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Atlas Shrugged

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    #242
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    Ireland's total external debt is inflated enormously by the financial organizations operating out of the IFSC and pushes us up to 7th in the world in absolute terms, according to the CIA World Factbook, which as you correctly point out, is way out of line with everywhere else.

    When these (effectively) non-Irish organizations and the balances they maintain with other non-Irish corporations and individuals is removed, the total external debt reduces, I believe, to around 50% of the statistical value you have used here to make your point.

    Or in typically simplistic Randian terms, A <= 0.5 * A


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    #243
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


    This post has been deleted.


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    #244
    bnt
    Registered Users Posts: 12,963 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    Wicknight wrote: »
    Anyone who thinks we should hand over the country to Libertarian ideals should take a long cold look at the economic disaster that is Iceland, which Friedman once saw as his utopia.
    This discussion is going round in circles. Way back near the beginning I tried to make a point about enlightened selfishness, as opposed to the unenlightened (dumb) selfishness that has been playing out recently. If you're trying to blame Rand for what happened, you're failing to see the difference. I mentioned Alan Greenspan, but Iceland is another good example, as were South American economies such as Chile, where Milton Friedman was so influential.

    Am I the only one to see the correlation between "free markets" and the natural world? In an environment where not all creatures are equal, you see what's called the "predator-prey model", sometimes called "foxes and rabbits". There's a bit of maths that accurately predicts how populations go through cycles of "boom and bust". Rabbits breed like, well, rabbits, so the foxes gorge themselves and have more young, who eat more rabbits. The rabbits overgraze and run out of food, so their breeding slows, but the foxes are still eating them. So the rabbit population crashes, and the foxes starve, so their population crashes too, and the cycle repeats itself.

    Is humanity doomed to follow the same pattern? Endless cycles of Boom and Bust? Not just in economic terms, but as a species? Our population expanding, filling and ravaging the planet until our population crashes and the cycle begins again? Can we break the cycle, and if so, what will it take? What makes us better than animals? Intelligence? Enlightenment?

    In other words, I view Rand as an idealist. Her ideas about free market economies are contingent on all people being enlightened i.e. they need all the facts, and the intelligence to make sense of them, and the courage and ability to act on their conclusions. Does this look like the world today? Not to me, it doesn't. Individual people may be highly intelligent, but People as a group are Dumb, in my opinion. We are limited in what we can know, understand and achieve, and I think an economy must reflect this reality.

    A metaphor: imagine trying to catch a bus being driven by a trained racing driver which never stops. To get on or off the bus, you need to be highly fit, so you can run at full speed and grab a handle as the bus flies past. To get off, you need stuntman training so that you can bail out safely at full speed. It's a great bus: it's never late, it gets passengers where they want to go in excellent time... but most people can't use it. It's not their fault, it's just the result of their human limitations. They are left behind, while a few people streak ahead. That's an unregulated laissez-faire free market economy: great for the "masters of the universe", a blur to everyone else.

    In short: while I like Rand's idealism and clarity of thought, her ideas about economics are not feasible in this world - due to human limitations. That doesn't invalidate the model she describes, just as long as people remember that it is still a model, and a model does not reflect the complexity of reality. The map is not the territory. The danger is when people exhibit the Selfishness without the Enlightenment. :rolleyes:

    From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.

    — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut



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    #245
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    Still better to subtract money owed, in the main, by foreign institutions to foreign institutions than to include it and make the situation out to be far worse than it, in fact, is:
    donegalfella wrote:
    We also have a total external debt of €1.8 trillion, €450,000 for every person on this island, owed to foreign banks.
    donegalfella wrote:
    This post has been deleted.
    Indeed :p


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    #246
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    bnt wrote: »
    In other words, I view Rand as an idealist. Her ideas about free market economies are contingent on all people being enlightened i.e. they need all the facts, and the intelligence to make sense of them, and the courage and ability to act on their conclusions. [...] her ideas about economics are not feasible in this world - due to human limitations. That doesn't invalidate the model she describes
    Her model is defective not because humans are limited, or because almost nobody has access to all the information related to a particular purchasing decision, but because she failed to understand -- she may well never have known -- Bill Hamilton's mathematical work in the area of altruism, which can be summarized as follows:
    Bill Hamilton wrote:
    Selfish individuals frequently gain control of more resources than non-selfish individuals, but a society populated with non-selfish individuals will always outperform a society populated with selfish individuals.
    Rand's theory isn't wrong just because it's ethically revolting, it's wrong because she ignores the findings of the mathematics of altruism.


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    #247
    bnt
    Registered Users Posts: 12,963 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    robindch wrote: »
    Her model is defective not because humans are limited, or because almost nobody has access to all the information related to a particular purchasing decision, but because she failed to understand -- she may well never have known -- Bill Hamilton's mathematical work in the area of altruism, which can be summarized as follows:Rand's theory isn't wrong just because it's ethically revolting, it's wrong because she ignores the findings of the mathematics of altruism.
    Well, all you're doing there is apparently contradicting what I wrote. I haven't looked at Hamilton's mathematics in detail, but I suspect we're dealing with a problem of definitions here, of the meaning of "altruism". My interpretation is that Rand opposed coercion (overt or otherwise), the idea of altruism out of duty or blind obligation - but had no objection to helping others out of conscious loyalty to a group, since that can confer a benefit on everyone, including yourself. Neither did she object to love, since it's (in its purest form) a win-win situation. From Atlas Shrugged:
    Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

    I'm not going to try to argue with you about Hamilton, but a quick read of Wikipedia reminded me of where I heard his name before: his influence on Richard Dawkins leading up to The Selfish Gene. He talked exclusively about altruism in animals, his formula factored in "genetic relatedness", and I see no attempt by him to extend his ideas to humans (though others tried). I thought that I was making a case that we are not animals, and need not be subject to the predator-prey model, and I could say something similar about Hamilton's Rule: we are not foxes and rabbits, and neither are we genes and squirrels. Are We Not Men? :cool:

    So I don't see how the ideas expressed by Hamilton himself (as opposed to others trying to extend them) apply to this discussion - but then I'm determined to have some fun in the process of throwing ideas around, and I don't take them personally. You find Rand's ideas "ethically revolting", but I think you're reacting not to the ideas themselves, but to the way they've been misconstrued and misapplied by people who ought to know better - like Alan Greenspan. As I said, I doubt that they can be applied, and think it was a bad idea to try. I end up back where I started: "blind selfishness" might "work" for genes, and for foxes, but it imposes a heavy price, and I wish we could do better. I'm not confident, based on what I've seen, but I wouldn't mind being wrong about that.

    From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.

    — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut



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    #248
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


    This post has been deleted.


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    #249
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


    This post has been deleted.


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    #250
    sponsoredwalk
    Registered Users Posts: 3,038 ✭✭✭sponsoredwalk


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.

    They most certainly don't when you fudge the figures,
    €358,088*
    *I dare you to find the source of that figure in my links*

    Now, what vultures like you want to do is ride the wave out like a surfer for years as people get richer due to all of the borrowing done over the previous decade to make people richer;

    foreigndebt-512-x-393.jpg

    and then when things go belly up you want to make the public sector scream in order to cover for their mistakes...

    Due to this running trend of yours to take figures in isolation you have the effect of scaring people into thinking your whole philosophy is right. Unfortunately, if you look at the proper documentation, things come into focus;

    If you read the CSO report on external debt you see how much money is tied up with banks & monetary institutions & how much of this overall debt is strictly related to the governent.

    The readable version here breaks it down so that you see everything isn't as easy as you claim it to be - look at where a lot of that money is tied up, do you care to explain this in light of all of the blame you've been putting on the welfare state?

    I urge everyone to read those two documents so that you can accurately deconstruct all of the fearmongering you've been reading in this thread regarding the public sector. When monetary intitutions and government rack up a huge debt, this just increases the standalone figure that, when used as part of an argumentum ad vacuo, looks a bit menacing. Still, don't let the fact that the debt is falling change your mind or that our public debt isn't as scary as it seems, no - just take money away from the poorer sectors when you've got an opportunity...*
    *snatch and run*

    I found a nice comment online about the IFSC that I'm sure you can explain to us:
    Suppose for example that a bank based in the IFSC is running a fund that has borrowed €10 billion and used it to invest in e.g. emerging market debt. The debt statistics count the €10 billion as gross debt but don’t count the offsetting purchase of an asset. The net debt could be close to zero — as long as the fund isn’t being stupid (which is another story). I do think that there are financial landmines sitting in the IFSC but not of the trillion euro variety. Note also that government debt is a tiny proportion of the total.here


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    #251
    Valmont
    Registered Users Posts: 5,856 ✭✭✭Valmont


    robindch wrote: »
    it's wrong because she ignores the findings of the mathematics of altruism.
    Where exactly do you find Rand and the literature (which has hardly reached a consensus of its own) disagreeing? It would seem to me that they ask fundamentally different questions and because of this I would be loathe to make direct comparisons in order to make a judgement on the veracity of either position.

    Then again, it's getting tiring reading you consistently criticise something you have demonstrably proved to know little about.


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    #252
    sponsoredwalk
    Registered Users Posts: 3,038 ✭✭✭sponsoredwalk


    bnt wrote: »
    Am I the only one to see the correlation between "free markets" and the natural world? In an environment where not all creatures are equal, you see what's called the "predator-prey model", sometimes called "foxes and rabbits". There's a bit of maths that accurately predicts how populations go through cycles of "boom and bust". Rabbits breed like, well, rabbits, so the foxes gorge themselves and have more young, who eat more rabbits. The rabbits overgraze and run out of food, so their breeding slows, but the foxes are still eating them. So the rabbit population crashes, and the foxes starve, so their population crashes too, and the cycle repeats itself.

    Is humanity doomed to follow the same pattern? Endless cycles of Boom and Bust? Not just in economic terms, but as a species? Our population expanding, filling and ravaging the planet until our population crashes and the cycle begins again? Can we break the cycle, and if so, what will it take? What makes us better than animals? Intelligence? Enlightenment?

    Humanity has the power to understand the sources of these cycles. For instance, humanity has discovered the poulation trends & their causes i.e. your predator-prey model. As regards economic cyles, their are a few explanations regarding recession cycles - Keynesian, Marxian etc... but there is at no point some deterministic law saying that this must be the case.

    Drawing parallel's with the natural world when living under a capitalist system is about as deluded as claiming that because humans speak it must be because they have been given a god given right.

    Understanding the system is like understanding the FOXP2 gene (assuming this gene to be the all explaining thing it's sometimes cracked up to be), once you have a framework for understanding how things happen you can see how fluidistic everything is and how suspect to change things are...

    As we've read in this thread, libertarians use as a fundamental part of their philosophy (if you believe what is written in this thread), the supposed deterministic aspects of human nature and just accept them. Reality however shows this to be a farce.

    There's no reason to assume that humans will always be nasty to each other, or that we are somehow doomed to repeat cycles of good and bad because of the uncontrollable forces of human nature...


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    #253
    bnt
    Registered Users Posts: 12,963 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    sponsoredwalk wrote: »
    There's no reason to assume that humans will always be nasty to each other, or that we are somehow doomed to repeat cycles of good and bad because of the uncontrollable forces of human nature...
    I wasn't assuming that, but neither am I assuming that things will get better all by themselves. I asked: what is going to break the cycle? It wasn't a rhetorical question, it's a key question to ask - in my opinion. What makes us better than animals? Something does, so what is it, and can we find some more of it, please? :o

    Getting back to Rand and Atlas Shrugged for a minute: her ideas represent (to me) one extreme, the opposite of the "dumb animals" I was describing. She paints a world in which everyone acts in their own self-interest, but it works because it's an enlightened self-interest. It's an idealistic fiction, and it's definitely not the world in which we live. Animals live in the "here and now", with little conception of a future, and we've seen how that works: the inefficiency of boom and bust, the slow, brutal pace of evolution by natural selection. People plan, and theorise, and strategise - but imperfectly, and I'm OK with that, while wondering how we can do it better. So I can read Rand and her "Objectivist" model of society, knowing that it's a model, and it's not going to happen as written, but hopefully learning something from comparisons with the real world.

    Too many folks in this discussion are falling for "false dichotomies", seeing things in black and white, when the world isn't like that. We can learn from Rand, and Marx, and Smith and others, without wanting to change the world to follow the models they proposed. I have a deep distrust of anyone who says they know how things should be for everyone, and would change things because "they know better".

    From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.

    — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut



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    #254
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    robindch wrote: »
    sponsoredwalk wrote: »
    As well as amassing quite a lot of mischaracterizations & lies while slanderously labelling [...]
    Keep it nice please.
    sponsoredwalk wrote: »
    Now, what vultures like you want to do is [...]
    The next unhappy personal comment will cause cards to descend from the heavens like high-voltage confetti.


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    #255
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    Second and third-hand?

    Are you saying that the person in the video I quoted twice wasn't Ms Rand, and that the following quotation which articulates what I find most obnoxious in her creed...:
    Some Cheeky Imposter wrote:
    I am challenging the moral code of altruism, the precept that man's moral duty is to live for others.
    was neither spoken by Ms Rand, nor described any aspect of what she was advocating?


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    #256
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


    This post has been deleted.


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    #257
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    Good -- I'm happy to see that you now believe that my understanding of Rand is first-hand, not second or third-hand as your previous superficial, flippant comment implied :)
    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    So what is a human's ultimate moral purpose, according to Rand?

    And how does she demonstrate that a society in which everybody followed this creed is the best of all possible societies?


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    #258
    sponsoredwalk
    Registered Users Posts: 3,038 ✭✭✭sponsoredwalk


    robindch wrote: »
    The next unhappy personal comment will cause cards to descend from the heavens like high-voltage confetti.
    sponsoredwalk wrote: »
    what vultures like you want to do is ride the wave out like a surfer for years as people get richer due to all of the borrowing done over the previous decade to make people richer;

    That was not an attack calling him a vulture, that was calling people who use his kind of arguments to defend their actions while they rape economies vultures. There are people who use these kinds arguments to condemn the poorer parts of society to justify making life harder for the poorer parts of society after the richer parts of society messed things up while they were banking all of the profit in the good times. It's not fair & these are not just bland insults against one person so please read the comment without assuming I'm just out to insult ;)
    bnt wrote: »
    I wasn't assuming that, but neither am I assuming that things will get better all by themselves. I asked: what is going to break the cycle? It wasn't a rhetorical question, it's a key question to ask - in my opinion. What makes us better than animals? Something does, so what is it, and can we find some more of it, please? :o

    Well what I've been arguing against here is the idea that because society is in a mess at the moment we should take away the generous welfare and generous teachers pay because society is all in a mess after about 7 or 8 years of banks making over a million a day, plenty of businesses starting up and doing great, politicians making bucketloads while often neglecting education and healthcare throughout this time and now changing their tune and attacking the poorer sections of society when things have gone bad for their money making scheme's. This is not going to fix the cycle... Attacking the poorer sections of society, especially using lies, lack of information and plain misinformation to do so is morally, philosophically and economically repulsive and it had/has to be challenged. If anyone actually cares about the points I'm making read back in the thread, I've given so much evidence to show I'm not just assuming x,y & z and actually have reasons for what I'm saying.
    bnt wrote: »
    Getting back to Rand and Atlas Shrugged for a minute: her ideas represent (to me) one extreme, the opposite of the "dumb animals" I was describing. She paints a world in which everyone acts in their own self-interest, but it works because it's an enlightened self-interest. It's an idealistic fiction, and it's definitely not the world in which we live. Animals live in the "here and now", with little conception of a future, and we've seen how that works: the inefficiency of boom and bust, the slow, brutal pace of evolution by natural selection. People plan, and theorise, and strategise - but imperfectly, and I'm OK with that, while wondering how we can do it better. So I can read Rand and her "Objectivist" model of society, knowing that it's a model, and it's not going to happen as written, but hopefully learning something from comparisons with the real world.

    I understand where your coming from and it sounds great, except for the fact that it's incorrect. Animals, (I'm assuming you mean non-human animals ;)), do plan, theorize and strategize in ways that aid their survival perfectly. How do they know how to crack coconuts, get banana's out of trees, hide nuts for winter, etc...? They are in no way better than humans are. They are if you're willing to take an anthropocentric view of life but it's frankly elitist or at least ignorant of the facts.

    I'm reading Franz De Wall's book on ape's, monkey's and bonobo's and he constantly shows you how their societies work, how they plan and how their social structure's are organised, how sex is used as a weapon, how sex is used as conflict resolution, how female bonobo's are the ones who migrate from the family in 'teenage' years and if a male, mommy's boy, bonobo is taken by a zoo to a new pen he is violently attacked. really interesting!

    Also, if you look at E.O. Wilson's work on ants you see how enormously complex their societies are, how altruism and war are used almost unconsciously, how they plan to attack other ant colonies and how they plan to take the unborn ants & turn them into slave worker ants as when they are born they will just do that. really interesting too!

    The argument about altruism also ignores humanities inborn and natural altruistic tendencies that are very common in the animal kingdom. Bats must share the blood they collect among the group the cohabit with, reciprocally, and it's been shown that if a bat is greedy and keeps all of the blood for him/her self after a food hunt then the rest of the colonies members will, from then on, neglect to share their food with that bat.

    From wiki;
    One example is matriphagy (the consumption of the mother by her offspring) in the spider Stegodyphus. Hamilton's rule describes the benefit of such altruism in terms of Wright's coefficient of relationship to the beneficiary and the benefit granted to the beneficiary minus the cost to the sacrificer. Should this sum be greater than zero a fitness gain will result from the sacrifice.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism_in_animals
    What about humans and animals being similar? Well we're all afraid of people outside our immediate group. We both will sometimes use violence against members outside of our group, many of us will hunt and kill other animals for our benefit, (meat-eating). To say one species is better than the other is questionable. Fom a human's point of view it can be argued that we are better, but then again we argue amongst ourselves quite a lot about who is better and there is never any long-term winner.

    It may be philosophically pleasing to think that because your genes were selected so that you can think cunningly enough to rise to the top of the food chain and you know how to use violence to enforce this position means that you are better than everything else, but should some catastrophe happen on this planet and we lose our brilliance we wont be the leaders of the world anymore, I see this very similar to the way we argue amongst ourselves about who is right - nobody is ever right...
    bnt wrote: »
    Too many folks in this discussion are falling for "false dichotomies", seeing things in black and white, when the world isn't like that. We can learn from Rand, and Marx, and Smith and others, without wanting to change the world to follow the models they proposed. I have a deep distrust of anyone who says they know how things should be for everyone, and would change things because "they know better".

    Absolutely, I get sick anytime I hear someone dogmatically reference an author as if they are the gospels. Nobody has the authoritative viewpoint that explains how people are or should be, it takes away people's freedom to choose how they want to live their life.


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    #259
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


    This post has been deleted.


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    #260
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    So, Rand advocates a system in which everybody can do whatever they like, so long as they are able to justify to themselves as "rational"?
    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    Can you explain it yourself?
    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    I'm not trying locate some system which will produce utopian perfection, I'm simply trying to understand how Rand was able to justify her view, to herself and her followers, that a moral system which asserts that people can do whatever they like, will produce the best of possible societies -- surely the point of any societal creed.

    If she couldn't prove it, or did manage to prove to herself that it failed to produce the best of all possible societies, then I'd have thought that somebody who talked up the value of reason so much would have pointed out this rather obvious failure.


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    #261
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    Valmont wrote: »
    robindch wrote: »
    For example, in a Randian world, how long would we have to wait for BP to plug the hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico?
    You are also assuming that BP wouldn't want to plug the leak without the government prodding it. I'm sure their reputation is worth enough to them to clean up their own mess.
    Looking at BP's response so far, do you think that their concern for their reputation is helping them sort out the mess in the Gulf of Mexico?

    I'm thinking here specifically of some of the sillier media snafus over the last few weeks, like when CEO Tony Hayward said he wanted "his life back", the chairman's comments about BP's concern for "small people", and Hayward who took time off over the weekend to go yachting.


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    #262
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    sponsoredwalk wrote: »
    That was not an attack calling him a vulture
    You compared him to a vulture, and that's an uncalled-for personal comment.

    That is all.


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    #263
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


    This post has been deleted.


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    #264
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    So, Rand advocates a system in which everybody can do whatever they like, so long as they are able to justify to themselves as "rational"?[/quote]You, in turn, derive from this that "Rand advocates a system in which everybody can do whatever they like." Therefore, in a Randian system, one could ensure one's personal financial well-being by robbing banks, and sate one's sexual needs by dragging women into alleyways and raping them? All this would be allowed, because Ms. Rand says "anything goes"? [/quote]I don't know -- you're the one who said that one's ultimate moral purpose was to determine a moral purpose that one believed was rational, and then to follow it. I'm trying to explore what that could mean in practice.

    Are you saying that robbing banks is wrong? If so, how does that derive from Rand's creed, if one manages somehow to dream up a rational belief that robbing banks is good?
    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    No, I haven't read Rand, but you have and at considerable length too, so I hope you won't mind me asking questions to figure out what it was that that Rand really did advocate :)

    For example, based upon what Valmont and your good self have said or quoted, I understand that taxes are viewed as theft or unwarranted interference or something similar. Nonetheless, she also demands that a central system of justice is created, administered and paid for, necessitating at the very least, a legislature, a police force, a judiciary, a penal system and a tax-collection agency. None of which come cheap. So, under a Randian polity, should there be taxes to pay for these organs of state, and should one submit oneself willingly to them, regardless of one's own opinion regarding them and what they advocate?


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    #265
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


    This post has been deleted.


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    #266
    sponsoredwalk
    Registered Users Posts: 3,038 ✭✭✭sponsoredwalk


    I can't believe Ayn Rand actually wrote this;
    Ayn Rand wrote:
    "Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: for all the reasons discussed above, a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy: it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government."

    It's as if she either just heard some hearsay of, or heard the word, anarchy and knew enough ancient Greek to realise the prefix an- meant without and arche meant rule and therefore concluded that the political and philosophical theory known as anarchy meant what she has written above...

    This is about as wrong a characterization of anarchism as they go, I need only pull up wikipedia, without referring to the works of Kropotkin or Goldman, whom she musn't have read, to show this to be false.
    Wikipedia wrote:
    The most fundamental maxim of anarchism is that no individual has the right to coerce another individual,
    and that everyone has the right to defend his or her self against coercion.

    This basic principle forms the basis of all anarchist law, and indeed of virtually all anarchist theory.
    "It is best summed up by the maxim 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (quoting Kropotkin),
    with the additional provision that if others try to do things to you that violate your rights you have the right to stop them.
    In short, anarchist philosophy includes the 'golden rule', but typically does not include "turning the other cheek"
    (with the exception of Christian anarchism and other nonviolent/pacifistic movements.)

    ...

    The principle of mutual aid, originally identified by Peter Kropotkin as arising from natural law, is that
    since evolution occurs in groups - not individuals - it is evolutionarily advantageous for members of a community to assist each other.
    The anarchist approach to building power - and structuring power relationships - is derived from this evolutionary and biological imperative.
    In a nutshell the argument is that since individuals require the assistance of groups to self-actualize,
    individuals have a strong self-interest in the good of the community to which they belong.
    It follows that (freely associating) collectives of individuals working for mutual improvement and mutual goals
    must form the basis of any anarchist society, thus providing the sociological and economic imperative for the
    creation of social contracts capable of binding these self-selecting groups together.
    In a pre-revolutionary situation, the principle of 'mutual aid' is the moral imperative that drives efforts
    by contemporary anarchists to provide material aid to victims of natural disasters;[3]
    those that are homeless or poor, and others who have been left without access to food or clean drinking water,
    or other basic necessities.


    ...


    Enforceability is one of the most controversial areas of Anarchist law.
    Early writers such as Proudhon argued that it was legitimate for working-class people
    to self-organize against criminals who prey on the weak, a process which would doubtless entail some degree of coercion.
    Proudhonian mutualists (and many others) have argued that such use of force by a collective
    against individuals is justifiable since it is fundamentally defensive in nature.
    As a more coherent example, communities have a clear interest in tracking down and isolating child molesters,
    rapists, psychopaths, and others who regularly employ coercion against their victims.
    The right of ordinary people to not be victimized and coerced by such individuals legitimizes their
    use of coercive force to eliminate such threats.
    Some individualist anarchists (who argue that any collective action against an individual is illegitimate) hotly dispute this point.

    The issue of mandate (on whose behalf an action is being carried out) is much more significant,
    however, when approaching larger-scale provisions for self defense such as armies and militias.
    For individualist anarchists the right of individuals to not be coerced legitimizes the use of coercive violence
    for personal self-defense only, while for collectivists it is legitimized both for personal self-defense
    and for defense of ones community.
    This issue is critical since, while the individualist model makes warfare far less likely by eliminating the rationale
    for the creation of large bodies of armed men, the collectivist approach makes it much more likely
    that the community in question will be able to defend itself against a hostile invader should one appear.
    Both schools, however, agree that the right and responsibility of self-defense cannot be delegated to a third party -
    such as a professional police department or standing army - since as soon as a third party becomes involved
    it is no longer self defense.
    A non-hierarchal militia composed of members of a community self-organizing for mutual self-defense
    against a hostile neighbor (such as that organized by the CNT during the Spanish Civil War) would thus be valid
    in a collectivist (anarchist-communist, social anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, market-syndicalist, etc) setting and invalid
    in an individualist (anarchocapitalist, egoist, etc) setting.
    Both, by contrast, would reject a standing army or police department.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_law

    One of the main tenets of this philosophy is that the exploitative nature of a monetary system
    forces people into roles that lead to some people being exploited while others benefit.
    Your idea of free markets and people being free to make money any way they please is in gross contradiction
    to the idea of freedom because it will force people to be exploited at the hands of those people
    whose lifestyle choices get them into economic power & lead to plebian servitude.
    Your system will also create much of the impetus for people to have to resort to thievery etc...
    which as we know arises mainly out of poverty and/or it's associated manifestations...

    A great idea falling out of this is that because people get to indulge in their evolutionary traits, see Kropotkin above,
    there would be no need for crime to arise out of want of property and/or money -
    to which I'm sure I could find psychological papers stating this
    to be the main cause of such.

    Nobody says it's perfect and the ideal is completely open to change and being made better.

    However;

    If you actually read that essay of Rand's it's quite shocking.

    What she is advocating is that government stick to it's designated
    functions, i.e. courts, law and police, and no more.
    This sounds good but you have to realise that
    she is a total advocate of modern day robber barron capitalism just
    with less government interference (the term nanny state is better)
    and complete freedom, along with unbounded admiration, for the leaders of
    enterprise,unless it interfere's with another persons rights.
    Mother's raising children is not considered a job
    as it's not making any money so they have, not want, have
    to work if they are a single mother. At least under the
    exploitation known as capitalism a mother can choose not to
    work and still live, if extremely poorly...
    Kropotkin, at least, understands
    how grossly this contradicts human nature

    The fact that you've been complaining so much about the welfare
    state etc... is a lot clearer now, it's plain that the focus is on making
    money and not on caring about other people. I'm almost confused as to
    why you'd advocate taking away money from people who are
    already so in need of it. Without any money they haven't the freedom
    to self-actualise & with less money they have to just worry about surviving,
    let alone enjoying life. The only answer I can see is that you see them
    as worthless because they are not making buckets of money, and
    the elitist things you were saying earlier only strengthen that conviction,
    I just find it shocking that such a philosophy is taken seriously
    by humanity...
    *goes back to being ignored*


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    #267
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


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    #268
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.
    Yes, of course I see the contradiction -- that's why I phrased my question the way I did, so that it would become obvious :rolleyes:

    By delivering "objective" rationality into the hands of subjective opinion, by the mechanism of requiring her subjects to believe nothing more than that their moral framework is "rational", Rand falls flat on her bum at at the first fence. She simply can't have it both ways -- either her system is objective throughout (denying the possibility that people could develop separate, incompatible moral frameworks which are equally clearly and logically derived from the axioms she produced), or her system is subjective throughout, as it appears to be.

    In this, Rand and her creed display many of the less appealing characteristics of religious leaders and religion in general -- a group and a belief system which provide, as Sam Vimes said with his characteristic clarity, a logical framework with which one can justify to oneself, the completely daft.


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    #269
    liamw
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,780 ✭✭✭liamw


    I haven't read Atlas Shrugged but I have watched a number of interviews now with Rand. While I disagree with running a society in the way in which she suggests, I have to admit I really respect her arguments for reason, rationality and her arguments for atheism.

    I get a feeling that her philosophy is somewhat Darwinian in nature, in the sense that elite, intelligent and fortunate people survive with prosperity, while others, well have crap poor lives.

    I also don't understand the creation of morals through objectivism. I don't get how she comes to the conclusion that pure altruism (self sacrifice) is 'evil' by her moral standards; standards based on reason. Is the reasoning simply becuase we have evolved as selfish beings?

    What are her thoughts on the homeless and intelligent people who may have potential to be positively influential to humanity but just will never get the opportunity? I mean, what if Einstein was born on the streets and never got an opportunity to shine. What does Rand make of that? Tough?

    Oh and thanks for this thread. I'm finding her philosophy very interesting :)


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    #270
    Permabear
    Closed Accounts Posts: 39,022 ✭✭✭✭Permabear


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    #271
    sponsoredwalk
    Registered Users Posts: 3,038 ✭✭✭sponsoredwalk


    donegalfella wrote: »
    This post has been deleted.

    Did you read the whole thing I quoted from wikipedia? Read it again...

    I quoted the whole thing for a reason, to avoid this very question. You'll notice it's answered below the opening paragraph...

    Furthermore, for what reason would organised gangs begin to form under anarchical rule?
    For money? - money isn't an issue when everyone has all they need...
    For power? - there are no people in the society that would submit...
    For land? - there are no people in the society that would submit...

    Everyone would have what they wanted out of life, the thing about this kind of society is that it is everyone working towards common goals that prevent the exploitation and suffering of human beings...

    If this is idealistic, you're right - it is. That is the whole point, it's an ideal that people have to strive collectively for. It is not like a system designed to let people die or to hire themselves out to business owners that exploit workers by having them make all of the produce & then only be paid a little while working to make a lot. e.g. A worker makes $500 a day for the company and only gets paid $80 - this is exploitation. Furthermore, economic, scientific & engineering advances in production are fostered & strived for in order to make life easier for everyone, not just a few... People control it, not rulers like the soviet style terror known as communism, and creativity is fostered and relished - like the positive aspects of what you're trying to advocate.

    It may sound crazy but this is what it's been about for well over a hundred years. I'm not surprised you're attacking this ideal seeing as you read Rand's explanation of it and didn't challenge it, in fact used it to further your points... She has totally misled you and you really need to read the proper books before dismissing the ideal based on Rand's completely childish explanation...

    That passage you've quoted above is atrocious, I seriously can't believe a political philosopher would pen such an atrocious misrepresentation of a political philosophy that had been developing for over one hundred years at the time of her writing it.
    donegalfella wrote: »
    Idealistic tripe. There has never been a single moment in human history when some people were not exploiting other people.

    There was always a point in history where people were being exploited yes:

    By rulers, hence;

    ἀν - (an-, "without")

    ἀρχή - (archê, "rule" or "magistry")

    ἀνἀρχισμός

    The fact that it happened in the past doesn't make it right. If we take your logic seriously then slavery can be condoned as it was done all throughout history, or racism, or oppression of women. Well, the generation before us could have, you know what I mean.

    If you'll excuse my brevity in condensing the politics of Western history, our society went from the various forms of rule in Greece, oligarchical, tyrranical etc... to democratic - which had it's cultural and political flaws, to feudalism to capitalism. There was very little room for the kinds of values we have today and equality, while strived for bloodily, was held back by factory owners, kings, rulers, governments, police, men of power... all throughout history.

    You seem to forget how many people died trying to fight against this oppression for equality throughout history.
    donegalfella wrote: »
    The system that best minimizes exploitation is liberal capitalism.

    You have yet to show us any evidence of this...

    Tell me how liberal capitalism minimizes exploitation. Tell me how a system that gets workers to rent their bodies to a business owner to make him/her products to be sold so that the owner takes the lions share & the workers make only X and work under the business owners whims i.e. can be fired at whim, must do what is told, etc... is better than what I have posted?

    I seriously want you to ask yourself how this can be so when the closest experiments we have of this way of life are Chile, Brazil, Russia, Iceland - all countried were destroyed by this kind of politics... The people utterly hated it (I don't know if Iceland's people did), and this kind of governance required murderous force to hold it in place as the people refused it.

    Remember, if you start to say "well that wasn't real liberal capitalism" you instantly absolve Marxism as a political ideology because I can argue "well Pol Pol and Mao weren't real Marxists and the Bolshevists weren't real Marxists..."


    I'm not playing games, this is the logic that follows and calling it tripe is you admitting you don't want to discuss this seriously.

    I've been patient with you refusing to answer all of the serious challenges I've given you, whether you actually can answer any of it I wonder, but if you're not going to be serious then forget it, live in denial because at least I've tried...

    I just want to say, I think the analyses Marx gave are strikingly apt & explain quite a lot, I also think that Rand made a few good points in that essay - for both political theories this does not mean their being implemented in practice is good - the historical evidence shows it to be atrocious.
    donegalfella wrote: »
    The government has to stick to its designated functions, rather than running around starting wars, meddling in trade, and setting up monopolies? Oh, the injustice of it all.

    You think Rand is alone in wanting this? Everyone wants this...

    But tell me how is giving more power to corporations and not asking them to provide adequate working conditions, which would not be required of them under your system of government, somehow brings justice to the world...?

    You do realise this is what it was like in the 19th century, factory owners were not required to provide all of these things and children were allowed to work 16 hour days.

    It's because we took away this kind of power from companies that bosses must provide workable conditions etc... There are reasons why these things are in place. I'm not condoning everything - much is questionable - but their origins are not cogently questionable...

    I also predict an argument like: "It will be in the bosses interest to provide good working conditions to get worker" well this is what it was like in the 19th century and all bosses let things slide as it was more profitable. There is one great guy Robert Owen who went against the grain and actually provided for the workers in the 19th century, but he really was one of the minority.
    donegalfella wrote: »
    Where does Rand mention single mothers? And can you point to anybody from the 1950s who considered raising children to be a "job"?

    That is exactly what I'm saying, because women do not get paid for raising their children they are not counted as working. If, under your system of society, some form of care is set up to pay single mothers can you tell me what kind of a political system you are advocating? If you want to set something up for women with children then you're just advocating modern day capitalism... If you want to take away social programs because they are too nanny-state-ish then what person in the world would want to let women with children starve to death? If you want to force this mother to work because she'll die if she doesn't isn't that contradicting your entire philosophy from the get go by taking away the choice?

    It goes back to my earlier post about you forcing people to save for the future, i.e. taking away their freedom that Rand advocates so much. I'm serious, I have to repeat myself to try to get a response out of you - these are not games this is what you're advocating to do to human beings...

    donegalfella wrote: »
    I'm not advocating taking money away from anybody. I think that's the point, yes? The government should not be confiscating money from some people so as to give it to others?

    Could you explain why you go off starting threads about reintroducing college fees when nobody below a certain income bracket could afford it or would struggle immensely to do so and when the funds gained will just go to paying for private education anyway - if even, why you go on a tirade about how generous teachers salaries are implying it's all just a waste, about the welfare state is just a drain and has to be cut off when most of the money we owe is from the government and monetary institutions, why unions are the problem when they are all that's preventing teachers, general workers, bus drivers, hospital workers, taxi drivers, truck drivers, etc... from being obliterated financially by scare tactics, can you tell me how all that is you not advocating taking away money from people. Does all of this stem from Randian philosophy or is all this just your own seperate view? The rest of that I don't understand is it a question or what...?
    liamw wrote: »
    I get a feeling that her philosophy is somewhat Darwinian in nature, in the sense that elite, intelligent and fortunate people survive with prosperity, while others, well have crap poor lives.

    It's the absolute opposite, if you read this thread you'll see that there were claims that human nature will never change because people have always been bad to one another. There are new claims that humans have always exploited one another and, by assumption, will continue to do so deterministically. There have also been claims about the negativity of altruism which, if you read this thread you'll see that altruism is one of the main tenets of much of life in the animal kingdom - and certainly in humanity. Also, if you read my last post you'll see that Kropotkin, a really important anarchist philosopher, basically incorporated Darwinian philosophy into his thinking, as explained above and used it to develop some of the very foundations of the anarchist theory.

    edit: liamw, I think I misunderstood what you were saying - I thought you were saying she was advocating a kind of Darwinian theory as opposed to her theory actually being it's own kind of natural selection i.e. selecting the rich - my bad :p just ignore my reply ;)


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