I have to say that Ive never really followed Ayn Rand because I found her to be too statist and that I have never really been a reader of novels... due to that, I have finally decided to ask... can promotion of rational self interest go against the ethics of liberty? If you believe it can, then do you think it goes too hard against the NAP? I was thinking so, because she is not promoting the nap. For example, It could be in someone's rational self interest for someone to kill me and to take all of my stuff, and so that could make people think the state is necessary because she is kind of saying that it is can be a virtue to kill people. Perhaps in her book, she says that it is not always good for liberty to act in your rational self interest... I don't really know so that is why I am asking.
Also, do you think she ever give a decent justification for herself taking welfare? If I ever take it, then my justification will be that the state exists and doesnt want other people to give or higher and that I am not the law enforcement and I am actually not doing anything destructive like many agents of the state do. In other words, I think that there are varying levels of violating the non aggression principle. I'd have to say that the combat troops and the troopers are the worst on one end and then congress, the supreme court, and the president are the worst of the other end. The janitors at the dept of education buildings don't cause destruction on the level that say, Obama does. I will stay the hell out of any govt job as long as I possibly can, but I will definitely do whatever I can to stay out of the military even if it requires to me be tortured and I will definitely not run for office. I wish I knew how to get out of the system... I wish we all knew how to get out of the system and could get out of this shit successfully.
No2statism:can promotion of rational self interest go against the ethics of liberty? If you believe it can, then do you think it goes too hard against the NAP?
No, I think Ayn accepted the NAP.
No2statism:I was thinking so, because she is not promoting the nap. For example, It could be in someone's rational self interest for someone to kill me and to take all of my stuff, and so that could make people think the state is necessary because she is kind of saying that it is can be a virtue to kill people. Perhaps in her book, she says that it is not always good for liberty to act in your rational self interest... I don't really know so that is why I am asking.
She believed in individual rights. She just chose an odd way to go about expressing it. Trying to rehabilitate 'selfishness' was, imo, a poor strategy choice. I think the word 'selfulness' might have been a better, more neutral term that still would've achieved the idea she was going for without the immediate assumption of selfish to the point of ignoring your effect upon others.
No2statism:Also, do you think she ever give a decent justification for herself taking welfare?
Well, it was the great depression, she was married, and I think it was before she'd developed a lot of her ideas. Hard to fault a younger woman at the time for not having lived up the convictions she would develop later on. That's my impression anyway.
No2statism:If I ever take it, then my justification will be that the state exists and doesnt want other people to give or higher and that I am not the law enforcement and I am actually not doing anything destructive like many agents of the state do. In other words, I think that there are varying levels of violating the non aggression principle. I'd have to say that the combat troops and the troopers are the worst on one end and then congress, the supreme court, and the president are the worst of the other end. The janitors at the dept of education buildings don't cause destruction on the level that say, Obama does. I will stay the hell out of any govt job as long as I possibly can, but I will definitely do whatever I can to stay out of the military even if it requires to me be tortured and I will definitely not run for office. I wish I knew how to get out of the system... I wish we all knew how to get out of the system and could get out of this shit successfully.
Come join a seastead ;) After I get one up and running, that is.
Also, do you think she ever give a decent justification for herself taking welfare?
I think that anyone forced into paying for something has the right to at least get what they paid for. As much as I dislike public roads, I still use them to get to and from school.
@anemone: thanks:). That makes sense. However, how could she accept the NAP if she didn't apply it completely to the state? Am I the only one who thinks that she didn't give the NAP enough value?
No, you are not. Ayn Rand supported the state because she lacked imagination - a bold claim about a novelist, eh? Seriously, she just couldn't envision a society functioning with a free market if it didn't have a monopoly on legitimate violence, (i.e. the state). I imagine one of the reasons was her distate for libertarians. She considered libertarians to be hedonists, even though libertarianism has nothing to do with hedonism. I consider this to be intellectually dishonest on her part considering her close friendship with Murray Rothbard for a long time. She must have known that Rothbard was no hedonist, yet she made this claim about libertarians nonetheless.
She was a great woman in many ways, but she was a very flawed person. Enjoy her novels, read some of her speeches and essays, and then move on to some more serious thinkers.
No2statism: @anemone: thanks:). That makes sense. However, how could she accept the NAP if she didn't apply it completely to the state? Am I the only one who thinks that she didn't give the NAP enough value?
I remember very clearly this quote from her writings where she critiqued anarchists, she said (paraphrasing) that 'anarchists want the free market while denying the very thing that makes it possible: the protection of individual rights.'
So, it would seem that Rand failed to see how individual rights could be protected in a free society. It seems she didn't see how a libertarian legal code could come about on its own. Thus, she tended towards a minarch society.
It was immersion in Ayn's writings that largely brought me to the fold of pure libertarianism, so it's all pretty fresh with me still :P
I continue to find defect with her ideas and means of expressing them, though she was certainly an effective popularizer of what she did come up with. For instance, she believed that it was the business owner who was the great hope for a free society. One can see her idolization of them in Atlas Shrugged, but that depiction belies reality.
In the modern world, it has often been the large business owner who sought to collude with government to protect their place in the market, creating a state-backed mercantilist system, economic-fascism you might say. The business-owners have not become great avatars for freedom, generally.
gotlucky: No, you are not. Ayn Rand supported the state because she lacked imagination - a bold claim about a novelist, eh? Seriously, she just couldn't envision a society functioning with a free market if it didn't have a monopoly on legitimate violence, (i.e. the state). I imagine one of the reasons was her distate for libertarians. She considered libertarians to be hedonists, even though libertarianism has nothing to do with hedonism.
No, you are not. Ayn Rand supported the state because she lacked imagination - a bold claim about a novelist, eh? Seriously, she just couldn't envision a society functioning with a free market if it didn't have a monopoly on legitimate violence, (i.e. the state). I imagine one of the reasons was her distate for libertarians. She considered libertarians to be hedonists, even though libertarianism has nothing to do with hedonism.
For the leftist libertarians it largely does. Modern libertarians are still painted with that association. I watched Libertopia recently, which features a vignette on the push for pot legalization in New Hampshire by libertarians.
gotlucky:I consider this to be intellectually dishonest on her part considering her close friendship with Murray Rothbard for a long time.
Didn't Rothbard reject the anarch label for a long time tho?
Honestly, I don't like the anarchist label either. It's been too long conflated with the leftist anarchists. Hell, anarchs started world war 1! Of course, at the time, they were leftist anarchists, more socialist and communalist than anything. Why use the same word as people who used aggressive violence for political change?
That's why I take the autarchist label instead, as referring to my own specific implementation of anarcho-capitalism. It means literally 'self-rule' rather that the 'anarch' meaning of 'no government.' Self-rule is actually closer to our true meaning, for we mean that the best government is one where we govern ourselves as sovereigns; whereas the anarch label implies that even self-government is dispensed with, leading to true chaos. The autarchist label therefore I consider the more apropos one. But unless and until such a label caught on, I understand why anyone would continue with the 'anarcho-capitalist' label.
gotlucky:She was a great woman in many ways, but she was a very flawed person. Enjoy her novels, read some of her speeches and essays, and then move on to some more serious thinkers.
Read some Rand, then graduate on to Murray N. Rothbard, there's real meat ;)
Ayn Rand on Libertarians (1981):
"A monstrous, disgusting bunch of people" and "who plagarize my ideas when it fits their purpose."
So yeah, I'm not exactly too fond of her.
Bloody hilarious.
@Anenome: Anarchists didn't really start WWI, because it would not have been a world war if Wilson who was a non-anarchist hadn't increased American involvement in foreign affairs. However, the anarchists of that time certainly were leftist and anti-NAP, so I guess that is why Rothbard changed it to "anarcho-capitalist". I need to make a better effort to not refer to myself as an "anarchist"
No2statism: @Anenome: Anarchists didn't really start WWI, because it would not have been a world war if Wilson who was a non-anarchist hadn't increased American involvement in foreign affairs. However, the anarchists of that time certainly were leftist and anti-NAP, so I guess that is why Rothbard changed it to "anarcho-capitalist". I need to make a better effort to not refer to myself as an "anarchist"
Yeah, I refuse to use the term myself. Any term that can allow you to be conflated with anti-property, anti-hierarchy, anti-market communalistic anarchists is to me a very non-precise term indeed :\ Anarcho-capitalist isn't much better, imo.
all you need to tell anyone is that you are a capitalist.
Wasn't the word 'capitalist' originally a smear term applied by the enemies of what we now call capitalism?
there are a lot of words that started off as a smear, but were later embraced.
lol, Malachi, I see what you did there.
I think he was trying to prove that labels are stupid, and I shouldn't have been so stupid as to use them so much without considering more. Malachi, no doubt in my mind, realizes that just because one isn't productive doesn't mean they're destructive, of course... I don't consider people or even corporations who pay negative taxes to be as destructive as Obama and Congress are. I guess we can all agree that "Republican Citizenship is almost as bad as, if not worse than, being a Subject under a Monarch, and that abolition of legislated force would be best".
Malachi:Why dont we refer to people who embrace the doctrine and practice of catallacty as "producers" or "the production class"?
A 'productionist'? I like it.
And instead of 'anarcho' meant to mean a system of self-organization but which is often taken to mean something else, perhaps we can substitute in 'ad hoc' which actually does mean spontaneous self-organization, turning 'anarcho-capitalist' into ad hoc-productionist.
Personally, I like the term "Rothbardian." Either that, or Market Anarchist. I think the term "capitalist" has become corrupted by people thinking that capitalism is corporatism, based on how the far-left and far-right advertises anti-capitalism by blaming it for things that it was never responsable. And Voluntaryism is too liable to be labelled through much more ridiculous accusations.