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Ayn Rand Was NOT a Libertarian
Many people assume that Ayn Rand was a champion of libertarian thought.
But Rand herself pilloried libertarians, condemning libertarianism as being a greater threat to freedom and capitalism than both modern liberalism and conservativism. For example, Rand said:
All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies, except that they’re anarchists instead of collectivists. But of course, anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet they want to combine capitalism and anarchism. That is worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two bandwagons. They want to be hippies, but don’t want to preach collectivism, because those jobs are already taken. But anarchism is a logical outgrowth of the anti-intellectual side of collectivism. I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. The anarchist is the scum of the intellectual world of the left, which has given them up. So the right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the Libertarian movement.
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I’d rather vote for Bob Hope, the Marx Brothers, or Jerry Lewis [than a candidate from the Libertarian Party].
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[The Libertarian Party is] a cheap attempt at publicity, which Libertarians won’t get. Today’s events, particularly Watergate, should teach anyone with amateur political notions that they cannot rush into politics in order to get publicity. The issue is so serious today, that to form a new party based in part on half-baked ideas, and in part on borrowed ideas—I won’t say from whom—is irresponsible, and in today’s context, nearly immoral.
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[Libertarians] are not defenders of capitalism. They’re a group of publicity seekers who rush into politics prematurely, because they allegedly want to educate people through a political campaign, which can’t be done. Further, their leadership consists of men of every of persuasion, from religious conservatives to anarchists. Moreover, most of them are my enemies: they spend their time denouncing me, while plagiarizing my ideas. Now, I think it’s a bad beginning for an allegedly pro-capitalist party to start by stealing ideas.
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Now here is a party that plagiarizes some of my ideas, mixes it with the exact opposite—with religionists, anarchists, and just about every intellectual misfit and scum they can find—and they call themselves Libertarians, and run for office. I dislike Reagan and Carter; I’m not too enthusiastic about the other candidates. But the worst of them are giants compared to anybody who would attempt something as un-philosophical, low, and pragmatic as the Libertarian Party. It is the last insult to ideas and philosophical consistency.
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[Question] Why don’t you approve of the Libertarians, thousands of whom are loyal readers of your works?
[Rand] Because Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and they denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication, when that fits their purpose. They are lower than any pragmatists, and what they hold against Objectivism is morality. They’d like to have an amoral political program.
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The Libertarians aren’t worthy of being the means to any end, let alone the end of spreading Objectivism.
Rand also disagreed with libertarians on foreign policy. For example, most libertarians - including Ron Paul - oppose military intervention against Iran, while the Ayn Rand Institute has supported forceful intervention in Iran.
Rand denounced Arabs as "primitive" and "one of the least developed cultures" who "are typically nomads." Consequently, Rand contended Arab resentment for Israel was a result of the Jewish state being "the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their (Arabs) continent", while decreeing that "when you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are." (Many libertarians were highly critical of Israeli government at the time.)
Sandeep Jaitly of Fekete Research says that real libertarians do not follow Rand's philosophy.
Murray Rothbard - founder of modern libertarianism, chief academic officer of leading libertarian think tank the Mises Institute, and one of the most important thinkers in the Austrian School of Economics - argued in 1972 that Rand was a champion for her own aggrandizement, not for liberty or reason.
Rothbard accused Rand -in a long but must-read essay - of being acting like a typical cult leader:
The Ayn Rand cult ... flourished for just ten years in the 1960s.... It also promoted slavish dependence on the guru in the name of independence; adoration and obedience to the leader in the name of every person’s individuality; and blind emotion and faith in the guru in the name of Reason.
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Since every cult is grounded on a faith in the infallibility of the guru, it becomes necessary to keep its disciples in ignorance of contradictory infidel writings which may wean cult members away from the fold.
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Just as Communists are often instructed not to read anti-Communist literature, the Rand cult went further to disseminate what was virtually an Index of Permitted Books.
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The philosophical rationale for keeping Rand cultists in blissful ignorance was the Randian theory of "not giving your sanction to the Enemy."
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In a development eerily reminiscent of the organized hatred directed against the arch-heretic Emanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s 1984, Rand cultists were required to sign a loyalty oath to Rand; essential to the loyalty oath was a declaration that the signer would henceforth never read any future works of the apostate and arch-heretic Branden [Rand's number 2]. After the split, any Rand cultist seen carrying a book or writing by Branden was promptly excommunicated.
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Cultists were required to swear their unquestioning belief that Rand was right and Branden wrong, even though they were not permitted to learn the facts behind the split. In fact, the mere failure to take a stand, the mere attempt to find the facts, or the statement that one could not take a stand on such a grave matter without knowledge of the facts was sufficient for instant expulsion. For such an attitude was conclusive proof of the defective "loyalty" of the disciple to his guru, Ayn Rand.
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Just as the Marxist movements developed jargon and slogans which were clung to for fear of uttering incorrect deviations, the same was true in the Randian movement. In the name of "precision of language," in short, nuance and even synonyms were in effect prohibited.
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Wit and humor, as might be gathered from this incident, were verboten in the Randian movement. The philosophical rationale was that humor demonstrates that one "is not serious about one’s values." The actual reason, of course, is that no cult can withstand the piercing and sobering effect, the sane perspective, provided by humor. One was permitted to sneer at one’s enemies, but that was the only humor allowed, if humor that be.
Personal enjoyment, indeed, was also frowned upon in the movement and denounced as hedonistic "whim-worship." In particular, nothing could be enjoyed for its own sake – every activity had to serve some indirect, "rational" function. Thus, food was not to be savored, but only eaten joylessly as a necessary means of one’s survival; sex was not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but only to be engaged in grimly as a reflection and reaffirmation of one’s "highest values"; painting or movies only to be enjoyed if one could find "rational values" in doing so. All of these values were not simply to be discovered quietly by each person – the heresy of "subjectivism" – but had to be proven to the rest of the cult. In practice, as will be seen further below, the only safe aesthetic or romantic "values" or objects for the member were those explicitly sanctioned by Ayn Rand or other top disciples.
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Any such confession meant a harrowing process of ideological and psychological purification, supposedly ending in one’s success at achieving rationality, independence, and self-esteem and therefore an unquestioning and blind devotion to Ayn Rand.
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One top young Randian ... was deathly afraid to ask the question, it being so basic that he knew he would be excommunicated on the spot for simply raising the point; but he had complete faith that if Rand should be asked the question, she would answer it satisfactorily and resolve his doubts. And so he waited, year after year, hoping against hope that someone would ask the question, be expelled, but that his own doubts would then be resolved in the process.
In the manner of many cults, loyalty to the guru had to supersede loyalty to family and friends – typically the first personal crises for the fledgling Randian. If non-Randian family and friends persisted in their heresies even after being hectored at some length by the young neophyte, they were then considered to be irrational and part of the Enemy and had to be abandoned. The same was true of spouses; many marriages were broken up by the cult leadership who sternly informed either the wife or the husband that their spouses were not sufficiently Randworthy. Indeed, since emotions resulted only from premises, and since the leaders’ premises were by definition supremely rational, that top leadership presumed to try to match and unmatch couples.
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One girl, a certified top Randian, who experienced the misfortune of falling in love with an unworthy non-Randian. The leadership told the girl that if she persisted in her desire to marry the man, she would be instantly excommunicated. She did so nevertheless, and was promptly expelled.
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But the most important sanction for the enforcement of loyalty and obedience, the most important instrument for psychological control of the members, was the development and practice of Objectivist Psychotherapy. In effect, this psychological theory held that since emotion always stems from incorrect ideas, that therefore all neurosis did so as well; and hence, the cure for that neurosis is to discover and purge oneself of those incorrect ideas and values. And since Randian ideas were all correct and all deviation therefore incorrect, Objectivist Psychotherapy consisted of (a) inculcating everyone with Randian theory – except now in a supposedly psycho-therapeutic setting; and (b) searching for the hidden deviation from Randian theory responsible for the neurosis and purging it by correcting the deviation.
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It is no wonder that the enormous psychological pressure of cult membership led to an extremely high turnover in the Randian movement, relatively far more so than among the Communists.
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Such fear was greater than that of a Communist member, because the Randian had far less leeway for ideological or personal deviation. Furthermore, since Rand had an absolute and total line on every conceivable question of ideology and daily life, all aspects of such life had to be searched – by oneself and by others – for suspicious heresies and deviations. Everything was the object of fear and suspicion. There was the fear of making an independent judgment, for suppose that the member was to make a statement on some subject on which he did not know Rand’s position, and then were to find out that Rand disagreed.
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Every Randian lived in – and indeed was himself – a community of spies and informers, ready to ferret out and denounce any deviations from Randian doctrine. Thus, one time a Randian, walking with a girl friend, told her that he had attended a party at which several Randians had made an impromptu tape imitating the voices of the top Randian leaders. Stricken by this dire information and after spending a sleepless night, the girl rushed to inform the top leadership of this terrible transgression. Promptly, the leading participants were called on the carpet by their Objectivist Psychotherapist and bitterly denounced in their "therapy" sessions: "After all," said the therapist, "you wouldn’t mock God." When the owner of the tape refused the therapist’s demand to relinquish it so that it could be inspected in detail, his doom as a member of the movement was effectively sealed.
No Randian, even the top leadership, was exempt from the all-pervasive fear and repression. Every one of the original cadre, for example, was placed on probation at least once, and was forced to demonstrate his loyalty to Rand at length and in numerous ways.
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Cult theory decreed that happiness can only be achieved by being a committed Randian; they couldn’t even be intelligent, since how could seemingly intelligent people not be Randians, especially if they commit the gravest sin – failing to become Randians once they were exposed to this new gospel.
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The errant member was peremptorily ordered to appear at a "trial" to hear charges against him. If he refused to appear – as he would if he had any shred of self-respect left – then the trial would continue in absentia, with all the members present taking turns in denouncing the expelled member, reading charges against him (again in a manner eerily reminiscent of 1984).... Having his closest friend take the leading part in the heresy proceeding was of course important as a way of forcing the friend to demonstrate his own loyalty to Rand, thereby clearing himself of any lingering taint by association. It is reported that when Branden was expelled, one of his closest former friends in New York sent him a letter proclaiming that the only moral thing he could do at that point was to commit suicide – a strange position for an allegedly pro-life, pro-individual-purpose philosophy to take.
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Robotically, the Randians intoned their slogans, generally imitating the poses and manner of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, and further, imitating their common cult vision of heroes and heroines of the Randian fictional canon .... Many of the young men managed to look like carbon copies of Branden, while the young women tried to look like Barbara Branden, replete with the cigarette-holder held aloft, derived from Ayn Rand herself, that was supposed to symbolize the high moral standards and the mocking contempt wielded by Randian heroines.
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Preferring Bach, for example, to Rachmaninoff, subjected one to charges of believing in a "malevolent universe." lf not corrected by self-criticism and psychotherapeutic brainwashing, such deviation could well lead to ejection from the movement.
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If the Rand line was totalitarian, encompassing all of one’s life, then, even when all the general premises were agreed upon and Randians checked with headquarters to see who was In or Out, there was still need to have some "judicial" mechanism to resolve concrete issues and to make sure that every member toed the line on that question. No one was ever allowed to be neutral on any issue. The judicial mechanism to resolve such concrete disputes was, as usual in cults, the rank one enjoyed in the Randian hierarchy.
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There was an unofficial designation that was far more revealing: "the senior collective" .... each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden. There was, for example, Nathan’s sister Elaine Kalberman; his brother-in-law, Harry Kalberman; his first cousin, Dr. Allan Blumenthal, who assumed the mantle of leading Objectivist Psychotherapist after Branden’s expulsion; Barbara’s first cousin, Leonard Piekoff; and Joan Mitchell, wife of Allan Blumenthal. Alan Greenspan’s familial relation was more tenuous, being the former husband of Joan Mitchell. The only non-relative in the class of '43 was Mary Ann Rukovina, who made the top rank after being the college roommate of Joan Mitchell.
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The Rand cult was concerned not with every man’s individuality, but only with Rand’s individuality, not with everyone’s right reason but only with Rand’s reason. The only individuality that flowered to the extent of blotting out all others, was Ayn Rand’s herself; everyone else was to become a cipher subject to Rand’s mind and will.
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The guiding spirit of the Randian movement was not individual liberty – as it seemed to many young members – but rather personal power for Ayn Rand and her leading disciples. For power within the movement could be secured by totalitarian isolation and control of the minds and lives of every member; but such tactics could scarcely work outside the movement, where power could only hopefully be achieved by cozying up the President and his inner circles of dominion.
Thus, power not liberty or reason, was the central thrust of the Randian movement. The major lesson of the history of the movement to libertarians is that It Can Happen Here, that libertarians, despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements. Hopefully, libertarians, once bitten by the virus, may now prove immune.
Postscript: Ayn Rand's main real life hero was apparently a serial killer. See this, this and this. That doesn't mean that she didn't write great books; but it does call her judgment into question.
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Jesse Americain hates Ann Rnd with a passion.
I just dont take anything a woman says that seriously. That includes Ann Rand.
And George Washington is a Nazi
GW is nasty or zany or baloney?
I can't figure out what the girl did to your mind let alone your dikk!
Leave it to a liberal to make a make a post that doesn't discuss any issue, provide any insight, but only makes a personal attack. Thank you
Falak Pema. I've gone after your posts every once and a while and again, you just confirm and shown everyone here at ZH what a worthless liberal troll you are.
So to add to his thread (actual content that falak pema could provide), I will say that the definition of libertarianism has changed dramatically, as has the definition of republican or democrat. Thus we have had the shift towards new definitions such as liberalism (progressives) and conservatives. Labeling is interesting since it provides identification. But we see so many times in our fractured society, no one label defines anyone.
In my little opinion, the problem is the ones that have not come to terms with their social views versus their fiscal views, since they effect each other and for liberals, they contradict each other (Why liberalism fails).
hey, you want meat? You get it elsewhere, just read.
I'm just taking facetious exception to someone who calls GW a "nazi".
I love the way you knee jerk into thin air as you spout you prejudices on that unholy L breed.
The L word now has a double meaning; how cute, you clueless dude!
Lloyd looks marginally more attractive somehow.
Its the perfect teeth I guess.
“Like the Marx brothers with a political ideology”
Journalist : Why are we supporting this covert illegal activity or that illegal activity ?
15.20
President “Because it would be against the law to do it overtly”
the law is not something to follow but to get around.
http://archive.org/details/AV_392_393-A_WILD_EVENING_WITH_PAUL_KRASSNER
Oh, God, William. That is both hideous and excellent at the same time. Though I wish you had added a tentacle holding the cigarette instead of a hand.
Ayn Rand was a Dogmatist for her new religion. And her mindset was like that of Ignacio de Loyola's.
It started off as being for religious purity through introspection; in ended up in the logic of the Jesuits : seeing spies under each bed and becoming as a consequence an outright proponent of the Inquistion which is what the Jesuits were in the New World, justifying the unjustifiable and then pretending there was a great conspiracy to destroy the "universal latin faith"; aka Ayn Rand's version of pure capitalism and universal truth of logical man.
Never forget that apart from being a NEW catholic, introverted spiritualist, Ignacio and his Company of Jesuits were very active to counter the work of heathen SaTAN and Amerindian cultures, aka communism in Ayn's context, but also by fighting the Reform, the Protestants of that age in homeland; aka Libertarian Anarchy in Ayn's context...a greater revulsion of "pseudo co-religionists" of similar western tradition; the enemy WITHIN as the enemy WITHOUT of infidel culture.
History repeats, or rhymes, as the MINDSET of ALL intellectual PURISTS. like all theological purists, leads them to the same intellectual and spirtual CUL-DE-SAC; dead end.
Game over, find a new window and a fresh outlook on to that mystery which is transcendental spirtual belief and also a continuation of secular Enlightenment, now based on science, logic and ethics.
The beat goes on as does the eternal quest! Civilization stays an uphill battle.
"Ayn Rand was a Dogmatist for her new religion."
Well said. Let's face it, she was seriously warped. Her views on anarchy are incomprehensible to me.
But I think she was a good philosopher--at least with regard to her "mainstream" thought on individualism and her ability to appeal (readability and interest) to a wide variety of people who ordinarily weren't "philosophically minded." She was definitely a good fiction writer (with some obvious exceptions--such as Galt's ridiculously long speech and the entire ending of Atlas Shrugged--it's almost as if the ending was written by a different person).
Anyone who agrees with everything she wrote is just plain warped. Anyone who approves of everything she wrote and everything she did (cultist follower) is just plain lying.
+1
...Ignacio and his Company of Jesuits were very active to counter the work of heathen SaTAN and Amerindian cultures, aka communism in Ayn's context, but also by fighting the Reform, the Protestants of that age in homeland...
You've taken great liberties with the temporary absconding of our beloved I-dog from the scence Falak...he would, if here, set you straight in a New York minute on that howler....in his absence, we less canny canines must do our best to keep you from toppling from the tower of your catharist stronghold due to gusts of overbold rhetoric...
Loyala and his crypto-jewish ilk were the original instigators of new world 'communism' and enrolled the natives of Paraguay into a vast experiment in Big Brotherdom which has been slowly boiling on the stove of the Lurianic cabbalists now for centuries...and is close to perfection...
as in a vast network of DHS\Fema holiday camps for those unfortunates who failed to to notice of the walls closing in on their Toledo-like cells. The 'red man,' in his various guises, was never so stupid as to follow a construct of hebraic origin like communism.
As for the rest of your revisionist history squire...please bear in mind that the same group of crypto-jews masquerading as soldiers of christ were bankrolling the incipient "protestant" movement as well as going through the motions of 'fighting' it...not unlike some modern day machinations which wholly escape the attentions of scholars like yourself who 'disbelieve' in conspiracy notions!
To your health!
I can always count on you to see a jew behind every new jesuit or "socialist" protestant ; well done you are true to form.
Remember before you get lost in your version of khazarian translation of the Old semitic Testament into neo-Caucasian jibberish, that Jesus himself as related by the Evangelists was the original communist; my cathartic heresy goes far enuff to state that plainly; not that I am a believer in social networks based on Dogma; of which the Latin church showed all thru the ages it was the original version of Facebook, before Gutenberg and users of his invention outdid the clerics' inward looking vision of regulatory capture of christian social chapter : the seven sacrements and their deadly hold on all members of that social chapter from birth to death!
I prefer Venus to the Virgin MAry in my realm of fantasy and Jungian ego. I stand by my version of what religious dogma really meant in western world and the jews were an infinitessimal part of it in medieval and renaissance times, as the Catholic Kings proved in Reconquista chimes and Spanish Inquistion 'déferlement' all to their glory; not to that of some fantasy cabal.
Inspite of how you translate that tale. The Inquistion was by the church and for the church all thru the ages alike Imperial crucifiction under Caesar; and it was NOT manipulated from without, but from within.
Just like Pax Americana today. Get over your Luciferian conspiracy thread. The enemy of Man is Caesar, or the Renaissance Pope, theocratic look-alike dressed up like Caesar, challenging his progeny, Charles V or François I, all over the world in papal bulls like the Tordesillas divide line. Its always been a fight between Oligarchs and their fold. Never about the heretic, insignificant minion who stays under the carpet.
This heretic breed was only good for one social purpose : feeding the knowledge thread that challenged Caesar : from Socrates to Spartacus, to Abelard, to Jan Hus, to Erasmus, to Galileo, to Voltaire. No khazarians there unless you look at life thru jaundiced eye; of purity of ethnic blood line...hahaha!
So Santé, your jibberish is well worthy of outdoing my "revisionist" drama!
One of the true highlights of this site was your referencing of the Venetian Black Nobility as mere "traders"...
I can think of no more profound ignorance of the basics of history(outside of the more obvious non-sequitors ingrained into the consciousness of every good goyish slave)and though that is no crime in and of itself, you sire, are a scholar and writer, and therefore can take no refuge whatsoever in the plea of ignorance...insanity, perhaps, but ignorance, never!
pray tell me how this "black nobility" of Venise, whoever they may be, influenced any decision of Venise that had a signal influence on western civilisation between the capture of Constantinople by Venise in 1204 and the BAttle of Lepanto in 1571.
I await your enlightenment. One historic thread that proves your point.
It would be a signal honour to be able to augment in any way the vast repositum of knowledge of one so erudite as thyself squire...
Mullins "Curse of Canaan" is of course the standard of excellence in any such pursuit...the man was an impeccable researcher and almost unmatched in analytic powers...providentially, the book's actually available to read online...http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/mullins_curse_of_canaan.pdf
If the burden of your necromantic pursuits weighs too heavy upon your time to do full justice to that tome, there is as well the Tarpley opus...perhaps, along with http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/952_venice.html this is a more accessible entry point for orienting yourself to the true role of Venice both before and during the period you have selected.,,,
but the best round up of all might be Colemans' - available here - http://investigate911.org/Oligarchy.htm - oligarchy...I believe that to be a word you are fond of.
I await the the next crushing blow from your estoc; I shall pass the interval sharpening my scimitar.
Joyful, please note that the second link starts quite early with "Queen Victoria the matriarch of the Venetian Black Guelph".
The connection with Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is over the Guelph bloodline while "Black Guelph" was a political faction term
Black Guelph: meant being against the return of the emperor and for the complete temporal supremacy of the Pope - this term was only used to differentiate from the White Guelphs that were popists that favoured a return of the emperor on certain conditions, for example Dante Alighieri
the whole Venetian Black Guelph myth was probably chosen this way because there is a period that Venice tried to hide from their own history books, and those holes are easily filled up with fantasies - but we have archeological records and a lot of those holes could be filled up again.
but Venice was never seriously involved in that conflict because it was never part of the Western Empire - de jure it was the most western Duchy of the (orthodox) Eastern Empire until it went down 1452 and de facto they were not part of the Catholic fold
So Guelphs+Venice=NonSense
and Victoria+"Black Guelphs"=NonSense
it sounds good, though. rolls well from the tongue, Venetian Black Guelph
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by the way, where is i-dog? I'm waiting for the second part of the Khazarian Saga
the black vs white geulphs was a pure intra Florentine tussle; between the people's reps (white) and the oligarch's reps (black), the latter aided and abetted by Charles of Valois! Read Dante...his family was white G and he was a great witness of that sham fight to save the Oligarchs pretending they were loyal to Pope. In fact, the Pope was loyal to Oligarchs and the people wanted Republic! There were no black guelphs in Venice.
well, yes, but allegedly the fight started in Pistoia and involved all Tuscany, with the White Welphs being so concilatory vs the empire to be everywhere - particularly after so many were in exile
so even more Black Guelph = only in Florence & Venetian "Black Guelph" = NonSense, 100%
falak, do people that write those websites giggle in the act and then load a new bong? must be fun
and for Americans - poor Nobility-starved Americans - it must be a kind of adult fairytale, I guess, or like SF
The saga of the 300 and the black nobles of Venise and Tuscany; in fact of all of Italy, as it includes the Genoese, dire enemies of Venise, in one huge panoramic global conspiracy over two thousand years to bring down all western civilization, is like the Andromeda strain theory. It makes a good novel, like the Da VInci Code but hardly a factual analysis of history.
Fitting the facts to fall into place wth the Grand Theory on the basis of ineundo; like Walter Raleigh being a patriot, being executed for being against the money breed of Italian merchants who brought ruin on his lands, is in that vein, pure Ivanhoe and Walter Scott stuff.
This is history standing on its head. Read Machiavelli and Dante or Petrarch, to name only a few; there are hundreds of contemporary sources,; to understand the reality of the ages of Guelph and Ghibelline fights; read all about the French pretentions to all crowns of Jerusalem, Constantinople and Sicily to understand the geo-political implications of french ambition that rivalled those of spanish aragon, and you understand better why Italy was war torn. The Italians were constantly on th defensive; Genoa a merchant whore to France since the Crusades; Venise jealously attached to its independence, from its hundred year ties with Constantinople, who killed its merchants in 1182; whence the joint Venetian and Crusader invasion of 1204. Pisa was Ghibelline and died at the hands of Guelph Florence in an intra-tuscan war.
Nope, reality is more complex than these after the fact cut and paste grand designs that explain history from a prejudiced angle selling a grand scheme with a preordained knave all thru the ages; the khazarian half-caste breed.
I don't buy it and no Italian of that day and age EVER referred to it as a grand design of things. Whereas the whole of christianity knew the basic fight between the Popes and different pretenders to Caesar's robes in divided Italy : Hohenstaufens, CApetiens and Aragonese nobility; the time line of Italy's history over that period.
Nice novelista stuff though I'll grant you that!
Usury is unpayable, it's a trick, arrest them all.
Usury just means interest on loans; and, yes, it's payable, as long as the bank injects the interest payments back into the economy.
Think about flows of money, as opposed to just stocks of it.
I'd be curious as to what times of the month these various bits were written...
She obviously had NO clue about anarchism.
Why people get so fucking hosed/mixed up (which shows up as obvious conflicts) is because one cannot have just a "little," that opening the door ALWAYS results in the door being kicked in.
The notion that we can have pure capitalism and some in-control law is PURE FANTASY. The door labeled "Capitalism" WILL be kicked in. The necessary controls will always lead to suppression of liberties, there can be no other way: it's got nothing to do with what I or anyone else desire/want, it's the logical trajectory.
Capitalism eventually reduces competition as it weeds out the less-competitive, and those few entities that are left tend to then toss their weight around to protect (rather than innovate and or improve) themselves. These entities that played pure/true capitalism on the way up then kick Capitalism in the teeth in order to stay on top of the hill. That door that was only slightly cracked open -small govt protection of the playing field- gets kicked in, and then big govt then emerges in order (and by command of these entities) to protect these (deemed) "critical" entities.
Based on what's here from Rand I read that she believes that Capitalism + Govt (only if it's Small) works. Capitalism, though no scholar am I, is supposed to be about OPEN trade of goods and services. I challenge anyone to find ANY instance in which the introduction of govt, SMALL or otherwise, has NOT compromised the trade of goods and services. Further, as noted above in my door analogy, it seems that govt provides the very entrance-way for corrupting Capitalism. I therefore believe that Rand's statement that Capitalism + Anarchism is worse than Capitalism + Govt. One has been given plenty of play, the other not (because those with power will always look to usurp laws).
POWER CORRUPTS. Power (or those in/with power) will always look to consolidate. Power WILL eventually violate the laws written to keep it from being abusive: we see this all so clearly- TBTF, "national security reasons," "doing God's work"...
Anarchism, which Rand appears to fail to understand, discourages consolidation of power and encourages free association. So, what was Rand really pushing?
In truth, my dear Seer, Rand had quite great insight into anarchism...which is exactly why she pilloried it so, and in the hilarious quote which GW has provided, she gives it all away...
Rand hated anarchists because C20th Anarchism was the only serious threat to the hegemony of sionist dialectical talmudism...of which Golem Rand herself was one appendage...
A classic bolshie Trotskyite, AR( Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum) whose luck in Mother Russia ran out when Stalin purged her sectarian brethern, was imported with open arms by the Chicago frankist-sabbateans, where she set up shop as intellectual counterweight to the natural evolution of non-statist thinking...and dyed in the wool enemy of non-statist thinkers[hint-Anarchists] whose almost successful challenges to the marxist bulldozing of the "left," in the form of the movements of Makhno and Durruti, gave the bolshi\trots such a scare as to cause a major shift in identification of 'the main enemy'...no longer 'capitalism,' with which the Statist socialist shares leanings and from which receives it's funding, but rather, the bogeyman of 'anarchism'...still the only antidote to the cabbalist campaign to defraud and destroy the west and east together...the resultant recasting of AR into a supposed pillar of freedom and liberty is one of the biggest frauds of all time.
*that line says it all...and should serve to silence those noisy Objectivist schoolboys who used to show up on these pages in flocks - forever
By the way...Murray R was a great thinker and a natural anarchist, seduced and misled by the Mt Pelerin moneypower types who worked to snuff outbreaks of sanity on the 'right' whilst the Trots did the same thing on the 'left'....
outcome...Neocons take over the world.
Great piece GW...you've come a loooooooooooooong way since those dog days of summer!
Anarchism is american as apple pie.
Thus, ad man Rand, always was anti-american, typically detesting everything which inspired America.
Obvious really, she was deployed to derail the American way, by perverting the American ideal.
American anarchism is informed by Emerson and Thoreau.
It is founded upon the dignity of the individual.
The acceptance of the march to a different drum.
Opening to the possibility my neighbor shares my goodwill, and is capable of thinking as well, and acting as efficaciously, as me.
Managerial types tend toward regarding others as subordinate, in the nature of psychopaths.
Anarchy is an absence of government. I'm an anarcho-capitalist but one would have to have lived a sequestered life to never have heard of the Constitution or Abe Lincoln or World War II. Not even a child could fail to see the iron thread of government running through American history. America was unique because its founders attempted to limit government but not one day has gone by since 1789 without government. There has been no anarchy in American history.
Also note that neither Emerson nor Thoreau were anarchists.
And why do you believe that Rand did not elevate the individual above all else? She did so with more gusto than any other individual in American arts:
Thank you for elucidating...
I plead ignorance when it comes to Rand. I was only responding to what I read, and what the WORDS said. Because humans are deceptive it's pretty hard to know what ANYONE really thinks/believes: figure that everyone is a double-agent, in the least.
That said, and it appears that you and I are speaking of the same, anarchism is the ONLY way to ensure there is a future. It's quite easy logic: DIVERSITY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE. One need only ask which operational parameters allow for the greatest diversity, that is where the answer lie. In the ONLY tenet of anarchism it is that there should be no involuntary* coercion: this is really heavily manifest as a response to governments and their heavy hands, but can serve even wider application.
* I do find this a bit sticky in that the voluntary should only come through a full understanding. How is it determined when that position is attained, how it breaks the threshold above the involuntary? Everything becomes a circular function... but at least with anarchism there are no doors.
Power everywhere detests anarchism. That right there should be a big clue. Anarchists (and those pre-dating the term) are always branded by the State as terrorists: soon the State will make direct association through their propaganda arm.
Capitalism contains a lot of anarchism. Seems like there is in fact a better match here. The problem that I have lies with how the notion of protecting property rights comes in... if outside the individual then power is vested in something/someone else, and that power is the power of projecting violence/death. I REALLY do wish that there could be a discussion by those who possess higher-thinking than I (I'm just a muse, if that even).
Capitalism contains a lot of anarchism. Seems like there is in fact a better match here. The problem that I have lies with how the notion of protecting property rights comes in... if outside the individual then power is vested in something/someone else, and that power is the power of projecting violence/death. I REALLY do wish that there could be a discussion by those who possess higher-thinking than I (I'm just a muse, if that even).
First, don't sell youself short... the reasoning you have already done in this thread (and others) is sufficient to discuss virtually anything.
Second, what you've described above is THE fundamental crux of all systems of government devised by man. It is why we get whiplash from bouncing back and forth between capitalistic and socialistic poles (each necessarily collapsing under its own weight). Humans have yet to find an answer.
Third, I agree that anarchism and capitalism are virtually identical twins... it is exactly due to their similarities that anarchism falls prey to the same pitfalls as capitalism. Capitalism and anarchism are predicated upon a few faulty, interconnected premises... that all humans are created equal, begin at an equal starting position, and are all competing equally when the starting pistol is fired. Without this inherent, initial equality, entrenched power and/or wealth will always have an insurmountable lead or, alternatively, will shape norms to allow for punitive exploitation of power and wealth.
This is why all of these systems fail when introduced to the real world; the initial lead either proves insurmountable by the rest (and the mob gets disgruntled) or the initial lead permeates a moral corruption that sows the seeds of its own demise ("new" power then has to moral underpinning to punitively exploit the power)... as a result, abandoning absolutes is probably a decent idea... to focus instead upon impementing the most "fair" system (based upon inalienable rights). We haven't yet devised the answer... and the answer is actually going to come about through a tragedy of the commons (resource depletion will lead to a shrinking pie which will put significant pressures on all governmental constructs, thereby requiring innovation in governance and resource distribution). I'm not sure there will ever be an answer... only that some forms of government are less bad than others... humans rarely stumble upon anything ideal.
Excellent. Just excellent. You nailed it--but how many understand what you've said?
Nestor Makhno--haven't heard of him in a while! Ol' "batko". In Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, you can see hints that the commies in the Spanish Civil War spent more time and energy fighting against the anarcho-syndicalists that they did fighting Franco. Very interesting.
The more I think about it, the more I admire the concision of your analysis. Your nuanced appreciation of Rothbard is admirable as well. Rothbard grasped that the American love ofr liberty had it mythical roots in the colonial era, where so many could simply drop their obligations, move west and seek the dream of independence. An honest man and fine researcher. I like his definition of "anti-semite": "Someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary"!
You know its funny, but no one seems to ever menitoned that people that are really ugly may have a distorted view of the world.
Rand was real ugly.
i don't like rand for the same reason i don't like cocaine .... i've seen what it does to people.
When Ayn Rand speaks I find it difficult to look away. Perhaps she was not a great beauty but her passion compels one to look and to listen. Despite her faults Rand was and is an endlessly fascinating individual.
Ayn Rand Mike Wallace Interview 1959 part 1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukJiBZ8_4k
you mean nobody made her cum and feel womanly?
She never met Freud or Jung? Jesus what a disaster!
Maybe she would have settled for Henry Miller when he wrote Tropic of Capricorn, not Arthur Miller who got Marilyn M !
You're thinking maybe Miller's title indicates of a predilection for... goats?
Wow. Sounds like Scientologists took a page (well, the whole damned book) from Rand. While Rand learned her tricks from the Catholic Inquisition.
What bleak and depressing evidence that being a modern intellectual does not make one immune to cultism. I guess the only reason we have any freedom and fairness at all is because it allows us to produce lots of food and a plethora of desirable goods.
Hope we keep churning out the ipods and the Big Macs. Otherwise the cultists will take complete charge of society and bring back the rack and other torture devices and employ them until we all sing the same tune.
And the tune is always the same. Only the lyrics are different.
Scientology also stole a lot from Buddhism.
Rand's philosophy - if it can be called such - was shallow at best. She was just a bore with a mission and a groupie for strong men. If you're into thick fiction books, page for page J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings provides better quality than Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
So, Ayn Rand fans, just thumb me down. I am John Galt's missing sense of equality.
I happen to find both Rand and Tolkien to be extremely compelling artists. Forgive me if I chose to live by my own values rather than the values of others.
"She was telling the truth and people were anxious to hear it." -- Ron Paul on Ayn Rand.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjwuGHPilwI
well put
Most of us don't understand
The evil that follows from Rand
Hoarding the feast
Releases the beast
Our selfish destruction's at hand
The Limerick King
I submit that who Ayn Rand was is an interesting academic exercise but not critical in the current state of affairs. What is critical is examining those pseudo Randians, political and corporate, who avail themselves of some disingenuous ideological interpretation of Rand's ideas in order to justify their own excess greed, CEO entitlements and self centered behavior.
They fancy keeping a leather bound copy of Atlas Shrugged on their office bookshelf until it comes time to explain TARP. They are happy to run business models based on sweetheart government contracts, food stamps and fractional reserve banking. They don't mind sucking their shareholders dry to top up their own grossly oversized pensions but complain about having to fund their employee pension plans.
As for politicians, guess how many Congressmen become millionaires after being elected to office.
This pseudo-objectivism is something else. It is inverted Marxism: socialism at the top, capitalism at the bottom.
+1 Well put, WB.
WB, your thoughts below the pic you posted are great, I for one would welcome more of your thoughts to accompany your pics. Just my two cents.
How anyone falls for that shitshow is beyond me, from the Koch brothers to all the other cockroaches stirring up and funding class hate (to the down side), jesus christ these people are so lost to their greed. The absurd thing is that libertarians think they have a better chance of social mobility if they go along with the people preaching this shit, when really they are just turkeys voting for Christmas. These fucks dont want social mobility, they are out to destroy it, for good.
lol on the turkeys...or chickens who vote for Colonel Sanders?
Turkeys voting for Christmas. I have to remember that one.
Well put.
Ayn Rand was an interesting writer. I liked her ideas, although her fictional characterizations are thin at best.
But she was a writer. Not a god, not a guru. She had ideas to put forth, and she put them forth well.
For me, I'd rather use Robert Heinlein as a guru. He wasn't one either. Just a fine writer with some solid ideas that also helped shape my young adult thinking.
We need to lose this cultish worship of people with great words. They're just folks, like the rest of us, even though some of them have deeper thoughts and finer wordsmith skills.
Ayn Rand: important writer, surely.
World changer? One person at a time.
Saint? Mmmmm, not quite.
But I'll take her stuff over Danielle Steele pretty much any day.
Not that Steele's views are entirely enmeshed with Libertarian thought either.
FOFOA is a guru
Were the Libertarians of Rand's day the same Libertarians we have today? I doubt it. It's just like the Republicans calling themselves conservative, and Democrats, liberal. Lots of false labeling.
***Were the Libertarians of Rand's day the same Libertarians we have today?***
"now here is a party that plagiarizes some of my ideas, mixes it with the exact opposite—with religionists, anarchists, and just about every intellectual misfit and scum they can find—and they call themselves Libertarians, and run for office. I dislike Reagan and Carter; I’m not too enthusiastic about the other candidates. But the worst of them are giants compared to anybody who would attempt something as un-philosophical, low, and pragmatic as the Libertarian Party. It is the last insult to ideas and philosophical consistency."
1980 POTUS election...
The Libertarian Party nominated Ed Clark for President and David H. Koch for Vice President. They received almost one million votes and were on the ballot in all 50 states plus Washington DC. Koch, a co-owner of Koch Industries, pledged part of his personal fortune to the campaign.
The Clark-Koch ticket received 921,128 votes (1.06% of the total nationwide).[10] This is the highest percentage of popular votes a Libertarian Party candidate has ever received in a presidential race to date, and remained the highest overall number of votes earned by a Libertarian candidate until the 2012 election, where Gary Johnson and James P. Gray became the first Libertarian ticket to earn more than a million votes, albeit with a lower overall vote percentage (as of writing) than Clark-Koch. His strongest support was in Alaska, where he came in third place with 11.66% of the vote, finishing ahead of independent candidate John Anderson and receiving almost half as many votes as Jimmy Carter.
Fast forward to 2012 and you will find that Koch's are still the power behind the Libertarian Party...to answer your original question, yes they are the same and "t's just like the Republicans calling themselves conservative, and Democrats, liberal. Lots of false labeling."
It would seem that the National Libertarian Party exists only to prevent the rise of a national candidate who might properly represent Libertarianism without compromise.
Thanks, I did not know that.
You say that like it was a bad thing. Ayn got a few things right but she got a lot more things wrong. In studying her life, I think she was a confused, mixed up sort. She said a lot of stupid shit too.