Ayn Rand is a philosopher and writer best known for her fictional works Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, in which unlikely protagonists embodying individualism and rationality triumph over the evil forces of mediocrity and statism. Though Rand’s fiction occupies a place in the western cannon, it was mostly a vehicle for explaining her philosophy of Objectivism, one tenet of which is the economic system of free-market capitalism.
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal is a collection of essays by Rand and associates, outlining her political, social, and economic views. Its dense 350 pages contain thoughts on many subjects applicable to today’s world, such as:
The repudiation of “extremism” as a political weapon:
“When men [ed: or women] feel that strongly about an issue, yet refuse to name it…one may be sure that their actual goal would not stand public identification”
Rand suggests that the crusade against extremism is a dangerous concept because the word itself holds no meaning. The creation of such “anti-concepts” allows ideas that are merely politically incorrect to be wrongly associated with ones that are evil. Even worse, if extremes of speech and thought are repudiated wholesale, the only thing remaining is a muddled centrist philosophy with no clear tenets. Repudiating “extremism” is rejecting the ability to have clear guiding principles of right and wrong, since one extreme must be wrong. The blanket labeling of manosphere blogs as “hate groups” is one example of this dangerous association.
The Gold Standard:
“The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit”
In this essay, Alan Greenspan outlines why gold is a sensible choice for currency and why it should be reinstated as our currency-backing standard. In the modern model, the Federal Reserve will continue to print fiat currency to finance a deficit, which will eventually result in massive devaluation of money. Greenspan outlines how returning to a gold standard would promote natural self-regulation of interest rates and guard against massive stock market crashes. He cautions that without anything backing our currency, nothing will prevent the de facto confiscation of wealth via rampant inflation.
The persecution of American business through undefinable anti-trust laws:
“Today’s liberals recognize the workers’ (the majority’s) rights to their livelihood (their wages), but deny the businessmen’s (the minority’s) right to their livelihood (their profits)”
Rand’s essay outlines the arcane and contradictory anti-trust laws on our books, which exist to execute the whims of the government against businesses they do not favor. For example, the Supreme Court once ruled against the Aluminum Company of America simply for “taking advantage of every opportunity” to expand their business. Rand suggests that the only way that a truly coercive monopoly can be formed is when the government interferes in the free market by artificially subsidizing certain industries. This creates massive corruption and deadweight loss, such as in the railroad industry early in the 20th century.
More than once I had to remind myself that this book was written in 1967, since Rand’s criticism of New Deal economic policies, the welfare state, and a mixed market economic structure ring chillingly true for our country’s present political climate. The book’s only drawback it is that it is incredibly dense. It certainly cannot be read in one sitting, but at the same time you can’t jump into it for five minutes at a time, since the concepts require careful reflection to appreciate fully. If you’re looking for a thought-provoking philosophical/economic manifesto that is highly relevant to modern issues, I suggest picking up a copy.
Read More: “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” on Amazon
Rand was an outspoken champion for men. She abhorred feminism and I would consider her on our side. Although her personal life seemed to be a train wreck it will never overshadow her intellectual contributions. She should be read and studied by all men that strive to be free.
Totally agree!
Many of her ideas are close to what the Founding Fathers originally intended for the United States to have. Unfortunately, as is usually the case with great ideas, they produce remarkable results until the (idiot) masses come in and take over. Then they’re ruined.
Just as the ideas that founded America were very noble in nature. They produced great wealth and success, then the masses immigrated in and started what we are witnessing – the beginning of the end.
Exactly which Founding Father had similar ideas to Rand? Someone like Jefferson was definitely “statist” when he supported the French Revolution and promoted the governmental powers of the individual states. The Founding Fathers, to a man, concerned themselves primarily with state-building, an activity that’s diametrically opposed to Rand’s philosophies.
As for your argument on the masses, it makes one wonder how useful an ideology is if its reflexive answer to society’s complexities is “geez if only those annoying commoners weren’t messing things up for me everything would be perfect!” and then taking one’s toys and going home (aka “going galt”).
Calling bs on that. Jefferson (and maybe Paine) were the least “statist” founding fathers and both supported massive gov’t interventions (French revolution, Louisiana purchase, delaying of the abolition of slave trade, basic guaranteed income for Paine).
I’m speaking mainly of Jefferson’s ideals and not his actions. It’s well known that he seemed to renig on many of his core principles once he actually acquired the highest office and became our 3rd President.
Jefferson could hardly be called a statist from his writing. His actions once in office did sometimes contradict his rhetoric. But even his actions were a far cry from the tyranny we now see emerging in the US.
Ideals are nothing. Actions are everything. Feminist ideals are of equality. Their actions…
Indeed, much of Rand’s non-fiction has been sorely overlooked these last 30 years.
Try, “The Virtue of Selfishness” – there’s some real min-expanding stuff in that one!
humans only do things when absolutely necessary, therefore selfishness does have a good flip side… since no one will bother doing much unless they can glean some benefit from it, or at least be assured that a bunch of overpaid government goons with clips boards and a 5000 page rule book of nonsense, aren’t going to come and harass them for their endeavor.
on the other hand when you rob the hard working industrious people who define what is needed by where they can make profits…. pinch their efforts with taxes and feed it into the government system which has little if any performance incentive beyond getting reelected for another term … you find all manner of pork and white elephant projects….
the pentagon recently managed to spend $1/2 million on fake intel chips… do you think a company could get away with being ripped off like that ? $500 for the military to procure a basic hammer you can buy in a hardware store for $15 ?
i’ll sell you as many hammers as you want for $500 each…..mr. govt. crony…
I’m in agreement that government is inherently wasteful, but private companies waste $500K all the time / get ripped off too. My last company blew $1.5 million on a horrible IT system that was doomed from the start because the owners got taken in. It was only 300 employees and 100% privately owned. New company I work for is much larger and wastes money all the time on advertising that doesn’t work. I’m as conservative as the next guy but we’re not going to advance our cause with examples like Obama phones, etc that are the small potatoes. Focus on the larger displays of inefficiency – private prisons, drug war/police states
re: private waste. In the private sector, it’s adapt or die. A company can only hemmorage money for so long until it must stop and go bankrupt.
Meanwhile, the Post Office and Amtrack have losses in the billions every year, and Congress continues to bail them out.
Rand was an emotionally undeveloped human being who sought to enshrine greed as a noble sentiment. Our society is still suffering from the wide adoption of her shallow philosophy by those who haven’t been able to emotionally mature beyond their adolescent years. It is truly a shame.
four likes? Do you have four accounts?
Nope, just one. Dig a little deeper beyond the appealing surface of what Rand has to say and you’ll see an angry, empty philosophy that quickly falls apart when it encounters the complexities of the real world. I guess there are at least 4 other ROK readers who have glimpsed that reality.
Rand said you’d say this when you had no rational argument against her arguments. She was apparently right again, the looters like yourself really do only have Ad Hominem attacks.
Here are a some rational arguments against libertarianism/objectivism that are far more eloquent than I could ever put together:
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/liberty-of-local-bullies.html
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/we-can-choose-that-workers-not-die-in.html?m=1
I read it. Talk about weak sauce.
It’s interesting that the primary argument against Rand’s view is that ignorance is pervasive and non-combatable, hence no individual is operating under a fair choice for their future. This seems to imply that education and a functioning independent media will not exist in Rand’s world.
A very poor counter-argument, since you are arguing that because this other ad-ignorantiam argument (a fallacy) is true, my argument is false.
Someone’s jacking his likes because if his comments are gaining so much popularity, we’re doomed. Ayn Rand’s philosophies won’t work now as it’s not a stop gap. The economy is in a bad shape and things have to be corrected and restored to an equilibrium before her philosophies can even be considered.
Die faggot.
Seems like after 5 years of efforts, our equilibrium has shifted which is what the data from discouraged workers is indicating as well.
^^ Absurd reasoning even at face value.
The argument Rand would make is that the economy is in poor shape *because* of too much interference and your counter-argument is that Rand is wrong and we need more interference to stabilize it.
An uncle of mine that is very wise said that some Randroid POS would leap to her defence in this kind of situation and say, “when you had no rational argument against her arguments. She was apparently right again, the looters like yourself really do only have Ad Hominem attacks.”
So I guess this proves I was right and you are a POS.
Wake up.
LOL, and Jesus said that many would reject his words…
Mo said that many would reject the Koran…
Buddha said it would be a long time everyone could accept the truths of Nirvana…
And I say, although many will disagree with Leon, in the end, he shall proven right and the naysayers will be smitten!
I’ll bite. What examples of “wide adoption” of these philosophies can you point to? Because it certainly seems to be the exact opposite.
See the Thatcher/Reagan era and latterly Greenspan effectively dictating US economic policy for two decades.
Thank you – this disastrous 30-year experiment in deregulation/laissez-faire economics was led largely by Rand acolytes.
socialism has of course proven itself again and again, lol
Democratic Socialism sure has – see Scandinavia.
How can you claim that we have laissez-faire economics when we have Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, labor laws, etc…?
The fact that we have a federal reserve should be enough to point out that we are no where near close to a free market economy.
You are correct – we don’t have a laissez-faire economy, but we have moved much further towards it than we were 30 years ago, and the results have been disastrous. The financial/banking system is a great example of this. The repeal of the Glass/Stegall separation between investment and commercial banks in 2000 (signed by Clinton) led directly to the crash of 2008, as was predicted by many economists at the time. The bailout was a decidedly non-laissez-faire move, but it would not have been necessary if the deregulation of the financial markets hadn’t caused the crash in the first place.
amazon supports legislation to make all internet sales in the US subject to state sales tax… putting mom and pop internet sellers out of business under the huge burden of filing 50+ sales tax returns per month… which amazon has to do anyway…. nice….. government and corporations in perfect (nazi) regulatory harmony….socialism at it’s finest…. roll on the good days…. anyone for the bread queue ?
since when has the creation of $18T dollars of government debt and two foreign imperialist wars….. moved us closer to a laissez faire economy…. it’s moved us closer to bankrupt socialism….
blame the real problem here…. don’t dream up scape goats in free market economics……
looks a lot better than the 70 year experiment in communism…. and socialism just works so well in africa and india….. we thought we’d take it on in the US, not even bothering to give 1960s and 1970s UK a second glace… wow a paradise of course… i forgot the benefits of forcing companies to obey union laws and employ three times the necessary work force… perfect…. can i get one of those jobs too ?
btw. Mr Sighed… your tax bracket is now 75%…. to pay for my government sanctioned wages….
Just because one particular piece of legislation/regulation is bad or harmful to the small players in the market doesn’t mean they all are. It’s not a black-and-white situation when it comes to a regulated economy. Some regulations are good for the general public and should be enforced, some are bad and should be scrapped away with. But if we were to get rid of all of them, as is the libertarian/objectivist fantasy, our society would quickly become quite an ugly and dystopian one indeed. If you liked the BP oil spill in 2010 and the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion of just a few weeks back, not to mention the frequent tainted food scares of the past few years, you can thank the deregulatory fervor of the past few decades.
The 18T dollars of govt debt and the two foreign imperialist wars are indeed objectionable and a huge problem for our country. But they were not the cause of the 2008 financial collapse. There is a direct line between our deregulation of financial markets and the 2008 crash, as any economist not bought and paid for by right-wing think tanks will tell you. These are separate issues.
Free markets are a myth. In order for any so-called free market to exist, there needs to be a governing authority enforcing the rules. Otherwise you have bad actors who try to take unfair advantage of the other players in the market.
I will again point to the example of Democratic Socialism in the Scandinavian countries, which yes, have high marginal tax rates and a highly-regulated economy, but their citizens enjoy the highest standards of living in the developed world. Free public education through their university years, free high-quality healthcare, near full-employment. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
rules written by corporate lobbyists that jacked up the president with millions to keep the little guy out of the market with ridiculous onerous regulations… perfect….
that works great for me….
my fortune 500 company is brilliant it’s only fair the government should help me illiminate as much competition as possible…
from massive oil wealth… and i’d point out the same system in Venezuela is a total mess….in cold countries people have their shit together.. that’s all it is….
Rand, whose real name was Alice Rosenbaum, cashed her Social Security checks.
“boo hoo hoo da evil kkkapitalist didnt let us take their monie ;~;”
Scandies don’t have higher living standards than white Americans.
Incorrect.
Not all regulations are like that!
You fucking idiot. The housing crash was not caused by deregulation, but by moronic liberal social engineers trying to ram bad home loans down the throat of every Jamal, Shaniqua, and Hector that would “qualify”. (As an aside, just how do you fail to qualify on a no-doc loan?). There were widely documented cases of bankers coaxing latina motel workers into expensive home loans, because the federal gov’t said it would guarantee those loans via Fannie and Freddie. In other words, the banker makes money, and the low-earning minorities get free homes, and, as usual, the WHITE TAXPAYER picks up the tab for the whole sick mess! The housing crash was orchestrated by liberal social engineers and their kosher banking enablers.
And yes, before you spew your nonsense, I’m aware that Bush was a big part of it, as a republican. That does not mean that liberals were not responsible for the crash. When you grow up a little bit, Timmy, you will see that both parties are liberal to the extreme….they have both been moved so far left by our kosher media and academia that there is no difference between the policies of Bush and Obama.
Don’t forget the most important points: they have no blacks, nor do they have15 million border-jumping peasants.
Is it “cold” countries, or is it “white” countries?! Be honest now….
Those social niceties are not meaningful measures of success, that’s the point.
When westerners start boasting about living standards or some domestic luxury, I get the feeling they never matured past puberty. Outward projections of power are far more important than how nice your home is. Nations are supposed to be ruthlessly competitive as a whole, economically and politically threatening to rivals. You can’t have big winners without big losers. In that sense, Scandinavia is only successful DESPITE its socialism.
The piece of legislation you are referring to is called the Community Reinvestment Act, passed under Carter in 1977 – a full 30 years before the crash. It is another libertarian myth that this was the cause of the crash. The deregulation that I refer to took place 8 years before the crash amidst warnings from many reputable economists that it would lead to another 1929-style crash. We’ve seen this movie before, but apparently haven’t learned from it. Get your facts straight before commenting please.
Yes. So? She had payed taxes all her life. It wasn’t as if she was mooching off other peoples work.
I am Swedish and I live in Sweden. What you don’t seem to be aware of is that Sweden has moved away from welfare state socialism since the 90s. Why? Because it was economically unsustainable. It is impossible to sustain a modern economy by having more and more people not working. The politicians finally realized that and started to privatize and liberalize the economy, beginning with the socialdemocrat Göran Persson. This the Sweden that the US should emulate.
But we have a growing number of muslim immigrants that aren’t able to find work because of pro-union legislation and minimum wage laws.
You need to update your knowledge. Read or listen to Johan Norberg.
You got i backwards. It is because of regulations that companies relax their security.
Government and the socialist
state is the real problem, watch this video:
True News: The Real Causes of the Great Recession
okay comrade,
The way to crush the
bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
The goal of socialism is
communism.
The best way to destroy the
capitalist system is to debauch the currency.
Vladimir Lenin
bullshit comrade!
Very good comrade,
“If you tremble indignation at every injustice
then you are a comrade of mine.”
“In fact, if Christ himself stood in my
way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm”
“Many will call me an adventurer – and that
I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.”
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
He would be proud of you comrade
FDR FTW.
As I understand it, only 13% of sub-prime mortgages were government backed.
You also forget that these mortgages were packaged into financial “products” like CDOs, leveraged, fraudulently given AAA+ ratings and sold all around the world over and over again. Can you explain how Jamal, Shaniqua, and Hector managed all that?
Be a racist if you like but please don’t let your hate blind you to the real culprits.
How does that make any sense? If BP for example had an economic incentive to prevent the oil spill they would’ve done it. The fact that the company didn’t feel it needed to do so when the regulations went away proves that the free market can’t do everything and that this portion of Rands philosophy is bullshit
That really tells the whole story, though, doesn’t it? Rand’s prescriptions haven’t been widely adopted because they aren’t practicable. I think libertarianism does make a few valid points, but until you have a real-world example to point to it’s all theoretical musings.
The US before the Progressive era. Hong Kong. Britain before WW 1. Etc.
Fair enough, though that was before Rand ever put pen to paper so we’re not really talking about objectivism anymore. Anyway, it’s hard to hold up Gilded Age America as an ideal, especially with Tammany Hall and other political machines running all sorts of shenanigans. Britain before WWI was marked by continued involvement of the crown and nobility in substantive politics, and it was the removal of that influence that led to much of the welfare state we see today…correct me if I’m wrong but Rand was no supporter of hereditary monarchy or aristocracy. Hong Kong is like Singapore and Switzerland, great in a small entity that takes advantage of geography, but inapplicable to anything bigger.
That’s because greed and profit is supposed to come before morals and social well-being. That some people may suffer for it is not relevant. It’s just not nice to say. This is why there is no rational argument against objectivism, it’s all just emotions and “you’re not caring for people!”.
That’s hard to argue that when your very first rationale is “greed”, which is indeed a human emotion.
Rand was a social/emotional/economic and philosophical retard, not to mention a gigantic hypocrite. Worship at her altar at the risk of your personal integrity, if that matters to you…it certainly didn’t matter to her.
butthurt cummunist faggot
anonymous cunt, left spineless and at a loss for words by the expression of simple opinion, Forced to resort to baseless name calling. What a worthless POS… typical Ayn Rand follower.
Why are there so many liberal simps, manginas, newbs, keyboard jockeys, and omegas on this site ever since roosh put the communist censorship systems in place and started deleting comments a la Feministing? Seems like all the cool commenters have vanished.
Jeez, not this nonsense again. Look up the literature on Modern Monetary Theory to see how fiat money works in the real world. It doesn’t work the way it does in the fantasy world of people who call themselves “Austrian economists.”
gay
It seems it’s you who doesn´t know how it works in the real world, if we were to judge fiat money performance solely it would have been discarded long time ago, if performance for the commoners is what we are measuring that is…and I am not even an Austrian economist.
Rand was a mental case who didn’t know right from wrong. She was an extremist who considered Palestinians subhuman. Why? Because she was a Jew who supported Israel.
There is no right or wrong. Just different perspectives. And from my perspective, the majority of flintstones in Iraq and Afghanistan are subhuman. I suspect the Palestinians are equally primitive.
Cheap postmodernism + mindless racism = hahahaha
I suppose you would be an authority with a wide range of first hand knowledge of the region right?
An authority enough to know that Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine aren’t in one region. But then, “there is no right or wrong”, eh?
They ARE in one region: the Musim Umma. That’ ==is== the way they look at themselves.
That’s more comparable to the idea of “Christendom”, which would include (for instance) Argentina and Russia, but doesn’t indicate a common region in the geographic sense. Thus, neither that term nor the more common term “Dar al Islam” can be considered a region, unless you want to seriously argue that Bosnia and Indonesia are part of the same geographic region (something that practically no Muslim would try to argue).
Well there is a Greater Middle East region encompassing from western Africa to central Asia. All of those countries are considered within that. Im curious why you think your opinion is of value if you have never been to that region?
Western Africa isn’t remotely part of the Middle East, neither is Central Asia.
I’m curious why you think you have to have been in a country to know in which region it lies. For that all you need is an atlas. But pray, tell me more about the value of your opinions.
Rand’s view is that humanity consists, on one side, of a tiny minority
of men of reason, and, on the other side, of subhumans who don’t deserve to live.
Who are the subhumans? Communists, socialists, welfare recipients, Christians, Platonists – in fact anyone who believes in God, anyone who is not a “thinker” (an intellectual) and anyone who believes in any kind of collective good, even partially.
Rand does have some truthful and illuminating ideas in her books. I would hesitate to dismiss her entirely. But to adopt her view of the world wholesale would be insane.
Ayn Rand had perhaps four or five interesting ideas, but unlike what her Kool-Aid drinkers think, she didn’t have the last word on everything. In fact she didn’t even have the first word in a very important area of life which I’ll explain below.
Though I can see why Rand cultists want to argue otherwise. No cult member wants to admit that an ordinary schlub founded his cult, so cultists tend to pad the cult guru’s résumé with all sorts of unlikely accomplishments: Ayn Rand revolutionized our understanding of philosophy! political science! economics! entrepreneurship! psychology! the potentials of art and literature! even human sexuality!
Fortunately this self-deception stops short of claiming that Rand gave us authoritative insights into diet, fitness and health (DFH), because the people who knew Rand could see, and smell, that she chain-smoked, tweaked on amphetamines, ate a bad diet, never exercised and let her cats piss all over the apartments she lived in.
No, even the most dead-ender Rand cultist has to admit that Rand offered no advice in the DFH part of life, which goes right to the root of biological success. The Randroid Anthony Dream Johnson, for example, has to invite sources from outside of the Objectiverse to speak on paleo nutrition and body building for his 21 Conventions.
Yeah, I don’t get it. Normally philosophers and economists are well-renowned for their advice on combining Leangains and paleo.
Cult leaders often think they know better than everyone else about DFH. Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists and Christian Scientists have religious DFH beliefs, for example.
And L. Ron Hubbard weighed in as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purification_Rundown
Objectivists think Rand knew how to live properly in every other area, including her advice to men about what kinds of women to fuck, what kinds of music to listen to and which novels to read, so they should probably consider themselves fortunate that she lacked crank beliefs about DFH and didn’t add them to their burden of Randian rectitude.
The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html
All that matters is the money. If the gov’t controls the currency, the unit of exchange, and has the power to force us to use it and forbid us from choosing a market-based currency, there can never be freedom of trade. Without freedom of trade, there is no free society.
Some people think it’s better to let private banks decide when and how the money is being created and destroyed. Doesn’t make sense.
You’re right. You are in agreement with Jefferson. Don’t End the Fed. Nationalise the Bitch and make her accounts publicly available for every citezen to audit at will. Same goes for every central bank in world. (the virus has spread far and wide.)
Broadly, sure, but FREEDOM is much more than that. if the only freedom you enjoy is the “freedom of trade” you’re probably living in a little place called the “People’s Republic of China.”
you dont know shit
Rand does have this weird sort of fertility when it comes to spawning offshoot cults. In addition to her own cult, which for a time went under the name the Nathaniel Branden Institute, I can think of three other cults which invoked Rand as an authority figure:
John Williamson’s Sandstone Retreat, which Gay Talese describes in his bestselling book Thy Neighbor’s Wife.
Frank R. Wallace’s Neo-Tech, which promised to give its members “iron-grip control over everything that moves,” and which promised its followers that they would become “physically immortal” some day and eventually become universe-running “Zons.” (Apparently Wallace viewed the Scientologists as his competitors.) Ironically Wallace spent time in prison for tax evasion, and died when a car hit him while he went out jogging one day. So much for his “iron-grip control” and “physical immortality.”
And then for a current cult, consider Keith Raniere’s NXIVM. http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Secrets-of-NXIVM-2880885.php
I have the impression that Andrew Galambos structured his Free Enterprise Institute as a Rand-like cult to compete with the Nathaniel Branden Institute, but he replaced his authority for Rand’s as the source of the fringe libertarian ideas he taught to his followers.
I think the sphere should largely steer clear of economics because we all fall into two major groups:
1) Those who learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and understand that central economic planning doesn’t work. These people don’t really need to be reminded of this common sense fact, so why bother?
and
2) Everyone else. This includes people who actually bought into the information handed down to them in politics or economics classes in school, or by their parents, or NPR. It also includes people who just don’t know their ass from a hole in their logic. It is a catastrophic waste of time and energy to try and change these people.
Depends on how you define “doesn’t work.” The Soviet economic system did produce real, tangible capital goods which didn’t exist previously. It just did so wastefully by Western capitalist standards.
I have to laugh at American libertarians who keep invoking Leonard Reed’s famous essay, “I, Pencil,” as some kind of demonstration of the alleged impossibility of using central planning to create complex goods. Where did the Soviet Union’s pencils come from? And how many of these American libertarians own AK-47’s, a very successful product of Soviet central planning?
don’t forget laser eye surgery.
GAY
Well said comrade
Someone here ignores basic concepts like the optimum solution and optimization as well as opportunity costs if we are suggest Soviet economics did work…Zarist Russia, given a chance would have had better results…sans millions of dead, madness and stupidity.
Yet Tsarist Russia was very much a “statist” society. I think the pro-Rand people miss the fact that states can be organized in vastly different ways through vastly different means…it’s downright silly to equate communism with all government intervention.
Let us not forget that the choice isn’t just between central economic planning and completely deregulated laissez-faire markets. It isn’t all or nothing. A well-regulated marketplace such as what you see in a Democratic Socialist economy is very far from a centrally planned economy like what the Soviet Union was. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism, and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism. I urge the libertarians/objectivists out there to really educate themselves on the various theories of economic organization that exist out there before making the decision as to which is best for organizing a society to the maximum benefit of its citizens. This black-or-white mentality that seems to pervade the libertarian mindset is very troubling and not conducive to solving the myriad of problems that a modern advanced economy such as ours faces.
Here’s one for ya: If you and I are too stupid to solve our own problems and determine the nature of our business and social interactions with one another, then how are we smart enough to elect an elite class of “representatives” to whom we will delegate that same task?
Thank You Comrade, well said:
Be assured that our illustrious beloved leader Barak Hussein Obama
and the centralized government committee for the preservation of our SWPL comrade brethren’s way of life and the feminine imperative are in full control of the interest rates and the fiat money printing presses underneath the white house; which by the way are working overtime ($85billion a month). Our beloved Socialist State of America and its illusory economy will chug alone a few more years without any nasty libertarian/objectivist party poopers messing with out happy reality. Thank you!
Remember the Revolution will not be televised!
Rand was prophetic in her ability to see to the heart of an issue and point out the flaws upon which it was based, and the ultimate point it will reach. It took the US more then 40 years of a systematic process created to undermine and destroy its foundation, but it is coming to fruition. Unfortunately, people are too stupid to see it – they are like sheep following the judas-goat to slaughter… And that is the result – it is ALWAYS the result….
It’s unreasonable to expect our pragmatism/behaviorism educational system to produce a people, who would actually even try to give much thought to the books of Rand’s philosophy (philosophy is basically ideas in context: it’s very easy to dismiss Ayn Rand’s ideas out of context.) I personally disagree with her politics and her economics, but the rest of her philosophy I find is very good.
As for the accusation of cultism, our educational system produces people who believe all moralists are cultist; all people who are absolutist or believe in principles are cultists; all people who believe they are on the right side of truth are cultists: in other words, anybody who believes in certainty and that they have or are capable of attaining it are religious nut jobs and thus cultists…so these accusations should be expected, since Ayn Rand was a moral absolutist which is basically what objectivism is.
Ayn Rand is the only female author I read…
Ayn Rand is a thinker nobody in the academia takes seriously. Not because of liberal bias as you may want to say now, but because her work just is not coherent. If you want to have a discussion rather refer to Nozick, who was open to debate with liberals like Rawls as well, compared to a writer with simplistic characters whose whole world only consists of social welfare parasites and glorious entrepreneurs.
I find libertarianism’s main failure to only adress direct forms of oppressions (physical violence), while totally ignoring structural forms of how you can take away freedom of an individual (hunger, disease…). If you are born in a society where only a few people have all the power and some individuals would not even be able to read or write nor pay for health care, then how can you say in all seriousness that these people are “free”?
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“BERNANKIFIED”!!!
New word look it up! URBAN DICTIONARYIESZ
Calling GB4M
British humor at its best.
Ayn Rand is everywhere. In her speech to West Point, recorded in the first essay in “Philosophy, Who Needs It?” Miss Rand said that she was there not to promote her philosophy, but to promote philosophy in general; confident that anyone who chose to take ideas seriously would adopt hers on their own.
Glad to see this here. As for the haters and their ad hominum attacks, I bet they never get laid. And if they do, it is only by feminist beasts. Real women dig the strong frame Objectivism creates.
You pussies are all getting worked up. Both right, left, and centrist. Get money, fuck bitches, die happy. Thats all there is to it. accept it. embrace it. deal with it.
This Chick is speaking the truth: a real live Dagny Taggart!
“I never believed that story. I thought by the time the sun was exhausted, men would find a substitute.”
— Dagny Taggart
Good book. Read it decades ago.
Rand is for children
fuck off, you jews. the ultimate form of capitalism is FEUDALISM. capitalism must die. we need socialism.
“The persecution of American business through undefinable anti-trust laws,” persecution of major corrupt horrible american jew corporations which have corrupted the US government…. ohhh booo hooo. soo sad. i’m in fucking tears. capitalism simply makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Offering huge corporations with unlimited freedom to “make more profits” for themselves no matter the cost. that sounds great. capitalism is the reason the US is in the economic state that it’s in.
stop aligning yourself with the fucking RICH! like you’re going to get rich someday too. ??? most people in the middle class will never become rich. think you’re special?