Atlas Shrugged film to be released in 2011

It's not just about being 'smart/creative.' It's about being hardworking.

The basis of your entire argument is deeply flawed.

The book is about the looters that want something for nothing, to the extent that they will steal from the people that are hardworking. It's about Dagny and Hank not wanting to just quit on society because they care about the work they've done and the lives they've built for themselves.

The tycoons in Atlas Shrugged went on strike because it was no longer moral for them to continue - which in Rand's context means it was no longer in their interest to conduct their business with the American public.

On other occasions Rand explicitly said the strike in AS was a 'if, and only if' situation and not applicable to the present world (ie. not justified. ie. not in anyone's interest). The point was that socialism/altruism had taken such a firm grip of the nation (and the rest of the world) that any grand enterprise that still existed merely prolonged the agony by feeding the ruling parasites. Once the protagonists finally realized this, they went on strike.

The strike worked because society had reached a point where those producers genuinely were irreplaceable, in that their likes were no longer being bred/trained by the industries. The book (and history) is littered with examples of the types of laws/systems responsible for this talent drought, and the young people who find themselves on the resulting scrapheap.

I don't recall how she treated the fundamental questions of ethics in Atlas Shrugged but you might find her 'The Objectivist Ethics' interesting (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand...). Here she presents her ideas on ethics fairly systematically, starting with questions like why man needs a code of ethics, what are values, and why does man need them.

Sorry, but there are more poor people who are hardworking than there are rich.

It's Rand's argument that's flawed: When you start from nothing, you can't achieve greatness except by raw luck. This has been shown again and again in economics game theory experiments, and it proves out in observations of real people.

Is it not passion that inspires someone to work three jobs, just to barely support their family? To come to a country where you don't even speak the language and take jobs that pay less than the legal minimum wage, living packed in like sardines, again just so that you can send most of the money back to your family? You can find hundreds of thousands of hard working, passionate people who are living close to or under the poverty line. In Rand's version of reality, those people would all be rich, and only the lazy ones would be poor.

Sure you can point to a few people who've dragged themselves up from really crappy conditions to multi-millionaires. But they're the exception--and it's not because they were the most hardworking, but a combination of hard work and luck.

I had a girlfriend at the time who was an avid objectivist, and I read the book looking specifically at the philosophy. I replied to you in good faith because you claimed that you'd never seen a decent argument by someone who'd read the book. I not only read the book but listened to hours of detailed explanation of objectivist philosophy -- if I've conflated anything, it's the general beliefs of objectivism with the specific plot and details of Atlas Shrugged.

Also, to say that Rand didn't "blame" those doing the exploiting is simply wrong: She portrayed those doing the exploiting as evil and without morals (which to her is synonymous). Maybe you can't "blame" a person who is acting out of their nature, but that's a semantic argument. She also said that the smart/hard working people had a choice, and so equally blamed them for going along with being exploited--and that much of her message I agree with, in that I quit my job to start my own company.

But if you're going to accuse me of lying straight out, then there's no real point in arguing. Your responses also didn't address what I actually said--I gave specific examples as to how the market has failed, and blamed the LACK of action of the government on corporate influence. WHY the market fails is far more complicated than can be discussed in a single blog comment--THAT it fails should be sufficient to make my point. The disasters I listed are all caused by too much reliance on libertarian/objectivist principles of absolute laissez faire capitalism. A government that properly protected its citizens and the environment wouldn't have allowed any of the above to happen.

If the reason for that is that you can't see ANY argument as decent, regardless of merit, then there's no point in engaging.

I had an argument with someone a while back that felt like this--I'd give a dozen rational statements that supported my side, and the response was always an attack on a tangential point in one or two. I'd try to dig deeper, and again the argument would derail in a bizarre manner. I think that in situations like this it means that the person responding that way SO MUCH wants to believe his or her side that any challenge is met with an overkill response of rationalization. I think this is where the term "Fractally Wrong" comes from.

From time to time I feel myself reacting that way to a question. I treat it as a warning: There's something that I WANT to believe, that I take as a matter of faith, that I don't really think is true, so my rationalization engine gets kicked into overdrive, and I get angry and the person challenging my assumptions to boot.

I am NOT accusing you of this to attempt to hurt your position. Your responses were not nearly of the magnitude of that past debate opponent. But if things that I -- or anyone else -- is saying cause an extreme emotional response (say, to accuse them of lying rather than just addressing their points), and you feel the need to write out pages of reasons why the other person is wrong without actually dealing with their points directly, then I urge you to perform a bit of self evaluation. See if you might not actually believe your position as rationally as you think you do.

Because when you reply in anger, it makes me feel that I'm attacking a matter of faith rather than a carefully considered position. And when I reply in anger, it says, to me, the same thing about me.

I may be a bit obsessive about writing long answers, but I'm not feeling angry right now.

/tangent