has emerged from a back room and stands next to you with his hand on his revolver. It would be preposterous to claim that you are merely engaged in peaceful commerce and if I take measures to regain my money I am initiating force. You started it.

Quote:

What meaningful difference is there between me breaking my agreement with you (I give you widgets, you give me money) and you breaking your agreement with the government (you pay taxes, they provide services)?

I signed no such contract, made no such agreement. The notion of a "social contract" forged presumably by our ancestors is absurd. Nobody has the right thus to bind his descendants for all eternity.

And I wouldn't complain – well, not as much – if the government merely offered "services" in exchange for what it takes. Unfortunately, the police, infrastructure maintenance and so on constitute only a small fraction of what the government does with its confiscated wealth. Most of it is either simply pissed away, or used in ways actively inimical to progress and prosperity.

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