I'm glad. :excited:

 

YEAH,,,,,that's definitely something to be proud of.

 

So that's all you have got?

Bush had flaws and in 4 years you guys come up with nothing to do better than a Black non-christian Muslim without a birth certificate bad grades in college and a poor neighborhood organizer.

Is that all you can say for your party?

OR what does that say about your party?

 

Wow.

I love the United States. I love life. I love living here.

If you cannot say that, then perhaps it is time for a reassessment of your hopes and beliefs.

No one and nothing on this earth is going to bring happiness to you. Happiness is something that you either have, or not, when you awaken each morning and see yourself in the mirror.

Back to the United States and your odd antipathy toward your only home.

I would suggest that you are even more ripe for conversion than my other obstinate and disconsolate friend, Stumbler.

I would suggest that if you want to understand the downward spiral in which you find yourself, you should forget everything you have heard about how wrong Ayn Rand is, and pick up Atlas Shrugged, as stodgy and stilted and poorly written as it is, and force yourself to read it.

And like Stumbler, you are now going to tell me to STFU.

Happy Easter.

 

I do not go around telling people to STFU. People, including stumbler, tell me that when they cannot answer my arguments.

I like to study different points of view, but Ayn Rand has no insights, no facts, just normative statements that she presents as the Objective truth. She was a pompous bore, whose popularity says bad things about the political culture in the Untied States. She has little support in more enlightened and civilized countries.

 

Yeah, reading Atlas Shrugged is probably all Ace needs to destroy all the rest of his working brain cells, if any.

 

Now wait a minute here,,,how did I get put in the middle of ''this'' conversation..

(I wont read Atlas Shrugged,,I'd rather watch the movie.)

 

You are quite right, Atlas Shrugged is a poorly written story. Worse however, is the philosophy therein.

 

I did not suggest that DL read the book for solutions to the problems in the United States.

The book's answers probably could not have worked when Ayn Rand wrote it, so they do not have a prayer today.

I suggested the book to DL because it portrays societal collapse in such a way as to parallel the collapse that we are now experiencing. The book does not offer any applicable answers. It offers perspective.

Anyone who has actually read the book would know that.

 

it feels like inflation

 

I usually enjoy investigating different points of view. I have read Mein Kampf, and think Adolf Hitler had valid insights into human nature. I have taken a seminar offered by the American Communist Party on Das Kapital, and think Karl Marx had valid insights into the workings of laissez faire capitalism.

Nevertheless, what I look for are facts and insights. One does not get this in Ayn Rand. One gets pompous value assertions that she mistakes for the Absolute Truth.

I just read her essay on Racism in The Virtue of Selfishness. She starts out by condemning racism, claiming that it is a crude form of collectivism, and so on. Then she concludes by arguing against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was pending at the time. Huh? How does that follow?

I have read good arguments against the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Some of it seems sadly prophetic. Nevertheless, Rand's essay on racism was little more than an effort using a lot of big words to impress high school students that were living against their means intellectually.

 

Anyone who has actually read the book would know that is a hamfisted disaster which sputters on for 1000 pages, repeating every ten or so words that greed is good and socialists are blood suckers. In place of subtlety it is a hammer. In place of a plot, it is mere preaching.

The world is a more nuanced place than Ayn Rand understood, and, apparently, than you understand. There are indeed socialist economies which are failing, but then, the strongest economies in the world also happen to be socialist. That is to say: A country which adopts a communal attitude is no more doomed to fail than a country which adopts an individualistic attitude is destined to succeed. There are a thousand issues which come into play to determine a countries economic success, issues which will not be touched upon here, and issues which go far beyond "looters" and "thinkers." There is no parallel between what Rand wrote and current circumstances. Any perception you have of Rand's prophetic powers is simply wishful thinking.

Beyond any of this, Rand's philosophy attempts to prop up the barons and businessmen of the world as necessary, acting as if the rich abandon us, we shall all be doomed. Reality disagrees. Companies shuffle management and Ceo's often, with little perceivable problem. Now find me a company which can survive while constantly replacing its, how did Rand say, "thoughtless workers"? The few do not hold up the many; the many hold up the few and always have. Were Rand not such a child of philosophy, she would understand this.

Shall I even go into her classification of the poor as "free-loaders" and "looters" when she never touches on how exactly her copper and oil baron's accumulate their wealth and power? How she gives the credit of work which requires ten-thousand men to the single man at the top? Should this man who makes his fortune off the backs of so many not be refereed to as the "free-loader," the "looter"? Why is it that when the poor get off good on the rich, it is vampirism, yet, when the rich get off good on the poor, it is economic success? This is the essence of this woman's idiocy. And the blunted blandness of her mind. I understand these are difficult questions, which could be answered in a hundred ways, yet she did not attempt even to ask them in one way. She is a single thought crashing against a single and solid wall. A humorless gas-bag of proud thoughtlessness.

Let us then digress into Rand's delusion of the "thinker" and the "successful" being one in the same. As if those at the very top are always, or even often, responsible for a companies wealth of ideas. As if they do not merely pay for the ideas of others. This is not to say that the talented are never rewarded for their talent. But it is a sin to pretend that the "free market" does not often find the greedy merely preying on the "thinker." How does Rand deal with this? The same way Rand deals with all nuance I suppose -- by ignoring it.

Let us crawl further down the rabbit hole and ask why Atlas is portrayed by the wealthy at all? For example, Rand imagines a world in which all the "thinkers," all the, how should one say, "managers," abandon the world and it, in turn, collapses. But would the world not also collapse if there were no one left for the managers to manage? Would the world not collapse if all the "thoughtless workers" merely vanished to the pitifully named "Atlantis"? If so, who is important after all? Why ask, "Who is John Galt," when one could easily ask the more profound question, "Who is Atlas?" Who is holding up the world? A useful book would seek to answer those sorts of questions. A useful book would at least ask them.

The story is fallacious. Absurd. Repetitive. And, above all else, simply uninteresting. You should not wish it upon anyone. And, if you insist on wishing it upon everyone; at least do so for the comedic value of watching a woman scream the same thought a thousand different ways, rather than pretending it hides some secret vision of reality.

 

The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult

by Murray N. Rothbard

not only was the Rand cult explicitly atheist, anti-religious, and an extoller of Reason; 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.

Virtually every one of its members entered the cult through reading Rand’s lengthy novel Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in late 1957, a few months before the organized cult came into being. Entering the movement through a novel meant that despite repeated obeisances to Reason, febrile emotion was the driving force behind the acolyte’s conversion...

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. Since most neophyte Randians were both young and relatively ignorant, a careful channeling of their reading insured that they would remain ignorant of non- or anti-Randian ideas...

after the titanic Rand-Branden split in late 1968...

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...

Another method was to keep the members, as far as possible, in a state of fevered emotion through continual re-readings of Atlas. Shortly after Atlas was published, one high-ranking cult leader chided me for only having read Atlas once. "It’s about time for you to start reading it again," he admonished. "I have already read Atlas thirty-five times."...

The Biblical nature of Atlas for many Randians is illustrated by the wedding of a Randian couple that took place in New York. At the ceremony, the couple pledged their joint devotion and fealty to Ayn Rand, and then supplemented it by opening Atlas – perhaps at random – to read aloud a passage from the sacred text...

The psychological hold that the cult held on the members may be illustrated by the case of 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.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html

 

Please explain to me in your own words in a comment that fits on one computer screen what I would gain from the reading of Atlas Shrugged.

 

If Ayn Rand was alive today she would argue that our "societal collapse" has been caused by insufficient rewards to the owners of capital. Since 1980 real after tax income for the richest one percent of the country has increased dramatically, while for 80 percent of the country it has lagged behind.

http://investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=971&mn=389436&pt=msg&mid=10153698

 

I would argue that a good book to read in order to discover what has happened to the United States since 1980 is The Communist Manifesto. Marx made mistakes. Some of his ideas, like dialectical materialism, are sheer mythology. I do not believe he would have endorsed the Communist dictatorships that ruled in his name during the twentieth century. It has to be said that he did inspire them.

Nevertheless, he had valid insights into the workings of laissez faire capitalism.
Fortunately, most of his leading ideas are explained in The Communist Manifesto. This is short enough as to be read in a single sitting.

Marx argued that the main contradiction of capitalism is that productivity increases faster than wages. Consequently employees spend their days making and selling goods they cannot afford. When these accumulate a crisis of over production ensues, leading to layoffs. These layoffs in turn make it even more difficult for manufacturers to sell unsold inventories.

Marx predicted increasingly destructive economic downturns. These happened following the publication of The Communist Manifesto, which was first published in 1848.

One can argue, and I would argue that The Communist Manifesto predicted the Great Depression.

Marx's most critical mistake was to assume that those losing ground economically due to the workings of capitalism would become left wing activists. If they belong to the dominant race or ethnicity they are more likely to be drawn to some form of right wing populism.

The economic policies of John Maynard Keynes raise the wages of most employees beyond what employers would need to pay them through the law of supply and demand by laws protecting labor unions, requiring minimum wages, and various transfer payments to most Americans paid for by progressive taxation.

Consequently, recessions became less severe after the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, until the Republican Party began to reverse Keynesian economic policies after Ronald Reagan's election in 1980. Now, economic downturns are once again becoming more destructive.

 

Excellent analysis and I would only add we also stand as witnesses to the recent economic collapse caused in no small part to Alan Greenspan believing Ayn Rand's bullshit.

 

The Obama Oil Boom (CHART)

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/04/the-obama-oil-boom-chart.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

 

Yep and in about a week we will get first Qtr. earnings for the oil companies and then lets see whats up...can not lie when reporting....