The Obscure Economist Silicon Valley Billionaires Should Dump Ayn Rand For
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
Previous HN Discussions: "Land-value tax: Why Henry George had a point" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442929
How I Used Eve Online to Predict the Great Recession - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158868
true.
> When you save a dollar rather than spending it, you increase society’s (and your own) wealth by a dollar
um no. spending only transfers the dollars, and normally you trade the dollar for something worth more to you than the dollar & vice versa, and society's wealth increases due to trade.
Edit: This is not to say that there isn't any merit in Georges' other ideas.
Money invested is spent - it's spent by people who it's given to.
There is no such thing as "stuck" money.
Is it obtained by labor or by extracting rent.
When labor is added (get paid for building a house) real value is generated. In comparison having a piece of land go up in price, no real value is created for society.
In a society with 100 dollars, having zero velocity of money means trade using money is stopped. That's "stuck".
If land prices go up, the resources associated with them then get allocated to those who find the greatest utility, and the money goes to other who will then spend it on other things.
If you force prices to stay static, you just get the Bay Area where whoever plopped themselves on the land first gets to keep it, like some kind of landed aristocracy.
Also tech (autonomous cars, hyperloop, flying cars , VR/AR ) or econ (UBI) disruption is coming in the next decade or two...
Banking existed in George's day too and when he said land I think he meant land. Land issues are still relevant today - in SF/silicon valley much of the value created by the tech industry has ended up with landlords who did nothing to produce it. You could make an argument for taxing that and spending it on social stuff. Also places like Monaco and Hong Kong have been successful in having low / zero taxes on wages etc by the government keeping ownership of much of the land and getting income from that.
Rand's views on capitalism are only a small part of her philosophy and not at all the most interesting or compelling by far. By reducing objectivism to a form of capitalism, the author and most contemporary Rand proponents show they know little to nothing about objectivism and understand little to nothing of Rand's philosophy. It's sad that this aspect of her writings is so emphasized over everything else when it's the least interesting and least compelling of her writings about the human condition and the self. Most people using Rand's philosophy as a justification for their exploits of others would be considered looters by Rand, the exact opposite of what she espouses.
I started reading the article and was blown away within the first paragraph by the quality of the writing and I scrolled up to see the author and.... Michael Kinsley.
Or the actual reason why the author thinks Ayn Rand should be "dumped", in case you are wondering.
President Trump is a fan of Ayn Rand. Travis Kalanick likes her books. John Mackey likes her books aswell. This proofs that Ayn Rand is evil and therefore her ideas are evil. Guilty by association.
Someone who somehow survived the atrocities of communism and dedicated the rest of her life to make sure nobody would face the same atrocities like she did again. And this person is considered to be evil.
Well, you know what, author over at Vanity Fair? Maybe Ayn Rand had some points which are debatable but YOU have unmasked yourself as a far left "liberal" ideologue. So fuck off, and take your ideological bullshit with you.
Please don't post ideological rants to HN. Regardless of how lousy an article or a comment may be, all this does is poison the commons and degrade the discourse further. We're trying to avoid those things here.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.
(I doubt Rand would have been a fan of Wikipedia FWIW, no matter how much Jimbo loved her books. Actually, scratch that, I'm certain she'd have despised Wikipedia even without reading it and realising how liberal the average contributor is. Not too much virtuous selfishness in collaborative, pseudo-democratic editing of a reward-free commons or indeed the Wikipedia begging bowl)
Poor old Henry George has to settle for being admired by the likes of Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, Sun Yat Sen, and Rand's own architectural muse Frank Lloyd Wright (some of them were nearly as bad at being Georgists as Jimmy Wales was at being an Objectivist). So as overtly simplistic as I think his economics was, I'd guess he had that going for him.
As for wikipedia happening to be on the internet, well whatever. You could make the same argument about money in general, since that is backed by the state.
Moreover, your argument that ignoring rand has done more for X is not inconsistent with the fact that using rand's philosophy has done more than using george's philosophy.
On the other hand Wikipedia is a small subset of that web resulting from a collaboration between two people that met over a still-unresolved argument about Rand's merits or lack thereof, so Randian philosophy wasn't even sufficient for Jimbo to get anything done without the support of someone who thought she was full of shit. (Ironic considering Rand's aversion to diversity of thought). Having been on the web before Wikipedia even existed, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the repository of information would have existed even if Jimmy had never touched a keyboard, or had bonded with Sanger over Dungeons and Dragons instead (would that have made D&D the philosophical root of Wikipedia?). I mean, the idea that neckbeards obsessed with correctness would create an eventually consistent information store via dialectical process isn't exactly a philosophical starting point close to Randian principles, still less one nobody else would have been likely to experiment with.
Famed radical non-Trinitarian Bible-nut Newton was driven by the stated belief that he was observing the need for a deity to interact with the universe, but I'm not convinced that unorthodox Scriptural interpretation can claim any particular merit as a belief system on account of being the motivation for an individual influential physicist. Though physics is a lot more impressive than Wikipedia, so it has that going for it.
http://savingcommunities.org/docs/george.henry/incometax.htm...