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The world is socialist

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26 pointsdavewiner18 comments

The author suggests that Ayn Rand would have had no response to the question of "who cleans up the snow storm?", as if the idea of events affecting the collective simply never occurred to her. What the author claims to be a gap in her philosophy is actually a lack of understanding of it on his part. That she had responses to many common criticisms should be obvious, but a focal point of his argument rests on the false assumption that she did not.

I don't think the author understands that state socialism implies coercive sharing, not voluntary resource pooling.

In his defense (despite an apparent lack of understanding of what "socialism" actually means), the author wasn't talking about state socialism, which isn't the only form of socialism.

In his defence, I find arguments that it's "coercive" for the state to take money from me in return for services rendered but not for my landlord to do the same to generally be tenuous[1]. The reality is that we live in a world where various entities claim "ownership" of resources, and governments are able to claim the "rule of law" over large areas of territory, and despite the conflicts and examples of egregious unfairness the system generates, we're usually better off for it than fighting for ourselves.

[1]I'm equally free to leave both my rental contract (upon expiry) and the UK tax regime for cheaper/better alternatives. In the absence of the government "coercively" imposing rule of law backed by social norms I would not only be free from the government redirecting a proportion of my pay packet to other causes, but also from any incentive whatsoever to divert a similarly large proportion of my income to be able to live in a property the overseas-based owner has quite possibly never even visited.

I think poster richcollins' definition of state socialism ("state socialism implies coercive sharing") is accurate and wonderfully succinct.

However, like it or not, we are born into a social contract. Those who want opt-out of that social contract are a bit like the child who, when faced with family responsibilities states: "I didn't ask to be born!"

Parent's response: "Sorry, thems the breaks kid, now go look after your brother and finish your chores."

While I enjoyed the Ayn Rand books I've read, I think it's a little naive to expect any large society to work on a strictly opt-in basis.

There really isn't that much range in the smartness or fitness of human beings.

Capitalism isn't necessarily about rewarding people that are "better".

It's about rewarding people that are productive in the ways in which other people value.

It rewards people for making stuff other people want. It's about rewarding me more for learning an in-demand trade than for skateboarding all day.

An argument against an ideology's handling of a particular problem is useless unless it quotes and responds to a respectable proponent on that subject. There are plenty of Objectivists and libertarians who have written about the provision of public goods.

Winer should read PG on How To Disagree: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

I am pretty tired of smears against Ayn Rand that amount to: I read her when I was a teenager and I was hoodwinked into her ideas. That's your issue, not hers.

I'll never forget her response to this very type of attack which you can see at the 8:15 mark of this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6jkQKAv13A

This is a content-free political rant, as you'd expect from the title.

Thought experiment:

How many able-bodied people are there in NYC? Let's say 2 million.

If each of them had shoveled snow for 15 minutes with a snow shovel (working in shifts, let's say, as there are not 2 million snow shovels) just in the area they personally were affected by, how effective would that have been vs. what happened?

It sounds good until you ask 'where are they going to put all that snow'? Can't put it on the sidewalks, cars are parked on the sides of the roads. The process of getting rid of that much snow in NYC involves industrial snow melting machines, the sewer system, the rivers, and coordination of trucks. Not so simple as getting together and shovelling out.

Generally they do just plow it into the cars / sidewalk / curb in the cities I've lived in (like Chicago).

I was actually talking about a relative level of effectiveness - surely doing some shoveling even without snow melting, etc. would have resulted in something better (not "completely fixed") ...

"Maybe there's a different premise. They [TV news channels] cover politics. Politics is a Democratic and Republican game.It's left and right. But then you begin to confuse everything through that same conflict. I think the conflict that would be more appropriate to devote a news channel to would be corruption."

John Stewart on the Rachel Maddow Show.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908//vp/40141311#40141311

Worth thinking about?

Americans, through blatant ignorance and misuse of the term over the last few years (on both sides of the political aisle), you've ALL forfeited the right to use the world "socialism" until such time as you can prove you actually know what the word means and can use it properly.

Sorry, but it's a fair cop. Social services != socialism.

Socialism is the government control of production, and it's largely dead outside of Cuba and North Korea.

Socialism is the government control of production, and it's largely dead outside of Cuba and North Korea.

Nope, not necessarily. There are many definitions of socialism, and lots of movements defined as socialists. Many of them don't involve State control of production, eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

You can find a few outliers (such as the usual crop of left-anarchists who want to smash governments and replace them with, um, different organizations that make people in their territories follow rules through coercion), but they are of no significance and give no cover to the sloppy American tendency to call a capitalist society with a welfare state "socialist".

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