Ayn Rand for Dummies

Great Debates
281

Rand doesn’t say that society can not help one be successful. She’s not saying that luck doesn’t play a part, or arbitrary factors such as the birth month of a hockey player. What she’s saying is that the best kind of society, the one which will maximize the ability of everyone to reach their potential, is one in which people interact with each other from a position of rational self-interest.

I think you might be making the mistake of thinking that if I’m successful in part because of society, that I then in some way ‘owe’ society. Or that an individual’s rights are only absolute if that individual is not the member of a larger society. This is just not correct.

There doesn’t have to be a contradiction between organized, mutually beneficial society and rational self interest. Too often supporters of individualism allow collectivists to assert that without collective will there would be no charity, no cooperation, and the world would become ‘dog-eat-dog’ in a process of endless Darwinian selection and a race to the bottom of all but the very best.

But humans ARE social animals. They thrive in groups. Cooperation brings value. But it’s precisely the fact that cooperation brings value to individuals that ensures individuals will cooperate, even when seeking their own self-interest.

You do need a state to keep people from stealing from each other, coercing each other, physically intimidating each other, violating contracts with each other, defrauding each other, etc. But within the wide boundaries of that basic social compact, people who want to do better for themselves find that they do so when they cooperate with others.

This isn’t a controversial insight - it’s a restatement of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The Nobel Prize in Economics this year went to a woman who has spent her life studying extra-governmental and extra-market organizations that people voluntarily build - everything from the Kibbutz to the corporation. Her finding is that it’s the natural state of people to organize in cooperative ventures, and collectives and such can work - but only when they are comprised of people who take part in them because it suits their own self-interest and they do so voluntarily.

The fact is, we organize together all the time even when no market forces compel us to do so and no government forces us to do so. We go to Comic-Cons, and join knitting circles and post messages on the Straight Dope and organize open-air festivals and create open-source software communities. People have no problem cooperating. Just don’t force them to do it, or tell them to cooperate in things that hold no value for them.

282

Probably because I used a whole bunch of terms unique to one of those ‘isms’.

283

Well, thats a fundamentalist dogma right there, isn’t it? Where is it written that Proudhon (“Property is theft”) is wrong and Rand is right? If there is no God to declare these fundamental facts of moral existence, then they are nothing more than dogma, basic assumptions that look suspiciously like assuming what supports our philosophy is fact.

But of course property is not an absolute, you are not permitted to use your property to the detriment of others, you can’t poison your part of the river if I’m going to drink from it on my part. Property rights are but one of the gems of our freedoms, it is not the crown gem for which the others are mere embellishments. To my way of thinking, its pretty puny and should be grateful to even be allowed to hang around with the Big Boys.

And, again, a nation is a collective, to one degree or another, we owe each other any number of interpersonal responsibilities, for no other reason than we are a part of each other, we are a nation, a tribe writ large, very large.

284

That would make it an axiom, yes?

Surely you are? Are you contending that I can’t use my printing press to publish articles that prevent a candidate from being elected? Or that I can’t use my firearm to prevent someone killing my children?

Does anyone anywhere actually believe that you are not permitted to use your property to the detriment of others? I thought that everyone agreed that it was often a duty to use your property to the detriment of others.

:confused: This seems like a non-sequitur.

You’ve tried to rebut the claim that no man has a right to expropriate the property of others by stating that I can’t poison your part of the river.

How does the fact that I can’t destroy your part of the river invalidate the claim no man has the right to destroy another mans property? It seems like this example supports the very point you are trying to rebut.

285

Excuse me, but when did “expropriate” become synonymous with “destroy”? Not meant as snark, I’m genuinely not following you.

286

It’s not a synonym, any more than disintegrate is a synonym for destroy. One is a subset of the other. Expropriate means removing someone’s ownership. Whether that is done by destroying what is owned (eg poisoning a fresh water resource) or theft is irrelevant. If I burn your house down you no longer own a house. If I poison your clean water you no longer own clean water.

When I poison your water I am, by any reasonable definition, removing your ownership of that resource.

So we get back to my question: We agree I can’t remove ownership of clean water by poisoning it without your consent. Seems fairly non-controversial. How does that in any way rebut a claim that I have no right to remove ownership of other’s property? It seems to support the claim rather than rebutting it.

287

To a certain extent it does, although I understood that Atlas Shrugged was was parabolic novel and that Rand was essentially using her characters and plots to illustrate points. I also understood that the ‘perfect world’ was an abstract or target to shoot for. Where I’m a little uncertain, though, is on a lower level and ina mundane sort of way. I got the impression from what Rand was saying in some of the interviews I watched that she viewed as immoral any action a man might take that is not the result of his rational, logical mind.

Now maybe I’m too much a literalist, but to me this presents all sorts of problems on a day-to-day lifestyle basis. Most people have all sorts of things they don’t need and which would be hard to justify on a rational or logical basis. They buy clothes they don’t need, music they don’t need, nicer cars than they need, etc. And then there is the type of person who doesn’t make all that much money and whose life is a constant struggle just to get by. Let’s say he’s barely making rent, paying his electric bill late, putting off repairs on his car, etc. He can’t go out to eat in nice restaurants, can’t go to movies, can’t do much of anything and his life is always like that. What does he do when a minor windfall comes along? Let’s say that someone gives him $40 for his birthday, and he decides “Fuck it, for once I’m gonna have something nice that I’ve wanted for a long time,” and he blows that $40 bucks on a nice bottle of single-malt scotch.

What would Rand’s take on those people’s actions be? None of these people, to my mind, are basing their actions on what a rational, logical analysis would dictate. And yet virtually everyone buys things they don’t need and people in dire straights occasionally blow money on some minor luxury even though they can’t afford it, probably from the rationale that they’d never have any fun or get any enjoyment out of life at all otherwise.

My belief is that according to Rand’s teachings, these are all immoral acts, and yet they are all in perfect line with human behavior all through the ages. This is what I meant when I said that people simply aren’t and can never be Spock-like automotons, going through life basing every action on what is most logical, and it is in this regard where I feel that her philosophy fails to take into account and make allowances for basic human nature.

I’m fairly sure that the disconnect is on my part and I’m simply taking her words too literally, but still there comes a time in most people’s lives where they need to know where (and how) to draw that line. I suppose what I’m asking is, how does Rand delineate normal and acceptable indulgences based on whim or personal preference vs. what a strictly cool, logical and rational analysis of the situation would dictate – and to the degree she may favor the latter, how does she square this with human nature, which is always going to seek to fulfill certain wants and needs based on nothing but whim, emotion and desire?

288

You got to work pretty hard to make my right to clean water a “possession” that is expropriated by destruction, thats more semantic fandango than I can dance. I fold.

Suffice to say that a natural resource like a river is a collective possession, it belongs to us, the people. Our restrictions on such clearly show that our collective rights supersede our individual property rights, which shows that we already hold individual property rights to be secondary.

As well we should, in my estimation.

289

No, I don’t because we are not and never have been talking about a right. We have only ever, very specifically, very clearly and very exclusively been talking about the property of others. FFS elucidator, the very post you quoted form uses the term property of others. To pretend at this stage that this is or ever has been about rights is disingenuous in the extreme. You posted the water example as an example of what others may do with your property, and that is what it remains. I don’t need to work to make it a possession. You used it as an example of a possession. You even described it as your water. Not your water rights, but your physical water.

But what the hell, I’ll play your game. I agree. You don’t have and never did have possession of the water. You merely asserted that you have a right to water.

All I can say is:

WTF? :confused:
How does this have any relevance at all to the claim that nobody can expropriate your property? That was the clam that you were challenging, remember?

If we play along with your moving goalposts and accept your claim that you do not possess the water then have no actual property, merely a right, the the whole example is a non-sequitur because it doesn’t ever have any relevance to what others may do with your property, because you claim that you have no property, just a nebulous right.

Honestly, I have no idea what point you are trying to make here. I thought you were trying to create an example of where it obviously wasn’t true that nobody has a right to expropriate other’s property. Now you say that you aren’t talking about property at all.

So what are you talking about, and how does it relate to the original passage you quoted:

290

So is it your contention then that it’s impossible to discern right from wrong without invoking God? That flies in the face of an awful lot of modern philosophy.

In my experience, the people who use this argument to discredit someone else’s moral code have no problem whatsoever coming up with a moral code of their own.

Of course, Rand goes to significant effort to derive her morality, starting from a few basic axioms. And of course, that’s what other secular philosophers do as well, unless they are pure nihilists.

And I would argue that we have immense evidence that Proudhon actually IS wrong. Has there every been a successful governmental structure that started from the axiom that property is theft? And by ‘successful’ I’m talking about a purely utilitarian measure - the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. If there is, I’m not aware of it.

On the other hand, we have plenty of evidence that shows that societies which embrace individual rights, including the right to property, tend to be better than societies which have weaker protections of individual rights. In fact, everywhere you look you see the same pattern. Plot economic growth against size of government, and the pattern emerges that the countries with least intrusive government have the best economies. Do it on a state level in the U.S., and you find the same pattern. Do it on a provincial level in Canada - same thing. Do it with similar countries in Europe or in Asia, and the same pattern emerges.

And of course, we can look at the experience of every country that ever flirted with Communism, and see how well that worked out for the people. The same is true of Socialism. Socialist economies have not turned out so well.

The amazing thing is that, in the face of so many examples to the contrary, there are still people who feel that government solves problems better than does the market and that it’s a good thing for the state to limit the individual rights of the people.

Straw man. Obviously, my right to property doesn’t mean I can use it in ways that violate your rights. We’re not talking about anarchy here. Ayn Rand was not an anarchist - she probably accepted more government than even most Libertarians do. What she objected to was the notion that you can take my property from me simply because YOU think someone else needs it more.

You’ve got it exactly backwards. The right to property (that is, the right to keep the fruits of my own labor and work for my own benefit) is the cornerstone of all other rights. There can be no right to speech without the right to build and keep a printing press. There can be no right to life without the right to grow and eat my own food (as the Ukranians found out to their chagrin). There can be no right to free association without private property to associate on. There can be no right to self-determination without the right to keep the fruits of my labor and use it in ways of my choosing.

Without the right to property, everyone is a ward of the state. Everything we do is subject to the whim of the state. Without property rights, we are all chattel who live or die based on the decisions of our ruling classes.

Yes, we do. We owe each other the recognition of the same rights we demand for ourselves - the right to be left alone to choose our own paths through life, to live for ourselves and the people we choose to support, to exist as free beings in the universe, rather than being ants born into a hive and subject to the rulings of the queen.

You are not born into the world with a lien on you. No one owns any part of you. The social contract says that you must respect the rights of others, but in return it says that others will respect your rights. We organize together for our mutual benefit as free, rational beings.

Any other philosophy is abhorrent to me.

291

Seems simple enough to me. If re-reading doesn’t work, maybe you should just shrug and forget it?

292

Translation: I have no idea.

293

Not much less. I have too many of them in my face in real life.

294

Well I can only speak for myself. Rand seems to me to be aggressively opposed to the concept of empathy. For my money, the absence of empathy is about as close as you can get to a working definition of “evil.”

295

In my estimation, the fundamental right is the right to speech, and to participate in civic decisions, the right to participate in the decisions that make the laws that determine what are, in fact, the rights of property and their limitations.

We hold that truth to be self-evident, that the right to speech existed long before any such device as a printing press came into being. Not that anyone had much opportunity to use such rights, but that they existed nonetheless.

But my dogma is not more true than your own, your basic assumptions are a matter of choice. Though why you felt a need to drag Stalin starving the Ukranians into this discussion eludes me, unless you think a Jeremiad is somehow superior to an argument, and thereby more persuasive.

Goodness, you Canadians are an excitable lot!

And this one:

We cannot associate on common ground? Why? Why couldn’t such a meeting place be held in common, what is gained by having it under private ownership? In other words, huh?

296

The problem with this entire taxation is theft nonsense is that it refuses to acknowledge the social contract and the role others play in the acquiring of wealth by an individual. It further ignores the subsequent debt or obligation one has to the larger group who made that wealth possible.

297

Now, now. It is pretty clear that it we are to draw conclusions from the book about the real world and that some people in fact do that. With your kind of reasoning you could justify quite a lot actually.
Robin Hood is another example of where ayn rant goes wrong in changing the facts to fit her theory. Correct me if I’m wrong but she immediately dismisses him as a parasite, a communist avant la lettre. But in reality (the historical facts) noblemen never did any work because that was against their ways. They lived off the peasants. On top of that in England they were foreign oppressors (Normans and other French controlling the Anglo-Saxons). So someone (in this case a fictionary character) steals the money they stole and gives it back to the people who do all the work. Who is good and who is evil in that scenario?

Nobody likes to pay taxes and give the state half your income. Anarchy isn’t cool either. You’re better off with the state than without it.

298

This is simply not true. It’s not even true if you define “better” as “having higher productivity”:

Paul Krugman on productivity US vs. France

Cite

Cite has a diagramm, although with 1997 data.

Even in Europe that countries which have most government interference (in general the northern countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Germany) do better than the southern countries.

And on top of that, in judging which society is “better” (if that is possible at all, which is a big IF) we should not just count plain productivity, but also quality of life (health care, leisure time etc.).

299

She’s aggressively opposed to someone demanding empathy from others. She has no problem at all with someone, of their own volition, expressing empathy. So I think you misunderstand her philosophy.

300

The phrase “rational self-interest” does not scream empathy to me.

Saying that one should never sacrifice of himself for others, and indeed that it would be “immoral” to do so tells me very clearly that empathy has no part in Ayn Rand’s thought process. Ayn Rand says:

With all due respect, John Mace, I think it is you who does not understand Rand’s philosophy.