Reidy

1. You do not define "culturally backward." 2. Whatever the expression means, you do not present an argument that it applies to Objectivism (or for that matter, to Objectivists who supported Romney). So why some were willing to overlook Romney's position on abortion? I think one reason is that they see it as a bumper-sticker issue - one that's good for firing up the hard core and shaking money out of them but which has no prospect of enactment. In the 50s and 60s Taft-Hartley repeal was such an issue for the Democrats. Proposed constitutional amendments are often of this nature: the ERA (after the first year or two), abortion, flag-burning, same-sex marriage and messing with the first amendment would all be cases in point. Thus a lot of people, including Objectivists, were able to overcome their dislike of Romney's position on abortion because they figured nothing would come of it.

Addendum: Eric Mack, Objectivist academic, has co-written a book about Locke. (To anticipate the inevitable objections that Mack is not an Objectivist, I say: OK, have it your way.)

Yes, she said that Aristotle was her only philosophical influence, but that doesn't prove that he was. John Locke's theory of rights seems to have been a big influence, as it was on the American founders. His Second Treatise, available in various editions, is his most important political work. George Smith, famous libertarian scholar, has an audiobook about it.

Your second and third points about Obama are easily seen to be inaccurate. He talks capitalism, with frequent mention of free markets, while practicing statism. Same-sex marriage, halving the deficit, closing Guantanamo and keeping federal hands off marijuana in the states that have allowed it, are all examples of the dreaded flip-flop.

Not reading Burns at the moment, but I learned a lot from her. One interesting revelation is that Rand was politically active, and building a reputation, as early as the 1930s. Burns is more academic than Heller and less personal. TAS had some remarks on Romney's 47%: http://www.atlassociety.org/ele/romney-47-percent.

"Universe" is a name, not a concept. No problem here. Addendum to #6: these considerations show that we need to observe more than one living organism to have the concept, not that we need to observe living organisms on more than one planet.

What's your evidence for all this? Do you have formal studies to back you up? Professionals who make such claims (including Freud and Branden) say they reach their conclusions from on-the-job therapeutic observation. This has problems of its own, but it's better than nothing. As far as I can see it's better than you've given us.

1. "[T]here is never only one of any type of thing" is a tautology. You need at least two instances to form a concept. Rand's treatment of concepts in ITOE rests explicitly on this insight. 2. Rand never said there is no life outside of earth. According to the Heller biography, she thought she saw a UFO in the 40s. More the the point, she never denied it in her published writings. 3. This is a scientific, not a metaphysical question. Show me such organisms and we'll go from there.

#1 and the linked-to blog read like what NB was saying in the mid-60s. I don't know if he'd endorse it today or not. People have claimed that Freud overgeneralized from his own personality and familial/social milieu to all of human nature. Rand and Branden may have done the same.

Cato has had a fair amount to say about this (though I haven't read it): http://www.cato.org/search_results.php?q=miliary+spending&site=cato_all&client=cato-org&filter=p&lr=lang_en&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=cato-org&proxyreload=1&getfields=summary.

Rand and Peikoff considered Smith's ethical theory inimical (though I don't know much about it); he was in the last edition of the "Horror File" in The Objectivist. His better-known economics expressly refused to mount an ethical defense of capitalism. The most famous quote from him is something to the effect that free markets are workable but, unfortunately, immoral - not throught the benevolence of the butched and baker... or something to that effect. Hume also had some good ideas about economics.

David Hume and Adam Smith were at U. Edinburgh. That would make it Objectivism-unfriendly territory.

Nobody can charge anything he wants for anything. As the price moves up, people buy less; as it moves down, they buy more. Economics calls this elasticity of demand. People can't quit using the roads altogether when driving becomes more expensive, but they have plenty of choices as to how often they drive and how far, how many passengers ride in a single car (or bus or what have you), whether to go out to shop or order home delivery and so on. In the longer run they have choices as to which car to buy, how many cars, how long to keep them and where to live and work. We've already seen this in practice when the price of gasoline fluctuates. Sellers try to maximize revenues (units sold X unit price). To this end they try to hit the optimum price; below this, they sell more units but bring in less money. Above it, they bring in more per sale, but less in total. The optimum price is not the highest price.

The government would get it initially. They could use it to pay down their debt, or they could give it back to individual members of the public, perhaps in proportion to the taxes each had paid.

They would be sold off. Auction would be best, as honest auctions would prevent sweetheart deals such as happened in Russia and China.

I don't have an exact citation, but I think it comes from either BB's account (The Passion of Ayn Rand) or NB's (Judgement Day).

The Breaking Bad scene lasts less than two minutes, and it's full of vivid, concrete imagery and of references to the story in which it appears. The character is expressing not ideas but simple emotions familiar to everybody. None of this is true of the speeches as Rand wrote them. The movie didn't convince me, as the book did, that Francisco's speech leads up to Hank's, and so the viewer is less willing to sit still for Francisco in hopes of picking up some plot point. They were more successful at making Hank's speech part of the story line. Just the same I think the running time was just about right in both cases and that more talk would have put moviegoers off.

Your complaints about James and Lillian and about Francisco's speech are simply ways of pointing out (altogether accurately) that the moviemakers took a novel and turned it into a movie. On the screen you simply don't have time for the detail and buildup a novel can provide. The ideal solution is to invent the story for the screen in the first place, but this wasn't an option here.

Once in a while we hear stories about proactive, preventive force, such as wives killing husbands who beat them up. I think this could be at least excused, though maybe not justified, though it isn't against an immediate attacker.

What you describe in #6 is the pattern of over half a century. Most people will read pieces like this and figure that Rand is wrong. A few will follow up and learn better. Johnson is just another iteration of what's been going on since the Eisenhower administration.

PS: if nature forces us to behave in ways Rand says we shouldn't, there wouldn't be any point to mounting a critique of her advice.

On the strength of the first few sentences of each of the first two links, I can make a few points, the first of which is that the earlier posters are right: you needn't worry. Rand was talking about learned, chosen behavior specific to rational beings, not instinctive (to use a dangerous term) behavior of non-rational species. What goes for one does not go for the other. If one of us is talking about chess and the other is talking about banking, and we both use the word "check," you can be confident that we aren't talking about the same object. So with "selfish" or "altruistic" behavior. The articles conflate altruism with cooperation or good will. Rand dealt with that one long before evolutionary biology became middlebrow trendy. Rand did not say that human nature is naturally selfish. She said that we have to identify the selfish thing to do and commit to it deliberately, all by a voluntary process. To say that it comes naturally is a deterministic position that would have been odious to her. The standard way of putting across this bit of misinformation used to be to call her a Hobbesian.

Craig24: where did you get the Rand quote in your signature? I've never seen it, and it doesn't look stylistically like something she'd say.

Var - Your presumptuous psychological pronouncements about Rand and me suggest that you don't have a lot of confidence in your case. If you say that Rand would have opposed fracking you put yourself in the position of having why she wrote a hero (Ellis Wyatt) who made the process work.

Tell it to Yoko Ono. The best piece I've seen on the subject is Kevin Williamson's. He makes the point, among many others, that lots of locales, including the one in Gasland, have naturally flammable water from underground methane, and people have known about them since ancient times. Fracking has nothing to do with it. What has this to do with collectivism anyway? It's a political or ethical theory, not a gas-extraction technology.