re: Hugh Freeze Quote Ayn Rand????

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Is it so bad to let people make wrong decisions and suffer the consequences? It's like aggressor said earlier. Greed has to be balanced by fear in the market place. Bad decisions must be punished with failure and loss. Nothing is more damaging to liberty than dependence. We should be treated as adults. The Statist wants to treat us like children. The left wants to tell us what to do with our money and the right to wants to tell us what to do with ourselves.


Well, yes, it can be bad to make people bear the full brunt of their failure. For one, it inhibits the very risk taking that you claim to value as a free market proponent. And two, it's essentially a pretty shitty way to live: constantly in fear. That doesn't mean people should be guaranteed a living wage at the expense of those who do work or any nonsense like that. But it does mean we can work to smooth the edges of a purely market based economy by implementing a social safety net. Such a failsafe is a recognition that not everyone is the sum of strictly their own personal initiative and abilities, and that those that struggle are not down solely b/c they were judged wanting by the market. The goal of a market economy is to maximize output, and things such as public education, infrastructure upgrades, and unemployment insurance go a long way towards helping us get the most out of our resources and increase that all important marker of economic success: our GDP. A purely market based economy may give you maximum freedom, but frankly living in densely populated areas REQUIRES the surrender of certain freedoms in order to produce a smoothly functioning society. And in reality, a market can be just as constraining on your freedom as a gov't.

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This is the slippery slope. How much freedom is too much? How much of a safety net is required? In the end Rand was very Libertarian which essentially was to take a minimalist approach where government's main job is to maintain security and create a fair marketplace where it can judge disputes. She also believed in intellectual property protection.

You can certainly argue the merits of many governmental functions and many things I would agree with you on and honestly I don't know how many things Rand truly would oppose as well. Rand was really about making people think at a core level about what was really necessary from the government and to make people realize and fear the power of government.

You have to remember she grew up in Tzarist Russia, saw the Russian Revolution up close, and was persecuted by the early Soviets before being lucky enough to be able to leave. She saw the abuse of government and the dishonesty of politicians in a way no one on this board ever has and it shaped her views. By the same token you can see how Marx's views were shaped by the abuses of corporations during the Industrial Revolution. Marx simply underestimated the power of the people to control corporations without the government and he had no sense of understanding of human nature.

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What were Jesus and most of the Jews? Did ANY of them get any welfare from the Romans? Jesus probably had NO IDEA the Romans did anything like that. Certainly there was no welfare program in either the north or south kingdoms. Why would Jesus teach from the prospective of a Roman citizen?

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You've got to be trolling at this point. This new argument is just flawed in way to many different ways.

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That's what happen when you spend your life rationalizing a system that is designed to increase your own happiness and treats empathy and compassion as immoral.

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You whiffed again.

Rand didn't think there was a thing wrong with compassion or empathy but that forced compassion and empathy(i.e. confiscation of wealth under threat of fine or imprisonment from those who earned it) is neither just or moral. It's no different than a garden variety armed robber holding up a liquor store demanding the money in the register. It's just theft on a grander scale and given to the moochers among us and called 'their fair share'.

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This is the slippery slope. How much freedom is too much? How much of a safety net is required?

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Well our form of gov't is an attempt to answer those tough questions. For better or worse, democracy gives the people the gov't they deserve. We can debate how much of a social safety net is needed and be existentially apprehensive that we're destroying our nation in some way b/c we decided to give too much or too little to the poor but that's missing the big picture: which is that we have a govt that allows these tensions to be reconciled through spirited public debate and which usually produces a result that contains input from all sides. So while we're unlikely to ever get a perfect result, we're usually guaranteed that we'll never get an extreme result (which usually produces catastrophe).

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This is the slippery slope. How much freedom is too much? How much of a safety net is required?


Well our form of gov't is an attempt to answer those tough questions. For better or worse, democracy gives the people the gov't they deserve. We can debate how much of a social safety net is needed and be existentially apprehensive that we're destroying our nation in some way b/c we decided to give too much or too little to the poor but that's missing the big picture: which is that we have a govt that allows these tensions to be reconciled through spirited public debate and which usually produces a result that contains input from all sides. So while we're unlikely to ever get a perfect result, we're usually guaranteed that we'll never get an extreme result (which usually produces catastrophe).

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We don't live in a Democracy though, we live in a Constitutional Republic. In a Democracy majority rules, our system of government protects the minority. Of course our government so ignores the Constitution as it was written and intended now it is hard to tell what we have anymore. The Swiss have actually done a lot better job of staying true to the intents of our Founding Fathers than we have as they based their Constitution off of ours. Our system of government is a mess because we don't follow the Rule of Law as it was written and intended but that is a REALLY lengthy thread derailment.

A Democracy as we are continuing to develop into is actually almost assured of disaster and extremes. At some point it just depends on who gets in power and how far they are willing and able to go. Government is a terrible way to try to solve problems, it is just far too clumsy, naturally corrupt, and filled with unintended consequences that often are worse than the original problem it was trying to solve.

Neitzsche actually was an early influence on Rand which she later rejected. Her main influences were Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

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What was Ayn Rand’s view on charity?

My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.

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Essentially Rand had no problem with compassion or empathy, she just didn't think the government needed to be involved or that people should be forced to be compassionate or empathetic. If doing good for others made you happy or fulfilled that is great, she just didn't think you should HAVE to do good for others if you did not wish to.

Mainly she thought government was a terrible way to express compassion for people because in order to do so you would have to forcibly take from others via taxes or freedoms. You can agree or disagree with that but you could actually argue her philosophy was more compassionate and empathetic because it was not forced.

glad to know you were just trolling kaiser. You always seemed like a decent poster and you were sounding awful stupid.

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Rand was all about the right of the individual to have freedom and operate in their self interest.

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except when she was directing the sexual activities of her acolytes -then, she was all about authoritarian control.

could you write a couple thousand words about that?

anyone who calls rand a "philosopher" is a hack who doesn't know dick about philosophy.

and if you hate and distrust government, all forms of government, move to somalia. i hear that they have very little of it.

Wow. Do we really have to wait until September for football?

Kidding, and I'm impressed that so many in this crowd actually read "Atlas Shrugged" and more importantly have an idea what it was about. I finally read it within the last few years after wondering what all the "Who is John Galt?" forum posts were about. The overwhelming thought I had when reading was "Get on with it!", and an 80-page speech by John Galt that could have been uttered in 3 pages sent me over the edge. Horrible story teller, but I agreed with her message. Others here are absolutely correct about the parallels. We're rewarding failure and, to a somewhat lesser degree, punishing success.