How do you prevent the capitalists from being too close to the government?

By taking away government power. How do you take away government power? Well the people decide that. But people nowadays have chosen to give the government control over their lives. They've decided to put the responsibility on government leaders instead of taking responsibility themselves. So if you want less government power you encourage people to be independent and responsible. To value their own lives as individuals.

among libertarians — AppLeo

Which you sound a lot like.

What gives you the right to distribute money. — AppLeo

Well, to the best of my knowledge, no body has given me the right to distribute money. I do have some ideas about what to do with a few hundred billion dollars. I do not expect to get the opportunity.

Do you know what capitalism is? — AppLeo

Ummm, I think I have some vague notion of what it is, yes.

Which means capitalism is the only system that values the individual — AppLeo

Surely you must be joking, Mr. AppLeo.

You know what's greedy? People who want to take money from the rich even though the rich created their wealth through sheer productive ability and built major businesses that increased the quality of life for everybody. — AppLeo

Very lame. If you are so smart, how come you aren't rich? Or, if you are so rich, why are you not smarter? It's a puzzlement.

Labor creates all wealth. Some people have ideas, some people are able to marshal investment capital and arrange for a factory to be built. But the building the factory and making whatever is made in the factory (useful goods or wasteful crap) is made by workers transforming raw materials into commodities of one sort or another. People get rich by expropriating the surplus value that workers (the vast majority of the population) create.

It's a pity philosophers don't take her more seriously. — Wallows

John Rogers (whoever the hell he is) says “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

Flannery O'Connor says "I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."

Well, to the best of my knowledge, no body has given me the right to distribute money. I do have some ideas about what to do with a few hundred billion dollars. I do not expect to get the opportunity. — Bitter Crank

No one should get the opportunity.

Surely you must be joking, Mr. AppLeo. — Bitter Crank

Capitalism is the only individualistic system. It's certainly isn't socialism. The word "social" is opposite of individual. Socialism is group based.

Very lame. If you are so smart, how come you aren't rich? Or, if you are so rich, why are you not smarter? It's a puzzlement. — Bitter Crank

Alright first of all, I'm only 20, so give me some time to build up my wealth. Most millionaires and especially billionaires are older because they've had time to accumulate wealth and make mistakes.

Second, intelligence doesn't correlate with wealth. It does to some degree, but not really. It's the value you produce in the economy. There's a lot of idiot celebrities, but they provide lots of value, and are therefore paid a lot. And there are plenty of smart people who provide no value to the economy so they aren't rich.

Labor creates all wealth. Some people have ideas, some people are able to marshal investment capital and arrange for a factory to be built. But the building the factory and making whatever is made in the factory (useful goods or wasteful crap) is made by workers transforming raw materials into commodities of one sort or another. People get rich by expropriating the surplus value that workers (the vast majority of the population) create. — Bitter Crank

I don't see a problem.

John Rogers (whoever the hell he is) says “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." — Bitter Crank

I don't know why people always mention that quote. Somehow they feel superior without really making any arguments. Plus, you're quoting someone you don't even know. Who cares what he says.

Flannery O'Connor says "I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky." — Bitter Crank

Again, another quote by an idiot who doesn't know anything.

You know I could quote another random person too. Anne Hathaway had something good to say about Ayn Rand, but who cares what she thinks because she's not a part of this conversation.

It's cool and trendy to hate Ayn Rand. And I don't know why. Because what she says is amazing.

You’re 20 and just discovered Ayn Rand, and I made the mistake of taking you seriously yesterday. lol

I'm always surprised by how many people read Ayn Rand and imagine themselves as similar to her hero, rather than the societal dregs that depend upon heroes' invention. A quick test to see whether you are a hero or a parasite, do you have a job? If so, go to next question, if not, you are a parasite. Would the economy at large be effected by you leaving your job? If not, you are a parasite, if so - congratulations, you might be a Randian ethical hero! Praise Galt!

Exactly

Why are the people around me so stupid?

It's cool and trendy to hate Ayn Rand. And I don't know why. Because what she says is amazing. — AppLeo

No, people have been loathing Ayn Rand for decades. It's old hat.

That you are 20 years old correlates well with liking Ayn Rand. Young adults, moving toward independence, in college or starting to build a career, equity... tend to like her. I read her several decades ago and thought she was, you know, OK. At my age of 72 she is not on my list of books to re-read; if I was sure I had another 30 years of mental acuity (and existence, of course), I'd find time to revisit her, but... the clock is ticking.

Yeah, you probably wouldn't know who Flannery O'Connor is. She was a Georgia writer whose short stories wonderfully expressed her rather dry, unsentimental Roman Catholic faith. She died at age 40 in 1964 from Lupus (an immune system disease). Some of her stories were regulars in freshman literature anthologies. She's hopelessly politically incorrect these days; a Flannery O'Connor story would be a multiple triggering event for fragile college students.

And now I know who John Rogers is.

William F. Buckley, conservative author, public intellectual, publisher of National Review, etc. interviewed Rand, but I can't find the clip I was looking for. Below is an Ayn Rand interview from 1979 with Phil Donahue, who is nothing like Buckley. I mention these just to note that Rand used to be a quite visible personality, and lots of people saw her on TV, as well as read her best selling books.

Here's the first Paragraph of Buckley's Ayn Rand obituary.

Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was, in fact, stillborn. The great public crisis in Ayn Rand’s career came, in my judgment, when Whittaker Chambers took her on—in December of 1957, when her book Atlas Shrugged was dominating the best-seller list, lecturers were beginning to teach something called Randism, and students started using such terms as “mysticism of the mind” (religion), and “mysticism of the muscle” (statism). Whittaker Chambers, whose authority with American conservatives was as high as that of any man then living, wrote in National Review, after a lengthy analysis of the essential aridity of Miss Rand’s philosophy, “Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”

Why are the people around me so stupid? — AppLeo

Maybe because you've not let yourself get to know them better. Acting from such a position of condescension confines others to fit your already established opinions. Which presumably means you = smart and we = stupid.

I've never been able to get a good education, not so much because of my class standing, my pedigree, or even an unavailability of funding, but more so because any school that would let me in obviously couldn't be that good.

Why are the people around me so stupid? — AppLeo

Do you live on Jupiter because that is where people go to get more stupider?

hahaha! It’s been a long time since I heard that.

Maybe because you've not let yourself get to know them better. Acting from such a position of condescension confines others to fit your already established opinions. Which presumably means you = smart and we = stupid. — fdrake

They were condescending first. You were condescending first. If I'm already summed up according to my age and my favorite philosopher, especially by people who think they understand Ayn Rand when they clearly do not... And on top of it say that I shouldn't be taken seriously. They don't deserve the respect of me getting to know them.

They were condescending first. You were condescending first. If I'm already summed up according to my age and my favorite philosopher, especially by people who think they understand Ayn Rand when they clearly do not... And on top of it say that I shouldn't be taken seriously. They don't deserve the respect of me getting to know them. — AppLeo

Yeah, some of it really isn't your fault. If you go back through the forum over the years, we get about a few Randians per year. They usually come, having solved all the problems of philosophy, preaching the virtues of freedom and the market (is there really any difference?) and of non-aggression (people should relate to each other as individuals and form contracts thereby, rather than having them interposed by a government which has monopoly over force). They also usually come with the attitude that everyone's an idiot.

I do feel genuinely surprised that people identify with Galt more than the dregs of society though, considering that seeing yourself as a hero like Galt or the captains of industry and innovation should require feeling like you have a lot of power and influence and that you're a self made person. It's frustrating to me to see people who have the freedom and opportunity to study, typically students at universities, biting the hand that feeds them; as if they were not benefitting from what society (at least attempts to treat) as a common good.

Of course the usual Randian rejoinder is that all the ills of the university system, like our current debt peonage, is as a result of government intervention ensuring education monopolies or power concentration, so they start charging through the roof for a premium good. This follows the general pattern of economic power concentration being equated to 'crony capitalism' - which is where capitalists are allowed regulatory capture by governments. In the ideal Randian world, such regulatory capture would not be possible as it requires a state to represent the interests of powerful capitalists rather than the interests of general people (which, apparently, is always aggressive and thus immoral).

However, Rand does not draw much of a distinction between the interests of powerful capitalists and the interests of general people. Her ethics focuses on heroic individuals associating freely with each other, and a state is ethical just when it enforces individual contracts between them - if the state oversteps those bounds it is forcing people to do things, which goes against a non-aggression principle that's central to Randian ethics. What this misses is that political negotiation doesn't actually occur in a sphere of individuals freely associating with each other, there are power differentials everywhere, and what's needed to get a good deal in the presence of a big power differential is collective bargaining strategies; an inverse of regulatory capture where the government is forced to serve the interest of its people.

The weakest point of Randian political theory in my view is precisely that it explains political and economic phenomena with reference to deficiencies from an ideal state, an unregulated free market system, which would emerge save the interventions of corrupt government officials. A not-so minor point here is that the capitalists are not being corrupt by attempting regulatory capture, propagandising and so on, they're actually acting in their own best interests. They are acting in their own best interests when say an oil company propagandises against the existence of climate change while lobbying government for construction of levees to protect low altitude oil fields, or when a spice manufacturer does something more minor by replacing content of spices at supermarkets with cheaply available salt, or when leveraging a rent gap and making long term denizens homeless. They were acting in their own best interests when opposing the creation of the NHS in Britain.

Really what this shows is a big misalignment between the short term profit motive that makes good business and the long term welfare motive that makes good politics. There's no special emphasis in Randian theory on protecting the commons from powerful corporate interests or the requirements of collective bargaining strategies for those subject to power differentials to get a fair deal; it's a theory tailored to the short-term interest of capitalists and shareholders rather than the long-term interest of humanity and stakeholders. The world it speaks about doesn't exist, and the closest historical analogues we have to capitalism without regulation took a huge toll on the people and, eventually, the planet.

Everything you're saying is all wrong. But I don't know where to start because you wrote so much.

That's fine. You can leave me in my ignorance, it won't hurt.

Okay.

In other news, this.

I don't know what this means.

Ayn Rand isn't particularly popular among the regular posters. It's very common that lots of people engage a Randian at once.

Oh pffft... are you kidding me I can take all these people.

I'm looking forward to your reply, then. :grin:

God, I have so had it with individuals. Most of them cannot even wire up a mains plug, let alone build a nuclear generator.

I heard a story on NPR claiming that poor people benefit from the big name schools because of the connections that they make while attending. According to the story rich students don't really benefit by attending the big brand name institutions, because the education is much the same as elsewhere, and rich kids already have the connections.