Dante

It should be noted that the OP isn't talking about sex at all. He's talking about seeing/touching a boob as if that's a significant milestone in and of itself. The claims of middle schoolers notwithstanding, it isn't.

In this particular case, it seems to me like it would be in the service of a meaningless 'milestone.' The idea that touching breasts, regardless of the context, is some sort of milestone strikes me as ridiculous. The only people that take this conception of manhood seriously are middle school and high school boys who regard 'getting laid' as the pinnacle of their existence. Now, getting intimate with someone that you like for the first time, that can be a major event. But 'seeing boobs' or 'touching boobs' ripped out of this context is meaningless. Someone linked a clip from the 40 Year Old Virgin above. That movie has a great scene where Steve Carrell is finally going to lose his virginity, with this random girl he met at a bookstore (really hot and reeeally freaky). However, once he gets up to her place it's just weird and awkward and he leaves. Instead, he has his first time with the woman he's falling in love with, and he's much happier for it. To the OP, save your money.

To respond to the OP here, I agree with Nicky that emigration is probably the best alternative in the real world. I think that any kind of 'strike,' whether it's early retirement, the scaling back of one's businesses, or the destruction of one's factory, is highly impractical without the larger plan that Galt offered. If Galt had just withdrawn from the world after the Starnes' took over the factory, had withdrawn his new motor technology but had not set out on a mission to convince others to do the same, there would have been no real effect from his one-man strike. The strike isn't practical without his mission to convice every person of ability to join him, and an equivalent strike in the real world would be just as ineffective. For someone like Rearden, it's either throwing himself into political activism to save his own country, or moving to another one that isn't as far gone.

To me it's very clear that this is not what they did at the end of Atlas Shrugged. Throughout the book you see a number of indications that 'the common man' is ready to embrace rational ideas. Causes such as the John Galt Line and Rearden's trial draw large popular support, and there are many minor characters that object to the current state of things but can't give voice to an alternative. That is the point of Galt's speech, to provide a positive moral alternative to ideas that many are ready to reject. That speech serves to rally those that have sensed something wrong with the current system to the new rational moral ideal. I think there is a healthy contingent of people ready for a rational alternative when those few from Galt's Gulch return to the world. It's not just the few people from Galt's Gulch returning to a destroyed world; Galt's speech has readied the way for much of the population to welcome them back.

Because it's literally the only example that you're citing, and you do it again in this post. Your original claim was that mainstream Objectivists will be unwilling to engage in critical debate within the wider context of academic philosophy for probably several generations. To support this, you've repeatedly criticized them for not doing so in JARS specifically, both in the original post I quoted and now doubling down here. The fact that they seem to have a problem with JARS specifically doesn't necessarily mean that they have a problem engaging the wider philosophical community. It may be an indication of that larger phenomenon, or it may simply reflect personal disagreements with Sciabarra and others at JARS. Certainly there is reason to believe such animosity exists. Now I certainly agree that during Rand's lifetime, and for years following her death, there was essentially zero interaction between academic philosophy and the Objectivist movement. I also agree with what I presume is your position that there should have been much more, that both sides would have benefited from critical engagement with one another. Really the only people willing to do so were those that were outside the organized movement, such as Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen. However, you seem to be arguing that this is still basically the case, and will be for several generations to come. I don't agree with that at all. I think we've seen a new generation of scholars within the movement, many of whom were mentioned above, that have taken such a task seriously, and have done good work in that area. Certainly the Anthem Foundation deserves much credit in this regard. Obviously this phenomenon has much farther to go, and there have been setbacks and backlashes, but overall it's much farther along than you seem to think. I certainly wouldn't interpret animosity towards JARS as animosity to the idea of engaging with any informed philosophical criticism at all.

Somehow I missed this when you originally wrote it, sorry about that. Anyhow, better late than never. Okay, but if this is your concern then I'm still pretty mystified. One glance at Tara Smith's CV, for instance, shows that she's been publishing in a number of philosophy journals not controlled by ARI or even anyone in the Objectivist movement: Social Philosophy & Policy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Value Inquiry, etc. The same goes for James Lennox and Greg Salmieri, although their research focuses more on interpreting Aristotle than outright defense of Objectivism. Although I can't seem to get my hands on his CV, Darryl Hunt has an article articulating and defending Rand in Social Philosophy & Policy. Tara Smith even has a publication in a non-ARI libertarian journal, Reason Papers. Just because they aren't publishing in the one particular journal that you'd like them to (JARS) doesn't mean they've insulated themselves from criticism. In fact, I would question your characterization of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series as an insulated forum controlled by "those associated with Peikoff and the ARI." One member of the editorial board for the series, Lester Hunt, has in fact published in JARS numerous times. Another (Fred Miller) is also on the editorial board of Reason Papers. I'm just not seeing this insular echo chamber that you're claiming will take several generations to fade.

Yes, I haven't read that particular book so I can't attest to its quality. However, I will say that McCloskey is no doubt on firmer ground in 'Bourgeois Dignity,' where her focus is on economic history and she can draw heavily on her own professional work and expertise, than she would be in a treatise on philosophy and virtue ethics. At root, she is an economic historian, and I think that is where she can make the strongest case.

Here you're conflating society with government. Rights presuppose other people, sure. Indeed, Grames includes treatment of others in his definition of rights. That doesn't mean they presuppose government.

I just finished reading selected chapters from the book Bourgeois Dignity by Deirdre McCloskey, and frankly I loved it. More importantly, I think the book might be of particular interest to other people on this site. McCloskey is an economic historian, but more specifically one that is willing to affirm the central importance of philosophy in explaining positive economic developments (a rarity in economic history). Here, I'd like to outline the basic thesis and goal of the book, because its thesis is quite similar to Rand's thought in many ways. The book is an attempt to pinpoint the cause of the Industrial Revolution. The central thesis of the book is that the best explanation for the Industrial Revolution is what the author calls the "Bourgeois Revaluation." What she means by this is a change in the way that people viewed business and market activity. Business and market activities, which had always been viewed as lowly, lacking in virtue, highly suspect at the least, began to be regarded with respect. Those that engaged in business began to be accorded a certain amount of dignity and a positive moral appraisal. Although McCloskey doesn't use this phrase, Rand might call it a 'moral revaluation' of businessmen and entrepreneurs. I'll quote extensively from the book as McCloskey lays out her central thesis: In short, her explanation stresses the power of philosophy, of ideas; specifically, the power of society's moral appraisal of businessmen and of profit-seeking. When businessmen begin to be accorded a significant measure of respect and dignity, society prospers. The parallels to Rand are obvious. In making her case, McCloskey takes on a number of other proposed explanations of the Industrial Revolution. She argues against the theses that what caused the Industrual Revolution was capital accumulation, or the Protestant work ethic, or pure scientific advancement, or foreign trade, or imperialism, or purely institutional factors. The root cause (athough she doesn't phrase it this way) was moral in nature. It was a positive moral appraisal of business and profit-seeking. Unfortunately, she does not extend this (as Rand would) to the pursuit of rational self-interest more generally. Even so, it is quite refreshing to see an economic historian affirm the central importance of philosophy in explaining one of the most important events in economic history.

It seems, from the description of the webinar and the summary and comments on his book on Amazon, that Mark Henderson is not trying to form some 'Christian Neo-Objectivist' philosophy or achieve a complete reconciliation of Objectivism and Christianity on every single point. Rather, his goal seems to be to identify, in addition to the vast differences between the two philosophies, the areas of common ground between the two (indeed, his book's subtitle is 'Ayn Rand, Christianity, a Quest for Common Ground'). The following quote is taken from an Amazon review of his book: It looks like his main goal is to foster an appreciation, on the part of Objectivists and Christians alike, of the under-appreciated points of commonality between the two (admittedly quite different) philosophies. This sounds like a much more fruitful task than the construction of some new 'Neo-Objectivist' philosophy which literally combines the two. Indeed, in her letters Rand engaged in a similar task on a few specific philosophical points, as noted here. It seems an especially important undertaking for those of us with deep personal relationships with people of the opposite philosophy (a group of which I am certainly a member). I'm sad that I missed the webinar, but I'll probably listen when it's posted online.

You need to go re-read the forum rules, and then seriously reevaluate your posting style. If all that you wish to do is hurl insults at people that disagree with you, or even ask you for references(!), this forum is not the place for you.

Obviously you should not be able to, nor should you. Just because it looks like a market transaction doesn't mean that it's morally legitimate, any more than accepting a bribe would be for a policeman. The purpose of a democratic system is to give each citizen an equal say in the collective decisions that necessarily impact everyone. If you choose not to participate in that system, that's your prerogative; just stay home and don't vote. However, it's certainly immoral to participate only to subvert the purpose of the system by selling your vote. As I'm thinking about it now, purchasing other people's votes might be the clearest possible case of asking others to subvert their own judgment and defer to another's. Throughout her writings, Rand was crystal clear on why this is a bad idea for both parties involved.

Wait, so now I'm trying to ignore all the examples you gave because I mention another one? That's quite a leap, especially when I talk about Japan as the 'best-case scenario' example... implying that I think there are obviously other examples, that didn't go so well. Are you so determined to convince yourself that people who don't automatically agree with you are just dumdums who ignore everything they don't like? And not two posts above you're complaining about others having preconceived notions of you and not going off what you actually wrote in your post.

And Japan... Oh, are we not going to mention that one? It seems like the most obvious historical parallel to what is being proposed here, and also a generally successful one. It should be noted that what followed from our actions there during WWII was essentially exactly what TOS is proposing would happen in Iran; the removal from power of a militaristic and totalitarian regime and its replacement by a constitutional republic. Of course, just because it worked there doesn't mean that it would work here; Japan's trajectory since World War II clearly represents a 'best-case scenario' when it comes to U.S.-driven regime change. However, it does challenge the simplistic and ahistorical view that U.S.-driven regime change can never work.

It should be noted that the horribly flawed rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges only makes this 'worst-case scenario' more likely. Again, the fundamental concern is that too few young and healthy people will sign up for the exchange. Because the exchanges are designed to use healthier people to subsidize the cost of sick people, if too few healthy people sign up the exchanges will not be able to offer cheaper insurance to people trying to sign up with preexisting conditions. As I mentioned before, the individual mandate is an attempt to get more healthy people to sign up, by fining them if they do not, but the low penalty is likely to be ineffective, especially if insurance in the marketplaces is very expensive. Now we are seeing a disastrous rollout of the ACA's central website, which goes far beyond a few small glitches. Millions of people have tried to sign up, and nearly all of them have been unable to, even with hours and hours of effort. President Obama gave a speech on it in the rose garden, where he trotted out someone from Delaware who managed to sign up for the exchanges after only 7 hours (!) on the computer and on the phone, and she was undoubtedly one of the luckier ones. So what does this mean for the ACA system as a whole? Well, it should first be noted that this is a much bigger deal than simply a malfunctioning website. For the majority of people, the website is the only way that they have to get on the exchanges and sign up for insurance. To draw some comparisons to private businesses, the ACA exchanges are designed more like Amazon than Barnes & Noble. If Barnes & Noble's website goes down, that hurts their business for sure, but people can still come into the physical stores and buy books, coffee, etc. B&N's website is nice, but it isn't synonymous with their entire company. Amazon, on the other hand, is its website in a very real sense. That is really the only way that consumers have to purchase things from the company, and if it is down, the company is down. That seems to be the current status of the ACA exchanges. Furthermore, it looks like the fixes are going to be a long time in coming. Even if the interface between consumers and the exchanges is fixed relatively quickly, it looks like the communication between the exchanges and the insurance companies themselves is also a disaster, and this problem is likely to get worse, not better, as the customer interface improves and more people successfully sign up. The scope of the problems is detailed here; here is a key excerpt: The final result of all this is that the cost of signing up for insurance in terms of time and frustration is much higher than anyone expected, and will be quite high for quite some time. The people most willing to pay that cost will, of course, be people who really need the insurance, while people who are most likely to give up in frustration will be healthier people who will just decide to wait until the exchanges are working properly. Many of these people will also probably assume that the individual mandate penalty will be delayed for at least a year; after all, how can the government charge you a penalty for not buying insurance when you can't buy insurance from their malfunctioning website? The result will be that, once the exchanges get up and running normally, and insurers have sorted out everyone that's signed up so far and their expected cost, they will have to set very high premiums, because the people that waded through the site headaches to buy insurance were mainly the high-cost, sicker individuals. These high premiums will prevent many healthier people, who decided to wait, from signing up at this point, and many of the people needed to subsidize the system simply will not sign up at all. Thus, all of this makes the negative outcome that I talked about above more likely to occur.

But this is already happening; specifically, in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series edited by Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox. The first book, Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue, contains essays by Objectivists which further flesh out Rand's philosophy, a series of responses by non-Objectivist philosophers, and rejoinders by Objectivist scholars. This seems like precisely the type of exercise that you are asking for. For example, in his essay on 'Objectivism and Analytic Philosophy,' Irfan Khawaja states his purpose as "to identify [the Objectivist ethics'] overarching justificatory structure in such a way as to show (without doing violence to its claims or watering it down) how it is in competition with analytic philosophy on problems that analytic philosophers can recognize as their own." The essay following this one is a reply to Khawaja by Paul Bloomfield, a non-Objectivist professional philosopher. The final section of the book is titled "Author Meets Critics: Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics." It contains critiques of Smith's presentation of Rand's philosophy by philosophers, and rejoinders by Smith herself. The second volume in this series, Concepts and their Role in Knowledge, is similarly structured. The first part contains essays which expand upon Rand's epistemology, written by Objectivist philosophers (e.g. Allan Gotthelf and Onkar Ghate). The second section, 'Discussion,' contains critical responses to each of these essays by non-Objectivist scholars, along with rejoinders from the authors. I'd note that several of the Objectivist scholars involved in this series are also strongly affiliated with ARI, most notably Onkar Ghate and Tara Smith. They seem to be perfectly willing to engage in critical debate with non-Objectivist academics over Rand's ideas. Harry Binswanger is quoted on the back of the first one as calling it "a valuable and exciting project." I think you strongly overstate the 'passion of cult of personality, aesthetic exuberance and hero-worship loyalty' that supposedly prevents Rand's ideas from being discussed critically. As an aside, Allan Gotthelf did an excellent job producing the series, and I sincerely hope that they continue to be produced in his absence.

But once again, it's about how to appear confident. Not focusing on how to actually boost one's confidence, but only on how to make a woman think you are confident. All the things that he lists, does he think that guys who actually do those things do them because they surveyed women to find what makes them seem confident? All those things are by-products of actually being confident. That should be the focus, not how to mimic the appearance of confidence. Certainly, if you are generally confident, but out of habit you do one or more of the things on that list, then paying conscious attention to it in an attempt to change it is beneficial. However, if you just completely lack confidence with women, that would seem to be the root problem to work on.

Under the ACA, any plan that is sold in the individual and small group markets (not just plans offered in the Healthcare Exchanges) must cover ten 'essential health benefits,' listed here. Plans in the individual and small group markets that do not meet these requirements do not satisfy the individual mandate. So, for example, if you have a plan from these markets that doesn't cover maternity services, newborn care, or pediatric services (because you don't plan to have children), you will have to pay the individual mandate penalty unless you add these to your plan. Also, as with everything, the devil is in the details. Requiring these plans to cover prescription drugs doesn't mean that, as long as a plan covers at least one prescription drug, it satisfies the requirement (that would be the easiest way for insurance companies to circumvent these requirements). Undoubtedly, there is a list of drugs or categories of drugs that must be covered. If your current small group plan doesn't cover all of these, you will need to switch plans or pay the penalty. Furthermore, the execution of these requirements is now in the hands of the Department of Health and Human Services, so don't be surprised if the specifics of what is an 'essential health benefit' is expanded over time through new regulations and bureaucratic fiat. Note that currently, these requirements only apply to people who buy their plans in the individual or small group markets (which I believe is about 15% of the total health insurance market). However, I also expect the scope of this to increase over time as the regulations government health insurance are expanded. After all, ten years down the road when all individual and small group plans cover these 'essential health benefits,' why would we let people who buy health insurance through larger companies be disadvantaged? If these are truly essential services, why would we allow employers to offer plans that don't cover them?

I seriously doubt that he would make that same statement today, in the wake of all the radical and unprecedented actions that the Federal Reserve has taken in the past five years, and the expanded role that the Fed has basically granted itself.

Medicare and Medicaid are a separate issue from the medical costs of ERs. ERs are required to provide care to anyone coming in, regardless of their ability to pay. Thus, they treat many people that are ultimately unable to pay their medical bills, and are simply forced to take a loss on these people. This inflates medical costs for other patients of that hospital. This is a separate issue from Medicare and/or Medicaid, which are certainly paid for through taxes. Also, that wasn't me that mentioned choosing hospitals that don't take Medicare/Medicaid. You're confusing me with another poster.

Explain to me exactly how you think this is happening; taxes going to making up for the cost of ER patients that don't pay, I mean. Because it was my understanding that the hospital picks up that bill, and has to cover the costs with their other procedures. This is one of the reasons that everything in a hospital is so expensive, which means that insurance companies face larger bills when they pay out, which means they have to charge higher premiums to everyone. It seems to me that the effect you're most concerned about doesn't happen through taxes; it happens through the premiums that you want to ignore.

Sure, Medicare involves taxing the young to pay for the old, but it doesn't directly interfere with the ability of young people to get their own health insurance in order to accomplish its goal. It's not just about how much money each system costs, but what each system does to the system of private health care. A straight tax-and-redistribute system still leaves us with the ability to provide for our own unexpected health costs, at least. When the private health insurance system itself is used as a redistributive tool like this, it has the potential to screw up the provision of private health insurance in addition to redistributing money. It's not just the amount being redistributed, but the way it's being done.

In the most basic model of functioning insurance, a person's premium is set by his or her expected medical costs. If I have a 20% chance of needing a $10,000 treatment in the next year (and that's the only medical care I might need), then my premium for the year should be $2000 (or at least close to it; the simplest models don't factor in profit and such). The point of insurance is not for me to get a 'good deal' by riding off of someone else; the point is just to eliminate my risk. If everyone like me pays their $2000 premium, and 20% of us need this procedure, then the insurance company is able to cover every procedure that is required. If someone has a higher chance of needing the procedure, or they might need a more expensive procedure, they would pay more. Notice that nobody here is 'free riding' off of anyone else; people pay according to their risk. Two points are important here: first, under this system there is no concern of older people dropping out, as you mention above, because they're not getting a 'raw deal' by paying more. They actually are higher risk, and they have to face that risk alone if they don't buy insurance. Buying insurance under this system makes just as much sense for them as it does for younger people with lower risk and lower premiums. Second, even if some people do drop out of the insurance pool, it doesn't matter. That's because you're not using some people to subsidize other people. You're basically breaking even on everyone (with a little room for profit, depending on the competitiveness of the industry), so if all the old people (or all the young people) dropped out, that doesn't affect the premiums you charge for the people still in the pool. Now, of course, there is no way for insurance companies to be able to predict with certainty the medical risks of different individuals. However, when they are able to charge people differently based on any risk factor they want, they can usually get pretty darn close to the system that I've described above. This is how insurance is supposed to work. However, the Affordable Care Act is an attempt to subvert the insurance system towards an entirely different purpose: it attempts to use insurance to subsidize high-cost individuals with low-cost individuals. If you place severe restrictions on the ability of insurance companies to do what I've just described (charge people differentially based on their risk factors), then in order to stay in business (and stay competitive) insurance companies have to charge premiums that are higher than the expected cost for low-cost people, and lower than the expected cost for high-cost people. Of course, in this system, low-cost people are getting a bad deal, hence the concern that some will drop out. If we indeed see young people drop out, and the average person left in the pool costs more, then premiums will have to rise to reflect this, which could cause more young people to drop out, and ultimately the market unravels. In this scenario, we end up with a system where older, sicker people are still basically charged according to their expected cost (exactly as I described in the first paragraph), because there's no one left to subsidize them with. Meanwhile, young people face these same (extremely high) premiums, and decide to forego insurance altogether. Thus, we've ended up at a point where high-cost people are no better off than they were before, and low-cost people can't get insurance at all.

What you're missing here is the simple solution to getting healthy people into the system, which is allowing insurance companies to charge lower-risk people lower premiums. The community rating aspect of the Affordable Care Act eliminates this, as I have described above. In its place, it establishes a watered-down 'individual mandate' which I think will be highly insufficient in getting healthy people into the system.

Much of the coverage of the ACA's negative effects has been focused on side issues, such as the incentives that it creates for employers to favor part-time workers (under 30 hours a week) over full-time workers, or the regulatory costs that it imposes on businesses. While these are certainly issues, the core question is what will happen to insurance premiums over time under the system set up by the Affordable Care Act. The core problem rises from the combination of the 'community rating' regulations with the 'guaranteed issue' requirement. Under the ACA, insurance providers are forbidden from denying insurance coverage to individuals regardless of their health status. Additionally, they are severely restricted in their ability to charge different prices to individuals based on differing health risk. In particular, there are three considerations that allow insurance providers to charge different prices in every state: they can charge differently based on age (but can charge the elderly no more than three times the amount that younger people are paying), they can charge higher premiums in higher health cost areas (like cities), and they can charge higher premiums for family insurance plans that cover more people. Some states will also allow smokers to be charged a higher rate (up to 50% higher). And that's it. Insurance companies are not allowed to offer lower prices to healthier, lower-risk individuals for any reason not listed above, and they are required to offer coverage to everyone, no matter how sick. The result is that premiums will be significantly lower for high-risk individuals and significantly higher for low-risk individuals. Additionally, if I found out next month that I have cancer, it will be just as cheap for me to get insurance then as it is for me now. The obvious result is that many young, healthy individuals without health insurance will choose not to purchase it. As these low-cost people drop out of the insurance pool, insurance premiums will have to rise to reflect the higher average cost to the insurance companies of paying out on their policies. One other factor that exacerbates this problem is the fact that, under the ACA, all insurance policies are required to offer coverage for an incredibly wide array of health care services. Under the ACA, insurance companies will no longer be able to offer so-called 'catastrophic' coverage to young people: coverage that only extends to extreme health care needs, such as a severe car accident or cancer treatment. Instead, every single policy must offer to cover numerous routine services that young people rarely need. In essence, the ACA limits the menu of policy choices to include only the most expensive options. The result of all of this is that insurance premiums will be significantly higher than they are now for young, healthy people, and many of these people will decide to drop out of the insurance pool altogether, at least for a few years. Now, this is quite an obvious problem for the law to have, and there are several measures in the Act that attempt to solve it. The first is the infamous 'individual mandate;' simply require everyone to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, in order to keep young, healthy people in the pool. Theoretically, this would work, but politically it was by far the hardest sell in the bill. As a result, by the time the bill made it into law, the penalty had been lowered to a fraction of what was originally intended. As it stands, the penalty associated with the individual mandate is a fraction of the average cost of health insurance itself. Additionally, the penalty is essentially unenforceable; it will appear as an income tax liability, but those that do not pay it will not be subject to criminal penalties, liens, or levies. Also, there are numerous ways to become exempt from paying the penalty altogether. In short, in its current form, I would be surprised if the individual mandate was even remotely effective in fulfilling its purpose. Another way that the bill tries to prevent individuals from waiting until they fall ill to purchase insurance is the 'open enrollment' policy. Under this policy, the only time that you can purchase insurance on the exchanges is from October 1st to December 7th (except for this first year, when the period spans from Oct 1st to March 31st). Aside from the obvious problem that most people thinking about buying insurance don't know that this policy exists, 'open enrollment' only influences people who are consciously trying to game the system. For young healthy people who look at the high premiums and simply decide to take their chances (which was the major concern in the first place), open enrollment does not give them an additional reason to purchase insurance. One way for me to ground this discussion is to think about what I, personally, would do if I did not already get health insurance through my university. Based on a precursory look, it seems like buying health insurance for myself in the exchanges would cost about as much as my rent does (certainly much more than the mandate would cost me, if I even had to pay it). Meanwhile, I haven't been admitted to a hospital since the third grade, when I split my eyebrow open playing catch and needed eight stitches. I am precisely the kind of person that the Affordable Care Act is relying on purchasing insurance, but I think I'd go without, at least for a few years. Finally, it's worth mentioning that we're not talking about capriciousness here. This isn't about people consciously trying to not make the system work. Although there are a few Republican hacks that are trying to make that happen, the simple fact is that the structure of the ACA disincentivizes young, healthy people from buying insurance. Even if most people want the system to work, on a personal level it won't make sense for many of them to purchase insurance. The more young people opt out, the higher premiums go, and the more expensive it becomes for those still purchasing insurance.