The Influence of Ayn Rand on American Society...

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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.

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.



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



"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.



'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.



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.




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.



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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?



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



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.

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...

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

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)?

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".



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.



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



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.



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.

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...