It is testament to the appeal of her ideology to alienated teenagers and I-got-mine 1%ers.
If you’re the head of Widget Corp, and the ten thousand people in town who work in the factory you established form the government and decide that your profits are to be taxed away so that you gain absolutely nothing, and then you have to work extra hours each week so that everyone in town can afford a new car, what then?
But it is rather hard to think of Gandhi as an Objectivist, or expounding on the “virtue of selfishness.”
I agree, but no one is asking you to do so. XT said
And that is spot on. Galt was, in fact, pretty much exactly following Gandhi’s tactics of protest.
The idle rich are rentiers by definition; they simply draw income from things they own, like nobles in 18th Century France. See economic rent – it also exists in the private sector.
No, you don’t. Assuming Widget Corp was a viable business, then the workers can start a new widget corporation if they need one, or offer to buy the existing corporation. But the fact is, when you work for someone else, that someone else might decide at any time that he doesn’t have work for you any more. If that is a problem for you, then you shouldn’t work for someone else.
Would you favor passing laws that say business owners cannot abandon their businesses if they choose? That they are required to keep their businesses afloat?
In the book, of course, it’s hardly a tantrum given the laws that were being passed to expropriate private property and control business. No one allowed to fire anyone. Everyone had to produce the amount of products dictated by the government. The US was, essentially, being turned into the USSR. Remember, the book was fiction.
Probably not, but it’s also not very “nice” to turn the US into the USSR, as was happening in the book.
No man can thrive unless others live for him. It’s called “society.”
Is it your position that teenagers, alienated or otherwise, would slog through hundreds of pages of a book that they find unreadable because the ideology, which is revealed fully only as the book approaches its end, appeals to them?
Sure, if they’ve read Anthem first, which we all did (it was the shortest book on the summer reading list).
And Rand does not propose an end to society. She proposes to an end to the idea that it is a virtue for someone to live exclusively for someone else. Again, parents giving up things so their child can be healthy and happy is high up on Rand’s lists of virtues. Parents giving up their child’s health and happiness so that someone who they don’t appreciate or care about can be better off, and be told it is their duty, that is what Rand would regard as evil.
If you’ve read Anthem, you should know that it presents little, if anything, of Rand’s ideology.
Rent-seeking is distinct from merely income from rent. Drawing income from things one owns isn’t, by itself, rent-seeking.
I don’t know about that. I have often seen the behavior of health-insurance companies described as rent-seeking. What they “own” is an organization and a position in the marketplace.
The message that “I” matters more than “we” seems to be the root of it.
Is it better to be a garbage collector in the USA or Zimbabwe?
Rand is positing that Galt’s Gulch is rich. Great place to work. Whether Galt’s Gulch would be rich in the real world is a different matter, but in the universe of the book it is rich, so it’d be a great place to be a garbage collector.
Health insurance companies can and do engage in rent-seeking behavior (such as lobbying Congress for a law requiring everyone to buy what they sell).
That said, their actual business of selling insurance policies isn’t based on rent, because there’s no element of exclusivity. Insurance companies have no right to the exclusive use of anything, unlike a landowner, patent holder, or a firm that’s been granted a monopoly.
Example A: A rich person owns some valuable oceanside property, and rents it to tenants for a fee. He is able to do this because he has exclusive right to use that land, as enforced by the government, by virtue of owning it. His income is rent, but he isn’t a rent-seeker.
Example B: A barber in town is unhappy with the number of competing barbers, driving the price of haircuts. He lobbies the local government to start licensing barbers, with no more than ten licenses outstanding at any one time, one of which naturally goes to him. His income isn’t rent, he’s still getting paid by the haircut. He is a rent-seeker, though, and the portion of his income represented by the increase in the price of haircuts could be called rent.
Are you kidding me? In one post you say “Ayn Rand did X” then when asked how, you say “Ayn Rand didn’t actually do X”.
First of all, Ayn Rand explicitly does not try to portray “the real World”, so saying her characters aren’t realistic is like saying no one looks like the folks in a Cubist painting.
Secondly, I’m not seeing how Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are significantly less of “paragons of virtue” than is Hank Reardon. I’m not seeing anything significantly “bad” about either BG or WB. Not in the sense of an actually bad person like Bernie Madoff.
What happens when the people who collect garbage, clean houses and serve food in the gulch can’t earn enough money to live doing these jobs? Obviously plenty of the characters were happy enough to take any job as long as they weren’t mooching, but what do they do when 50 hours a week of physically strenuous labor doesn’t earn you enough to pay rent and buy food?
Work more hours, get a better job, or leave the Gulch.
Why? What did you think they would do?
Probably that Galt would have the pirate guy bust a cap in him or use the unfortunate as a lighter to get his fine Cuban cigar going just right (they always taste better lit on the backs of the working class peasantry after all), or something. 