I agree with most of your points. I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged as a story first and foremost. It was just this interesting mystery - I found it quite difficult to understand what was going on. I also liked the heroes - Mary Stuish as they were, they were still presented sympathetically. Much of the ‘philosophical’ content I didn’t pay attention to at all. It was only when I later noticed that there were plenty of newspaper articles and politicians that actually sounded a lot like her ‘villains’ in AS that I thought she may have a point.
I suspect panache45 doesn’t want to get involved because most threads involving Ayn Rand contain so much venom being spewed at her ideas and those who defend them, and so little understanding. Witness this thread and Amateur Barbarian’s posts for instance. It doesn’t seem like a productive way to discuss things.
I think you’ll find taxpayers can’t go on strike. When soldiers try that, it is not a strike, it is a mutiny; when taxpayers do, it’s tax evasion. A “legitimate response” in the civil-disobedience sense, one might argue, but not in any other.
No, the ‘strike’ in Atlas Shrugged was just people refusing to do productive work when all the gains went to a system that they did not like. As the Soviet Union discovered, you cannot force people to do work. There’s a decent argument to be made that all she’s doing with the novel is setting up a system of perverse incentives within which people stop working when they do not see a benefit. And given the performance of socialist economies (I have first hand experience of India ) I’d say she has a point. Specifically with India for instance - during our great experiment with socialism when the state was liberally using its legitimate power to tax, people didn’t go on strike, disappear and go to Galt’s valley - they went on strike, disappeared and went to the US. All our best and brightest, who, had they been allowed to live for themselves, could have been productive members of society and done far more for the poor of the country by not actually directly living for them - are now the highest earning ethnic group in the US.
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.
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.
To add briefly to that since I’m on the topic - much to my chagrin, instead of having learnt from our mistakes, the party that rules India today - the Congress - is still governing very much in the old mould of promising the treasury to the voters while neglecting the economic growth that brings in the treasury in the first place. In a democracy, it is far too easy for the incentives for politicians to be set up like this. We’ve suffered because of it in the past, and we’re suffering again today. I can only hope they get voted out next year before they do even more damage to the economy.
Well, if you define lately as the 15 years before 2011 yes. Growth in the last financial year has dipped to 5% (and considering how far behind we are, that’s low) and that dip’s largely because reforms(to do away with the socialist era restrictions and regulations) have stalled out. Mostly because government doesn’t like giving away power, and pretty much the only policies being enacted are populist ones with an eye on elections.
That’s as may be. But even the Stalinist model of totalitarian state socialism does work, you know – for limited purposes, i.e., heavy capital formation. In 1924 Stalin took control of a backward, agrarian country, marginally industrialized by the onset of WWI and that little industry devastated by that war and the Russian Civil War, and – by methods which were bloody, brutal, repressive, wasteful, but effective – by 1939 had turned it into an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler’s Germany; and Germany had always been at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. No way could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period.
OTOH, central economic planning, lacking the constant corrective feedback of competitive market performance, is spectacularly inept at any kind of fine-tuning. Moreover, it does not encourage innovation very well. No state planner would ever have thought of something like the Sony Walkman, or the Pet Rock, or fabric softener. (Whether that is an argument for or against Stalinism is open to debate.)
Korea shows the contrast. Up until the 1980s, the North Koreans were actually eating better than the SKs. But then NK’s economic growth hit a wall, and SK caught up and kept going.
Of course, as noted above, Rand did not even pretend to be an economist (unlike, say, Milton Friedman, who did); and Objectivism, if and as manifest in the political/social/economic realm, is essentially an ethical position, and its economic performance makes no difference in those terms.
Oh I’m well aware of the conditions under which and for which communism works - as you mention, fast heavy capital formation is one of them. However, this does not necessarily mean that sensible capital formation is also implied. So there is no denying that many of India’s heavy capital goods industries would not have come up at all without the model of development we adopted. But if we step back and take a look, the first question that ought to strike us(and it does to many economists), is that for a country as heavily endowed with labour as India is, why did we go the route of heavily capital intensive industries? The resultant skew in our economy, (and the labour regulations that came with) is something that has still not re-balanced to where it should be. As a result, far too little of our labour is involved in the industrial sector, and far, far too much in agriculture - which is relatively unproductive. It’s one of the many reasons for so much poverty in India. And that’s the second big problem - such systems are about as flexible as an elephant in a tutu, and prone to decay. Even assuming they start off in the right direction, once that initial push from the zealous first generation is done, none of the incentives/information is organised in a manner such that the system can manage any course corrections. It’s simply not sustainable. And there’s plenty of empirical evidence of that.
ETA: Sorry, just saw your cite already makes points similar to my post.
That works when everybody does it. You do not seriously believe, do you, that if the Atlases alone withdrew to Galt’s Gulch IRL, (1) the rest of the world could not get along without them or (2) they could have a workable society all by themselves?
Milton Friedman wasn’t an Austrian economist. He was a monetarist, and did real economics, with peer reviewed articles and mathematical models and everything. Even got a Nobel out of it.
I know. (Of course, so did Paul Krugman.) But it was too good not to use, and isn’t any economist inspired by the Austrians just a little tainted in any case?
Friedman wasn’t inspired by the Austrians. Friedman said that the Austrian view of the business cycle “has done the world a great deal of harm”, and blamed Austrian economics for the Great Depression. Rothbard called Friedman a “technician of statism” or something like that.
Friedman’s main influences were Viner and Knight, neither of whom were in the Austrian school. If you had to pick a school that monetarism came out of, it would be the institutionalism of Veblen.
I followed your link looking for some support of your claim that she had coined her own names in ignorance and I found none. Perhaps you had provided the wrong link, or possibly misread
One hears only good things, lately, about India’s economic growth.