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'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

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Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#131

Post by orib »

walterk wrote: post #66
Tangurena wrote: post #49

I came across an interesting analogy about how Atlas Shrugged was the first book in a trilogy. And how Anthem was the 3rd book (the second book, "shrug harder" not having been written or released). > Then [John Galt] went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to "stop the motor of the world," to kill 90% or so of Earth's population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding…

That is a fantastic post and thread. Thanks for linking.

It might be a good read if it actually talked about what happened in the book. However, it didn't.

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#132

Post by jamesnvc1 »

randallsquared wrote: post #46
msie wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The government confiscates citizens' money at the point of a gun." Why don't you find a place where you don't have to pay taxes? Would it be as nice to live in as the US?

It could be. I have friends who live in Costa Rica, and, deriving their income from outside CR, need pay no taxes. They talk pretty often about how great it is there. :)

But they still reap the benefits of living in a country where most people pay taxes, do they not?

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#133

Post by randallsquared »

jamesnvc1 wrote: post #132
randallsquared wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be. I have friends who live in Costa Rica, and, deriving their income from outside CR, need pay no taxes. They talk pretty often about how great it is there. :)

But they still reap the benefits of living in a country where most people pay taxes, do they not?

Okay, if your problem is with the benefits, say so. It's not clear to me that there are any benefits that are actually exclusive to taxed funds. I'd be willing to consider defense against invasion, but I'm not even sure, there.

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#134

Post by mmmurf »

davidw wrote: post #115
aswanson wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get that out of the comment. I read that as neither collectivism or objectivism is a completely flawless method, and we should take from each as the situation, rather than the ideology, dictates. I also read that as capitalism seems to have been obviously more successfull than communism, so solutions most often will be derived from objective philosophy.

Close: solutions will most often be derived from the real world (trial and error), and real economics, which says that capitalism is the best system, albeit an imperfect one, and therefore needs some tweaking now and then. How much and what tweaking is of course a matter of ongoing debate between reasonable people, and probably depends a lot on what various communities and peoples prefer. I.e. most people in Sweden a…

Your point references the correlation between capitalism and democracy.

One downside of a democracy is that special interests can gain power and distort the system to the benefit of the few rather than the many.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand shows how corporate interests run amok can lead to very bad outcomes, and she creates a moral argument for capitalism -- as compared with crony capitalism.

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#135

Post by msg »

unalone wrote: post #114
msg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selfishness isn't selfishness if you lose something.

It's still selfish if you gain more for yourself than you lose. What is Rand losing in this case?

No. A rich executive loses a whole bunch of money. He "lost a lot for himself", but he was acting from selfish motives, like the search for more money.

"Selfish" goes to motivation, not consequences. Depending on the amount of pessimism in your dogma, you can always interpret actions as selfish or altruistic after the fact.

Reasoning that can create two equal and opposite arguments like this doesn't mean anything.

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#136

Post by mmmurf »

ellyagg wrote: post #32
GavinB wrote: post #6

Absolutism: Simple. Satisfying. Wrong.

Well, you have to realize that up until Ayn Rand, the only popular absolutism was Marxism. People were pretty excited to have an absolutism that promoted striving for excellence rather than striving for grey sameness.

I disagree with your premise that it's absolutism. Rand called herself a capitalist and Atlas Shrugged is simply Rand's argument about the morality of capitalism.

Notably, Atlas Shrugged is more of a treatise against crony capitalism than it is against socialism.

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#137

Post by AlexeyMK »

Libertarians and Objectivists are so good at being half-right. Yes, public money should not be used to help mediocre businesses, but the way to prevent that from having to happen is to impose restrictions on company market share in certain industries (Banking, specifically) to make sure that no one is 'too big to fail'. Regulation is a necessary component of any business environment. Businesses need to either follow strict regulations or be limited by size and investors such that their failure would not be acceptable.

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#138

Post by nazgulnarsil »

anewaccountname wrote: post #127
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he expanded the money supply in 1995 and again in 2000 in order to create growth. Since you can't create growth out of thin air these bubbles eventually burst. This is blatant Keynesian economics, the opposite of the free-market.

Guess WWII never happened.

war is the broken window fallacy writ large.

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#139

Post by jamesnvc1 »

randallsquared wrote: post #133
jamesnvc1 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they still reap the benefits of living in a country where most people pay taxes, do they not?

Okay, if your problem is with the benefits , say so. It's not clear to me that there are any benefits that are actually exclusive to taxed funds. I'd be willing to consider defense against invasion, but I'm not even sure, there.

Well, given that the parent comment is "Why don't you find a place where you don't have to pay taxes? Would it be as nice to live in as the US?", it seems a tad disingenuous to use people who don't pay taxes in a country where everyone else does as an example...they are still recieving the benefits (if any) of taxation.

Re: 'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

#140

Post by mhartl »

olefoo wrote: post #107
jerf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I mean there was the whole mortgage deal (that only happened in the largely non-socialist US) that started screwing the economy up because the US doesn't have enough legal protections in place to stop people who physically don't have the money to pay a loan to get a loan in the first place." Exactly backwards . And I mean exactly backwards. There are, in fact, laws that forced banks to give out loans to those people…

Please name the regulation that said that any bank had to give a loan to someone with No Income, No Job, No Assets? Please name the laws that are (you claim) still forcing banks to make loans to unqualified borrowers. Now I would agree that there were many failures of regulation in the mortgage industry; but if you are trying to claim that things like http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/housing/title8.php forced banks into maki…

The Federal Fair Housing Act (which you linked to) isn't meant to force bad loans, but that is an inevitable consequence. Briefly, the Act has provisions such as the following (http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/lending/index.cfm):

The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful to engage in the following practices based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status or handicap (disability):

    - Refuse to make a mortgage loan
    - Refuse to provide information regarding loans
    - Impose different terms or conditions on a loan, such as different interest rates, points, or fees
    - Discriminate in appraising property
    - Refuse to purchase a loan or set different terms or conditions for purchasing a loan

The problem is that creditworthiness is correlated with some of the forbidden factors. For example, a bank denying loans to applicants with low incomes will, as a side-effect, disproportionately deny loans to African-American applicants, simply because African Americans have lower incomes on average than other ethnic groups. In order to avoid penalties for discrimination, banks must therefore lend to people whose credit doesn't justify the loan. (Of course, this was never the intent of the Act, but it's called the Law of Unintended Consequences for a reason.)

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