Imagine the kind of bosses that arrogant and greedy narcissists like John Galt or Dagny Taggart would be (I guess a lot of us don’t need to imagine). They’d all have Harry Bennetts roaming around their shops, too.
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I think we can easily imagine how little regard Rand would have had for the #MeToo movement given the way she romanticized rapists like Howard Roark.
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We really need @the_borderer or @Wanderfound on here to discuss the theory, but in their absence I’ll try.
In my callow youth, I read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, and I thought it was the best thing ever. Then I read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and I thought it was even better. Then I discovered anarcho-capitalism, and hoo boy, that was really the stuff. No coercion, everyone free to make such contracts as they saw fit, peace and prosperity for all, any losers cared for by the winners out of the goodness of their hearts.
But it didn’t take long before I realised that such a society would be fundamentally unstable. If you have private ownership of capital, capital will concentrate. And as ownership of capital grants power, especially in the absence of counterbalancing centres of power like a government, you’ll either get one dominant concentration, and hence a de facto state, or multiple competing concentrations, and hence warlordism.
The only way an anarchistic society could survive is through communism, or something close to it. Far from the anarchist left having an idealist view of human nature, they know what humans are capable of, and thus why it is not a good idea to trust in the beneficence of the wealthy and powerful: safer not to have any wealthy or powerful in the first place.
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Since the previous quote from this man was seen as snarky, certain folks will probably ignore this one as well, despite his in-depth research into the people and systems who have concentrated money and power in this world of ours.
Also:
Like I said, the man did his research. Over 5 years looking at this shit.
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They think the Mr. Potter is the hero of It’s a Wonderful Life.
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And that A Christmas Carol is a tragedy.
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I suspect they see it less as a tragedy and more like some kind of twisted antiparable. Along with how the grinch stole Christmas.
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Ironically the last time America had a large-scale implementation of anything resembling the decentralized, anarcho-utopian society libertarians profess to support it was run by the very people Rand labeled “savages” who didn’t deserve to have their own country.
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I can’t bring to mind a lot of fiction that deals with the collapse of a randian society but bioshock takes a stab at it, there’s a bit of orwell and huxley in there but randian philosophy is the overarching theme. Although it descends into warlords competing for control (andrew ryan and frank fontaine) you also have people like sander cohen carving out a slice of rapture for their own disturbing randian fantasies.
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Frank Fontaine sums up the core of the failure of any Objectivist paradise:
These sad saps. The come to Rapture thinking they’re gonna be captains of industry. But they all forget that somebody’s gotta scrub the toilets.
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Not just that. If you want to be a captain of industry, you need a crew of laborforce.
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Yeah, when a captain of industry subjugates people’s will it’s good, but when the government does it, it’s bad? Is that the Randian argument?
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The “we can’t be tyrannical, we are against government” cry of a certain type of libertarian is something I am particularly annoyed by. If you are for capitalism then you demand an incredibly complex system of regulation, property rights[1] and currency all of which must be administered by a government and enforced with violence the ‘men with guns’ as I believe the popular dictum goes.
[1] And more often than not, property rights of a very particular usus/abusus/fructus sort which isn’t naturally occurring but was invented by the Romans, largely.
In such a case the assumed simplicity of the NAP is long gone (not to mention vexed questions of externalizes and the like) and you are dealing with a compromise: you are okay with a certain amount of coercion and control. Okay. Fine. But if you demand that the people give up a certain amount of their freedom (assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that absolute freedom is the ground state of being for a human), then it is natural that they wish to negotiate terms and arrive at a compromise system where, say, the protection of very expansive property rights comes with certain obligations and certain public services.
Absolute anarchy is at least a consistent position, but the moment you admit the need for contracts and someone to oversee them and guard labor and all that, then there’s no simple deontological argument why this should be the place of compromise and not some other. Indeed, since it is a compromise, it could be said that the natural place it should occupy is the sort of averaged-out preference of everyone making the compromise.
This, I should point out, is not actually an argument against a society run against objectivist lines. This is an argument against the claim that it is possible to reason out such a society from any sort of universally accepted first principles as is customarily claimed. Instead, the defense of a society run along such lines must be made the way most actually-existing messy compromise solutions that actually exist in the sphere of practical politics are defended—through the lens of consequential meta-ethics.
Now there can be arguments that trivially manage this provided you get to pick the terminal values that concertize your ethical system, but if you are stuck at the common formulation through aggregated preference utilitarianism you get to pick between claiming that not everyone’s preferences count the same and that the Producers’ wishes count for more (the anti-egalitarian position) or that the objectivist principles will increase the general weal universally.
This last option is how you could, conceivably, convince this crowd of your position: show that the adoption of objectivist principles in policy-making improves the lot of everyone. It is not in any way evident that this is the case.
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Yet, egalitarianism doesn’t require enforcement to operate anymore than individualism. You can have both. The fact I care for others out of my own personal concern for others and that I give others as equal of consideration and treatment as I best can without anyone putting a gun to my head or threat of some hellish afterlife is evidence that the Randian thesis that altruism is bad or not a quality worthy of cultivation is without teeth. Rand’s thesis depends on a total disregard of biological history where cooperation and interdependence has won out across the entirely of the tree of life (cooperation is the found iirc in the majority of species either directly or indirectly).
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Do you amortize costs of anything? It’s just a fiscal model. Money is the bugaboo of small minds (Heinlein).
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In my experience, most rank-and-file Objectivists don’t understand basic business and finance terms (John Galt and Dagny Taggart likely didn’t, either).
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