Craig24

This is false. The qua man standard, which is to say, reason, is precisely what guarantees that conflict will not exist between individuals. Conflict is the result of the initiation of force, which is irrational (see above regarding the impossibility of prudent predation); with reason, force is not initiated, so no conflict can exist. Rationality and initiating force are mutually exclusive.

In this example, you have the cleverness of one mind - yours - on your side, while your enemies have the minds of an entire civilization on theirs to stop you. You're not the only one who's prudent; suppose they put in place measures to detect you of which you were unaware. Waging a war of one against all is not prudent. And it is a war. By choosing a path of destruction, you have taken a risk you did not need to take - particularly considering that your cleverness could have applied productively, i.e. in a manner that does not result in conflict among men. Prudent predation is an oxymoron.


This does not answer the question at all. The question was how do you know what your lifetime indirect losses are from the loss of productive activity that the corporation cannot now undertake because you stole its $1 million? Not only can't you answer that question (i.e. your destruction was indiscriminant, the long-range effects of which are unpredictable), but your answer shows that you do not understand the way in which a free society benefits all men. Productivity and trade is not a zero sum proposition. There is no such thing as a benign confiscation of wealth, because it separates the wealth from the mind capable of making use of it in the most productive way, the results of which spread incalcuable benefits throughout the whole society. The loss for you is incalcuable, your risk unquantified, and your decision to steal irrational. The comparison with productive companies engaged in competition is improper, because productive competition entails the creation of wealth, not its destruction. More competition in the form of increased productivity can never be dangerous to anyone. The same is not true of looting.


His decision is irrational because he was unable to calculate its long-term costs. He will have a million dollars, but he might not have access to the medical treatment that wasn't invented because the $1 million for its development was stolen by him, or a longer chain of causes and effects from his decision resulted in the same. Nor do the effects end there; the nature of human knowledge means that no one else will receive the lifesaving treatment, which costs the lives of other creative men that would have made discoveries and contributed to his life in other ways, and so on.


If two people exist by trade, they each benefit from the value of each others' productive work. If only one produces and the other loots, neither will obtain the benefits of the looter's productive potential. This is why Gary has to argue that some are simply better at looting while others are better at producing. But this defies the facts of man's rational mind. There is no evidence that a mind capable of the complex calculus necessary to justify looting as a rational decision is any better at looting than at production, and certainly not sufficiently so to justify the incalculable losses the looter suffers.

For the love of Peikoff, not this argument again. Existence/non-existence is indeed the fundamental alternative, but to what does it pertain? Existence qua man means more than just physical existence (morgue avoidance) because there is more to man than just a body. It also includes, for man, the existence of his rational mind. You cannot destroy that mind AND achieve greater longevity, because longevity necessarily entails the existence of the mind. That fact is glossed over in insisting that existence of the body is sufficient to say that one exists. If the mind goes out of existence as a consequence of your scheme to continue to exist, you have NOT succeeded. You might as well be cremated and say that because your ashes exist, you still exist. The point being that you cannot analyze the question without focusing on what all is necessary for man to exist. When you notice that his needs include more than just physical needs, it should be apparent that your idea of man's survival is flawed. Survival of what? Of the ashes? No. Of the body? No. Of the body and the mind. Ah, there's the answer and the reason why the fundamental alternative leads directly to flourishing and not mere physical survival.

Of course, man must choose to live as man by choice. That choice is a primary. You may, if you choose, dismiss your mind and attempt to exist as an animal only - or as ashes, for that matter. There are no Kantian categorical imperatives here, nothing proving that you must choose to live as man. But then, you would have no need of ethics. Your inquiry would then be pointless, so it's kind of assumed, perhaps mistakenly, that in asking the question you see that you have already chosen survival qua man as your standard. I think that point should be clarified before proceeding further. If you hold survival qua man as your standard, then your inquiry is substantive, but there's your answer; if not, the inquiry is pointless anyway, so why press the matter?

Grand jury decision is in. No indictment, obviously.

As the overwhelming evidence confirming the cop's innocence was being released (including testimony from the people who originally talked to the media, squarely contradicting statements the media has accepted unquestioningly and presented as facts), the new round of riots looted and burned down the same businesses that were rebuilt and restocked after being destroyed three months ago.

This time, everyone knew exactly what was coming, authorities on all levels had weeks to prepare, and actually had the luxury to choose the time the riots would start. And yet, they still chose not to respond with the level of force necessary to protect private property. Once again, they allowed it to happen, and only arrested a small portion of the many hundreds of people involved in the looting and violence.

And that makes sense, of course, in a democracy. As long as the voices demanding restraint in the fact of lawlessness are louder than the voices demanding the use of proportional force, unchecked lawlessness is what you're going to get.

It is immoral to initiate force for the reason given in the Ayn Rand quotes given earlier. If you want to act like an uncivilized aggressor who decides to deal in threats, force, fraud, etc., then any rational man has the option of treating you in kind -- i.e. we would thereby gain the choice of your premises and can use force to restrain you. So, from the purely egoistic stance, do you want to trade value for value in economic exchange, or do you want to be treated as a brute who, by right, could be forced to do anything by your own premises?

It is not altruism that is at work in Rand's formulation, but rather egoism, that a rational man would not want to exchange punches in order to gain a value, because then he could have much greater force acted against him by right.

Therefore to the rational man, force can only be used to deal with force, and that if the brute wants to use force as his means of "exchange" then the rest of us could comply at any time and take the brute out with force, either by restraining him or by killing him. If that is the terms under which you want to live, then tell us your real name and your address so we can send the police your way.

It all depends on your definition of potential, but the way I most often hear that word used, it just means a chance or possibility that something will happen or exist in the future. And yeah, last I checked, a fetus does have a chance to turn into a person. 
 
But, like Ayn Rand explained, potential does not equal actual. The reason why babies have rights is not because they have a chance to turn into a person, it's because they are a person: they don't just have potential for a rational capacity, they possess a rational capacity (which is what defines a person <=> rights possessing entity).
 
To easily understand the difference between potential and capacity, picture raw clay vs. a vessel made of clay. Raw clay doesn't have the capacity to hold rain water, but it has the potential to become a vessel with the capacity to hold rain water (I believe this use, in Latin, is actually the origin of the word "capacity"). 
 
An empty vessel (and boy there are many, young and old alike:) ) still has the capacity to hold water, and therefor fits a category defined by that trait, whereas clay does not.

Indeed. What the OP's question dodges (among other things) is the nature of dictatorship; it's not the product of a single charismatic leader or even a cabal of thugs but rather a general populace that has morally and philosophically degenerated. The actual role of the dictator is to serve as a rallying point and enabler for the majority's evil impulses and that is what makes him interchangeable as long as there is someone around who is charismatic and vicious enough to play the part.

Hence, the effective prevention of a fascist Germany would necessitate the murder of millions of Germans instead of one.

The attack on corporate personhood only make sense from the collectivist mindset, it is a collectivist critique.

A collective is not merely a group of individuals. Where collectivism goes wrong as a theory is its reification of the group as a new entity whose welfare is considered as separate, more real or more important than any individual comprising it. It is the hierarchical priority of the group over the individual that leads to poisonous and destructive consequences. In the collectivist imagination, some novel and foreign element comes into existence upon incorporation, something inhuman and wicked. This is every bit as stupid and superstitious as anything some tongue-speaking, snake-handling evangelical voodoo practitioner could ever say.

A corporation is an instrument that makes it possible to conduct business without having to draw up contracts acknowledging each individual involved with the business. Whenever a corporation acts or speaks, it is still the action of one or more individuals. It is not possible to restrict a corporation's speech without restricting some individual's speech.

Title was theirs, not mine. As with my other letters, I don't do these to be some great work of writing. I just like to get a strong statement of some basics out there to oppose the crap.
___

Some letters contain philosophical disasters of such epic proportions that my respect for the greatness of man inspires me to spend some of my time challenging them. Such a letter appeared in the Lincoln Journal Star recently. That letter was “Stop U-Stop,” in which John Baldus opposed the building of a U-Stop/McDonald’s at 21st and K streets.

According to Baldus, it is immoral to start a business. It is immoral to invest time and money providing products and services people want at a price they are willing to pay. It is immoral to value one’s time and effort, and thus to want to be paid for the value one provides to others.

To Baldus and those agreeing with him, I ask: What, then, is moral? One possibility, Baldus implies, is the Antelope Valley Redevelopment Plan. Part of that plan is the theft of desired property when negotiations fail. If the property owners do not wish to sell their lands, the government simply readies its guns and takes them.

By what standard does this morality condemn trade while condoning theft? Were it not for the wealth that people behind businesses like U-Stop create, there would be nothing to steal. Production is the means by which we thrive. The people with the courage and ingenuity to produce should be praised, not condemned.

Matthew Stein, Lincoln

What do you mean by "if". There are no ifs here. Blue states have the same legislation. 
 
You can stop speculating about what I WOULD DO IF Democratic governors signed similar bills into law, and start looking at what I ACUALLY DID, WHEN they did sign similar bills into law.
 
You'll find that the answer is I did nothing. Just like with this. It's a totally unremarkable, standard thing that everyone does. Picking out the one instance when it's a Republican doing it is cheap political hackery.
 
And it doesn't change the fact that when it comes to less mainstream economic fascism (stuff that's not done by every politician in the country, but only by some of them, like $15 minimum wage, or banning McDonalds from the neighborhood, or shutting down coal mines and oil pipelines), Republicans are marginally less fascist than Democrats. Not by a whole lot, mind you, there's a pretty wide spectrum of fascism that both accept equally (protectionist franchise laws for instance), but there is a strip there at the edge that's almost exclusively Democrat country. Again: not this type of protectionism, this is mainstream. I'm talking strictly about issues right at the edge of the progressive movement, which haven't yet moved into the mainstream. Those are all the domain of Democrats, and Republicans are hard at work trying to delay them. They're not doing a good job, but they are trying.

It might be useful to remember context. 
 
Atlas Shrugged was a novel and things that are said in there, while certainly reducible to her philosophy, reside in the context of the characters and the story.  It is also a dramatization.  Rand herself always said that in real life ordinary things are marginal while in a story they are to omitted if they do not support plot, them, characterization, etc.   Her books were not about generosity, which is good as generosity as a theme sounds more like an after school special to be truthful. 
 
Modern talking heads simply confuse the point by package dealing Altruism (as sacrificing yourself to society i.e. Comte) with goodwill/generosity (traditional).  Altruism, which she reiterated in her speech quote you highlighted, is a core philosophic point that is the backbone of many other ethical and political justifications and she hammered the point to keep it unpackaged.    Atlas Shrugged dramatizes that point.  For general generosity, she didn’t spell it out since it was not a theme of the book but if you really want to understand it you can look at how she dramatized people’s actions.  Notice that the heroes of the book consider how the government’s policies will affect others while the looters who preach altruism claim to want to help the poor while ignoring how their actions do the opposite (because they really want power).  Dagny is desperate to get farm loads shipped so people so they will not starve.  It is not a sacrifice, society collapsing and others dying is certainly not in her interests either, but yet the fact is true goodwill does not conflict with rational self-interest.  The looters sabotage this, even redirecting trains to crony projects, while wringing their hands about sacrifice, unconcerned of the real harm they are doing. They know it conflicts with rational self-interests but expect others to compromise towards the sacrifice.  Generosity and goodwill is not compatible with altruism and it's all over the book. 
 
There are many more examples of goodwill.  Reardon gives his brother a charity check to make him happy and gets slammed for it.  Reardon sees it as being generous and nice to his brother while his brother criticizes Reardon for being personally motivated and doesn’t want his name tied to the money.  James Taggart expects Cheryl to love him for nothing selfish and treats her badly while Dagny actually tries to give her moral support.  Stadlar thinks people are animals and not to be trusted while Dagny gives the tramp a warm meal. 
 
You might not have noticed them since Rand was pounding the big picture while these flowed naturally from the characters, but they also happened for a reason.  It’s just not the point of the story.

Yes, from page 1101 of the kindle version of Atlas Shrugged where John Galt has been taken into custody by the government and Mr. Thompson offers him Wesley Mouch's job as the country's Economic planner.  The quote actually goes like this:
 

Yes, from page 1101 of the kindle version of Atlas Shrugged where John Galt has been taken into custody by the government and Mr. Thompson offers him Wesley Mouch's job as the country's Economic planner.  The quote actually goes like this:
 

Yes, from page 1101 of the kindle version of Atlas Shrugged where John Galt has been taken into custody by the government and Mr. Thompson offers him Wesley Mouch's job as the country's Economic planner.  The quote actually goes like this:
 

It has nothing to do with whether something is man made or not. Rights, including property rights, are a right to action, not to objects. They are principles that guide human interactions. They tell us what we can and, more importantly, what we shouldn't be allowed to do to each other.
 
We CAN claim and use previously unclaimed, unused land for our own ends. Why wouldn't we? We're not doing anything to anyone by doing so, we're just minding our own business. On the other hand, if a man has claimed and is using a piece of land, we CAN'T chase him off of it. Chasing people off of land they've claimed for themselves and are using would be initiation of force, a belligerent act, and in general behavior not conducive to peaceful interactions.
 
That is the basic assumption upon which a more complex system of land ownership laws were built, which also allow for the trade, and, if certain stringent conditions are met, even the forfeit of land.

This statement is in error because it equivocates knowledge with information. They are not interchangeable concepts. Knowledge requires and implies the existence of a knower, but information does not. Computers (common Harvard architecture computers of all sizes and speeds) do not qualify as knowers, they merely hold and serve up information. A knower requires and implies the power to correct its own errors, and to recognize error as a failure of correspondence between what exists and what it regards as knowledge. Information is a primitive physical quantity, analogous to length or mass, measured in units of bits.

It is not a matter of correctness, it is matter of what Muslims think they can get away with based on their numbers and relative power within a society.
 
Three Stages of Jihad is a 20 minute video that puts forth a theory for understanding and reconciling the contradictory stances of Muslims on the subject of peaceful co-existence.
 

At this point, the biggest problem is racism among blacks. I don't mean the "black power" idiots, I mean the type of racism where black people are expected to behave and think a certain way ("be black") by fellow blacks. It's not just when it comes to political views (though that's a big part of it, as evidenced by the overwhelming majority of blacks leaning left), but also religion, culture, everyday habits.
 
It's ridiculous how many times one hears the adjective "black" used by black people to describe not a person's skin color, but the very thing MLK warned people not to define based on skin color: the content of a person's character.
 
There are of course other forms of racism (be it institutionalized racism in some areas of government and business, against blacks, or affirmative action, a racist policy which disadvantages whites), but they have nowhere near the kind of impact the racism blacks inflict on other blacks has.

Dr Chiill,

Your attack against the politics of Rand via the issue of welfare red-flags your shallow knowledge of Objectivism. You allot a blanket moral judgment on our mere existence in the presence of hunger while conveniently leaving out any moral assessment of the differing means to resolve that problem, your own in particular.

Rand's means is to leave people like Sam Walton free to become the richest man in America on the day he died, having raised the standard of living of this country's poorest more than all the charities and government programs that occurred over the span of his lifespan. Your means is to point a gun at people like him, take as much as you and the majority gang want to and give it to the poor after incompetent bureaucracies siphon off a major share.

Unlike you, Rand was no pragmatist. She did not advocate letting Sam be free because she thought it would lower the cost of food for the hungry. She advocated it because she had no other choice. Once she recognized that man survives by applying the product of his reason to his actions and that being volitional every one of us was inherently fallible, she knew that the number one ethical mandate was to have for ourselves and grant to each other autonomy over our thoughts and actions to preclude being victims of each other's fallibility.

If you had read more of Rand than two books and a couple of essays, you would possibly have grasped that if you cannot destroy the principle I just stated, all of your arguments for welfare are dead on arrival. You cannot have welfare funded by taxation without the threat of physical coercion implicit in the Form 1040 et al. That violates the ethical mandate, and ethics trumps politics every time when it comes to mandates. So it is time for you to return to the drawing board.

You must provide and validate an alternate definition of the nature of man and his means of survival and derive from that a consistent set of principles that will constitute an ethic that would be valid for all men who are, were, or ever will be, and from that you may then formulate a principle or set of principles by which that ethic can be extended with consistency from the context of the life of a human individual to the context of the life of many individuals living and interacting together in a society.

Here is my own summary form of the principle at the heart of Objectivism's radical capitalism so you will have something to contrast yours to:

No person may initiate the use of force to gain, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible value created by or acquired in a voluntary exchange by any other person.

The government established to defend this principle may not engage in the redistribution of wealth ever. It may only guarantee that all human exchanges of value shall be voluntary. To understand how that will feed the hungry and make the poorest hugely more wealthy than they are today, you will have to read Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" and Ludwig von Mises' "Of Human Action".

But you should already see, that in a government that is moral per the stated principles, any attempt by you or anyone else to feed the hungry by pointing a weapon at others would constitute a claim to be infallible in making the choices of those others for them. Simply bemoaning this will get you nowhere. You cannot undermine such an ethic by alleging there will be consequences you do not like. Rather, you must disable the base upon which it rests.

MichaelM

Somewhat related: This 'hit piece' on Walmart (and Starbucks) appeared in the NY Times (The Corporate Daddy)
 
Not content to let things go, Walmart had a response (Fact Check: The NY Times "Corporate Daddy")

Not voting endorses an outcome as well.  It endorses permitting others to select the winning candidate in your absence.  If there is a distinction between the candidates that will make a difference in how the govt impacts human lives (starting with your own) then not voting could permit others to help make life worse than it would or could have been.   

Not voting endorses an outcome as well.  It endorses permitting others to select the winning candidate in your absence.  If there is a distinction between the candidates that will make a difference in how the govt impacts human lives (starting with your own) then not voting could permit others to help make life worse than it would or could have been.   

According to conventional wisdom, industry must pay a 'living wage' to all workers so that they will not, in essence, starve to death.  Here is an excerpt from a story about a protest against Wal-Mart (who else?):
 
Protestors Call For Wal-Mart to Pay a Living Wage
 
 
This is from Daily Kos:
 
Bill Maher's excellent argument for a living wage
 
 
According to the 'welfare statists', paying your workers a living wage is a duty.  If you oppose a living wage,  ..  get ready..   
 
You don't care about people.
 
You just don't care if they live or die. 
 
That's the standard line.  That's what every opponent of the minimum wage or the welfare state has to endure.
 
Emotional appeals are common when debating political issues.  Are you pro choice?   Baby Killer!   Against Obamacare?  Patients will die!
(are these people obsessed with death?)
 
You can't win when your opponent thinks you are out to injure the innocent to benefit yourself or your rich neighbors.  The sad part is that this kind of appeal to emotion works well enough to keep and grow the welfare state year after year after year (Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on this.  They just disagree on the means or the cost.)
 
What is to be done?   How do you change the minds of enough people to start the process of decontrolling the economy?  Where do you even begin?  

Not voting endorses an outcome as well.  It endorses permitting others to select the winning candidate in your absence.  If there is a distinction between the candidates that will make a difference in how the govt impacts human lives (starting with your own) then not voting could permit others to help make life worse than it would or could have been.   

You're misunderstanding everything. Ayn Rand's Ethics is meant to empower good people to act against evil, not to paralyze them into inaction and indifference up until the second before it's finally their turn to be raped, killed or have Allah shoved down their throats. 

Yes, initiation of force against another is immoral. That is exactly why Objectivism is a philosophy that affords NO MORAL PROTECTION OF ANY KIND to Saddam Hussein, Khamenei, Kim Jong Un, or Bashar Assad. Because they're homicidal tyrants. Ayn Rand explains why what they're doing is evil and why we are justified to take a stand against them, and you've somehow twisted than into "we should stand by and do nothing, because they're not bothering us at the moment".
 
How can you take the statement "So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others." and conclude: "Right. There's a guy killing and enslaving millions. I best stay out of it.". Did you not just hear Ayn Rand say that "no man may"? Seriously, what do you think that means? No man may or else we're gonna look at them sideways? No man may or else we're gonna post about how it would be immoral for us to do anything about it?
 
Or did she mean, "no man may or else"? No man may or else the might of the collective effort of every peace loving, productive, moral individual will descend upon them in the form of the US military, or NATO, or whatever alliance free nations can muster, and wipe them from the face of the Earth so that the phrase "no man may" can actually mean something: that it can mean that peace loving people have a place in this world, and homicidal maniacs don't?
And recognizing evil, but arguing for allowing its continued existence, on moral grounds no less, doesn't meet my criteria of rational.