I take a different perspective. Sure, part of the reason I want to educate all chidren is so that one day they will be able to pay my social security (and I’m still hoping one of them will develop really cool video games that I can play in my senility) but a large part of my desire for universal education is because I think there are some goods that should not be distributed based on ability to pay (healthcare being another example).
But I appreciate your acknowledgement that sometimes a society has to act in its own best intersts even if it means forcing my neighbor to pay property taxes so that someone else’s kids can go to school. I think that it is important to be able to admit that sometimes the rights of the individual do not trump the desires of the society.
That gets into stickier questions (and why these sorts of discussions are fun): regarding universal healthcare, does every person have the right to as much healthcare as they can consume (or that they think they need)? Does a person who smokes, drinks, overeats, and takes unnecessary risks deserve the proportionatly larger cut of the healthcare pie as the person who doesn’t do any of these things? Does someone deserve a boob job because their self esteem demands it? Does someone deserve Octomom-style fertility treatment? What about controversial medical care like abortions, or experimental treatments? Is the homeless person entitled to the same healthcare consideration as the rich man (answer: Yes. Will he get it in the real world? No.) If the state is providing healthcare, then who gets to determine what constitutes “reasonable” and what constitutes “heroic”? Can a person opt out? What about illegal aliens? While I agree with you again that it’s in society’s best interests to provide a basic level of healthcare to its citizens, I disagree that national healthcare is the answer. Bureaucracies screw things up. Private healthcare might be greedy (and they are, and that sucks) but at least there’s some competition.
Well, see, I don’t agree that it’s right to “force” your neighbor to do it. But (and here’s a big but) your neighbor has to acknowledge that he’s living in, and gaining benefits from, our society, and part of those benefits come from the results of education. So while yes, technically he is being “forced” to pay for something that he isn’t participating in directly, it can be argued that he is indirectly participating in the benefits derived from his money.
I will leave aside the fact that some Rand supporters are reading Rand to say exactly what your first clause says and just note that sometimes it is immoral to put your desires ahead of the needs of people who mean aboslutely nothing to you. (see previous comment about public education).
Like I said, my neighbor loves his money more than he loves public education (now that his kids are all grown). Is it immoral to force him to pay taxes (under threat of losing his home) to pay for the education of those poor kids that he cares nothing about?
My exposure to her is pretty much the opposite of yours: I haven’t read Atlas Shrugged and have only been exposed to what she said outside of it. In post #53 (link) I posted links to several excellent interviews with Rand. I would encourage anyone (Jali, Damuri Ajashi?) interested in knowing more about what she thought to watch those interviews. The Donohue interviews in particular are interesting because she takes audience questions, which gives her a chance to answer some of the same kinds of accusations about her philosophy that are being made about her here. (It’s also interesting to note how she doesn’t take any crap from anybody and how completely self-contained she is.
Well, putting the whole “some people are luckier than other people” aside. I think the whole “there are some great irreplacable men that drive society” argument is flawed. Sure there might be some that drive society forward but there is not a class of them and I certainly don’t think that inherited wealth entitles you to that status.
Once again I will use the example of public education. Lets say that you think public education is wasted on the poor and yet society disagrees with you and forcibly extracts a tax from you to pay for educating children regardless of their ability to pay. Are you being selfish and greedy or is the government being greedy and selfish?
There is this notion that you have expressed that everyone deserves every last penny of everything they have earned. If I sell a radio for $100 do deserve all $100? Shouldn’t some of that go to the folks who made the radio? Of course, because you have only earned the difference between the sale price of the radio and the purchase price of the radio. Shouldn’t some of that go to the folks who own the building from which I sold the radio? Of course because they have provided the means for you to sell that radio for a price higher than your purchase price. Shouldn’t some of that go to the society that provided the environment in which I can sell a radio for $100? I suspect your answer is that the rest is yours and you owe nothing to society.
Your obligation to contribute to society does not end merely because you do not like how society allocates the resources it gathers from you. Society has values of its own and if you don’t like them, I guess you can drop out like Reardon did.
If you decide to give up everything you have ever received from society and drop out of society like Reardon did, then I guess society has no call to tax you but that is not the bargain you wish to make. The bargain you wish to make is that you get all the benefits of being a member of society without any of the burdens.
The concept of “enlightened” self interest has been around a lot longer than Rand and yet people do not read those words the same way they read Rand. Why do you think that is? Could it be the context in which the self interst is presented? There is all sorts of rational behaviour that is harmful to society, things like freeriding come to mind. Freeriding might be entirely rational and it is certainly self interested but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have rules to prevent it.
I don’t think it’s “for” any particular kind of person. Like any philosophy, people can read it and take whatever they can from it. But I will agree that based on comments people are making, they don’t seem to understand it any more than they understand Gordon Gecko’s “Greed is Good” speech. The basic tenet of both works is that all human accomplishmant is a direct result of mankind’s innate desire for more. What they seem to omit from their tirades is Rand’s belief that your greed does not give you justification to coerce others through force or the implied threat of force.
Rand did not advocate creating a class of “producers” in Atlas Shrugged. It was only a class such that the members of this “class” happened to be the ones who rose to the top of a meritocracy. In fact, her argument was that being born into wealth was a great gift and came with a great deal of responsibility (which can easily be taken away through mismanagement). Dagny and Francisco were both born into wealthy familes (Taggart Railroads and D’Anaconia Copper respectively ) and believed that their greatest contribution to society came from managing and growing their businesses (at least before Francisco went on strike).
I think we might be starting a hijack so this will be my only post on this health care debate thing except to the extent that it directly addresses the OP’s question. Well, I don’t think the problem is quite as stark as you put it. We provide a minimum level of education to all children regardless of ability to pay. There is no doubt that many of these children would derive more value form ohne on one tutoring but we allocate one teacher for 30 students. The government is quite capable of making cost benefit analyses.
Sure the government doesn’t always do it right and in metropolitan areas, Obama is supporting alternative (most notably charter schools). The question gets more sensitive with health care and people don’t want to talk about rationing but ALL GOODS ARE RATIONED, I wish people would recoognize that fact and realize that everybody has to die sometime.
What Obama is proposing is not government run healthcare, the current proposal envisions a marketplace of health insurance policies. You can pick any of these policies and if you don’t make enough money, the government will subsidize you. One of the options you will have will be government backed (the public option). I don’t see where you think that competition is disappearing.
Once you acknowledge society’s right to tax you for the benefit of living in this society, couldn’t I extend the same analysis to universal health care, a job training program, food stamps and any number of other things? I mean in the end, what are you left with to criticize but things like “welfare queens”
I think the best we can hope for is good government without buying into these ideologies that are attractive to people who simply don’t want to pay taxes. Seriosuly if libertarianism carried a large tax burden with it, the only libertarians left would be the ones who think pot should be legalized.
Rand is probably best known for Atlas Shrugged, if I am critical of Rand because of what she is best know for then you’ll have to forgive me. I don’t intend to spend a whole lot more time trying to get to know the “real Ayn Rand” when it is obvious that this is not the Ayn Rand that I am arguing against when I argue with folks who use John Galt and A=A as punctuation marks. I mean seriously, A=A is not the proper response every time you lose your train of thought.
Yeah I understand, I don’t think Ayn Rand is trying to create a class of producers. She thought that a class of producers already existed and the rest of us sponged off of them and they were too stupid to realize it until John Galt came along.
Nope, not at all. In *Atlas Shrugged *and in her philosophy in general, she acknowledges that there are plenty of people out there who aren’t producers–they’re perfectly worthwhile people, honest, industrious, and worthy, but they don’t have the intellect/drive/focus/whatever to be Hank Rearden or Dagny Taggart or their ilk. The best example of such a person in *AS *is Eddie Willers, Dagny’s personal assistant. In Rand’s eyes, Eddie was every bit as worthwhile and valuable as the main heroes, because he maximized his own potential. Sure, his potential wasn’t equal to that of Rearden or Dagny, but not many people’s are. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The people she vilified were those who couldn’t produce (or chose not to), made no effort to maximize their own potential or use their own talents, and instead chose to define themselves in terms of other people–what they could get from them, how they could exploit them, how envious they were of them, etc. Some of the biggest villains in Rand’s works are positively Machiavellian in this–they know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. James Taggart and Hank Rearden’s brother Philip are somewhat pathetic and the product of their misguided upbringings. Ellsworth Toohey (from The Fountainhead) and Floyd Ferris are downright evil.
While there is truth to that, it still doesn’t explain the hostility towards Rand, herself. Most people here who are hostile towards Rand are not hostile towards Jesus because of the way some people are so cult-like towards him.
I haven’t read all your posts, so have you defined exactly what you find immoral about her ideas? Can you quote something, in context, that you can objectively (pun intended) define as “immoral”?
There are a million threads where you can shoot down everything Rand said. It’s rare to find one where you can discuss what what she actually said. You might end up disagreeing with her philosophy anyway, but at least let the rest of us learn something along the way.
Here’s the thing: Rand was a writer of romantic fiction. She had no interest in depicting the world as it is - she depicted the world as it would be if it were ideal. She’s asking “What would the world be like if there were men of perfect virtue according to my philosophy? How would they behave? What would that do to society?”
There’s a lot of value in this. For one thing, it’s a natural fit for a work of polemical fiction. If she portrayed real people with real conflicts between the ideal and the reality, it would be much harder to understand her philosophy. It would be hard to know what the good motivations are and what the bad ones are.
Likewise, her villians were the result of her asking the question, “What if we stripped away the mask and showed what people would really be like if they valued nothing but the collective?” Or in the case of the moochers, “What would a person look like if he was totally occupied by improving his own self-esteem and financial ability by playing along with the collectivists in stealing from the truly gifted and self-motivated?”
So yes, the philosophy tends to look black-and-white. Romantic fiction is like that. Robin Hood didn’t spend a lot of time being conflicted about the nature of property rights or whether or not his nice green outfit was appropriate when the poor he was helping were in rags, and the Sheriff of Nottingham didn’t spend a lot of time wondering whether the state had the right to tax the peasantry. They’re archetypes. Don’t look to this kind of fiction for nuance and lots of shades of gray.
The matter isn’t helped by Rand’s own personal failures and her controlling, domineering personality. She was in many ways her philosophy’s own worst enemy.
But regardless of all that, we can still accept that the basic principles she espoused are correct - that man is born free, that man’s proper nature is to use his reason for productive self-interest, that no man or group of men have a right to expropriate the property of others or turn groups of people into servants of other groups.
Sure, there will be shades of gray. I don’t for a second believe that all capitalists are sterling individuals of fine character, or that all socialists are motivated by evil desires to enslave people for their own benefit or the benefit of their preferred group. But you can have shades of gray without losing sight of the fact that there are still ideals, and that it’s worthwhile reaching for them.
There’s some similarity here with the Christian Doctrine (cue Rand rolling in her grave). The bible presents all sorts of archetypes and pictures of perfection, and calls out the rules for perfect behavior. At the same time, the New Testament recognizes that people fail, that no one is perfectly good or perfectly evil, and it makes allowances for that. The key to salvation in the New Testament is not that you be perfect, but that you keep trying to attain perfection knowing you’ll never reach it.
I don’t think this is correct, even by Rand’s own philosophy. Rand was no unemotional effete. She used to listen to what she called her ‘tiddlywink music’, which was happy music of no real consequence that she liked to dance to in her own home. She was an avid reader of Mickey Spillane.
The point isn’t to avoid emotions - the point is to not let them triumph over reason. She’s really just expressing the attitude of many of us on this board - secular, scientific skepticism. Just because you want something to be true doesn’t mean it is true, and you should never let your desire to believe something override empirical evidence, reason, and logic. It would be nice to believe in God, but wrong to do so if there is no evidence. It would be fun to believe in flying saucers, but wrong to do so just because it would be fun. Reason has to trump all else.
This part of Rand’s philosophy I agree with 100%.
It’s a difficult subject. Let me give you an example from my own life: The way I express charity is not to just give to the United Way, or give to random strangers on the street. What I do is reward people who I believe are deserving. For example, I won’t give a penny to someone who holds out a cup and asks me to give him money. But if I’m walking through a train station and a busker is there playing music, and I can tell he’s actually practiced it and is trying to play well for people, I’ll give him a very generous tip. If I get exceptional service in a restaurant, I’ll tip 25% or more. When I read blogs from people I respect, and they have a tip jar, I always contribute. I pay for my SDMB membership even though I no longer have to, because I value it and I want to help it survive. If they set up a system were we could pay double if we wanted, I’d pay that too. There are many other ways I find to be charitable, but they all follow the same pattern.
These are all things that I support because they help support the kind of society I want to live in, the kinds of services I think are valuable, and because they help people I personally believe are deserving of help.
In none of these cases do I believe that my own wishes should be subservient. I am not sacrificing myself to give to these things. I’m not subverting my values for the values of others. I do not believe that the people I help have a right to my help, and the fastest way to lose my charity is to attempt to assert a right to it.
And I would never, ever think of trying to force anyone else to give to the causes I believe in. They have just as much a right to their own values as I do, and that includes the decision to not be charitable at all if they so wish.
Why, just the other day I was thinking about the coming dictatorship of the proletariat, wondering whether it should overcome the bourgeoisie or only the petite’ bourgeoisie, who are not quite as affected by the metabolic rift, especially given the antagonistic contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and the resulting class struggle which may not discriminate, especially considering the Partiinost’ rife amongst the revolutionaries.
Oh, I’m sorry. That’s Marxism. That’s kind of your thing, isn’t it?