The Influence of Ayn Rand on American Society...

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It is, but I find it to be a useful frame for getting people to fully understand the consequences of the policies they pursue, especially lefty folks who simultaneously talk about systemic racism and the broken justice system and propose more laws for said broken system to enforce, without seeing the problem. The anti-gun people, to beat my favorite dead horse, lobby for draconian gun laws, and then are shocked, shocked I tell you, when they're disproportionately enforced against minorities and not the white redneck gun nuts I'm sure they had in mind when they pushed for the law, and this incident is a good example of the same phenomenon in tragic action.

To quote my favourite Welsh socialist rock star, Nicky Wire, "f*ck the Brady Bill".


All very valid points, but it suggests stopping public ownership or subsidy of sectors that don't need it, the military-industrial complex, and corruption, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.


Though naturally you can only count the incidents that occur as a result of the policy you pursue. It is much more difficult to capture brutal deaths as a result of a policy you didn't pursue on video and upload them to YouTube.

This incident perhaps isn't the greatest example, but industrial standards perhaps. If one CEO dies resisting arrest after his company are caught trying to dump lead in the NYC water supply, many lives will have been saved.



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]
I might have "started it", but I have not initiated force, except by intimidating you.


You "sign" a "social contract" when you agree to live in your country. The "terms and conditions" of being allowed to live in, presumably, America, include paying income tax. If you don't like it, you are free to move to, say, Bermuda, and renounce your citizenship. You are also free to persuade your fellow citizens to adjust the terms and conditions democratically. It would be the same in any alternative system you propose, unless you are suggesting a dictatorship with closed borders (which seems unlikely). If someone doesn't like your libertarian laissez-faire utopia, they can move to Britain or Sweden or Nigeria or North Korea or Saudi Arabia. If someone under your system wants an anarchist set-up, they can persuade their citizens to elect politicians who propose an amendment to the constitution that instantly dissolves the US government.

I never understood the sense in anyone saying, "I never signed any social contract, therefore it shouldn't apply to me, or anyone else." The social contract allows us all to live together in a law abiding, civilized society. Those who say it doesn't apply to them, it seems to me, are motivated more by selfishness when it comes to extending a hand up to those who have fallen down, or who are unable to stand up themselves.

That assumes that the government actually owns all the land and everything on it, and citizens are merely permitted to reside, as tenants, so long as they obey the landlord's arbitrary rules. (Of course, this is called feudalism.) Perhaps that makes sense in the UK. It is absolutely not the philosophy expressed in the American founding documents. Our ideal is a government which is the servant of the people, not the other way around.

It also assumes that people in groups somehow acquire rights they don't have as individuals. May I, as an individual, levy a tax on you? You have no choice but to pay, but I do promise to perform some service for you – to be determined by me, and you don't have a say in what it is either. If you refuse to pay, I will come around, kidnap you, and lock you in a cage … Of course nobody would accept that I have the right to do anything of the kind. So how is it different if there are a million of me, or a hundred million?



Vox populi, vox dei? Fifty-one percent of the voting population are always right? I don't think you'll find that logically defensible.

The whole concept of a "contract" assumes "individual rights." Nobody may rightfully impose a contract on his descendants or on anybody else. An "involuntary contract" isn't a contract at all, it is naked coercion. And so we're back to the ruling elite imposing their will on everybody else because they have more men with guns. It isn't the sort of society I want to live in.

That's the funny thing for me, as an "organic" libertarian (came to my beliefs on my own, learned the labels later) I often find myself having to distance myself from Rand, but I can't help but defend her from dishonest accusations or misrepresentations of what she stood for, same as I'd defend anyone else from false attack.

My primary experience with her work is Atlas Shrugged and throughout that unwieldy tome two scenes still stick out for me; the brilliant researcher being perfectly happy flipping burgers as long as they're the best burgers he's capable of making, and the description of the company town run by 'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs', and how badly that went awry. The former, because it reminds me of myself and my own path through life, when countless people have told me I'm wasting my potential making things that I'm proud of rather than things that might make me money, the latter for it's vivid, if long winded and subtle as a bag of hammers description of why that particular Marxian axiom fails so spectacularly in the real world. The rest of the book I found to be neither as bad nor as transcendent as advertised, though it was certainly a struggle to get through in points.

No, it doesn't assume that.

Have you ever read the US declaration of independence?



If the government is to secure Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, it needs to be funded. We, as peoples, have decided that governments work best as representative democracies (with or without an elected head of state). We have consistently decided to elect representatives who feel that taxation is the best way to fund governments. Consequently, we have consented to taxation.

You seem to have this strange idea that the government is some kind of independent taskmaster, answerable to no one, rather than a democratically elected body that requires the consent of the governed. We have agreed to be taxed so that the government can function.

Again, you have four options: accept the decision of the electorate, try and change the decision through the system, leave and live in another system that better suits your tastes, or overthrow the system. Overthrowing could either see yourself and like minded individuals somehow seceding from your country, or you could appoint yourself as an undemocratic leader so the consent of the governed no longer matters. If you feel that democracy always results in the tyranny of the majority, then only one of those systems is going to work for you, as of course democratic assertion of your ideals would be tyranny...

Thank you for supporting my position. Since not all of the people consent to taxation, the government's claimed power to tax is unjust and invalid.

One word you won't find in the Constitution: "democracy." The Founders hated the idea that a majority could use the apparatus of the State to force its will on a minority.

And murderers don't consent to being imprisoned, yet I don't see you advocating against prison for murderers?

Murderers choose to violate the rights of others. This is an action which has logical consequences. People do have the right to defend themselves.

So, you see all citizens as criminals?

Are you an American male who reached the age of 18 after 1973, and you were never drafted into the military? You have the influence of Ayn Rand to thank.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articl ... 25148.html

Just because Martin Anderson, who had helped Nixon come up with ending the draft, had been a disciple of Ayn Rand hardly means Rand's influence had led to it. As a matter of fact, we might have had universal healthcare in America had Watergate not derailed Nixon's Presidency, so I'm more likely going to credit that to the occasional spark of humanity in Nixon's soul than I would that heartless harpy.

You crack me up. Rand Derangement Syndrome at its most predictable.

Suppose there was a senior government advisor who was not only a Roman Catholic himself, he had studied for years under a Catholic leader known for his intransigent opposition to abortion. Suppose that this advisor was named as the prime mover behind some new legislation restricting access to, yep, abortion. Would you then be able to discern a Roman Catholic influence on government, or would you declare it to be unconnected, random, out of the blue?



The existence of humanity in Nixon's soul has not been proven. Not being a man of high principles, he was probably motivated by narrow political goals (trying to woo the youth vote). But the person who pitched the idea to him did have principles: Objectivist principles. I guess it would cause you physical pain to acknowledge that?


Ayn Rand stood against corporatism, subsidies, bailouts, protective tariffs, regulations intended to stifle competition, corporate welfare of any kind. She defended equal rights of women and every kind of minority. She called for the abolition of all "sodomy laws" which criminalized homosexuality and other consensual adult behavior. (How many other public figures were taking this stand in the '60s?) She opposed the Vietnam War, as a senseless waste of lives and resources. And yes, she was an outspoken opponent of the military draft, at a time when that position was associated chiefly with the sort of people no GOP politician would give the time of day.



None of these was a random opinion. They all follow logically from the Objectivist tenet that individual rights are the foundation of a civilized society.

No wonder you hate Ayn Rand so much that you feel compelled to snarl incoherent insults at the very mention of her name.

Okay, Nixon had ended the draft to court the youth vote. Happy? I'm still not going to give her minion credit.
As for Rand's support for ending sodomy laws and ending the Vietnam War - good for her. Shows you a stopped clock is right twice a day.