Did Ayn Rand sincerely believe that Objectivism would be good for mankind?

[bldysabba]

@BrainGlutton

If India’s experiments with socialism have ended badly, how have the Communists had so much electoral success in Kerala?

Interesting that you should bring that up - I’ve just responded to someone else touting Kerala as a communist success. I’ll quote that in its entirety.

@bldysabba

Kerala owing its ‘success’ to communism/socialism is a fucking terrible example. Unless you’re using it as an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The state owes most of its high social indicators to a head start over other Indian states, and, ironically, private property. This head start was provided by enlightened monarchs(the Travancore family) who encouraged land ownership by peasants and several resulting reform movements(Narayana Guru et al), meant by the time the British left India, indeed by the time socialism was even invented, Kerala already had among the richest peasants and most advanced social structures anywhere in India. In fact, the post-independence turn to communist parties (which btw later alternated quite frequently with India’s big tent party - Congress) meant that it became much more difficult for private enterprise to flourish there, and resulted in a huge displacement of Keralites. The Keralite diaspora is famous and respected throughout India(and also widespread in the middle-eastern oil economies) - but I think it’s a shame that so many of these educated, healthy people were driven from their home state by an ideology that actively hampers economic growth. For a long time, much of Kerala’s economy ran on remittances sent by the diaspora, and things are only now changing.

Note also that the communist party has been powerful in Kerala, but they have by no means swept all elections. In fact, since 1982, they’ve effectively alternated power with the Congress, and before that too their power was nowhere near absolute. And at present, the government is not communist. The one place where the communist party was all powerful until recently was West Bengal. That was due to land reforms they carried out in the 50s, after which the communist party sat back and chilled. Since the rest of India was also by and large socialist, there wasn’t a huge gap in growth. After India’s liberalisation though, it became increasingly clear that the communist party wasn’t delivering, and after trying one moderate communist, they finally voted them out of power last year.

To sum up - there are no governments formed by communist parties in India today, and at the national level too they have very few seats - they are practically irrelevant.