Nonsense. Any one of us isn’t big enough to take down the system by being selfish and greedy. So it’s rational for me to be brave enough to be selfish and greedy while expecting everybody else to be the chicken chumps who keep it all going by not being (as) selfish and greedy.
Assuming the reflexive idea that “I’m just an ordinary schmoe so I should choose for me what I wish all ordinary schmoes should do” is very much not Randian.
Backwards reasoning is involved. The point is to justify absolute, amoral selfishness; therefore, selfishness and greed are rational and good for society. Because any other position is unacceptable.
Again…not what “rational self interest” means and not really consistent with Ayn Rand’s writings.
I would argue that Rand supported a very specific type of “selfishness and greed”. If you started a company, you should be able to grow it as large as you want to or can. You should pay your people at least a fair wage based on what the market supports.
There is nothing inherently “evil” about large corporations or extremely wealthy people and families. Forcing the transfer of wealth or printing money to give to people unwilling or unable to contribute to the economy was unethical in her mind. At the very least it was unproductive and creates disincentives that ultimately harm the economy for everyone.
Ayn Rand’s strikers in Atlas Shrugged didn’t “take down the system by being selfish and greedy”. Just the opposite in fact. They simply decided they weren’t going to run their companies anymore. The system went down on its own because no one knew how to run anything.
Now keep in mind that Rand wrote her books in the 50s and focused mostly on old school industries like railroads, steel mills, and mines that actually produced stuff. I would be curious about her opinion about our modern service-base economy. Like would she view Silicon Valley as a hub of innovation and ingenuity or would it appear in the same manner of lunacy as it presented by Mike Judge. I would also suspect Ayn Rand might view our bloated finance industry less as a center of wealth creation and more as a sort of industrialized looter culture using fraud and accounting tricks to extract real wealth and transferring to people who had no hand in its production.
And there is the hole big enough to drive a perpetual motion machine through. If the market will only support near-slave or slave wages, what does the word “fair” actually mean?
Comrade Musk has done some absolutely top notch agitprop work combating this Randian theory. He is a walking counter example to Rand’s idea that these super rich heads of industry got where they are by being competent and are indispensable to the running of their companies. A single clip of Elon Musk makes the most utopian communist ideas of the workers seizing control of production seem realistic in comparison to Rands ideas
Ayn Rand’s characters were overly broad stereotypes at best that make “Aesop’s Fables” seem like in-depth analysis in comparison.
What does “slave” or “near-slave” wages or “what the market supports” mean for that matter?
I think a fair presumption is that if someone is able and willing to work a regular job, they should be able to afford a reasonable standard of living. So I think it’s also fair when prevailing market conditions don’t allow that to happen we ask why.
We take our kids on a lot of historic tours around the tri-state NY area. Milton Hershey created Hershey, PA as a company town to support his chocolate factory. While not perfect, he at least had a certain “benevolent paternalism” with regard to the design and how his workers were treated.
In contrasts, other company towns like the one created for the Lackawanna Coal Mine in Scranton, PA using the “company store” model were highly exploitive.
But really in both cases it creates a sort of “feudal” economy where the workers are directly tied to the employer. Even if the employer is largely benevolent, the worker’s rights and personal lives are still subject to the whim of the employer beyond the simple employer-employee relationship.
I agree. In real life people just cannot afford to move their families around looking for a better job and/or better wages, and “asking why” openly is a great way to lose your job to someone who doesn’t ask those questions. Btw, it is less a case of Hersey being a great company town and Scranton being a crappy company town, because in most cases towns like Hershey were a rarity.
Rand wasn’t a capitalist, as much as she thought she was. Her ethics demanded that you make your money in the right way, and for the right reasons. She simply assumed that once everyone realized the correctness of her philosophy, everyone would immediately adopt correct behavior. It’s funny because if people actually behaved like that, communism would work just fine, too. Objectivism isn’t wrong, per se. It can’t be used to actually improve things because it can’t enforce its own precepts. It’s just irrelevant.
Anyway, I highly recommend “Ayn Rand and the World She Made” by Anne C. Heller.
How did Ayn Rand feel about protecting the environment? Dealing with the so-called “tragedy of the commons”? Concerns about pollution, husbanding resources, etc. increased in the years since her active years as a writer.
We assume your self interest is enlightened enough. No problem.
I would agree with this 100%. Rand’s failing is not that she preached unrestrained capitalism. It’s that she failed to account for how the market wouldn’t necessary limit and by the very nature of unrestrained capitalism could actually lead to the very “looter / moocher” behavior she harshly criticized.
Hence as I said,
Not to mention considering that the needs of your children outweigh the needs of others.
The prime directive of human nature is to become a looter/moocher. The only difference is whether any particular set of looter/moochers are on the top of the political/economic heap, or the bottom, or sorta salted all throughout the middle ranks of that hierarchy.
She reserved all her opprobrium for the looter/moochers of the bottom & lower middle. While carefully ignoring the inevitable rise of those at the top.
That makes me think you haven’t actually read her work. She is highly critical of the top of the political/economic heap who engaged in self-serving protectionist and wealth redistribution policies under the guise of the “greater good”.
I’m not saying Ayn Rand was right about everything. But her main point didn’t seem to be “rich people should be able to do whatever they want because they are so smart”.
This is only true if they created their wealth ex nihilo. If it’s in any way based on owning real property, anywhere down the chain, they’re ultimately thieves.
This is an incredibly insightful and concise critique of Rand, and quite a succinct and comprehensive analysis in itself. We could call it “moocher distribution theory”.
I suppose if you believe this nonsense then in your mind it’s perfectly acceptable to support policies that take wealth from one person and give it to another. Because every is a bunch of thieves anyway, right?
Except that it is actually the complete opposite of what she believed or wrote about.