amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
Payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, sin taxes, tariffs. Also, income tax rates take effect before the poverty line, not after.
Nonsensical argument.
What is your view of Libertarianism and Ayn Rand?
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Murky
Deity
How can private ownership protect the environment if all private property is owned by those who want to exploit it to make money?
There are plenty of people who do that - they make a few million, then retire early and spend their mornings playing golf. The economy loses some of its best managers, and transformative economic change is reduced because brilliance is discouraged.
It should be given a good chance and will almost certainly work - but if it doesn't, then a hard choice has to be made between introducing some kind of welfare, or having starving orphans on the streets and other terrible things. Personally I would take the welfare option, but there are different opinions about it.
[But that's if private charity doesn't work, it has a history of working quite well.]
A lot of people [incorrectly] define Objectivism almost entirely by this concept of an elite. The purpose of Objectivism is rationality and freedom - those who want to join the "elite" have no automatic right whatsoever to free education or healthcare at the expense of wider society. If it really means so much to them to join the elite, let them carry out their own darn struggle and get there on their own ability. I don't think that people who pine to be in an elite group are owed anything by me or others.
Murky said:
This goes back to the externality problem which is a really complicated area of economics. It's possible that market forces will be sufficient to protect the environment - for example, the environmental damage in the Soviet Union was far higher than the damage in the developed West.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
How markets can limit externalities, versus how regulations can do it, is a raging debate with no simple answers. Also, neither side agrees with the other, like much on the capitalism/socialism debate, people just seem to have a "faith" disposition which makes their minds up for them in advance.
HannibalBarka
We are Free
If regulation about "Water usage" do not suits you, no body is forcing you to do business in that area neither!
In your different posts, you seem actually to think that regualtion is bad unless it is considered necessary by the "people", how is that different than what is done today in liberal democracies?
I think we may be comparing apples to oranges here.
The limited liability concept is used largely for forming corporations [or in England, often called "joint stock companies"]. When a group of businessmen and investors want to form a company together, they create a legal entity which issues shares and people buy the shares in order to own a part of the company. The money paid for the shares is used as the assets of the company.
This is an extremely effective method of voluntary co-operation between people. However, people can form other types of companies [in UK, these are called "partnerships" or "sole proprieters"] which may not have any limited liability.
So I can go into business, alone or with partners, and I don't have to be a limited liability company if I don't want to. So it really is a free choice.
As for other types of regulations, these are often legally binding. There is no choice - meaning there is no alternative [within the national borders].
So there is a difference between non-voluntary and voluntary regulations that is more than just "you can go away if you don't like it" and is really more "you can do pretty much the same thing, a different way, if you don't like it".
Also, self-styled "left libertarians" seem to express a dislike of Corporations - which is what I think this may be partly about.
HannibalBarka
We are Free
OK, fair enough. You are more pragmatic than objectivist though, meaning that you again think regulation is necessary when people think it is
My point wasn't about calling it an elite or what ever, but about how to solve the problem of making the system closed. Taxes and their use to provide free education and minimum access to basic things are also there to give everyone a chance to get to the Elite, otherwise the system is closed and the freedom of having a better life is just a dream. My question is therefore isn't an objective society demmed to end being a closed society where the rich tranfer their wealth and privelege to their kids as it was the case in pre Revolution France?
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
Ayn Rand, do you believe food producers should be able to walk away from regulations that make them put the ingredients which are actually in the product on the label?
There's an Orange Juice I know which puts: "100% Orange Juice" on the package. Which is true, since the pack does contain nothing but Orange Juice, because that's what they called the product. However on the ingredient label you can read it contains about 10% "juice from oranges". Is your opinion that the food producer should be free to put "100% juice from oranges" on their package when it's just 10%?
Note that this is a pretty harmless example, I didn't want an emotional example where harm is involved, since I am interested in the principle of the matter, not the effects.
There's an Orange Juice I know which puts: "100% Orange Juice" on the package. Which is true, since the pack does contain nothing but Orange Juice, because that's what they called the product. However on the ingredient label you can read it contains about 10% "juice from oranges". Is your opinion that the food producer should be free to put "100% juice from oranges" on their package when it's just 10%?
Note that this is a pretty harmless example, I didn't want an emotional example where harm is involved, since I am interested in the principle of the matter, not the effects.
OK, fair enough. You are more pragmatic than objectivist though, meaning that you again think regulation is necessary when people think it is
True to a certain extent
With ideas like Objectivism, it would be good to try them but there is a responsibility that if they don't work, you have to accept it and self-correct rather than denying it while other people suffer for no reason. Any transition to a new type of society should IMO be gradual and built upon experience and moderation.A systemic failure like that, where the elite became a closed system, would only occur if the natural forces pushing for elite privilege were stronger than the other forces in society pushing to keep the whole system open. So there is a natural tendency for that to happen in any society, but if a society is diverse, free and open then in theory there should be enough feedback to prevent that happening. However, it may not be a bad thing if it did happen - I wouldn't pre-judge what kind of society is desirable in that respect. For example, if a society were truly free, you would expect the most able people to get to the top and stay there [for the most part]. People who constantly did the wrong thing would also stay on the bottom of society - in France, I believe this system was maintained largely by forceful coercion and religious ignorance, neither of which are suited to Objectivism.
ZiggyStardust said:
What a strange company - but good of you to choose a non-emotive example.
I think there are different models for evaluating these kind of scenarios and how to deal with them. I'm no expert on this area, but there are some good free market arguments I've heard about market self-regulation and the role of the courts in these kind of disputes.
As for the "principle" I'm not sure if this wider area can be condensed down into a single principle or what it would be. If they have deceived people into buying a falsely described product, then in theory you would take them to court and sue them [or write to a consumer group or newspaper, who might do it for you etc].
So should they be allowed to do it? I don't think so, although I don't fully understand the issue involved - and I think that resolution of problems like this should be carried out between individuals, companies and courts as that promotes freedom better than having government being able to call all the shots.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I agree that it's entirely incorrect to view Rand as taking elitism as her goal, but I think that you're inaccurately downplaying the role of the elite in her hypothetical Objectivist society. As you say, her primary goal was freedom, which she conceived of as the freedom to pursue a life of rational creativity, and the emergence of an elite is a consequence of her belief that only a minority of the population will be capable of exercising that freedom to its fullest. However, she didn't simply treat this as a side-effect, something which would occur passively, but understood that such an elite would in turn act upon the social structure from which it emerged, that it would enter into a reciprocal relationship with that structure. Given her understanding that the elite was defined by its exceptional ability to follow its rational self-interest, it follows that the elite would restructure society in such a manner as to facilitate the elite (is that not the entire point of "Going Galt"?), and even if they do this in an utterly scrupulous manner- rejecting cronyism and nepotism, ensuring social mobility, and so on- it still leaves a very definite system of hegemony and subalternity. The Galts of the world emerge as a ruling class as surely as in any Marxist conception of capitalism, simply a ruling class that maintains control purely through ideological hegemony.
Edit: And I should make clear, that last point isn't meant to be some "Ha ha I'm right anyway" thing. Rand clearly envisions a relationship of dependence between the 1% and the 99% (to use the barely accurate but nonetheless popular labels), in at least very broadly the same way that Marx did. She just regards this dependence as natural and eternal rather than socially constructed and historically specific, and that was in the long-term interest of the masses not to reject this relationship, but to acknowledge and accept it.
True to a certain extent
I'm curious, would there be election during that transition? Would a non-objectivist party be allowed to run?
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
The problem here is, the consumer would not be any the wiser if there is no one who actually checks the products or the food producer is not forced to display the correct ingredients. The consumer is too busy with his job to do tests, the company itself won't do this and it's not the court's job either.
So if we agree to have regulations that the ingredients need to be displayed, who's job is it to test the validity of labels? You mentioned a "consumer group". Who finances the consumer group?
I just don't buy them, because obfuscation is cheaper than truth.
My very best example of the failure of the free market system with food is a hilarious debate I had with a libertarian. He thought Cheerios were healthy, because (obviously) Cheerios advertising had convinced him of that. I merely needed to point to the government-mandated food label to prove him wrong.
This is in a regulated system that somewhat follows free market principles (other companies are motivated to be 'more healthy' than Cheerios), and he was still casually deceived by corporate executives who're well-compensated for fooling him. The overwhelming simplicity by which the presence of a regulation defeated his ignorance was (to me) very convincing that his initial premises were incorrect.
Murky
Deity
Have you thought about a scenario where the government decided to sell all public lands to private companies or individuals?
Let's see.
A big oil company would buy up ANWR so they can drill there unregulated. Say goodbye to the pristine wildlife sanctuaries across the nation.
Natural gas Fracking would contaminate the drinker water because, unregulated, it would have no safeguards in place.
A mining company would buy up the Grand Canyon National Park so they can get to the Uranium.
Public Parks would probably be bought up by Fast-Food companies or other industries.
I appreciate your effort of making a joke, but I was expecting a genuine answer - which I have even made explicitly clear before - and you didn't give it. That's disappointing.@Leoreth - re-read my answer, maybe with a sense of humour
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
This seems a bit disingenuous to me as nobody succeeds completely on their own.
Interesting points, well put. Rand's characters are very much an "accidental elite" - particularly in the social meaning of the term. As you say:
Traitorfish said:
Possibly I am - but it is not intended. All the characters in Rand's books relate primarily to objects and processes, rather than people. Their "dominance" is a dominance of reality, rather than of society. They want, more than anything, to create better steel, better railroads, better architecture.
They do sometimes employ tens or hundreds of thousands of people - but they are somewhat indifferent. They employ on a technocratic basis, not because they desire social power over others. The attitude is "I'm making the best steel, so of course people want to come work for me, and I need workers, so of course I'm happy to take them".
That's where the perception gap begins - Rand's characters "accidentally" fall into the role of social elite, but they are really more like big kids playing with their favourite toys. If you read Atlas Shrugs, Dagny just wants to build a gorram railroad and wishes everyone would get out of her way. Which leads onto this:
Traitorfish said:
Which is a technocratic attitude to the complex problems of society - it can be summarised as "these people are getting in the way, get them out of the way - it doesn't matter how, just somehow. Then we can get back to making steel, building railroads, running banks".
So this is a Worldview which hardly relates to society at all. "Freedom" [for this "elite"] can in some sense be understood as "get these irritating people out of the way - we is trying to build a railroad here!"
Traitorfish said:
Here I disagree with you - if the elite is small, that is a property of reality. Rand had no particular desire to keep the elite few in number, it is not her belief that a small elite is necessary or desirable. In fact, she probably didn't much notice or care about its size.
Traitorfish said:
But this action-reaction pattern I think is largely unconscious and unwilled by either the elite or wider society. It stems largely from unintended consequences [Rearden's new steel, for example, puts other factories out of business] which are perceived in two different ways. The resulting attempts of one side to correct the mistakes are seen as flawed by the other side, leading to the "reciprocal relationship with that structure" as you describe it.
The means of resolution [Objectivism] is to restore freedom - ie, to remove the perceived obstacle, which is the attempts by "society" to impose controls, corrections, taxes etc. As I mentioned, this is a "technocratic" response - there is an obstacle on the track ahead [social feedback] so you get rid of the obstacle - and you do that by an ideology that increases freedom [and rationality].
So no, that is not the purpose of going Galt - this elite have no desire to be an elite as such, they default into the position by virtue of their ability.
The reason they go Galt is simple - they want to play at making railroads, running banks, building steel mills and so on, and they don't care about the social power they have or how much better off they are than everybody else. They don't want bribes or power [Rand never mentions the concept "power" except to dismiss it as beneath contempt]. So they "go Galt" for one reason only - to carrry on living their lives as they originally intended, without being punished for doing a good job.
But your post is fascinating - it shows with clarity the enormous perception gap that exists between Objectivists and many others in society, and the interconnected feedback of unintentional and misunderstood consequences and perceptions that can occur in the system. I thank you for making it
[Also, your final point about Galts reigning through ideological hegemony - the whole point is they don't want to rule, but have simply turned to ideology to restore the original conditions that allowed them to "accidentally rule" - namely the freedom to be technocratically brilliant]
Crezth
i knew you were a real man of the left
Isn't that kind of a strawman because the elite in Atlas Shrugged are absurdly so? I mean, the Galt Engine is complete science fiction. Pure and utter trash. Why couldn't she illustrate her point with a more believable premise?
Likewise, the people "getting in the way" of the elite rarely do so because they religiously believe in Das Kollective. And, sometimes, those people are also brilliant entrepreneurs. I mean, look at Warren Buffet. How are we supposed to apply her theories to a society that works much differently than she envisioned it? AS spoiler ahead:
Likewise, the people "getting in the way" of the elite rarely do so because they religiously believe in Das Kollective. And, sometimes, those people are also brilliant entrepreneurs. I mean, look at Warren Buffet. How are we supposed to apply her theories to a society that works much differently than she envisioned it? AS spoiler ahead:
Spoiler :
The point is that people will not form the companies without the protections. And so capitalism cannot take root without the government.
You are arguing for a capitalism without government, when there is no such thing as capitalism without government.
What makes you think that the golf playing is a function of taxes and not a function of having enough stashed away to be able to play golf for the rest of one's life? If anything, taxes delay the golf playing days, keeping your supermen making brilliant business decisions a bit longer before the golf playing days arrive.
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