The new age of Ayn Rand
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
-- John Rogers
It's been a long time, but that seems like a good piece of fiction that covers similar themes without getting bogged down in plot and/or dogmatism.
Huh. The idea of Rand as kind of a weird mirror image of Marx, much better as a critic of a particular system than a prescriber of solutions (though, even with his problems in this regard, Marx is much better than Rand here), is interesting.
I'm been an active Objectivist for the last two years and I've met dozens of others. They're a diverse bunch (I know Objectivist actors, Objectivist musicians, Objectivist academics, Objectivist finance guys, tons of Objectivist programmers), but in general, I'd say they're way more friendly, less cynical and more optimistic than the majority of people I meet. They're fun to be around and are usually working towards some personally meaningful life goals.
I do think that teenagers probably shouldn't read Atlas Shrugged -- they're too likely to take away a shallow understanding of the message. I first read it just before my 25th birthday, and I think it's best read in your mid-20s, when your youthful idealism starts crashing into practical reality.
An index of her thoughts on many topics: http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html
A graduation speech which summarises her views on philosophy in general: http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/library/pwni.html
Her most technical work, her theory of concept-formation (and the book that sold me on her ideas): https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology...
But yeah, garden variety objectivists, just like garden variety communists or people generally really, are good people.
It is long, and it is indeed preachy, but she nails so much about the human condition.
I do think that most people that complain about her don't really understand her work. In her eyes capitalism is an intrinsically _personal_ system, individuals helping each other.
The heroes of the story all have their companies named after themselves, while the "bad companies" are bland things like associated steel. Her point is that as soon as you divorce the individuality from capitalism, you get these bad outcomes. At the end of the day companies aren't companies, they're people.
To drive this home, the USSR treated people as interchangable inputs. If that's your policy you are completely ignoring people's individuality. Are they lazy? smart? work hard? People are not interchangable, and by respecting that the US outspent the USSR.
This "personal" capitalism is far different from the way our multinationals, governments, or even people, act today.
As a Socialist myself, I have wondered: how does capitalism become personal? Is it possible to achieve this? Let's assume for a moment that Marx was wrong about exploitation; how does wage labour, unexploitative, take the form of personal relation?
From my point of view, I was thinking that the division of labour will create an impersonal relationship, so much so that the worker will not see his own labour in the final product. How does personal capitalism fare with division of labour and automation?
I want to keep an open mind rather than to steer this ideologically, so I hope you are not put off by my differing viewpoint.
At its core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties. I work for your company, you pay me X salary.
Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose, non-consensual transaction. You're doing well, give me your money so I can give it to a third party, or else.
Of course there are negative externalities to worry about, contractual enforcement, etc. But those don't change the core philosophies.
A review of the works criticizing the dominant system of the mid-19th Century industrialized West by cobtemporaries who coined the name "capitalism" to describe that system would answer that question.
> At it's core, capitalism is simply the codification of a win-win transaction between two or more parties.
No, at its core capitalism is the arrangement of government, property rights, and legal system to preferentially serve the interests of the holders of capital over others. Hence the name.
More deeply, capitalism is not only incidentally tied to government through the necessity for society, but more deeply through the dependency on a specific model of property rights being enforced by government.
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State," "Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. "
Socialism is the control of the means of production (not necessarily all property) by the public at large (Marx/Engels view of the State as the agency by which this control is exercised is not the only Socialist view, Socialism is broader than just Marxism.)
And if I don't work for your company, and I can't find other work, I starve. It's hardly win-win if one side of the transaction faces much more dire consequences if the negotiations fail.
"Objectivism" is just another name for narcissism. If you're not a winner, the narcissist's view is that you deserve whatever bad things happen to you.
Narcissism is wonderful for short-term gains, but an absolute disaster for long-term stability and growth.
Which is not a surprise because empathy is an established reality, not just in human behaviour but in animal behaviour, with straightforward evolutionary benefits.
You have to go quite a long way back down the evolutionary tree to lose empathy. If Rand and her acolytes want to live down there I suppose we can respect their choice.
But it doesn't mean it's a good choice, an intelligent decision, or one that's going to lead to better outcomes in the future.
- If you hold too much empathy for those who would destroy society, society will weaken.
- If you hold too little empathy for those who would support society, society will weaken.
Farmers don't tend to have much empathy for invasive weeds or pests growing in their crops. I believe Ayn Rand saw communists in a similar light.
Of course, that is all based on the presumption that society should continue in the first place. Feel free to replace "society" with "your family," or "your company."
In summary, market transactions are final, in that you once a the goods exchange is complete you will have no further obligations to the other party. This property is very useful, and makes our goods exchanges very easy, but they are still inherently impersonal. There are other forms of goods exchange that do not have this property, which he discusses in the book.
Of course, market transactions being final doesn't mean that no further relationship is _possible_, but that relationship forms outside of the market system.
That kind of transaction dates back to bartering, and is neither unique to capitalism nor excluded from socialism.
The way you put it also assumes that both parties are capable of negotiating the work/money trade to be advantageous to both; it seems pretty clear that Walmart and their floor workers are not in such a win-win.
> Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose
This is roughly equivalent to saying capitalism is the codification of exploitation, in that neither are true of their respective, functioning systems, and both are failure modes of their respective systems.
Socialism is the venture capitalism of people, at scale. Society invests in you and your situation; if you pan out, it needs a return on that investment so that it can reinvest.
Of course these are all drastic simplifications of complex systems that cannot be boiled down to soundbytes, but eh.
I don't think that's true; I view capitalism as a mode of production, subsisting on private ownership of the social means of production, the primacy of wage labour (this is the aspect you mentioned) but also the production of commodities (i.e exchange is to be maximised rather than the use of products) and lastly that production is for profit and accumulation of capital rather than satisfying social wants.
>Whereas socialism is the codification of a win-lose, non-consensual transaction. You're doing well, give me your money so I can give it to a third party, or else.
This is not what Socialism is about. Socialism is contrasted with capitalism not by money redistribution (in fact, no redistribution of non-social MoP produce or money occurs) but by the fact that means of production would be owned collectively by workers, and used for their benefit. The workers are also the consumers. This two-faceted benefit would seem to be a win-win in my opinion.
>non-consensual transaction.
The non-consensual part of Socialism is seizing the means of production from capitalists (either via revolution or otherwise). The non-consensual part of capitalism is the fact that people must sell their labour-power as a commodity on a market to private property owners in order to survive. Although all parties appear at face value to be participating in a system of equal and fair uncoerced exchanges, a look at the more extreme examples in our world of sweatshop labour or prostitution by necessity gives an opposite picture. These people are free to quit at any time, but have little option otherwise. They certainly can't accumulate sufficient capital to start a self-employment model of business.
Most things sold in the business world are sold by personal relationships and conversation or personality.
AFAIK, capitalism is the idea of investment of capital. Marx's issue is that the capital pools in such a way that most people don't have it, or don't get to spend what they do have in a way that gets returns.
In an ideal situation, I am able to "spend" my "excess capital" - my excess time, skills, drives, etc - to improve my own situation. This is personal.
However, in practice, many people can't or don't do this. Maybe they're missing that drive towards self-investment. Maybe they're minimum wage and literally don't have any excess.
Marx's issue of "praxis" - that you do not own (literally or emotionally) the product of your work is an emergent, rather than inherent, quality of capitalism. So it seems reasonable that a society could exist with other factors the confound that emergent quality, so that you can have you cake (the core bits of capitalism) and everyone gets to eat it (everyone can actually take advantage of those core bits)
When I read it, my impression was that the message is 'all acts are moral if they are in your own self-interest.'
The 'heroes' as you call them abandoned civilization to create a utopia where the free-market is the only law. Check out Bioshock to see what might happen.
I believe it's more, "All acts are moral when transactions are conducted fairly and consensually between the involved parties."
The villains of the book think that charity takes precedence over everything, or that they are intrinsically entitled to something just because they exist. In other words, if we're both starving, it's my moral obligation to feed you first.
Abandoned civilization? By the end of the book the main characters had their wealth confiscated and civilization had fallen apart. And it's not just the heroes. There's countless references to regular workers "abandoning civiliation," giving up work and roaming the countryside stealing food.
I would love for you to point out a passage where Rand says that the only law should be the free market.
Born in the upper-middle class in tsarist Russia, her dad a business owner. Got thrown out in the street by the muzhiks, along with the whole family. Had to wander through the country, nearly starving on occasion. Fled the place at the first opportunity.
It's all in the books. The glorious, near superhuman entrepreneurs are echoes of Daddy. The welfare state is the masses who robbed her family of their wealth. She has a visceral hate of them because, well, they were the cause of her family's destitution in real life.
And she is actively trying to construct an ideology which is in every way, every single detail, opposite to the ideology of the revolution that sent her life on a different course - opposite even when it makes no sense. Like someone who got raped and then is preaching how sex is bad for you.
It's quite transparent.
The story that you gave and your reaction to it shows a distinct lack of empathy. If it happened to you I'd bet you'd bitch too.
As for the "lack of empathy" - I actually intended to add a coda, as to how the life of young Alyssa Rosenbaum was pretty miserable, and how I, as someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain and actually lived and suffered for two decades under a stalinist-like dictatorship (unlike armchair libertarians who read Atlas Shrugged at Starbucks in a comfy western city, all decked up in turtlenecks and designer jeans), I sort of understand her visceral reaction to the horrors of that kind of regime. No, not "sort of"; I truly understand - again unlike western readers.
But then I said to myself - this is the accidental "thought leader" of a movement, the rise of selfishness and base instincts, that - if left unchecked - would burn down the world and put a stop to the project that has started 6000 years ago in Sumer, and still going strong, that we call civilization.
So pardon me if there's another side of me that says "screw Ayn Rand and her insane mumblings".
And your insistence at labeling the values she espouses as being simply selfishness is a shallow understanding of her ideas.
If you'd like to expand your history I'm sure I could give an example of your animosity being the result of you overcompensating for something. Does that make it true?
If you disagree, your understanding is "shallow". Or perhaps there's something wrong with you, psychologically. In other words, you're dumb or crazy. She would approve so much of this tactic, because she's used it a lot herself.
And it's ironic because Ayn Rand herself was shallow as an intellectual, and her writings really were the attempts to overcompensate of someone whose mental equilibrium was in bad shape after living through horrors.
It's called projection. And the answer is no. Have a nice day.
Atlas Shrugged is a novel which happens to contain Ayn Rand's philosophy. You can learn from it or not. I think there's some truth to all kinds philosophy, you just need to be discerning.
An analogy to this would be: "you can't seriously be a Christian. No academic thinks the Bible really happened."
I can still learn from the Bible, or the Church, even if it's all a lie.
If you're looking for a scholarly consensus on the "one true universal philosphy" you're going to be waiting awhile.
That's not to say that there's nothing useful in objectivism, but as a work of philosophy it's weak in some ways that could be shored up, and weak in other ways that could not. Of course, Ayn Rand went the pop philosophy route, publishing novels and leading a weird tiny cult more than trying to address critiques of her work.
Both sides are echo chambers because neither side can prove anything. Philosophy is wild like that. The only thing you can do is think for yourself.
I do think it's interesting that the defenders of objectivism here are so confident, where mainstream philosophers really tend to be pretty humble. The way I read it, mainstream philosophers know their ideas will either stand on their own, or get built on by the next generation for something bigger and better. Kinda like, most scientists I've ever known were pretty humble.
Rare is it to meet a philosopher who's as confident in their stuff as the objectivist defenders here, and never ever have I met a philosopher or scientist who's dismissed critiques as "they're an echo chamber".
I dunno. I'd like to see an objectivist embrace that kind of humility and see where it takes them. (My guess is, it takes them straight out of objectivism entirely, which is why you don't see anyone like that.)
I said both sides are an echo chamber. I can sit here and give you my reasons, and then you can give me your reasons, and then I can say what problems I have with yours, and you can say your problem with mine. At the end of the day if we disagree then we're both just repeating our reasons and not convincing each other. An inconclusive echo chamber. Philosophy.
If you look up the word humble, it means having or showing a modest or low estimate of one's own importance. I'm not arguing about my importance though am I? I'm arguing about an opinion on an independent issue I feel correct in, just like you. Only I'm using reason instead of insulting your character.
You can find lots of critiques of objectivism based on some inconsistency in its flaws or premises; what you can't find much of is objectivists addressing or resolving those critiques. You can only find them dismissing them ("lacking logic and understanding"), as you've done.
Where adherents of some mainstream philosophy are faced with critiques, they usually try to resolve them to strengthen the philosophy or, if it can't be resolved, discard the philosophy. You just don't really see that happening with objectivism. There's no "echo chamber" here, mainstream philosophy evaluated your stuff long ago and moved on.
As for taking a lack of humility as an insult, why on earth would that be an insult or bother you? You're right, aren't you? Objectivism is the best philosophy, isn't it? Why would you need to be humble?
I'm sorry, but I can't include complete philosophical essays about Objectivism, its criticism, and my rebuttal in these comments to justify my logic for you. I'm sure if you really wanted to you could find people that could address these critiques. I don't think you want to.
If I disprove assumptions (the flaws or premises in objectivism), I have already disproved the conclusion. I have not proven myself correct, but I have shown the conclusion to be incorrect. That's just logic.
You're saying objectivism excludes humility? Silly, Objectivism doesn't mean you should be a tool. Ironically, that suggests a lack of understanding in your critique.
I don't think 'helping' is the best word choice here
For those who haven't read Atlas Shrugged: amongst the group of protagonists in the book, the granting of favours or donations is clearly outlined as immoral, as per Rand's philosophy. All goods and services are to be traded for fair value.
Rand was so averse to the idea of "individuals helping each other" that she includes a scene where a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car[1]. It's the villains who show their villainy by talking about doing each other favours and the heroes who talk about driving a hard bargain even when they're about to consummate the business relationship by having an affair.
[1]which is absurd both for the assumption that it's better that way and for the assumption that a zillionaire capitalist accepting a token amount of gold for performing unskilled labour represents a functioning market.
The scene where "a zillionaire capitalist charges for giving one of the other heroes a short ride in his car" is symbolic. The characters in the valley wanted to uphold the ethos that everyone there lived by the product of his or her own effort.
Ayn Rand didn't include that scene for people like you who want to nitpick everything. She is writing for the kind of readers who think "hmm, having to pay for everything sounds annoying -- but on the other hand, it means you're not constantly dealing with requests for free favours. What kind of people would live in a place where everything had to be paid for? Would I want to live with those people?"
The real purpose for Dagny's dinner with the tramp after all isn't for Rand to illustrate the virtues of helping tramps, but for the tramp to lecture on how the Twentieth Century Motor Company failed because the company based its ethos around helping those claiming to be in need, and explain that the book's hero has resolved to "stop the motor of the world* rather than continue to work for others.
And yeah, the symbolic nature of having to pay for everything rather than do favours is the heroes believe [in maintaining the illusion that] those deserving of their support are evaluated not as individuals but based on their ability to produce interchangeable tokens of past effort....
"The real purpose for Dagny's dinner with the tramp after all ... [is] for the tramp to lecture"
This is another example of your nitpicking. You know that I was not talking about that one particular scene, but illustrating that Rand has nothing against charity and she has many scenes in her novels where characters help people in need. That is, Rand does not teach "never help others", as you imply.
"And yeah, the symbolic nature of having to pay for everything rather than do favours is the heroes believe [in maintaining the illusion that] those deserving of their support are evaluated not as individuals but based on their ability to produce interchangeable tokens of past effort...."
And nope, you're still misunderstanding the message. The heroes are not asking who is "deserving of their support" then evaluating them "on their ability to produce interchangeable tokens". The heroes want to live by their own effort. Living with others who also want to live by their own effort makes life easier, because you can specialise and trade the products of your labour for the products of their labour. Production and trade are essentials of any human community, charity isn't, which is why there is no charity in the valley.
And when the heroes do help each other, just in case you think they might be supposed to be doing it out of a sense of kinship, Rand tends to have them say things like this:
"I hope you know it's not for your sake that I wanted to help you fight."
He smiled; it was a faint, friendly smile. "I know," he said.
"It's not out of pity or charity or any ugly reason like that. Look, I intended to give you the battle of your life, down there in Colorado. I intended to cut into your business and squeeze you to the wall and drive you out, if necessary"
He chuckled faintly; it was appreciation. "You would have made a pretty good try at it, too," he said.
"Only I didn't think it would be necessary. I thought there was enough room there for both of us."
"Yes," he said. "There was."
"Still, if I found that there wasn't, I would have fought you, and if I could make my road better than yours, I'd have broken you and not given a damn about what happened to you"
As with all religious texts, Atlas Shrugged produces its blind devotees who will assert literally anything to avoid confrontation with any other aspects that might conflict with their worldview. But it's a curiously selective reading of the text that argues a book whose key moral messages include the slogan "I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine" is about a personal system of individuals helping each other, and not the negation of said system in favour of the logic of self-interest and cold hard cost-benefit analysis.
When I read the "Communist Manifesto" and - part of - "The Capital", I was impressed by Marx's critique of capitalism. Most of his hypotheses (back from the 19th century) were eventually proved true, while seeming absolutely unthinkable at the time (e.g. the issue of over-production). However, his proposed solution - Communism - seemed naive and overly-optimistic, probably due to the outcomes we already are already aware of from such social experiment today. His critique was excellent, but his proposed solution weak, and dare I say almost a fairy-tale.
When reading Rand, her solution - Objectivism - seems also impracticable and overly-optimistic. I personally believe that he who disassociates his well being from the well being of his neighbor, has little understanding of how society behaves in the long term. However, her critique of Socialist policies is spot on, and almost eerie. I live in Brazil, and there are many moments of our current political catastrophe that seem to have come out of Atlas Shrugged, and therefore I cannot through away the authors entire work because of a broken solution, which is only part of both novels. The anticipation of such self-destructing forms of government with more than half a century in advance is a merit of Rand's.
Needless to say, it is always easier to criticize then to come up with a solution. In Ayn Rand's case, her critique is pertinent and time has in fact proved it to be well founded. Just please ignore her solution.
I say its much easier to find faults in a system than coming up with a well-designed system.
They are structures or perhaps models. They all fail because of people not doing what they're supposed to be doing. The only true solution would be a process that forces people to do what they're supposed to do.
And I don't see that happening... ever? Until the AI rules us at least.
However, not everyone is convinced of such faults. There is still a considerable part of the current political movements that still believe that: a) neoliberal democracy is perfect, and any failure is only the fault of who has failed; or b) communism is the perfect solution, and the failures of USSR, Cuba, N. Korea, etc were only caused due to capitalist interference.
For these convictions, a well developed critique has its merit, for it at least can question such certainties and unblock the way towards thinking of a better solution.
Capitalism does that, too (it's a central element of the Marxist critique); that's actually a big part of why many non-Communist socialists and even non-Leninist Marxists, from very early on, described the system in the USSR as State capitalism (where the State was a vehicle for the Leninist vanguard, rather than the population/proletariat, to control capital and oppress the proletariat in much the same manner as a traditional capitalist elite.)
Writing caricatures of people and ideas and how those caricatures of people ideas relate to each other is great.
Here's an honest sentence "Paul Ryan, who has never really done anything the protagonists of Rand's novels would, is said to have liked the book a lot"
We have captains of industry that we hero worship today.
Devil's Advocate: Jesus was the son of God, but we don't ignore his ideals as unrealistic.
Dagny and Rearden have internal contradictions, and it's not the point to find relation to them as people, but how their contradictions affect them.
The one sided villains aren't meant to be rich characters full of life, but people who carry out principles you here uttered in real life to their extreme conclusions.
The purpose is to take people at what they claim their values are and illustrate their implications.
"The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are." -- Ayn Rand Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974, text published on the website of The Ayn Rand Institute
I worked at the Ayn Rand Institute, and still keep tabs with their activities and their progress.
If Ayn Rand's ideas were as widespreadly acknowledged and held, then we'd see a distortion free economy, not a series of spin jobs all geared towards acquiring political power.
(From Wikipedia)
In reality "the pursuit of happiness" could mean working in a soup kitchen, meditating full-time, moving into the rain forest and living with a primitive tribe, or buying a farm and working towards becoming self-sufficient.
(Does this sound hypothetical? I know people who did some of these things, and some of them reported their happiness increased significantly.)
In reality it always seems to mean the narrow and small-mindedly unimaginative pursuit of money, power, and social status for the purposes of physical comfort, childish short-term ego gratification, self-importance, and conspicuous wealth/status display.
Sometimes a rare individual will produce something worthwhile as a side-effect. But don't confuse cause and effect - plenty of individuals chase these goals and produce absolutely nothing of value at all.
So there is no deep insight there. It's just a transparent exhortation to work, spend, manipulate, and consume in a very public way, instead of doing something more challenging with your life.
Objectivism touches on a few things, some pretty mundane. But the most controversial aspect of it would be this part:
"that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness (rational self-interest), that the only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism".
It's been a while since I read Atlas Shrugged now, but as I recall, she essentially sees the role of government as being limited to the defense of both the society and the individual from external threats (so, military and justice systems, respectively). Everything else has its place in the market.
The idea is that the free market is able to solve every problem. Businessmen will serve their own self interests but that is OK because in the process - others will benefit via the goods they produce and the jobs they provide. So businessmen will always offer fair wages and benefits to their employees because if they don't, those employees will go work for another business owner that does offer them and will get the benefit of more motivated workers. The best workers will always be offered the best wages, again because this benefits the owners bottom line to have the best employees. (collusion between businesses to depress wages, people stuck in locations with few employers and no competition for wages, the reality of businesses paying off politicians - are just a few real world flaws here IMO)
As far as regulation goes - the government does not need to be involved there. The free market will sort it out! Businesses that offer dangerous products will not get any customers so the incentive is there to only provide safe products (of course, what happens to the people that initially buy those products before people find out how dangerous they are or never find out about the dangers at all until it is too late? How do you fight a polluter that ruins the water source in your town, especially if they are also the main employer?).
As far as social programs - again, the government need not be involved there. All the rich (as well as the other people just trying to get by) will help their neighbors out of the kindness of their own hearts. Or not! Being forced to be altruistic ruins the whole point and regardless of the benefit to society, is one of the worst sins to a Randian. There are many references to money being taken from the wealthy via force - at the end of a gun. How a society handles the disabled, the poor, the elderly - if everyone doesn't out of the kindness of their own hearts - was never really addressed and was the final flaw for me. Just let them die I guess?
I'm sure I'll get some flack for this from the true believers and many will say I have it wrong. I guess I'd say that it is a great personal philosophy if you want to use it that way, but to try to apply it to governing or to any large scale modern society is impractical and, in the end, just downright cruel. Just one man's thoughts.
I can't help but feel that environmental issues also put a nail in the coffin of her philosophy, but to be fair, it wasn't a big deal back in her time. Atlas Shrugged made no mention of the negative externalities of any of the businesses being run, from steel mills to mining and oil. As soon as a business's externalities impact others, moral issues are raised.
"The idea is that the free market is able to solve every problem."
Ayn Rand doesn't say this. It sounds more like a stereotypical Republican talking point.
Rand would say that the only thing that can solve problems -- can, not will -- is an active individual mind. (This doesn't rule out people working together in groups, provided the group is made up of active individual minds). Laissez-faire capitalism would not solve all problems, but it would leave individuals free to work on solutions to whatever problems they saw fit.
Ayn Rand's philosophy goes far beyond the stereotype of capitalism and selfishness. She wrote a ton on consciousness, concept-formation, the psychological function of art, and so on. Click around that link above and you'll see what I mean.
If you want to dive in at the deep end, this is her most technical work, and is the book that convinced me (and many others) that she's on to something big. https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Objectivist-Epistemology...
You mean the way that a voting majority can use the power of the state to punish others they disagree with?
> prevalence of sweatshop labour
The only reason we don't have sweatshops is because of our level of prosperity, not because of government action. If you outlawed sweatshops in developing countries, for instance, many children would starve or be forced into much worse lines of work.
What portion of the value of their labour is captured by them, and what portion of it is captured by the sweatshop owner?
How many of these starving children had families that were removed from their land by various forms of rent-seekers (Or were used as generations of sharecroppers by said rent-seekers)?
then we'd see a distortion free economy
But it's not incumbent on Rand to plan these areas. (Not sure if you're implying that it is.) Free market price signals do the majority of the heavy lifting, in resource allocation, broadly speaking.
To the GP, I would stipulate "state distortion free". ("State", as in "by force".)
Sounds exactly like what my neighbourhood Marxist-Leninist tells me. (He also avises me to not listen to the drivel spewed by the New-Trotskyists.)
this is such a bizarre idea to me. i've only read the fountainhead some years ago and watched a documentary or two about rand herself, but it seems to me that the general thrust of her ideas is that acting in one's self interest is the most morally correct mode of activity in the economic sphere (and to some degree, the interpersonal).
establishing and maintaining a leveled, open and fair market seems to essentially be altruisitic, a term i know she was not fond of. it's working to further a level playing field that conforms to ideal principles at direct cost to one's self, if one is dominant in any particular part of that market.
monopolistic and semi-monopolistic behavior is pursued because it works. the essentially charitable act of aiding your competition by shunning those practices seems to contradict the lessons of her philosophy, as far as i can tell. it's subalterning the individual to the collective. feel free to correct if i've read her incorrectly, though.
That's not accidental - after all she lived in the early USSR and seen it all with her own eyes. That's how life under socialism really is - envy and brutality combined with breathtaking incompetence.
I am (on the Internet at least).
Venezula looks a lot more like Animal Farm.
For a moment there I thought you were describing Capitalism.
Why do you think these are core to the ideas of Socialism? If by envy you are referring to envy of private property holders, have you considered that it could be something else? The Marxian and indeed anarchist analysis of capitalism brings in the ideas of exploitation, commodity fetishism and alienation. I think it is quite incorrect to characterise Socialism as envy of the wealthy.
With regard to incompetence and brutality, I don't want to get into a match of Whataboutism, though it should be pointed out that capitalism exhibits these qualities too, in the state defence of private property all the way to sweatshop labour and overproduction.
There's no room for any improvement in this mindset. In a zero-sum world being more efficient at something and hence more profitable means you're stealing, either from customers or from less-efficient producers. Which really means any attempt at making things better is evil.
After a generation or two people start to internalize it, and you get a 'homo sovieticus' society which interprets any ambition as aggression - wanting a better life becomes synonymous with wanting to steal.
No, it's not.
> Marx's labor theory of value is an attempt to explain how economy works given that premise.
Even if that was true (a debate for another time) the LVT may be somewhat important in Marxism but is not central to socialism (which is much broader than Marxism.)
>is not central to socialism
The whole point is that workers get their 'surplus labor' stolen. The concept doesn't exist without labor theory of value. Socialism without labor theory of value becomes a naked call to plunder without any pretense of justice.
Altruistic acts can be, and often are, done selfishly.
At first glance, objectivism makes a lot of sense: In one simple situation, how much easier is it to deal with people when they're clear and certain about what they want?
But then you start to notice the ways that value system fails (it seems easy to miss how indirect aid of others helps you).
That stage set - All systems have failure modes. The trick seems to be layering your systems so that the failure modes don't overlap; the failure mode of utility monster could be covered by functioning objectivism; the short-sightedness of objectivism could be covered by the broad view of patriotism, etc etc. (Not saying this particular stack works, but trying to suggest an example of what I'm getting at)
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/amazing-chart-shows-thanks...
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_...
This massive decline in misery is far more the influence of markets than bureaucracies. We should be so lucky as to be in a new age of Ayn Rand.
She had a real opportunity to educate people about a proper relationship between people and their government, during a time of creeping totalitarianism and collectivism.
Sadly, she also wanted to create a cult.
The chapter about her in Brian Doherty's "Radicals for Capitalism" most certainly bore this out. My favorite part was when she sat her husband down and informed him that the Objectivist philosophy dictated that she should be allowed to bang her assistant.
First you have to realize that Politics is but one of a philosophy’s necessary 5 interdependent branches: 1. Metaphysics, which answers the question “what is the fundamental nature of everything?” 2. Epistemology, which answers the question “how do I know that or anything else?" 3. Ethics, which answers the question “given #1 & #2, how should I act in order to achieve the fulfillment of my nature?” 4. Politics, which answers the question “what kind of relationship consistent with #3 should there be between me and others when living in a society?” 5. Aesthetics, which answers the question: “how can I experience concretely the the product of my abstract conclusions in #1-#4 before they are actual, and of what value would that be?”
The validity of any philosophy depends on 1) consistency of conclusions drawn within and between each of the branches and 2) consistency of those conclusions with the actual facts of reality.
So, half of the task in grasping Rand’s radical Capitalism is understanding what its principles are vs. all the other versions of Capitalism. The other half requires understanding how they rest on and derive from her Ethics. While it is easy to inform yourself of her political principles, you can neither validate them nor argue successfully against them without dealing with the ethical principles from which they are derived.
For instance, a Capitalist government, in Rand’s view, may not fund itself through taxation. 99% of her critics will argue that is impractical; but her Ethics, recognizing human fallibility, demands individual autonomy in the pursuit of one’s life, and inherent in claiming the right to autonomy is the obligation to grant it reciprocally to all others.
Therefore, the only job allowed or required of the government is to secure that autonomy for all by forbidding/preventing/punishing the use of force by anyone against others for gain. Since taxation is the use of force by one group against another group for gain, it is inherently immoral, and the immoral may never be argued to be “practical” under any circumstances.
If you cannot devise a way to fund the government without using force, you don’t get a government! If you want to know how to fund a massive worldwide service like Rand’s minimalist government in which those with money pay for it voluntarily while the poorest get it for free, just ask Google or Facebook, who have been there and done that.
Here are 13 fact based conclusions supporting radical laissez-faire Capitalism as the only moral form of government:
the metaphysics: 1) The existence of living organisms is conditional on self-generated selection and exercise of certain actions consistent with their specific nature in the face of alternatives.
2) The most fundamental of all alternatives for all living creatures is life or death.
the epistemology: 3) Of all living creatures, only a volitional human can initiate the selection of which alternative to pursue and how to pursue it.
the ethics: 4) The choice (deliberate or implied in all other choices) to pursue the fundamental alternative of life over death implicitly establishes one’s life as one's fundamental and primary goal.
5) One's fundamental goal is implicitly the standard of measure for all values one acts to gain or keep in its pursuit.
6) Therefore, that which contributes to one's life (consistent with one's nature, as opposed to mere vegetative existence) is necessarily "the ethical good", and that which detracts from it is "the ethical bad".
7) Since the identification and evaluation of goals/values is slow and deliberative while everyday life is spontaneous, the long run pursuit of life necessitates a hierarchical code of values in principle (ethics) to guide (by programming emotions) one's spontaneous choices in any alternative faced, and it requires one to opt, in each concrete instance, for that which is the higher value per that code in lieu of the lower one (the morality of egoism).
8) Man's singular means to fulfill these requirements of his nature in the pursuit of life is by applying the product of his reason to his actions in the production and exchange of values needed to survive and flourish consistent with the nature of the human being he is.
the politics: 9) The extension of that individual ethic to the social context of an individual living in a society of other volitional (and therefore fallible) men requires that one seek to preserve one's own autonomy over the application of one's own reason to one's own action in the pursuit of one's own life ( = freedom from the fallibility of others).
10) The only threat to a man's pursuit of his life in that context would be the initiation or threat of physical force by others to coerce certain choices of action against his will thus diminishing or negating the above defined individual autonomy.
11) The single most fundamental political alternative is therefore not left vs. right, or liberal vs. conservative, but rather: freedom vs. force (autonomy vs. coercion).
12) Therefore, it is morally imperative that each individual human being living in a society of men advocate and sustain, to the best of his efforts and extent possible, a third party institution authorized to remove the use of aggressive force from all human interactions within its jurisdiction.
13) A moral government must therefore guarantee that:
No person shall initiate the use of physical force or threat thereof to take, withhold, damage or destroy any tangible or intangible value of another person who either created it or acquired it in a voluntary exchange, nor impede any other person's non-coercive actions.
Note that every interrelationship, every exchange of values, tangible or intangible among those who are acting in their own rational self interest must be voluntary. Further, in every voluntary exchange of values, both parties profit. Each gives up something he values less to get something he values more, and they do it without using force. That is the essence of a free market!
Thus, no one can oppose Ayn Rand’s politics without sooner or later embracing the use of force against others for their own gain.