Wealthcare: Ayn Rand's Retardation. Damn you Spelling Nazis!

[MadImmortalMan]

Sometimes, some people gotta get fucked or nobody will be able to fuck. 

[Razgovory]

There are no "rabid" libertarians here.

All libertarians are rabid, for it is a disease. 

[Caliga]

There are no "rabid" libertarians here.

All libertarians are rabid, for it is a disease.

I'm glad you're going on dates and such... less time at home means more opportunity to see that the world isn't starkly black and white. 

[Razgovory]

I am not a moral relativist.

[Neil]

Simians are actually pretty selfish.

Social is probably a better term. 50,000,000 years ago our ancestors didn't do much socially besides mate.  One of the biggest pushes in the evolution of monkeys was towards more complex social behavior, which ultimately results in thinks like complex social organizations, empathy and group thinking.

How would you know?  Were you there?

[The Minsky Moment]

Er... how did you acquire such a detailed knowledge of objectivism? 

Took a class on medieval philosophy in college.  While taking the class, I saw a poster advertising a lecture on a "novel solution to the problem of universals." Turned out he was an Objectivist.   The lecture contained what seemed to be some very odd ideas and I thought that perhaps I had misunderstood.  So I borrowed a copy of Intro to Objectivist Epistemology from a Randian I knew.

[Neil]

Isn't the proper term 'Randroid'?

[Jacob]

At this point it seems to me there are two ways for her to go - some kind of skeptical empiricism in the tradition of Hume and Quine or some kind of philosophical pragmatism.  She doesn't go in either direction - however, because both of these paths do not permit epistemological certainty which is essential to Rand.  So without skipping a beat, she careens unexpectedly back into philsophical realism.  While simultaneously acknowledging that concepts are mental inventions and that all understanding of the world is derived from and filtered through individual sense impressions, she nonetheless proposes an "objective" process of concept formation that somehow turns all these mental operations into a foolproof depiction of some underlying reality.  How this magical transformation from subjective sense impression into "objective" concepts occurs is never satisfactorily explained.  Rand ultimately falls back on seemingly tautological axioms such as "existence exists" and "A=A" in order to try to maintain some coherence in her philosophical system.  Taken as a whole, her philosophy amounts to a personal, idiosyncratic weltanschaung masquerading as some kind of rational philosophical system.

Sounds like some of our regular posters.

[Alatriste]

Well, such a moral solipsism ("one's own happiness or rational self-interest") even after taking into account the reference to laissez-faire capitalism can't be fairly defined as a mere 'Fuck the workers'; actually is far closer to 'Fuck everyone'.

Laissez-faire capitalism is not only close to, but right on top of, "fuck no one."  That is precisely its problem.

Errr... I'm not really sure I have understood you correctly, but I think you haven't understood me.

I meant that we can't reduce objectivist labour ethics to "fuck the workers" merely because Rand mentioned laissez-faire capitalism in the same paragraph than "one's own happiness or rational self-interest". 

However I can't accept capitalism, laissez faire or otherwise, is right on top of 'fuck no one'. Even Adam Smith was enough of a realist to write than "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices". And let's not even enter to consider the ethics, if there is one, behind - for example - tobacco industry...

In other words capitalism has nothing to see with morals. While not interested in fucking anyone if there is no gain in it, capitalism sees nothing basically wrong in fucking everyone and everything for profit. It's a jungle out there, greed is good, only the strong survive, etc, etc... A mindset quite prone to embrace objectivism, I would say.

[Razgovory]

I suspect Smith would be appalled by some the mindsets of modern Capitalists. 

[Malthus]

Er... how did you acquire such a detailed knowledge of objectivism? 

... he asked, crouching slightly and backing away slowly with a nervous grin ...

[Caliga]

I suspect Smith would be appalled by some the mindsets of modern Capitalists.

I suspect that you are correct, much in the same way that I suspect Marx would not have been delighted to learn about the development of communism in the 20th century.

[The Minsky Moment]

I suspect Smith would be appalled by some the mindsets of modern Capitalists.

On the subject, given that sympathy for others was the basic foundation for Smith's philosophy, he is about as far away from Ayn Rand as you can get.

[Berkut]

I suspect Smith would be appalled by some the mindsets of modern Capitalists.

On the subject, given that sympathy for others was the basic foundation for Smith's philosophy, he is about as far away from Ayn Rand as you can get.

Perhaps I am merely projecting my own view of Rand onto Rand, but I don't think her philosophy was that she had no sympathy for others, but rather that the attempt to enforce re-distribution of wealth didn't actually work to improve the lot of of others, since it just reduced the total wealth created by discouraging it's creation.

I don't think that is really correct - or rather, it isn't to the extreme that her stance would imply, but I don't think characterizing her position as "not caring about others" or "fuck the workers" is at all accurate. That was not her position at all.

I cannot say I have evaluated her "philosophy" in the manner that you have though.

[Razgovory]

I suspect Smith would be appalled by some the mindsets of modern Capitalists.

I suspect that you are correct, much in the same way that I suspect Marx would not have been delighted to learn about the development of communism in the 20th century.

I honestly don't know enough about Marx to know if he'd have been happy to be proven wrong.  I don't know how bloodthirsty he was.