Rand’s Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
From the blurb about the book on her site:
"Franklin Roosevelt systematically established the modern political constituency, from unions to artists, to senior citizens. Roosevelt's solution was to spend for these groups, so extensively that federal spending that year outpaced state and local spending, for the first time ever in peacetime. The consequence was the Roosevelt landslide of 1936 --but also the modern entitlement trap. Roosevelt often spoke of the Forgotten Man, the man "at the bottom of the economic pyramid." Yet, Miss Shlaes shows, his New Deal created a new forgotten man, the man who subsidizes the funding of other constituencies -- and who haunts politics in all developed nations today."
Actually I thought the article was trying for an easy to understand "hook" with the tax info, since it is unlikely that the top 1% of earners are the bulk of those buying the $7.99 (or whatever it is) paperback edition at the local Barnes and Noble.
Or the basic premise of equating money with wealth. In that having lots of one immediately means you have lots of the other.
She never once talks about how to address these people. Perhaps she was hoping it would be possible to enlighten people enough to make them look past such scammers and dilettantes, but if she was then I'd have to disagree severely with her position.
By ignoring "lucky money", she creates a logical loop in which money becomes a marker for productivity. The more money you have, obviously the more productive you are, because there are no productive poor.
It is also the problem of equating money with wealth. Money is just a good faith token between parties to expand the barter system to people who would otherwise have no basis to barter. For example, I am a software developer. I need a plumber. The plumber does not need software developed. Now, I can initiate a whole chain of exchanges that winds up with me having something the plumber wants, but that is inconvenient for day to day living. To short circuit all of that I give him a number of markers equal to the value we place on his time.
The markers aren't the point. That's the problem we have. We are emphasizing these markers and ignoring actual production. In a true idealized society based upon actual utility and such as Rand would have it, it would not be the scientists, artists, and executives at the top of the heap, but the electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and other doers and makers as they possess the skills of making.
Atlas shrugged is just CEO porn.
Also, I don't understand how people so readily apply vast utilities to carpenters and plumbers, but not business process managers and leaders who make a business vastly more efficient and productive. Is it because value creation that can't immediately be felt (it's not a fixed leak in a faucet) is beyond the capacity of most to imagine? It completely ignores the amount of operational leverage that such improvements have in large enterprises.
Not to say there aren't plenty of people who make plenty of money while providing questionable value creation.
I attribute vast utility to carpenters and plumbers, because without them you don't have a house. Whereas without business leaders, we still have houses. At the end of the day, you need people to do more than you need people to manage.
What you do here is assign zero value to productivity changes. If a change in productivity has zero value, then the value of the original productivity has zero value as well.
The only way to claim that a person who makes carpenters more efficient is worthless is to claim that carpenters are also worthless.
But I'm also not arguing what you want me to argue either. I'm not saying that "leveraging synergies" is worthless, just that it is worth less. If we are to ascribe value to production and utility, those who can do are the top of the heap.
That's what I was trying to say. Rand's books are very limited in scope, but if you treat them as such then they're not harmful books to read and enjoy. However, she does very specifically mention looters and inheritants as being the evil sort of rich, that which doesn't create but merely uses. So my initial point still stands: She admits that there's a problem there, even if she never really explains what she'd plan to do about it.
If that book is on the rise, then rationality is for sure on descend.
Sad
Look at Nietzsche. Absolutely pretentious, wrote his philosophy in semifictional narratives, made up ridiculous fantasies like eternal recurrence. But people don't dis Nietzsche like they do Rand, not even when his readers are more obnoxious and pretentious than even the most obnoxious of Objectivists, because Nietzsche at least hit the vein of being difficult and therefore respectable.
Give Rand credit for at least one thing: Her ideas are given to you so simplistically that it's very easy to build a counterargument against them. Would that most philosophers would do the same favor.
That said, this article shouldn't be here, and Objectivism debates are old and tired.
tl;dr Blasting Rand without balance is just as bad as worshipping her without balance, so if you're going to disagree with her be less of a jerk about it.
Otherwise it is her ideas.
(I'm in general agreement with Zimbabwe)
PS: A linkbait title. Suggesting Income Tax numbers are meaningful without including SS, or Medicare numbers is effectively a lie. Which is why I feel this is pure political spin and is not worth discussing.
By 2000, that 1 percent was paying 37 percent, and "Atlas Shrugged" sales were at 120,000. By 2006, the top 1 percent carried 40 percent of the burden.
Obviously, increased sales of "Atlas Shrugged" leads to legislation increasing taxes on the rich, because Randian lobbyists are at home, reading. Or -- just guessing, here -- this correlation is meaningless and should be omitted?
This one takes the cake:
Of all American governors, Arnold Schwarzenegger of California is the one who most resembles Rand’s outsized characters. [...] Yet Schwarzenegger seems to be missing the Rand gene. His policies are all pain and no growth.
Either he resembles something in the book or he doesn't. Why claim both?
Exeptions would be a law that is going into effect that chaning the rules for becoming startups or some such.
PS: Ok, talking about what exit number you need to retire based on X income tax would be a good and usefull article, linkbait that's talking about politics belongs somewhere else.