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Atlas Shrugged: Why is this so bad?
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Its not theft in the legal or technical definition no, but for casual discussion its an acceptable term.
All who believe society would be perfect if we all lived by exact randian ethics raise their hand?
Nobody?
Thats what I thought.
Everyone trying to prove that anyone who read and enjoyed Ayn Rand, and/or found any part of it inciteful is a mentally challenged troglodyte raise their hand.
I know there are a few of you.
I haven't seen ANYONE claim that Ayn Rand was perfect. I have seen plenty of senseless hating on people who enjoyed a work of fiction which had some interesting ideas, no matter how flawed. Something doesn't need to be perfect to be interesting.
You have an interesting definition of "hating". Particularly as the hating has been directed at Rand and those who idealize her philosophy.
There's a wide gap between "not perfect" and "mostly crap, but with a few good ideas that others have said before and said better."
Also, emphasizing that this is "fiction" is a bit dodgy. Do you know what a polemic is?
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Actually, I wouldn't be too surprised that people who want to make policy based on it actually haven't read it. Wouldn't necessarily be the first time government leaders will ill-informed on anything.
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Ed & Larry : "Doesn't matter."
I recently was gifted a thing in Steam. If it was from you, thank you very much!
Greenspan was like one of Rand original followers right?
Somehow crazy-low interest rates and bootstraps don't seem to go together.
Edit: The small-government people I listen to (Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, etc..) Seem to have a hard-on for Paul Volcker as fed chariman. A democrat according to wikipedia.
True enough, but this thread isn't about the Bible.
Also on PSN: twobadcats
Which is ironic because Volcker instituted a strong market intervention by reducing monetary supply and inducing a recession in order to prevent a bubble (I.E. textbook monetary policy in the New-Keynesian framework) And the whole "Volcker rule" being anathema to the founding economic principles which drive libertarianism.
But then again Schiff isn't a libertarian like the Paul's are.
Inflation = Bad
Taxes = Worse
Taxes being used to help average people = Tyranny
Taxes being wasted in massive defense boondogle with no end in sight = Good
Any Questions?
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Inflation is a monetary, not fiscal, phenomenon.
This statement is extremely confusing even though I'm sure it makes sense to an economist. One quarter of intro economics didn't prepare me for this.
edit: If monetary means monetary policy (fed) and fiscal means congressional action, then it makes sense.
srsly tho, i think objectivistism hating is just some weird internet band wagon considering the number of times i;ve come across people on the net who obviously dont knw what they're talking about w/ regards to atlas or the fountainhead
Fiscal policy can have monetary implications... +Taxes would be a negative AD shock about any way you look at it. Which would tend to lower prices.
what "inflation is a monetary phenomena" means:
MV=PQ
This is a definitional relationship. The amount of Money in the system X how often it changes hands = The price level X how much stuff got done in that period.
If V is relatively stable, then inflation (I.E. the change in P) is entirely a function of the monetary base. Or, entirely a monetary phenomena.
Even if V isn't stable(and iirc its not for a variety of reasons, its relatively stable. I.E. V doesn't react to changes in M much if at all) such that velocity changes can be seen as exogenous to the system(excepting cyclical velocity).
Though I forget what AD is. D:
It's one of the measures of something.
edit: Aggregate demand! Yay, memory.
Objectivism flies in the face of pretty much everything that 10,000 years of human history has taught us: No man is an island.
What I'm saying is that Dr. Evil was an objectivist.
Dr. Evil was awesome. So, Rule of Funny.
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To me, Objectivism falls apart very quickly because the egocentric nature of it means that response to disaster is all but impossible (Your farm got destroyed by the flood fred? Recover on your own or die.), raising a family is directly opposed to the ideology (unless you count children as property but that leads into a host of other issues), and the monopolization of essential resources (You want a loaf of bread? Gimme your wife.) would result in either tyranny and/or wide spread revolt.
By the end of 100 years, people would either have died out or devolved into individual hunter/gatherers.
Oh hey! So we could get hardcore objectivists and hardcore evopsychs in a room together and bet on the outcome.
"Two men enter - ONE MAN LEAVES!!!!"
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The funny thing is when they exclaim that everything else is a failure, where as perfect libertarianism isn't, as perfect libertarianism hasn't been tested. Every non-gold standard economy is a failure, and every gold standard economy is a success, despite the fact that the non-gold standard economies are still being practiced and gold standard economies are not.
Note that the never actually bother to look at the reason behind failure, or how the gold standard would fare any better. Or if they do, it usually boils down to, "Yes, there might be mass starvation and unemployment. Yes, there might be plenty of supply and plenty of demand with no medium of exchange to make the movement of goods more efficient. But the value of the dollar is still strong, and therefore, the economy is still good."
In other words, non-libertarian ideas are failures because they have historically failed in specific instances of failure. Where as libertarian ideas are successful because they have never failed in cherry picked cases of success*.
*Such cases currently exist as pure hypothetical.
So just because some form of libertarian government has never existed and thus never failed it is perfect?
Do people really argue this?
It seems like any discussion on the subject fails because there's a mass of people saying "libertarians are x so y" and a group of libertarians saying "but that's not what I believe at all!," then you get another saying "yes it is! I am libertarian and know this."
And it all falls apart.
yeah specifics are the killer
Oh my yes. And as mentioned above, when you actually try to get several of them to define what Libertarianism is, that's when it all falls apart. You either get something meaningless such as "Someone who values liberty" or something virtually identical to the current government setup.
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.
Constantly.
It's not even that hard to get a libertarian to get to that point, either. All you have to do is find a historical example of libertarianism in action. i.e., Child labor. Somalia. The current economic crisis. The BP oil spill. The libertarian argument is always the same: The real culprit was not deregulation, but too much government. If there had been less government, then the BP oil spill wouldn't have happened (this is what libertarians actually believe!). Remember, this is a group that points to food contamination and drug safety issues as reasons why we don't need an FDA.
From there, they insist that these examples were failures because they weren't libertarian enough. Which implies that if they had been libertarian, then they would have been successful. So what government can they point to for examples? Oh, it doesn't exist yet. But if it did exist, it would work splendid. It's a combination of "appeal to novelty" and "no true scotsman."
tl:dr, any attempt to criticize libertarianism will provoke a libertarian to argue the above point if you bring the discussion to the conclusion (real world examples).
That's why I keep bringing up Somalia. If the argument is, "A perfect libertarian government doesn't exist, it must first be established," then Somalia is the best place for that. If you're an anarcho capitalist who believes in no government, then Somalia is perfect for you. If you're a minarchist who believes in government for the sake of a police force, then that is exactly the sort of thing that Somalia needs right now, and it's perfectly compatible with your viewpoint.
Of course, there are many reasons why libertarians will never take this policy seriously. For all their fantasies of being the main characters from "Atlas Shrugged" and "Red Dawn," they're also a cowardly and lazy lot and it's doubtful that they would ever even put their sweat on their line for such a plan, much less risk their lives. Even the "New Hampshire Free State Project" was a failure, and the only requirement there was to ask libertarians to move to New Hampshire.
But the other problem is this. In order to establish order in Somalia, you would need a shitload of armed mercenaries to defend the territory from murderers and thieves. And once you have a shitload of armed mercenaries, it's hard to keep them from turning on you. Our own government has separation of powers and puts the military under civilian rule. In libertarian land, the civilians are the military. Ergo, any plan to establish a libertarian society is doomed from the start.
Right. Like the Peanut Company of America scandal, where PCA was sending out tainted peanut products for two years before government inspectors figured it out and shut them down with attendant publicity. The market hadn't stopped it, because they were supplying to producers of finished food (in other words, nobody who got sick connected it to PCA). The market also screwed totally innocent producers of peanut butter, peanuts, etc because people heard 'contaminated peanuts' and refused to buy anything peanutty.
The libertarian wingloons who write the WSJ's op-ed page blared that this was a perfect example of how the market works and we don't need the FDA. Because, see, people stopped buying peanut products so that's totally the market shutting down a bad actor!
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Don't be silly. Of course the market self-corrects.
After the horse has escaped from the barn.
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The government did X to address Y.
Does Y still occur?
If yes, then this shows that X is pointless, and we should stop doing it. If no, then this proves that X is unnecessary, and we should stop doing it. In both cases, government is bad.
Missing in that logic is the underlying question, "Are things better with X than they would be without X?" Because that question doesn't matter.
Examples: The Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action, Desegregation, Labor Laws, Environmental Laws, Social Safety Nets, Unemployment Benefits, Consumer Protection, Drug Safety Laws, Food Safety Laws, etc.
Or it doesn't. In the case of PCA it "overcorrected" and punished innocent marketplace actors.
But this is how most libertarians think. It's an article of faith for them that the market always works. This is why the WSJ op-ed'ers mouthbreathe about REGULATION EVUL - they simply ignore the evidence that is inconvenient (wrongdoing revealed by the government, not the market; overcorrection) and talk louder.
They do the same thing when they complain about discrimination. The article of faith is that nobody should be encumbered by laws saying who you have to hire, fire, etc. But that bumps into the uncomfortable notion that, um, that means it would be totally legal to refuse to hire black people. So they pretend that The Market cannot possibly allow such to exist!
One of these days, dammit, I am going to put together a Claude Rains-style outfit and go out on Halloween as the Invisible Hand of the Market.
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My favourite deregulation scheme had to be the airlines though. Banks were bad, but this made no sense. Thin, barely held together aluminum tubes hurtling through the air at several hundred miles an hour and no enforced rules keeping them safe?
Sounds like a winner to me! Gimmie my cheap airfare! They should deregulate the oil industry next since it'll be the only way we can get our cheap gas that they promised us.
Get off my lawn!
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Libertarians tend to assume perfect rationalism and perfect information in the market place. This comes from the Dunning-Kruger effect, which shows that incompetent people tend to overestimate their own abilities, simply because they are too dumb to be aware of their own personal limitations.
One example occurs when I try to discuss absolute property rights with them. Does the government have the right to violate your property rights and collect evidence from innocent Americans who are suspected of a crime? How do you justify that within an absolute property right framework? The response is, "Well, there's a loophole. People who commit crimes forfeit their right to property, because they show that they don't respect the property of others." Fine. Except that the person in question is not a criminal. He is merely a suspect. At this point, they are still presumed innocent. Then the response is, "Well, if they haven't done anything, then the government has no right to invade." Except that they might have done something, and there is probable cause to investigate. And at that point, I lose them. Because they honestly can't process the idea that someone might be guilty without them knowing. In their world view, we already know whether or not the suspect is guilty, and evidence is merely collected to confirm it.
It sort of reminds me of something I once read regarding autistic people.
Suppose you tell them, "Bob thinks that his coins are kept in box A. When he leaves, Clark moves the coins from box A to box B, then leaves. When Bob returns, what box does he check to find his coins?" Most people will answer box A. Autististic people answer box B, because they know that it's in box B, and they assume that Bob does as well. The concept of asymmetric information alludes them.
And assume, as well, that the market is a sort of moral agent of karma. where people who do not behave with perfect rationalism will be punished.
This is why you will hear the argument that there's no reason to make discrimination illegal, because if Business A refuses to hire black people, Business B which only hires based on merit will scoop up all those talented black employees for a discount, and will thus make a higher profit and drive Business A out of the market. Karma!
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So, libertarianism spawned after the Civil Rights Act, then?
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Crap in a hat, are you listening? The only reason there was discrimination in the first place was that the government did it! If the government hadn't enforced Jim Crow laws a thousand business would have bloomed and there would be no need for the CRA which was more government intervention in the market and thus bad anyway!
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