I’m not saying Rand was perfect, by any means, and she was completely blind or dismissive to the legitimate criticisms of capitalism (and there are many)- But at the end of the day, I think she did an excellent job of articulating the moral argument for a system which rewards risk, innovation, hard work, and merit. Now, if only we could get capitalism to actually function that way…
Differentiating between “maximum” and “absolute” liberty is part of it. The bigger sticking point for me is how we define that liberty- I mean, for absolute terms, that would require things like omnipotence and an exemption from causality.
Since that isn’t possible, I think a realistic measure of “complete” freedom is being able to assert “none of the above” and still have somewhere to go from there. So like I said, I generally think in terms of number of available options, and whether or not I’m truly free to walk away from any or all of them.
Long term. Possibly longer than I’m alive, but that isn’t a good reason to not do anything about it.
Then the local community get out the communal wetsuit, and the rubbish dumper can spend the next few weeks realising that their actions have consequences as they clean out the well.
Meanwhile, other local communities would help out with supplying clean water.
Rather than thinking of a community of individuals who can do what they like, think of decentralised voluntary collectivism with direct democracy.
Anyone who can pull themselves up by their bootstraps is either capable of ignoring the laws of physics, or has been strung up from the rafters by their ankles.
That’s my point. While there’s been a shift in usage to warp the meaning of ‘liberal,’ the same’s happened to ‘libertarian.’ So why treat the one differently?
FWIW, whenever I see a left winger using ‘liberal’ as a pejorative, I die a bit more inside, since that’s incredibly toxic to the project of the left. Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot were all anti-liberal leftists. Illiberal left wing movements never turn out well. To me, Liberalism is a far more important civic virtue than any left wing principle.
Libertarian-socialists are not treating either liberal or libertarian any differently. It is only in the US where the meanings have warped so that liberal means the left and libertarian means the right. For a few years about ten years ago liberalism looked like it was the left in the UK, but Nick Clegg and his friends killed that with the Orange Book.
A system which rewards merit sounds good, but there is a huge amount to unpack there. By the time you know what you mean by “merit” and “reward” the whole thing has fallen apart.
As for rewarding risk, Rand (and her disciples) have things all backwards. They are all about increasing the payout for risky success and the penalty for risky failure. This leads to narcissists, thrill-seekers and megalomaniacs taking risks and taking over (and none of us noticing those that failed). If you instead create a safety net so that the reward for succeeding isn’t so great but the penalty for failure isn’t so bad, you’ll attract people who are motivated intrinsically to want to achieve something with the lives (rather than extrinsically motivated by lording it over others) to be the ones taking risks and running things. Rand envisions a system that discourages risk except among those with delusions of grandeur.
Yeah, I thought I was, but ceded the term a decade plus back.
I don’t really bother with terms these days, “progressive” is okay, Democrat technically accurate, but “libertarian” is too confusing to be useful. In a Reason/Cato dominated world.
If I wanted to make Mike’s metaphor even more insular, I could give a nod to Heinlein and say the government’s role is to see that everyone has time machines
You would have hated my high school English teacher with the burning passion of a thousand suns, then. I kind of did myself at times.
Metaphors are specifically not accurate, to put it mildly, so extending them like you did is not cricket, you could even say it’s murdering the point. But it’s perfectly OK to extend analogies to show where the similarities between the analogous objects break down. If you google metaphor, simile, analogy you should get a range of explanations and/or opinions.
Edit: Crap, I’m criticising English composition on bOINGbOING. Let me say that this site has fantastically better writing than nearly all of those I read, and you yourself do a brilliant job of conveying your meaning, and I should probably shut up now. Sorry. (But it really was a metaphor!)
I wasn’t arguing with you calling it a metaphor. Your description is more accurate (even if I maintain that a metaphor is an analogy).
The part I don’t get was how viewing it as a metaphor instead of an analogy changed it from “bad” to “good.” If they had said, “People should pull themselves up the ladder, and the role of government is to see that the ladder has rungs,” then that works as a metaphor. But, from the link that you provided…
The term appears to have originated in the early 19th century United States (particularly in the phrase “pull oneself over a fence by one’s bootstraps”), to mean an absurdly impossible action.
The goal of a metaphor is to impose an aspect of one thing to highlight a similar aspect of another thing. But the only aspect that “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” has is its impossibility. Put another way: metaphor is imagery. The image of someone crouching down, reaching back, grabbing onto their bootstraps and pulling upward in an attempt to get themselves off the ground isn’t aspirational, it’s sad. Pathetic, in the original sense of invoking a feeling of pity.
Yes, I understand a metaphor isn’t an exact analogy, but you can only stretch a meaning so far. When Dr. Seuss says that the Grinch has “all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile,” you don’t take that to mean that the Grinch is very tender and sweet. The object of the imagery has to have an aspect (or, at least, to be conceived to have an aspect) in order to convey it onto the metaphor’s subject.
Achieving the absurdly impossible is always inspirational to me. At least when I do it, and probably even when my enemies do it.
I do recommend All You Zombies and By His Bootstraps if you haven’t read them yet. They are more sad than inspirational, perhaps; your mileage may vary!
The Lorax lifts himself by the seat of his pants because he hasn’t any boots.
I believe that the phrase originated as a criticism of those who believe they achieved success without help, but in it’s current colloquial usage, it’s lost that connotation, and is instead generally taken to mean the opposite: To actually achieve based on one’s merits without assistance.
Ergo, a proper analogy if one defers to common usage, rather than literal- But then again, “literal” seems to have undergone the same colloquial reversal, and I really need to drop that point before it reaches a new depth of pedantry.
I kind of did myself at times.
