The Influence of Ayn Rand on American Society...

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I am not so sure that she did mean well, though her interpretation of that would probably be different from mine. It has always concerned me what a (theoretical) Randian culture would mean for the unproductive - the elderly retired, children with disabilities, adults with brain damaging head injuries, adults who for some reason or other could not personify her ideals. In her world, would they simply be consigned to the rubbish tip? And anyone who didn't share that philosophy - off to the gulag?

Ok, I'm going to weigh in here.

Ayn Rand is one of those bad events that you have to have. She does highlight individuality, and not following the rest like lemmings, but she does it with an unapologetic totally selfish model. To her, any other way is a compromise of personal integrity. She's like the college debate you have, where you know instinctively that the protagonist is wrong, but through her arguments you still gain something of intrinsic value. I'm glad we have Ayn Rand's works. She is an example of how you sometimes need to exaggerate something to make a point.

Well, she didn't necessarily object to helping the poor, but she objected to the idea that the poor were inherently entitled to being helped.

However, I don't think that people are inherently entitled to their wealth being protected by others. If someone wants to pull the keys from your hand and drive off with your car, are you going to come to me asking that I go chasing after that person? How are you entitled to such an extraordinary service? How are you entitled to me risking my life for your perceived "right to property"?

If I am walking through an area, how are you entitled for me to walk several extra steps to skirt around your property line? What gives you such magnificent entitlement? If you come down the road in a golden chariot pulled by a team of white horses, then, am I also obligated to step aside and bow as you go by? Fool. I do not acknowledge your entitlement to any sort of real estate at all.

Furthermore, if a bunch of squatters were to decide to set up an encampment in your back yard, you deal with them. I'm not going to mess with them. It ain't my watch-out. If you ask nicely, I'll lend you some ammo to shoot them with, but you'd better hope you're a better shot and a quicker draw.

A bunch of squatters drove you off of your own land at gunpoint, you say? I bet you think you're entitled for me to risk my neck helping you clear them out, right? Hahaha! Don't bother me!

Essentially, Ayn Rand was ready to object to one form of entitlement, but she was very much attached to others. The flaw in her thinking was that it was incomplete. If you applied her principle of rejecting entitlement very completely, it is clear that you would find your society in a state of anarchy.

Her attachment to certain forms of entitlement showed in The Fountainhead. Her hero created ugly architecture, yet because it appealed to his value-system, she felt he was entitled for the "dirty mob" of humanity to gasp in awe over his magnificent accomplishment, regardless of whether or not it was compatible with their aesthetics. In her eyes, they were all obligated to fall worshipfully at his feet and tell him how glamorous and brilliant he was. She was not willing to let go of that particular entitlement.

In the end, we have duty. We have a duty to respect the property of our fellow man. We have a duty to give our fellow man compensation for services rendered. We have a duty to make sure that our fellow man has enough to eat. We have a duty to serve in the defense of our nation. We have a duty to proactively support the freedom of speech of individuals whom we disagree with or even find offensive. In the end, civilization is a deeply interwoven network of rights and duties, none of which are inherent but all of which are accepted as part of a social contract that has slowly evolved over time, in accordance with need and circumstance. Although it is continually renegotiated, it is what distinguishes civilization from savagery.

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.

Money is one incentive, it's not the best one.

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.

I can't speak for her of course, but many libertarians blame the government at least in part for the financial mess. The bailouts would not have happened in a Randian society so the bad bankers would be allowed to fail (go broke) and ultimately be replaced by the financial people who actually invest in useful stuff. Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac invested heavily in the crappy subprime mortgages, and they were government banks, which of course would not exist in a Randian society. And in many countries there are (or were) tax breaks for getting a mortgage, which would horrify libertarians.
I am not an Objectivist in any way, but you can't pin government-sponsored housing bubbles on them.

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. ;)

Yes, it's probably true that such irrational, illogical, unreal nonsense could not have come into existence through pure deregulation. And the problem is extremely powerful groups influencing law-makers with their irrational self-interest.

Do Ayn Rand and libertarians have a suggestion as to how to keep the minimal government objective and incorrupt ?

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

^^^

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. :)

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


Oh, ok. In that case I largely agree.

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


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.

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.

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.)



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.



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."



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.

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.


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?

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?


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.


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

...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.


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.