Who has said that? No one here has proposed such an absurdity.
Why does the guy who pushes the broom deserve only one one-hundred-thousandth of the income Rearden gets? Why does he deserve to be absolutely powerless in salary negotiations? (“I’d like a raise.” “You’re fired.”) Why does he deserve to be so dependent on that rotten job that he can be abused in the workplace, and have to take it, because without the income, his kids starve?
The U.S. workplace is softened by regulations on business. This is a good thing, something we learned from the Robber Baron era, when abuses were extreme.
Well that’s a bit extreme. The “reason” is that his contribution is far less than Rearden’s. He’s only responsible for keeping the floor clean. It’s a job anyone can do (and one he can do pretty much anywhere). Rearden has responsibility for keeping thousands of people employed.
What property are you referring to that “not his own”? It’s been a long time since I read the book, but it was my impression that Wyatt Oil was not a public company. That it was privately owned. But I could be wrong. Am I?
I’m not going to go back and read the book, but if you want to do so and substantiate the claims you are making, that would be great. Otherwise, you’re just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.
I think you’d have a better case against Roark, but then he turned himself in to the authorities, so there’s that.
Business success is just luck. It really doesn’t matter who’s in charge–anyone could do it.
I get that the beneficiaries of capitalist wage slavery like to pretend otherwise, but reality exists independent of the artificial self-serving narratives they create.
That’s the problem with Ayn Rand. She insisted that reality did not exist, and that instead things worked based on the shit she just made up.
Which is, incidentally, also the flaw of Austrian pseudo-“economics”: “praxeology” is just a fancy way of saying “reality doesn’t matter so we’ll just make shit up.”
D’Anconia’s whole deal was defrauding shareholders. The notion is that the shareholders aren’t thinking for themselves, they are relying on D’Anconia’s mind, so it is only just that he remove his mind from society. The shareholders should have thought for themselves and realised that the business owner would burn it down. The only way for anyone to support laissez faire capitalism is to ignore or deny the existence of information asymmetry, and this character is a good illustration of Rand’s attempt at that.
That’s fine. But again, this whole bit about these guys destroying their companies is a red herring. The claim that was made, and that I asked for examples of, was: " This gives righteous justification to Randians to be cold heartless jerks who build themselves up at the expense of others." ( See post #179, emphasis added.) Somehow “build themselves up” morphed into “cut themselves down”. Can we concentrate on examples where one of the heroes in her books “builds himself up at the expense of others”?
I don’t think there are any obvious examples of that. Like I said earlier, Rand presented laissez faire capitalism as a chivalrous battle of ideas where the smartest guy wins because he’s smart. Her books were intended to illustrate that. They were fiction though. The person you were responding to was talking about people following her ideas in the real world, where everything is not so black and white.
You should probably not respond to him. He is not really interested in discussion, he just wants to spout his extreme views. Views which are not entirely off-base, but are not framed in a way that would foster discourse.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the morality of the actions taken by the “strikers” in Atlas Shrugged is not necessarily transferable to everyday situations we might find in the US. I’m not going to defend Rand’s morality, but the actions taken by people like D’Anconia in the novel need to be understood in the context of the world as it existed in that novel. Countries were routinely nationalizing private companies, and passing laws contrary to what she would consider legitimate actions by the state. I said earlier that the strikers were essentially at war, and they were. It even came to actual shooting at the end of the book.
Instead of asking: Would it be OK for Bill Gates to act like Francisco D’Anconia tomorrow, one should ask: Would the US have been justified in taking similar actions against German and Japanese companies in WWII? Or, would it have been OK for industrialists to have taken similar actions against the USSR in the 1920s or The Peoples’ Republic of China in the 1960s.
Anyway, I think it’s fair to say that Rand would not have endorsed “getting ahead at the expense of another person”, even if lots of her readers (and even more non-readers) come away thinking that.
I, as a libertarian, am evidence that Rand is neither necessary nor (to my mind) sufficient to develop a philosophy around.
I’ve read only Night of January 16th, her shortest and most approachable work. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are in my to-be-read pile (they may reach the top some day) but then so are the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.
I’ve not seen the move of The Fountainhead but I did struggle through the recent trilogy of Atlas Shrugged. Thirty years ago my wife and I attended a showing of We the Living when it was showing in San Francisco. When the lights went up we discovered Milton Friedman had been sitting three rows in front of us.
Along with Isak Dineson, Virginia Woolf, and Pearl S. Buck, I consider Ayn Rand a strong woman writer of a certain era who kind of went off the rails towards the end.