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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/31/12 in all areas

  1. The question as posed seems to have the implicit assumption that we have a right to whatever product we would like to have. No matter how awesome the product is, that someone has invented, we have no right to it. They have no duty nor responsibility to sell it to us and have the right to charge any price they want, that awesome product the make is theirs to do with as they please(insert normal cant kill me with it clause here). There has never been a monopoly not based on government force that has ever acted in the manner you describe that has not resulted in its own destruction. We have nothing to fear from monopolies in a laissez faire economy
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  2. Hey, that's my scenario you are tweaking! Only I know what happened! Seriously, the flaw is in "he has no reason to take John's word..." Remember, we are in a rational mini-society, in which all inhabitants presume that all men and women are rational, just like themselves. It's not a question of "never being wrong" - it is a question of always being honest - even if one is wrong, one can be honestly wrong. So yes, he would have every reason to take John's word for it, or any stranger's. As last resort, he'd allow benefit of the doubt, benevolently. I haven't read AS for many years, and I am a bit hazy on details, but my theory is that Rand was showing with Galt's Gulch, not how an ideal government worked (there wasn't one) nor what a Utopian society could look like - but how individual men can and should live together. Showing that government, even an exemplary minimal one, would be superfluous when any man could not in his wildest dreams intrude upon another's 'moral rights', his self- sovereignty. If by accident or consciously, he did - he would be the first to take responsibility, acnowledge it, and make amends. Out in 'normal' society (with its mixed rationality, and irrationality) moral men would have need of individual rights, only for their protection from the immoral, and no other reason. Rights will not make for a rationally moral society: only each man can achieve that for himself.
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