I don’t think it presumes no one is a jerk. Everyone is someone else’s “jerk” after all. It presumes everyone is free to do as they want so long as they don’t interfere in other’s rights. Really that’s the problem with most political ideologies. They only work if everyone believes the core tenets of the ideology.
The flaw is that Rand doesn’t really describe the mechanism for enforcing the rules for people who want to cheat or exploit the system.
In Atlas Shrugged, the protagonists are shown to be shrewd and cutthroat businesspeople. But in a way that conforms to Rand’s ideology. They choose employees and vendors based on cost and competency. They believe in paying a fair wage for fair work. They see the value of work people would typically consider mundane, blue collar, or otherwise beneath their station, They don’t cheat or defraud. Rand makes a hard line between “productive” business owners and executives and “looters and moochers” who use political favoritism, cronyism, bribery, legislature and other forms of corruption to hide their incompetence or indifference.
In reality this is a nice ideal which is often embraced I think by a lot of tech workers and engineer types who make stuff and often get frustrated with the politics at big corporation. In reality, I think that line is actually pretty blurred as once you are running a large enough company, the very size and influence of the company creates potentially corrupting influence.
I think what really burned Rand’s butt was the mandatory or-else “altruism” of Soviet collectivism. If the word selfish or self-centered has acquired too much baggage, what would be a term for pursuing one’s legitimate desire to not be absorbed amoeba-like into a superorganism of which one would be regarded merely as a cell.
I think more people misunderstand the concepts of basic economics.
The characters in Atlas Shrugged perform plenty of actions that (at least according to their beliefs) are altruistic good deeds that don’t provide any obvious economic benefit.
Rand’s main argument was against coercing people by threat force to act against their own economic interests - building a rail line in a region that can’t economically support it, lending money to people who can’t pay it back, preventing companies from competing on price or firing incompetent employees.
Philosophers and economists don’t advocate these things because they “aren’t nice”. They do it because it is a waste of resources that could be put to better use somewhere else in the economy. A train line to nowhere uses resources that could have connected workers in a distant suburb to jobs downtown and saved on commuting costs, we all know what happened in 2008 when banks made all sorts of loans that could never be paid back.
Undoubtedly this is the case. It seems her entire education was a 4-year stint majoring in history and philosophy in an early Soviet-era university. We can only imagine how insane that curriculum must have been, and how corrupt the institution must have been. Moreover she and a number of others were apparently expelled for being “bourgeois” and then reinstated. Most of us would have our brains bent from an early-life experience like that.
The philosophy would be individualism, and the best politics would be liberalism.
Though to be fair, I think most individualists would really do well to examine whatever ideology they’re resisting and make a clear-eyed assessment of whether it truly wants to subsume you into a Borg-like collective, or if that’s just accumulated propaganda being shoveled by some guys who are chafed that their 700,000th dollar gets taxed at 37% instead of 35% so that a child in poverty can eat.
As far as trains to nowhere, it’s hard to talk about the merits without a case study. I would guess this is more about the fact that when a population wants a big honking rail system, occasionally you’ll get a segment that doesn’t have much demand. That’s less a feature of people being coerced to act against their own interests, and more about the fact that a government that does big things will occasionally have a miss. People forget the things that seem smooth and efficient, and dwell on the misses when they pay their taxes.
As far as lending money to people who can’t pay it back in 2008, that was because private lenders lobbied for years to dismantle sane lending regulations, and eventually succeeded, and then made a bunch of stupid loans because of lending bubble. The government didn’t put a gun to Countrywide’s head and make them issue a bunch of bad loans and then securitize them in a confusing and opaque way. That whole crisis was purely about what happens when private self-interest predominates. Nobody has their eye on systemic risk, so they jump off a cliff trying to claim their piece of the bubble before it’s gone.
But the “child in poverty” is not a great argument. Because the slippery slope of that is anyone who “needs it more”.
A better argument IMHO is that for your business to exist, it has to be protected and supported by a legal framework and law enforcement recognizing your property rights and the ownership structure of your corporate entity, shared infrastructure networks like roads and power grids, public safety, an education system that produces competent workers, plus a national defense.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable that anyone who reaps the benefit of doing business within a region should have to contribute to the maintenance and support of those shared resources and infrastructure.
I also don’t think it’s unreasonable that a portion of those taxes go to “a child in poverty” and other social safety nets if they help ensure a stable society for you to operate your business in.
The “child in poverty” is a great argument because the general public is better able to rationalize feeding hungry children.
As you observed, there are stronger arguments such as that it creates a stable society, and I’d suggest there’s an even stronger argument that it’s important to invest in economic capacity that may not seem important at the moment – an overproducing cornfield here, a starving child there – because there may come a future time when we need that surplus agricultural capacity, or we need that extra worker or taxpayer.
In fact, at this very moment, we’re hurting from the consequences of treating child-rearing as a hobby of the undeserving poor rather than part of the future labor pool. As well as a failure to stimulate the housing industry in the 2010s after private industry fled it. We’re now short on workers and housing because of this.
But the average person is a lot more swayed by visceral arguments like “poor children should eat” than “it’s wise to make investments in economic capacity that may seem surplus right how, because a functional farm and an educated worker can’t just be summoned out of thin air in times of unforeseen demand.”
A key tenet of libertarianism is renouncing forceful coercion: never using force except in counter to being coerced. And when you stop and think about it, that’s really an extraordinarily self-abnegating principle to hew to. It would almost require the society of saints I postulated.
And these are not rare, as anyone who has ever dealt with a scumbag landlord (or if you’re a landlord, ever dealt with scumbag tenants) knows from firsthand experience.
Mainly, because denial of objective reality is a standard characteristic of Objectivists, libertarians and so forth. They firmly hold the position that their ideology cannot fail, it can only be failed; so inconvenient facts are automatically dismissed.
Also, the nature of train lines being slow to build and inflexible. Even with good planning it’s quite possible for the intended destination to have shrunk drastically by the time the track is actually complete.
Actually the “slippery slope” is “they’re scum, let them starve and die”. As we are seeing from the Right as we speak.
As for feeding people, the moral reason is obvious; the practical reason is that starving people are both a source of instability and poor workers. If somebody hates Communism that much, it’s not smart to create the sort of situation that leads to Communist revolutions.
No, it’s about oppression. It’s about setting up a system of exploitation where there’s no legal recourse or protections, no solution other than violence - then making it the sole purpose of government crushing anyone who turns to violence as the last resort.
@Der_Trihs, we already know that you think that the evil capitalists distill welfare babies for biofuel to gas up their limos. Simply asserting in any discussion whatsoever that what’s under discussion is really about the psychopathic forces of evil… it gets a little old. And doesn’t really contribute all that much.
This isn’t “any discussion whatsoever”; this is about Objectivism, a philosophy that’s selfish to the point of absurdity. It is ideological psychopathy.
I’m thinking more along the lines of @Der_Trihs who believes all things Capitalist “distill welfare babies for biofuel to gas up their limos” on one end and right-wing incel tech bros who never actually read her book who use her to justify distilling welfare babies for biofuel to gas up their limos.
I tend to agree with you. Her philosophy is somewhat inconsistent and contradictory and Atlas Shrugged reads like a ham-fisted manifesto of contrived self-serving scenarios. At least such that I wouldn’t design an entire economy around it.
Any system capable of non-trivial achievements will also be capable of non-trivial waste, or if not waste, investments whose benefit isn’t obvious immediately, or may in fact not be obvious to the layman at all.
Waste and malinvestment and mislending are part of the operating parameters of a functioning higher-order society. As such, their value must be weighed against the benefit they produce. Here Randians make the error they ascribe to others, of seeing a moral offense to personal autonomy in what are just systemic behaviors of an amoral system. They want human society to be a moral system and specifically reflect their form of morality.
Hence we can see that Randianism is very much not about “cold, calculating morality”, but about choosing to (a) make dispassion a moral virtue, and (b) claim that only a system of individual, physical reason is satisfactorily dispassionate. It wants to elevate itself to a privileged frame of reason simply by greed and physical reality are transparent, transactional, and easily calculated, which can be seen as a elevating availability bias to a virtue.
It’s neither a moral nor intellectual virtue to constrain one’s analysis to things that are easy to inspect and reason about. It’s a form of moral convenience if anything, which resonates strongly with an analysis of Rand’s life as a practice of moral convenience.
In Atlas Shrugged, companies were directed to build unprofitable rail lines and other ventures as political favors by politicians knowing full well that they would be unprofitable. Often superseding potentially lucrative ventures. At best, these efforts might be considered a form of charity disingenuously framed as “business ventures”.
The point IMHO isn’t that “greed and physical reality are transparent, transactional, and easily calculated” virtues. The virtue is that people and companies should be free to pursue their own (legal and arguably not immoral) transactions based on their own calculation and best observations of reality. Not have government tell businesses who they need to do business with because it’s “morally right”.
Rand suggests that ultimately protectionism, political favoritism, and other forms of market manipulation and corruption ultimately doesn’t work. It leaves consumers with inferior, if not dangerous products. It gives critical decision-making ability to people who are unqualified or incompetent. The “virtue” is in that hard working, ambitious people making profitable business decisions based on reality works.
But this is a highly idealized world. The real world doesn’t work that way.
Which presumably happens in reality, but it’s dangerous to contrive a case like this in a book, and then base one’s system of morality on what happens in fiction.
It shouldn’t be overlooked that the libertarian utopia presented in Atlas Shrugged was enabled soley and entirely because of a literal perpetual motion machine that created infinite energy. Even in fiction, even with an infinite world of narrative contrivances at her disposal, Rand couldn’t design a self-sufficient libertarian society without the use of magic. It’s a remarkable self-criticism that’s really more devastating than anything anyone else could’ve come up with.
