Those who are against Ayn Rand, care to shed some light on the reasoning?

I don't support laissez-faire captialism.

Capitalism is a great engine of innovation and economic growth that works by providing fabulous rewards to those who provide what the market wants. These rewards incentive work, effort, and risk taking that provides innovation and efficiency. We should not destroy that element.

The problem with capitalism is that it does not give a (*)(*)(*)(*) about people who, because of age, infirmity, illness, mental condition or just temporary market conditions, do not have market value that provides a basic level of subsistence. Capitalism doesn't care if they starve to death or bleed to death because they couldn't afford health insurance. Capitalism is only interested in profit. Capitalism doesn't care if our skies and waters and beaches are polluted or that our resources are mismanaged or that the unprotected are abused. Capitalism just cares about profit.

Social capitalists like me recognize that profit and incentive are important and need to be maintained for an effective economy. But we also believe people have a value that is not simply based upon the current market value for their skills or services. We recognize that clean air and water have values over just profit margins. We like the fact that hordes of the aged or infirm or temporarily down on their luck are not living under freeways begging for food at stoplights, that our air and water are cleaner, that workers and investors and consumers have some basic rights and protections against sweatshops and ripoffs and frauds and unsafe working environment, that people don't bleed to death outside a hospital because they don't have health care coverage, and that a little boy or girl doesn't have to forego education because his parent is too poor. And so we believe that society is enhanced when you provide social programs and regulations that limit some of the defects of the type of laizzes-faire capitalism that Rand espouses.

That is why I disagree with Ayn Rand.

 

As George Bush noted, dictatorship is much easier. I think what he was getting at is that democracy is too messy for a lot of people.

 

Simple -- because you can be a libertarian without being a dick.

I agree with some of her tenets, but where I deviate from her is the motivation. Rand seemed to have an inherent loathing for anyone needing help. While some defenders of Rand claim to shun elitism, Rand herself was more elitist than most of the ideologies she criticized.

 

Lol, this statment is just classic. Regulations are the only reason we have fresh air for you to breath.

 

Not only that but it provides benefits too even those who don't participate. Economic growth is the pie getting larger, whether I have the same size slice as everyone else isn't relevant so long as my slice continuously gets larger, we are exponentially more wealthy than we were 50 or 100 years ago, every single person without exception and that was accomplished on the back of self interested individuals being free to pursue their goals.

Capitalism is just an abstraction, a way of organizing activity for the individuals who participate and those individuals absolutely care about the downtrodden. Where the most charitable nation on the planet, maybe it's the case that government ought to help those who can't help themselves, but it does lead one to wonder if those didn't exist would private solutions emerge? It's really a question without an answer though because along with capitalism we've chosen democracy and through that process we've decided that we don't want to wait for that to occur if it would.

Capitalism doesn't do anything, it just allows people to make choices based on the incentives they face. The reason it seems to "not care" about pollution is because those who create it often don't have to bear the costs associated, it's the classic case of negative externalities. Along with government, there are market based approaches to resolve these types of problems. For example, our oceans and forests are over used because no one has an incentive to acknowledge the long terms costs of over use, one such mechanism used to resolve this is by assigning or auctioning off property rights.

I don't like her because she's spawned an ignorant following that arrives at conclusions without understanding the underlying aspects of the system, it's emotionalism pure and simple and appeals to a group with a particular bias.

 

If your slice of the pie is zero or not getting bigger, what benefits are provided?

Safety net programs were established because private charity was insufficient. Not enough people were willing to share their big slices of pie.

Market solutions do not always exist to address these problems.

Agree with that.

 

The number of people with no stake is virtually zero (this group might include the homeless, but even the quality and quantity of shelters and aid organizations have increased during this same period so I'm not even sure it's true for them), and just as a mathematical statement of fact, if I have a slice and the pie grows, so does my slice.

Take a look at any measures of quality of life spanning the time period I've mentioned that it's just a statement of fact that we're all much MUCH better off.

And yet those with the biggest slices are the most philanthropic (whether that's for tax purposes is obviously debatable), I'm basically evoking the notion of crowding out, and what is and what isn't sufficient is hard to gauge as the demand for aid increases with it's availability. Some who use may not if there were less of it.

No, not always and that's certainly not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that where they do, they are always preferable because government doesn't face the correct set of incentives to find the optimal solution.

 

Your are mixing hypotheticals with reality. I agree that over the past 100 years that all income groups improved. And a large part of that arguable has been because of policies that gave workers and poorer forks a bigger share of the pie. This has been much less true in the last 30 with "trickle down" policies.

But you're hypothetical example suggested that all benefitted from overall growth. That is not true if all the growth is going to the a relative small group at the top.

Irrelevant. They are not philanthropic enough.

Why would you think corporations do?

 

Well first and foremost hack writers and their poor fiction is not a good place to base public policy for the worlds strongest nation.
The last 30 years of decline because of it is more than ample proof of that.

The real question is,
When are the idiots that 'believe' in the moron Rand, going to open their eyes and stop?

 

My point is that simply isn't possible, they got rich doing something and whatever that something is unavoidably made someone else better off. Yes, some may gain disproportionately more than others, and we could talk about whether that's just, but it's unavoidable that in the process of doing so other gained along with them, maybe not in the same quantities or even at the same rate.

Is that for you to decide? The better argument is whether they're paying in proportion to the benefits their receiving, but your statement is both subjective and arbitrary. This statement in particular irks me because it rings of there being some type of obligations to be altruistic. It's moral authoritarianism of the same breed evoked by those on the right who want laws to enforce their particular moral code onto others.

When they're forced to bear the full costs of their actions the profit motive ensures that outcome. It's why you're currently seeing a rise in corporate citizenship and outreach programs, image matters.

 

I disagree that increase the wealth of the few unavoidable makes everyone else better off. It is possible that the gains go to a few and not the many. This has largely been the case over the past 30 years.

Yes, as a member of society, it in fact is for me to decide, along with all other Americans, whether philanthropy is sufficient to provide for the needs of society.

What are the full costs and how do they bear it?

I disagree that we can rely on corporate altruism and good will and the market to ensure acceptable behavior.

 

To believe otherwise you'd have to believe that someone can become wealthy in a vacuum. Did Carnegie smelting steel for use in a huge variety of products benefit him alone? Did Ford making vehicles accessible to the average man benefit him alone? Did the financial innovations from wall street that bolstered millions of Americans retirement funds benefit only them? The obvious answer is no, you cannot become wealthy in a vacuum.

Taxation and public good provision aren't philanthropy, the latter comes with the implication of consent. Whether you think someone ought to be taxed more is a different question entirely than whether they're philanthropic of altruistic enough.

One example might be paying for polluting, it's about dealing with externalities and ensuring those creating them are also paying for them.

No more so than we can rely on government to force people to do so. Neither solution is a complete solution.

 

How is that that those folks "did not participate"?

I did not claim taxation is philanthropy, not did I make any value judgement as too a person individually.

Point point was that philanthropy as a whole was not sufficient to provide for the safety nets IMO society needs, not whether any person's philanthropy was sufficient.

How do you get them to pay for pollution in a lassiez-faire economy where only the market provides the rules?

I can say we make them pay for injuries and pollution and health care and safe working conditions and reasonable wages and safe business practices etc and it doesn't sound like Rand's utopia.

I agree. We need both.

And when we get a breakdown in both we get the Great Recession.

 

Really, eternal darn nation isn't a gun to your head?

 

I didn't participate in any financial innovation and yet I'm a benefactor. I don't participate or share in the wealth of oil companies but I and anyone who drove today benefits. Point being that it's very difficult to be in a growing society and not be better off as a result, even for the worst off.

You said that a particular group wasn't philanthropic enough, which as I said is subjective and arbitrary. It's subjectivity means it's also based on values, which is fine but that's definitely what it is.

Ok, the statement certainly seemed to imply otherwise, but I'll take your word that, that is what was meant. Originally all I tried to imply is that were it not being provided publicly we can't know that private solutions wouldn't emerge.

No one here will agree, but carbon credits are a market based solution. You're essentially paying for the right to pollute and in this context you can choose how much or little you do so, of course this creates the incentive not to and since firms are profit maximizing entities and incentives matter I think it'd lead to better outcomes while also providing revenue to deal with the spill over effects.

The counter argument is typically that, in a world with perfect information and perfect competition no such firm would or could exist because no one would work there, they'd jump ship for better alternatives. We don't live in that text book world though so all of those sans reasonable wage (only because what exactly that is is difficult/impossible to determine and the solutions have consequences of their own).

That's a whole 'nother bag there. I tend to air more on the side of moral hazard issues leading to the financial meltdown and only one institution is capable of perverting the natural incentive to be risk averse... but yea, that's a topic worthy of it's own thread.

 

Well, OK, I agree that structural improvements and technology advances benefit most.

But not as a value judgement as to them individually, but as to whether that source provides sufficient funds. Sure the amount of social safety nets needed as a subjective value to it.

I certainly agree you can have market based regulations and policies and they can be preferable.

I'd much prefer, for example, a tax on gasoline and let the market figure out cost effective responses, than have the Govt pick and choose what things to research or industries to invest in.

Does that assume a pretty full employment scenario where other jobs are available, and that such other jobs will provide those better conditions?

 

Nobody is against Rand. She was a fiction writer and entitled to her opinions.
You might as well be against Steinbeck for writing the Grapes of Wrath.
Intelligent Americans don't base their philosophies on some fiction novel.

And you might be better served to pause and ruminate on the fact that sucking at Rand's teat is what got the right-wingers to where they are today- LOSERS to the ideas of a scrawny Kenyan usurper with the notion that we are all in this together. That's a message that really resonates.

 

From what I know of her, she was an athiest and would have supported abortion, just so you could kill that fetus and get back to making money, fukkking and having selfish fun, so I can't see how she can be supported by the Christian Republicans.

 

I think it goes deeper than that, if what a person did had no value to others, then no one would want it, by allowing people to become wealthy creates the incentives to bring to the market that innovations and technologies that make the quality of all of our lives better.

Certainly, my concern is always with dependency, particularly of the intergenerational variety.

Where applicable, without a doubt, no other institutions has a similar set of incentives to search for the cheapest and most efficient solutions.

Agree completely, subsidizing fuel like we do now is foolish and counter productive.

Yup, there must exist alternatives or at the very least low barrier to entry so that if no satisfactory job exists, you can make your own.

 

Sorry, I'm not one of those who thinks that government is what keeps the world spinning round on it's axis. Like it or not, the world does not revolve around these fiscal retards, nor does it require them to "save" it.

 

Those tanks and hummers sure use a lot of petrol.

 

http://tunes.digitalock.com/gimme_shelter.mp3

Okay... First: In the ancient Athenian method of debate, when their civilization got rich enough to afford a dinner party allowing dickholes to lay about eating goat-cheeze dipped in honey while drinking wine in exchange for some good conversation, you would be kicked out for being so obviously deliberatly stupid.

In the second place, tell me about the new drug you are stoned on to say "liberals" rush into the ranks of Hitler? Are you that insane and/or poor and/or well paid enough to volunteer for a new study where you get to pretend you are Hitler to see how long it takes to get through pergatory?

Warning... you're going to get a pinapple hammered up your *ss for (according to arithmatic of all souls lost in WW-II) every day for 36 million years.

Now here's where the "liberals" step in.

What if after 36 million years of having a pinapple hammered up his *ss, Hitler's soul has not been pergatoried?

*Then*, as a mud pup, mommy and daddy in the garden learned too much just cause they got curious. http://tunes.digitalock.com/goodvibrations.mp3

 

BIOGRAPHERS DESCRIBE AYN RAND:
hot-tempered
addicted to amphetamines for years
knew almost nothing about psychology
favorite word was “evil”
her eyes revealed madness and enormous anger
had contempt for her own followers
thought her followers would believe anything
squalid private life
learned economics from Alan Greenspan
didn't know what she was talking about
wouldn't debate anyone of prominence
loopy
amoral
nasty
unkind
insensitive
slow reader
may not have had a high IQ
slipshod thinker
narrow-minded
arrogant
dogmatic
incapable of self-criticism
not a great idea originator
her philosphy was sloppy and ignorant
had poor scholarship
always blamed someone else
a prick and a terrible person to deal with
bad prognosicator
knew nothing of medical science
no way to express how crazy she was
hypocrite
liar
megalomaniac
never exercised
demanded her lung cancer be kept secret
inconsiderate
stole her ideas
unclean

 

Just for the record, I'm not really against Ayn Rand. I don't wish her ill, or anything. I think it's unfair of her, as a political tactic, to write so badly that I can't properly debate her because I can't stand to read her writing long enough to make myself properly informed as to the topic of her writing. For all I know, there could be nuances and perspectives that I just won't ever see because her writing inflames my sinuses so. She has no rhythm or style. It's like she's drumming with a pipe wrench. It's like soup made from packing peanuts. No. Gah. Just thinking about her writing leaves a funny taste in the back of my mouth. I'm trying to remember the last time I accidentally ate a dead bug.

 

Duplicate!