You have heard it from Tea Party Patriots and Libertarians for a while now: a reprise of the old rhetorical bumper sticker query, "Who is John Galt?" Don't remember him? He was the protagonist of Ayn Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, written in 1957.
John Galt was Rand's archetypal "philosopher hero" and Atlas Shrugged devotes pages and pages to Galt's (and Rand's) philosophy of "rational self-interest."
Rand, an atheist, conceived of "rational self-interest" as the natural state of man, ordering his relationships and actions more so than religion. (It may even have been that Rand constructed her argument to supplant religion, as the tenet of rational self-interest closely parallels and is consistent with Jesus' "Golden Rule.") Rand implies that no one, no rational person at least, would do unprovoked harm to others because it would not be in one's rational self-interest to do so. Fair enough, even makes sense.
It is when Rand and her hero Galt venture into politics that things get a little flimsy. Rand was born into a Russian Jewish middle class family that fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Her firsthand experience with the excesses of authoritarian communism (her family's business was seized by the state) colored her worldview. Rand could not separate her childhood experiences from her intellectual work. Things might have turned out differently for us all had she been able to.
Rand correctly observed that authoritarian communism stifles creativity at some level, as it possesses the power to confiscate personal work product. She generalized this observation to all forms of socialism. She speculated that socialism would undermine the development of a perfected intellect and life through subjugation to an inferior common good. What she deemed the seduction of charity is little more than an indictment of the core of socialism. She advocated for laissez-faire capitalism as the only socioeconomic system that would allow the freedoms necessary for the full development of her idealized rational man. As for the common good, she proposes that we trust that it occurs as an unregulated property of mankind following the law of rational self-interest.
Ayn Rand was a drawing room capitalist, a theorist on a subject with which she had no practical experience (other than with its opposite). She could not understand, or ignored, the fact that the stifling of creativity and the seizure of work product is not the exclusive prerogative of communism. It happens every day in capitalism. Corporate monopolies act to break the will of competition. Corporations stifle creativity with things like planned obsolescence and the withholding of known solutions from markets in all fields. Corporations buy legislation, passing the cost on to consumers, and stack the legal deck against the public interest with impunity. Corrupt bureaucracy can be found at Wal Mart as easily as the Politburo.
To conclude that laissez-faire capitalism is any less onerous to the individual than is communism is simply not to have given the question much thought beyond one's own traumatized prejudice. Laissez-faire capitalism breeds mega-corporations that are immune to public influence. Corporations now rival the power of government and are in the process of owning it outright. While the forces of communism and the extremes of capitalism have lit off global warfare for a century, the moderating factor, the victor so far, has been in the province of Progressive thought. Communism suppresses deviation from the will of the state. Capitalism suppresses deviation from the will of the corporation. Progressivism is only an oppressor to those that would oppress. The Constitution was written by Progressives of their era.
No socioeconomic system is inherently evil. Most people are not inherently evil either. But there are enough evil people to chronically endanger the world under any socioeconomic system.
So, where Rand was right (piercing through her own faults of prejudice against socialism and charity) was in identifying an ideal to which the best of us should aspire. She, like Jesus, sought to provide a message to the betterment of man. Of course the difference is that Jesus' teaching was an admonition; it does not presume anyone's ability to consistently behave in accordance with it, just to try. Rand's worldview does the give credence to the weaknesses in the minds of individuals, nor does it recognize that short-sighted greed often invalidates her philosophy. She posits rational self-interest as a constant in humanity instead of what it should have been, an ideal and an admonition. We have spent thirty years proving that it is not a property of man to conduct himself with rational self-interest. Greed is not rational, but the greedy have exploited Rand to justify their greed.
Greed is not rational self-interest. Rational self-interest is not a force of markets or the nature of man. It is a hope and an ideal through which Rand attempted to put her childhood demons to rest. Until we are all able to live by the Golden Rule, it seems unlikely that rational self-interest (much less the self-regulation of businesses) will ever be something on which to bet a nation, as we have done of late.
Tea Party persons and Libertarians need to reconcile with this fact. But it will require far more thought than they have customarily been willing to spare. John Galt is a fiction, even to those of us who have been what he was fictionalized to be.
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If Major League Baseball decided to charge ridiculous ticket prices and pay their players less than their worth, another league would have arisen and the best players would have joined them. If AT&T wasn't forced to be divided, sure they would have enjoyed a monopoly for awhile, but maybe that would have brought on the telecommun
What is most dangerous is when business gets "in bed" with government as is the case now. What I can't stand is the myth that it is only the republican right that is guilty of such. It fits into the equation nice, the one that is fed to the masses. But, the truth is that both sides are guilty of it, and now we can look to GE as a shining example.
Jon B
According to the study, a 2006 Zogby poll posed the following question to a sample of voters: "Would you describe yourself as fiscally conservati
The authors of the study used a different poll to determine how many voters are actually libertaria
Obviously, the Republican
by Wes Benedict
It is obvious that you do not understand Rand's philosophy of Objectivis
You wrote, that Rand "could not understand
If you really understood her message, you would realize that the examples you listed above are NOT free market capitalism
I could easily cite instances of sole proprietor
Laissez faire, especially Rand’s version of it, is a utopian construct. Rational self-inter
Regulated, fair market capitalism is the only kind that benefits all comers.
Please, cite one half formed, half understood argument. Cite them all. That's why I'm here.
Please name a "corporate monopoly" that was not assisted to become a monopoly by the government
At least with the market I can avoid a bad business. When government monopolies are involved I have no such ability. Greedy businessme
As much as we would love government to merely help the poor and powerless, in reality, political control rewards the rich and the powerful. State power is always used by those with power already to screw those who don't have power. And all you do is hand them the ability to impose their greed on the rest of us.
And I agree with your assessment of the political situation. Greed powers inequity in government as well as markets.
In true laissez-fa
Goverment interventi
Making up rules under which your philosophy would work in order to support advocacy for a lack of rules is intellectu
The only regulation needed is a constituti
If government can't intervene in the economy, a corporatio
Objectivis
Objectivis
A rule that prevents government from intervenin
Software developmen
Give me a break! A simplistic and juvenile understand
The simple fact of the matter is that wealth is not a zero sum game. It is not distribute
Rational self-inter
It is not an article on the redistribu
As many others before you have mistakenly done it; you ventured to explain Ayn Rand's Philosophy in a short article without any accuracy and liability.
Ayn Rand considered rational self-inter
Ayn Rand did not constructe
She wrote and explained the way altruism went against human nature. She considered it a sacrifice, since the rewards of altruistic acts are always lesser values than the ones altruistic
Ayn Rand had the power of clearly explaining what ought to be the outcome of any type of socialist and collectivi
Finally, many of your ideas and comments are contradict
John Galt is a fiction hero but I can assert that many individual
Rand attempts to rationaliz
Her book sales often pick up in a recession. If the truth be known, her followers are people in the their teens and early twenties. You know- when people are most selfish and do lack true "clarity" of thought because of lack of experience
It both frightens and amuses me that so many of the people that despise and blame the Fed for our economic ills are inclined to it because of the result of Greenspan'
One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievab
The other, of course, involves orcs.
However I'd say his critique of 19th century capitalism was pretty accurate. It's just that his "cure" was worse than the disease.
I can't say that Objectivis
And I wonder how much all the anti-Commu
The details are all very complicate
But then, it's the same question placed two or three decades earlier, because the police were bashing union picketers back in the early 1920s too.
And all the anti-commu
Libertaria
I would add that I think Rand's philosophy fails because it is so focused on the self. People seem to think that as long as they're not hurting anybody else, they're fulfilling their obligation to society. That doesn't go far enough, because bad guys seem to have no qualms about ganging up on good guys. That means the good guys need to band together if they want to maintain a civilized society. Society breaks down if it consists entirely of hard-worki