Atlas Shrugged, bad book, bad theory

sig

Sorry but that was not what I said please re-read

You said

To suggest roads wouldn't be built without government is dishonest.

I replied

You can only say it is dishonest if you have another planet were public money was not used and the road were built privately.

They were built publically maybe they could have been built privately but they were not.

But you cannot prove that the roads built publically would have been done privately

 

It is exactly what you said. Own it. You committed a logical fallacy. You cannot honestly say that without public funds roads wouldn't get built. Private roads have been built in this country. Though, I will admit, the vast majority are publicly funded.

Just as you cannot prove they wouldn't get built without public funding. Again, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. This is pretty simple logic. Grade school stuff.

 

What about 'Toll roads'/ 'turnpike trusts' / 'Build–operate–transfer' or simply just the road most traveled? I think you have to take into consideration which roads you are talking about, and if those roads would be needed. We don't really know which roads would or would not be needed today. We just have them. A myriad of road networks all for various purposes. We don't know if XY or Z road would have been built by government - but it is safe to say if people needed them - they would be there.

 

Exactly my point, either with or without public funds.

 

You most likely have no clear idea what regulations are even changing, but you'll close your business because then you can pout, and claim that obama took some jobs.

Sorry, you're weak. Natural selection, boy.... go tell the rest of the world about how much it sucks to be you, that your heavily developed country is finially bringing regulation up to par so you can't act like you're in china with how you pay your employees and dodge your taxes.

Survival of the fittest businesses. It's something social darwinists should be gaagaa about, just removing your crappy business with it's crappy margins and crappy management and crappy imagination.

Toodles:daisy:

 

I was 21 once, but have learned alot since then. Good luck!

 

Sig

Could you please read my posts?

I do not say that ‘only government can build roads’ I’m saying that you cannot claim that private money would have built the road if they were actually paid for publically. Might of is not did.

The thing is that roads are built for varying reasons and public and commercial interests can be different and sometimes they can overlap. Historically one of the main reasons for road building has been military the economic benefits were a secondary side effect, sometimes understood sometimes not.

Private interests are mostly commercial interests, it is tactical thinking about gaining immediate returns either through ‘tolls’ or getting products to market - good governance should be strategic with long term objectives opening up areas economically etc, sometimes those agendas coincide sometimes they don’t.

I’m a pragmatist I think private and public have roles to play.

As I’ve said the problem I have with the right wing libertarianism spawned by Atlas Shrugged is that it is ideological - it simplistically has good and bad - private good public bad. Reality is more complex than this fantasy novel would suggest.

I really don’t understand why anyone would take this dreary book to heart as said its like basing your political views on Lord of the Rings.

 

Lafin

Again you haven't made the case for your belief that “she got it right”.

Can I take it from your silence that you have no case?

 

As to the roads, sure, they would be built. And we know exactly how they would be built.

When a huge corporation with the millions that it costs to build or maintain a proper road of any length, needs a road, they build it.

Everyone else gets to do it like they do in afghanistan.

Speaking of which, afghanistan is a pretty cool, unregulated place. Maybe you should stfu and move there, where you can use your money as you see fit, to build roads, hire mercenaries, or whatever else you feel like.

 

Oh I did. Your fallacy was clear.

Just as you cannot say that such roads wouldn't get built without public funding. By arguing against that I originally said, that is the stance you are taking. From that you introduced a logical fallacy.

Right, and I never said public funding of road projects is a bad thing. I simply took issue with someone insinuating that without government funding roads wouldn't get built.

 

Yeah, that mechanism is people working up through the ranks for years. Mentoring, sweating, and finally taking over when the owners or leaders die. The whole point is that if the current owners or leaders of businesses go on strike abruptly, not if they slowly phase out from old age. Bad argument.

Why do you think the US is one of the most innovative nations to ever exist? Because of the incentives to succeed and make something for your life and family. Not to exist in some collectivist scenario like a hive of bees.

The book has angry undertones, because she was angry. She left Russia only to see the same patterns starting to take place in her new home.

 

Strict ideology does not work.

It did not work in russia, and yeah, sure, she got mad.... and developed the opposite dysfunctional ideology.

The point is to keep people living well. There is no other point, no higher "fairness" to look to, nothing. Boshivek type communism, and free market capitalism, both sacrifice people to the system using some sort of lame dialogue about how they didn't cut it, by toeing up to some arbitrary imaginary line. In the free market, that means you can't just live a good life, but must be constantly struggling against those who would drown you economically to the end that you literally starve to death, and in marxism-lenninism, it means they either keep you busy and drunk and miserable, or put a bullet in your head for not pretending to be happy as you're kept miserable.

Either way, you're getting dicked around by those who champion "progress", it's just that one system admits the progress is really only for wealth and the wealthy, and the other lies that everyone will get it.

What's needed is a humanistic society, that is truely socialist in that it actually functions as a humane society that takes care of people, but that still aknowledges human nature and how that involves ownership and private property and personal rights, so long as that ownership or behavior is not so grossly excessive that others are in a state of want as a result of it.

 

The best 3 authors ofthe 20th Century are George Orwell, Stephen King, and definitely not Ayn Rand.

The third one is whoever you want it to be... when you know you know.

 

So I take it you don't have a pot to piss in?

 

Sorry, that was rude. I'm just seriously put off by the idea of socialism and stealing from the successful to give to the unsuccessful.

And for the record, our current system is not a true free market system. Under pure capitalism you would see a vastly different society than we have here. Would there be class separation and unfair things? Sure. But the separation between ultra rich and destitute would be more blurred. And possibilities would be wide open.

 

I certainly don't think she's one of the best authors of the 20th century. Though I do think it is an important novel, and regardless of what might be said about it in here it is still being talked about 50+ years later..

I think she made her mark.

 

No it's just a buzz word that fits an agenda

Most people won't read the book and just watch the movie that'll strip some of her more important parts like religion.

 

Deviate
Artists die art doesn’t die, business leaders die there business often carry on, inventers die but inventing doesn’t stop. One of the lessons of history is that things carry on, yes sometimes for the worse but often for the better.

So every artist would have to go on strike? (I mean how would you know which artists work would be popular?). Everyone that could possibly actually run a business would go on strike (how would you know in advance who they were?) I mean most small businesses are run by people with no previous experience in business even the one that grow into big ones.

Get rid of senior management and the tier below takes over get rid of them and the tier below takes over and so on. Openings are just opportunities for others.

Are you saying that everyone in research or at university or even at school who shows any acumen at invention and tinkering is going to go on strike?

How are you going to make all these people go on strike and what are they going to live on?

 

Deviate

The US and Americans are not exceptional, they are just people, and they do not live in a vacuum. Most innovations in the world are just the product of accumulated data or previous developments.

Lets just pick an example – automobiles.


This was a development going all the way back to the age of steam rather than a single person’s creation.

No one stepped forward and designed a Bugatti Veyron from scratch, no one person created all the parts and components that make up an automobile, wheels, tires, pistons, gears, etc were all in existence already.

Yes some people got the patents for things first, but the elements were already in existence and a number of people were working on putting them together.

But then what are cars without roads? And as I’ve already pointed out there are the big infrastructural projects financed by government, the transcontinental railroad, the road network, the dams etc

The thing is that most roads are public works along with the bridges, traffic control systems etc.

I mean Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway act of 1956 has often been called the "Greatest Public Works Project in History".

You could say it is a collective work.

 

As with any book you read for more than mindless egotistic pleasure, one needs to read Ayn Rand, and her at times extreme philosophical arguments in context. Her hatred of 'collectivism' and advocacy of a - to sensitive, progressive types - inhuman disregard for 'the greater good', is rooted in German Romanticism, derivative (however poorly understood) of a thinker like Friedrich Nietzsche, but of course also formed by personal history. She experienced firsthand the Russian Communist revolution, the ransacking of her father's business, and may be forgiven for thinking of all forms of 'collectivism' as a pretext for mob rule, and extolling the virtues of selfishness and egotism instead.


Of course, in reality, Soviet-style communism, while undeniably collectivist, had little to do with 'altruism', nor were its ardent supporters motivated by anything other than the same self-serving 'egotism' which Rand celebrates. This is a problem not exclusive to Rand, but something conservatives can't seem to get their head around, namely that the 'rabble', 'underclass', 'proles' or what have you, will inevitably internalize the 'noble virtues' of their Masters and demand to get theirs - if need be through collective action.

It is entirely rational for working people to organize themselves in unions, and through collective bargaining seek to improve their standards of living. Which is also why, from the side of the Owning class, billions of dollars are spent annually to destroy said unions and forms of organization.

At any rate, Rand's conception of capitalism is like something out of a children's book: you've got your alarm-clock manufacturer here, your baker there, all these businesses in the process of making honest, tangible things. Again, unless you've spent the last few decades on Mars, you might have caught on that the West barely makes shit anymore, save for financial debt-traps, having outsourced all production lines to the Far East, where 12 cent per hour Chinamen crank out the iPhones for Western consumers. We don't make things, we make concepts, designs, ideas - which you can get all indignant about China copying without appropriately reimbursing the Men of Genius who first came up with it. But that, if you read Hegel's Master and Slave parable, is immanent to any form of rational (in the sense of 'divided' between an owning and a producing class) production. Unless you feed your worker-drones some kind of amnesiac agent, it's inevitable they'll retain a degree of intellectual capital that comes from first-hand experience in making things.