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Objectivist here. (For what it's worth: I don't hate poor people, nor do I think all rich people deserve their wealth, nor do I think the free market is a univ

by IsaacL 11y ago

Objectivist here. (For what it's worth: I don't hate poor people, nor do I think all rich people deserve their wealth, nor do I think the free market is a universal panacea for all ills. What Rand actually says is that there are good people and there are bad people, and the defining characteristic of good people, the essence of virtue is not altruism, but productive work. People rarely mention that there were truck drivers and manual workers in Galt's Gulch, and that half of the villains in the novel are unscrupulous businessmen). Rand didn't actually say that much that's original about economics per se. This leads people on both left and right to dismiss her as a simplistic thinker. This ignores what is original is what she's saying. Unlike many libertarians, she doesn't argue that the free market is good because it leads to good results for society. She says that a capitalist society is good because it's the only society which fully protects individual rights. It's not a coincidence that capitalist societies are more prosperous -- however, when this is used as the justification for capitalism, the logical conclusion is to have a semi-free market where the government tries to manage the economy and optimise different variables (GDP, employment, inflation, etc), i.e. the system in almost every western country today. I'd argue the constant financial crises and ballooning sovereign debt show that this system cannot possibly be sustained. Also: the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is not respected in official Objectivist circles. It's one of a number of organisations which attempt to water down Rand's message to appeal to more people, but as a result put off both Objectivists and non-Objectivists.

tamana 11y ago
This is the nut of it: >She says that a capitalist society is good because it's the only society which fully protects individual rights Any theory of society that ignores that it's defining characteristic is that it is NOT fully individual is fundamentally flawed. That is what is broken about Objectivism.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
We used to have some stability. We didn't have constant financial crises for a long time. But then the regulations got tossed in the interest of enterprise. So capitalism can work.
- IsaacL 11y ago
  The problem with deregulation was that certain industries (e.g., finance) were deregulated much more than others (e.g., manufacturing), with predictable consequences. Rand is pro-government where it's needed. She's even pro-environmental regulation - she says it's justified where there's an objective threat to human life (as with air pollution), or violation of property rights (as with noise pollution).
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Whoa - property rights?! That opens a whole can of worms, all the way up to regulating industries. Everybody is somebody's neighbor.
roymurdock 11y ago
I'm a big fan of Hayek who would be described today as the libertarian counterpart to Keynes, although they agreed on almost everything. If you follow individual liberties to their extreme end, you have cannot have a society as nobody makes sacrifices in personal belief systems, pleasures etc. for one another. You have small warring tribes. If you follow government control to its extreme end, you have perfect communism where nobody has an incentive to work hard and corruption/cronyism cripples the entire system. There always has been, and always will be a balance that swings back and forth along the two extremes. We allowed capitalism to get out of control through deregulation since Reagan and now people are angry because they thought the government was supposed to protect them from corporations (FTC, FDA, SEC) but it did not. So now the pendulum is swinging back in the opposite direction. It's a never ending cycle.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  The Reagan-era "deregulation" was severely overrated. The highlight of the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism" where supposedly full employment and Keynesian demand management prevailed had, for instance, a Federal Register that was a seventh the size of what it is today. Reagan did pay a lot of lip service to free markets and rugged individualism, but his fiscal record and foreign policy doctrine speak otherwise. It seems to me like a lot of left-leaning commentators have a sort of vested interest in maintaining this pseudohistorical divide between "embedded liberalism" from around 1946-1974 and the "neoliberal" period since then. Many of them never lived through or remembered this period (neither have I), so it serves as a sort of utopian benchmark of hope that we should return to. A more accurate picture to me would be a virtually constant period of state-merchant/corporate coalition since the mercantilist era after the dismantling of feudal relations, to the present. (After all, it was the Golden Age of Capitalism when the Truman Doctrine was in full effect and the United States had some of its greatest foreign policy ventures, a true renaissance for the military-industrial complex.)

by IsaacL 11y ago

tamana 11y ago

This is the nut of it: >She says that a capitalist society is good because it's the only society which fully protects individual rights Any theory of society that ignores that it's defining characteristic is that it is NOT fully individual is fundamentally flawed. That is what is broken about Objectivism.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

We used to have some stability. We didn't have constant financial crises for a long time. But then the regulations got tossed in the interest of enterprise. So capitalism can work.

IsaacL 11y ago
The problem with deregulation was that certain industries (e.g., finance) were deregulated much more than others (e.g., manufacturing), with predictable consequences. Rand is pro-government where it's needed. She's even pro-environmental regulation - she says it's justified where there's an objective threat to human life (as with air pollution), or violation of property rights (as with noise pollution).
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Whoa - property rights?! That opens a whole can of worms, all the way up to regulating industries. Everybody is somebody's neighbor.

roymurdock 11y ago

I'm a big fan of Hayek who would be described today as the libertarian counterpart to Keynes, although they agreed on almost everything. If you follow individual liberties to their extreme end, you have cannot have a society as nobody makes sacrifices in personal belief systems, pleasures etc. for one another. You have small warring tribes. If you follow government control to its extreme end, you have perfect communism where nobody has an incentive to work hard and corruption/cronyism cripples the entire system. There always has been, and always will be a balance that swings back and forth along the two extremes. We allowed capitalism to get out of control through deregulation since Reagan and now people are angry because they thought the government was supposed to protect them from corporations (FTC, FDA, SEC) but it did not. So now the pendulum is swinging back in the opposite direction. It's a never ending cycle.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The Reagan-era "deregulation" was severely overrated. The highlight of the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism" where supposedly full employment and Keynesian demand management prevailed had, for instance, a Federal Register that was a seventh the size of what it is today. Reagan did pay a lot of lip service to free markets and rugged individualism, but his fiscal record and foreign policy doctrine speak otherwise. It seems to me like a lot of left-leaning commentators have a sort of vested interest in maintaining this pseudohistorical divide between "embedded liberalism" from around 1946-1974 and the "neoliberal" period since then. Many of them never lived through or remembered this period (neither have I), so it serves as a sort of utopian benchmark of hope that we should return to. A more accurate picture to me would be a virtually constant period of state-merchant/corporate coalition since the mercantilist era after the dismantling of feudal relations, to the present. (After all, it was the Golden Age of Capitalism when the Truman Doctrine was in full effect and the United States had some of its greatest foreign policy ventures, a true renaissance for the military-industrial complex.)