It's Time for the 99% to Give Back to the 1%
forbes.com
forbes.com
If this anti-human ideology actually worked, these self appointed geniuses would have long left society and created value all by themselves, but currently its as petty as putting up a stall in a club and refusing to pay the fees.
It takes a huge amount of time, generational effort and resources to build a functioning civilized society in which everyone is vested and thus peaceful. Nothing is free, and it appears its the 'makers' who want to be the takers while feigning a childish self serving ignorance of how civilization works.
Even animal species that are social look out for one another in order to survive and thrive, human social instincts are far more sophisticated. To deny it altogether and seek to reduce human relations to economic interactions is to regress to barbarism.
I would argue his argument is overly simplistic for two reasons:
* many of those who engage in nonremunerative work contribute just as much as those who have accumulated millions. Saying the 99% owe the 1% is just as much of an over-generalization as the reverse
* many institutions allow people to earn wealth from activity that is socially harmful, like politicians turned corporate lobbyists who earn millions getting subsidies and regulatory barriers to competition for their employers, or like public sector bureaucrats who sway public opinion in support of useless government work just to ensure their department budget continues to grow.
Like SCL/Cambridge Analytica.
No income tax for someone that earns $1m+, but taxes on those who earn less? In what entirely silver-spoon-born-and-bred entitled mind does this possibly make sense?
Taxes create the infrastructure that makes society possible and the bigger the business / industry, the more it requires basic infrastructure in order to grow or maintain itself.
What more do people earning $1m+ want? Can they not sustain themselves and their families on $1m per year? Do they want to create enough value that their children no longer need to work? If so, then what of their value of hard work? What about the natural instinct of bequeathing their role as "boss" to one of their children? That doesn't feel earnt to me?
What of the large financial institutions role in money laundering and sub-prime mortgage disasters and where that has left the 99%?
Look at some of the findings of the banking royal commission in Australia to see the kinds of things large financial institutions do as run-of-the-mill if they're not regulated. These institutions are run by people earning significant coin and take advantage of those who are already struggling financially - the very reason they seek advice / help on financial matters.
I'm making assumptions above and targeting financial institutions above others, but the article name-dropped Goldman Sachs, and the golden parachutes and massive salaries that the kinds of people he's talking about already get make it sound as if he's complaining about how the silver spoon tastes.
The author of the article is a member of the Ayn Rand Institute. Which likely means he was converted as a teenager and hasn't been able to question these beliefs as that gets more difficult and depressing as one ages.
Also: Harry Binswanger was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He is an heir to the Binswanger Glass Company, founded in 1872 by Samuel Binswanger
In that context, this article sounds like "waaaaah, I'm hard-done-by, taxes are holding me back, government help me - by intervening as a government that doesn't believe in intervening"
That explains why I'm having a hard time gauging whether or not this article is satire.
Somalia.
Let’s help this man emigrate.
Instead, the author is a hypocrite who just wants rich people left alone, but others very much not left alone. This worldview is typically accompanied by an astonishingly naive accounting of the benefits that one must enjoy from society to attain their position. Objectivism, as espoused by this article’s author and Ayn Rand alike, is a childish and cruel ideology.
Somalia is not laissez faire..
Laissez-faire is an anarchic ideology.
The term to describe this party is, a "government."
A government is an institution which has monopolized the use of force in an area.
Being opposed to anti-free-market interventions by the government is not the same thing as being opposed to the existence of government.
I had literally explained this multiple times in this very discussion, before you posted your comment.
There seems to be no exchange of actual information and building of understanding in these discussions.
What you’re on about now, I have no idea.
I can't bring myself to categorically disagree with either of those positions, because big business, fundamentally, is about setting common goals for absurdly large groups of people and to operate within even (much) larger groups of people in the real world. Complicated situations are bound to arise, and even if a manager failed to save a company, their contract entitles them to bonuses for whatever business goals they did achieve. If they managed to get that agreement signed beforehand, it needs to be honored, because binding contracts are a really fundamental building block of society, that needs to stay intact.
It's legitimate, though, to question the payment amounts and business goals they were bound on, as well as whether payments were made, that they were not entitled to. That's where our taxes need to fund a strong justice system, that can bring corruption suits to such cases.
Also, I'm sympathetic to situations and feelings of people being ground up in corrupt systems and I think we really need to understand how capitalism-apologists insulate themselves against those feelings by focussing on the guilt of weak people for not taking care of themselves. It's a coping mechanism, that helps when one has been of the receiving end of things before, but on the way up. It also protects from the guilt of not being able to help everybody, that one would like to.
>It's not the Henry Fords and Steve Jobs who exploit people. Problem is not all of the 1% is Steve Jobs, Henry Ford or Warren Buffett. It also includes, for example, royal families whose contribution is not intellectual.
>When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible:
And something which Ms. Rand forgot to include in her statement, which is the desire of customers to buy the product the factory produces.
>In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns.
Paying someone less than the value they provide is what makes capitalism work. Not even CEOs or founders are exempt from this law, though I'm sure more than one skates awfully close.
>Instead, we live in a culture where Goldman Sachs is smeared as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity."
Not sure how deep GS was involved but here goes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80...
>There is indeed a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity: the Internal Revenue Service. And, at a deeper level, it is the monstrous perversion of justice that makes the IRS possible: an envy-ridden moral code that damns success, profit, and earning money in voluntary exchange.
Plus the need to finance the bodyguards for the New World Order (aka The War Machine.)
But who says what the value you provide as a worker is, if not the job market? The original complaint from Marx and pals as I understand it, is that the profit generated by the company represents the stolen labour value. So does that mean that as long as a company takes no profit (or presumably just doesn't pay dividends, given that carrying over profit is just a way to maintain cash reserves) that there is no exploitation?
The whole labour value criticism just doesn't add up.
Dividends come out of profits. According to Marxist gobbledygook, any profit, meaning return to the shareholders, is theft from the workers, which implies investors should get nothing for investing.
This sham of an ideology is responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
In any case, that's not the point I'm trying to litigate.
What I'm trying to get at: Given the obvious flaws in pure capitalism (as there would be in any "pure" ideology), how can we reject the need for checks and balances?
Of course pure capitalism is a silly idea, assuming everyone is homo economicus you'd end up looping back round to feudalistic stratification via the Matthew effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect). Of course everyone is not homo economicus so it'd likely be less bad than that, but there are still plenty of sociopaths who would achieve much more success when the restraints are lifted.
Since you asked me about a constructivist model of value, let me try at a sketch (and put qualify with "in my mind" as necessary):
First and foremost, value is information, because it's a relation over facts, so relates facts to one another, puts them in perspective. What I think many people would call "true" or "real" values are those that can easily be considered facts in and of themselves, because all their relatives are known facts.
Those values, when considered closely, are few and far between and many intellectual currents, including science, have been devoted to finding more of them.
Social constructivism (a category, that includes capitalism as well as marxism, basically every model talking about people doing things with their lives), has the inherent problem that many of its facts are unknown. That's because people keep them secret, because they are part of their private lives, that they don't want other people to know about. Also, people change over time and so do their private facts.
Hence, in social sciences, it's _even_ harder to find meaningful true values and successful models have to account for large degrees of individual freedom.
Coming back to your argument, I categorically agree, that supply-demand creates untapped demand. I don't categorically agree, that that's a good thing. More concretely: Sure, free expression has promoted many good things, still, everybody has their own line about what they want to be allowed to be promoted and/or even sold.
In practice, I think for a functional state, it's much more common to defend the free market against yet another asshole that just found out that destructive behavior can give you a temporary advantage, but didn't quite figure out the calculation of long-term costs and / or doesn't care.
Note the ad hom comments in this thread dismissing the content of this article because Binswanger inherited his money. Nobody has "deconstructed" Rand's ideas because they are true and because modern intellectuals are unable to rebut her arguments they are reduced to smears and gross misrepresentations of an important intellectual achievement.
My advice; read Rand's work firsthand and judge her ideas for yourself.
It's a mistake to confuse proclaimations with beliefs. What sounds like gibberish to outsiders is just ways for members to find each other, validate their shared identity, reinforce their superiority.
Pick one and refute it instead of spreading the old and tired "cult" smear. You would be the first.
No.
And neither do their critics.
Settle down. I was supporting your point.
And yes, I was once in highschool, read my share of Ayn Rand. Then I grew up.
That fact should pretty much exclude Binswanger from having a public opinion on it because, whilst he may have worked hard for what he's got, the very fact of his being an 'heir' means his opinions will always be coloured by the likelihood of a life born into privilege.
Even if the ideas presented make sense in a highly-complex interwoven society, having articles written by someone potentially starting with heavy assistance will not help their cause. Get a genuine gutter-to-penthouse self-made person to write up how the common worker should be more thankful to their upper management and company-owners that they rarely see, much less have any interaction with. I'd read that with interest.
(Disclaimer: I've not read Rand, so I'm knowingly squarely within dmfdmf's crosshairs. I understand the basic concepts, but do need to actually read the source material - and am planning to do so, in order that I can "deconstruct" properly)
I truly hope you follow through with your intent, ignore the smears and misrepresentations, and read Rand firsthand and judge for yourself. As the first book I recommend Philosophy Who Needs It followed by The Virtue of Selfishness and leave the politics for later. Rand argued that politics follows from ethics and that is where the debate needs to shift if you want to understand the dire state of the world.
That is ad hominem against a straw man, so I’m applying grains of salt heavily to your commitment to logical and rhetorical integrity.
It means to raise some irrelevant fact about the person making the argument as a reason to dismiss what the person is claiming. E.g. don't listen to Binswanger because he is rich.
The vast majority of people who attack or dismiss or smear Ayn Rand have not (or superficially) read what she wrote but this is a fact that IS relevant to whether their opinion on Ayn Rand has any merit so its not ad hom.
That is ad hominem against a straw man, so I’m applying grains of salt heavily to your commitment to logical and rhetorical integrity.
Is the first thing I said. Meanwhile I stand by it, but it seemed prudent to break it down point by point until you had nowhere left to go. “All of these people I must invented haven’t even read the books!” Is still just what I said it was.
> Meanwhile I stand by it...
You can stand all you want but your position is not defensible in logic. I will repeat what I previously stated: You do not know what Ad Hom means. I know this for a fact because you fail to see an obvious implication of your position. We can address the validity of my claim but only if you see that my argument is not Ad Hom. If not then there is not much else to discuss.
Remember saying that? I’m getting tired of having to “remind” you of what has been said, so yes, we’re done.
Of course western civilisation is not a dictatorship. For example we would never tolerate a leaders son or wife taking control of a countries executive powers.
Did you intentionally leave that to the HN comment reader to finish?
I'm sure you could find someone making the same rant 150 years ago.
> But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him.
> The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.
That's an enormously toxic view of the bulk of humanity.
Maybe he should head out to Trump Country and say to all those blue collar types that he feels they are hopelessly inept and contribute nothing to society and would starve without men like himself.
Despite this comment, I’m not sure if this is satire or not.
I would find it much more appealing if I didn't find the ideas so repulsive.