Dante
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Posts posted by Dante
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Not necessarily everyone. Obamacare starts at 50 employees. Most single unit independent restaurants have less than that.
Many believe this will, through illegitimate government means, serve as an "equalizer" between the big companies and independent operators.
It is the reason many small operators have foolishly welcomed this nonsense.
Interesting, thanks.
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This is oversimplified to say the least. Prices are sticky since there are plans around those prices and so forth. Then there's the role of investment, which can nullify the effects of negative profits (video game device makers lose money for years before turning a profit; retailers carry lost leaders all over the place; etc.).
There are a number of ways for businesses to get around the stickiness of prices. One common way is simply to increase or decrease the frequency of sales. If you decrease the frequency and quality of the sales that you offer, that will raise the average price that people pay for your product. Sales are currently abundant in the pizza business; I basically never buy a pizza that doesn't have some kind of a discount. It's actually weird how deep the discounts are in the pizza market.
I think in the case of PJ, would they really raise prices and risk losing customers? (Pretend for a moment that OC cost them something actually significant).But this is a cost being imposed on everyone. Other pizza companies would also be facing these cost pressures, and would be inclined to do the same thing. Why would PJ lose customers when pizza prices and food prices more generally are rising across the board?
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Not always, no. If the business in question is under competitive pressure, those costs will be charged against profits.
If the industry in question is highly competitive, then the businesses in it are already making close to zero economic profits. If profits in the industry fall below zero, say from an additional cost, then businesses will begin to leave the industry. This will cause price to rise to the point where businesses, on net, stop leaving.
In short, lower profits directly result in the price rising for the consumer.
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Notice the wording... it is already known that the person fleeing the murder scene is a serial killer. That fact does not need to be determined in a court of law.
That's precisely the problem. "It is known..." is specified in the OP, but life doesn't work like that. In real life, these things have to be proven with evidence, in an objective forum, and if this guy were proven to be a serial killer in a court of law then he'd be in jail.
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Implied in this hypothetical situation is the given that the person is a serial murderer who has just murdered again, and the person making the choice is physically present.
The person has witnessed one killing, which may or may not be murder, or self-defense. However it looks in the moment, it must be objectively proven in a court of law.
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Forget the superhero part. Even as an ordinary person I would allow the murderer to be killed if I wasn't able to do it myself.
Why? Murderers do not deserve to breathe the air they stole from their victims.
Except whether a person is a murderer or not must be established by an objective legal process. Vigilante 'justice' does not deserve the name.
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As far as I know these three are the main respected economists who argued for radical capitalism. They all won Nobel prizes and they were all highly respected amongst their peers. You could include people like George Reisman or 100 other economists, but I would say they are in a lower intellectual league than these three. These three essentially influenced the development of the 20th century and beyond.
Mises never won the Nobel, and he was the only one of the three that conceivably advocated a government compatible with Objectivism. Both Friedman and Hayek held that the state should have a more expansive role than an Objectivist politics would allow, in providing for a forced social safety net, roads funded by taxation, etc. If you wish to argue simply against generic libertarianism, I suggest you do so on a libertarian site.
I can reject dictatorships because I believe in democracy, but why would an O'ist reject a dictator that was spreading Objectivist ideas and ideals? Say a hypothetical dictator simply changed the law to make 90% of tax collecting illegal and punishable by death? On what basis could Objectivism fight this since tax is theft, and the dictator has just outlawed theft?
Asked and answered.
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Btw, we still have Hayek as a sympathiser with dictatorship (liberal or not) too.
Two words for this, and the whole thrust of this thread: who cares?
This thread basically amounts to digging up obscure quotes from libertarian theorists to try to argue that they, personally, sympathized with some fascist regime or another. You start with the ridiculous bolded claim that "Unfortunately in every actual case of a respected economist arguing for radical capitalism, that economist also has sympathies with fascist dictatorships." You argue this from your sample size of three (which has since been whittled down to maybe one) and your uncritical reading of a singe Salon article, as it turns out. But these are not even your most significant errors.
This whole line of argument is fundamentally religious in its approach, and it shows the inability to focus on ideas rather than people. You try to take individual people (none of whom were actually Objectivists anyway) and attempt to discredit a philosophy by showing some quotes about their views on particular regimes. However, a philosophy does not stand or fall based on every single view of its advocates. That's a religion you're thinking of. For example, Jesus is claimed to have lived a sin-free life (which theologically is integral to whether or not he can save others), and therefore Christianity lives or dies based on whether every single word and action of his can be defended. Cults or governments centered around one person operate the same way. You seem to view systems of ideas through the same religious lens, but there's a problem; it doesn't work that way. Even if you had done your homework and gotten your facts right before starting this thread, it wouldn't matter one bit. You cannot discredit a system of ideas by pointing out flaws in the people that advocated them. So, I conclude with the same two words... who cares?
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hmmm...
I'm not a fan of deliberate lies of omission with intent to gain value via withholding vital information but what about this-
what about omitting information just because you don't believe it's any of the asker's damn business and it is not worth having a confrontation over?
Well, if you're trying to gain a value from them, then that alone would seem to make it their business. If you're not, then there's no problem.
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This quote is explicitly endorsing temporary dictatorship as solution against what he views as an increasingly illiberal democracy. I find this an interesting argument and wonder how this can be rejected from an Objectivist perspective? Ie, why don't you guys try to infiltrate the military in order to form a military dictatorship with a view to dismantling the welfare state and instituting a republic with free market capitalism enshrined in the new constitution? I find this unacceptable as it is antidemocratic, but wonder how Objectivism could reject this solution?
Quite easily. Ayn Rand strongly believed and argued that the ultimate driver of history is philosophy, not politics. No political system can survive for any extended period of time which is not supported by the intellectual, cultural, and philosophical trends of its people. Simply put, the prevailing philosophy of a populace leads, and politics follows. Capitalism cannot survive in a nation without a supporting philosophical base that is well-articulated and accepted as true by the people of that nation. This was precisely what she spent her life trying to create and promote. There is only one way to get a capitalist government in America, or any other country, and that starts with a cultural and intellectual acceptance of the foundations of capitalism, not a military coup.
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Maybe someone here can help me understand this. So one of the legislative proposals being tossed around by gun control advocates is the idea of banning high-capacity clips (e.g. http://thehill.com/homenews/house/273813-sensing-political-shift-pelosi-dems-call-for-ban-on-high-capacity-gun-clips). And it seems that the magic number that defines a high-capacity clip is... 10?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the sidearm most commonly used by police officers was a Glock 22, which comes standard with a 15-round clip. So this would mean, that if I wanted to carry a handgun, and went through all the certification to get a license and a concealed carry permit and everything, I wouldn't be able to choose the go-to weapon of the police? The magazine would be too large by 50%?
I get the rationale behind trying to ban large-capacity clips; advocates typically argue that really the only purpose for such a clip is to kill large numbers of people. However, when you set the cutoff at 10 bullets, this means you're now saying that police sidearms are equipped with clips whose only purpose would be to 'kill large numbers of people'?
Police officers clearly carry their sidearm to protect themselves and others in the case of a shootout, so (even granting the argument for gun control) how can gun-control advocates possibly say that a 15-round clip is an unreasonable thing for a private citizen to want?
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The legal tender laws are not what give the Fed a de facto monopoly on money. The law that forbids national banking outside the Fed does.
Interesting. Which laws specifically are you referring to?
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I'm happy to be corrected. What do you see that I don't? Or, do you happen to know some background context about the author. If you have read something else by this author and know that he is sane, then I can see that you'd assume this is satire, but if you're judging just from the article, I'm curious what you see in it that I missed.
Well, he's Asian himself, so there's that.
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In both of your hypothetical examples, the person who is committing the lie of omission is doing so in order to gain a value from the deceived; in the first case, the wife's approval, and in the second, the parents' permission. Furthermore, the person doing the omitting knows that this information is material to whether or not the value will be given. He knows if he gives this information to his wife, she'll probably withdraw her approval. He is using the person's ignorance to get what he wants out of them. This is clearly dishonest.
The cat example has neither of these elements. The questioner is not deciding whether or not to extend a value, and the breed, color, gender etc. are not material to any decision the questioner is making. Now, if the questioner was looking to adopt the cat, and you withheld information that you think would affect their decision, then it would have both elements, and it would be dishonest.
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As far as the Fed is concerned I don't see any rights violations worth mentioning. All they need to do is make it legal for people to use other paper currencies as legal tender and their rights violations become zero. Even if that happened everyone would continue to use Federal Reserve dollars anyway, so the point is moot.
I'm inclined to agree with this analysis, except for the last point.
Obviously, people would not switch en masse away from using the dollar if the legal tender laws were lifted, but it would open the door for the use of other currencies in certain situations, such as large transactions between corporations. Furthermore, the more dollars that the Federal Reserve created, the more appealing such infant alternative currencies would become. Ultimately, cash is hardly used at all anymore, and I wouldn't care much at all if my bank account was denominated in something other than dollars. I think the repeal of the legal tender laws would provide a tangible check on the actions of the Fed, one which is sorely needed.
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All paper currencies have to be issued by someone. And that someone then gets to control how the currency works by controlling which banks can access the reserve system of that currency. In other words the exact same system would form under a free market, so the point is moot.
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Central banks form naturally. The old US system had one, it was called the Suffolk System.
Discussions about whether or not the Suffolk system was a central bank hinge on the definition of a central bank, but here's one thing that nobody claims: that the Suffolk System was the U.S.'s central bank. The Suffolk system was a localized institution that did not exert any significant influence on the banknotes that were issued outside of its area. Consider this quote from your link, in the very next paragraph:
Contemporaries pointed to the greatest contribution the system made to the people of New England: because it forced all members to maintain a "high ratio of specie to net demand liabilities" the New England banks avoided the carnage experienced elsewhere in the banking industry during the Panic of 1837.Clearly, the Suffolk system was a regional institution, and many parts of the country were not a part of it. We can argue about what kind of private clearinghouses might arise in the absence of the Federal Reserve, but it is simply wrong to say that, when we didn't have a national central bank, the Suffolk system arose as such an institution.
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Hopefully this should cut through much of this discussion as far as my viewpoint is concerned.
If a person is a "broken unit" (somewhat more on that to come), I don't know that this changes my assertion. Their ethical standard must follow suit to accommodate and reflect their "brokenness." An individual lives his life for himself -- for his own, one existence on earth -- and not for the sake of any other entity.
Yes, absolutely.
The point of me bringing that up was that I wasn't comfortable with the statement that, if we've indeed identified some fundamental gender characteristic, it must apply to absolutely everyone of that gender. So we can properly identify the essence of masculinity or femininity without necessarily implying a course of action for all men and all women.
The whole of the Objectivist ethics is premised on the notion that we can make true statements about the nature of man, that imply certain courses of action (adopting productive purposes, adherence to reason, dealing with each others through trade, etc). Thus, if someone actually does make a convincing case for the fundamental nature of a gender, we should take it seriously as men and women who want to achieve happiness. In actuality, I'm not at all convinced that anyone has done that. Furthermore, this issue of broken units, as well as the importance of context in applying principles, just goes to say that we should first and foremost be concerned about ourselves as individuals.
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I find it very unlikely that she simply didn't value or like her life that much, and thought this would be a good opportunity to just throw it away for little or no reason.
I find it much more likely that she took her responsibility (her chosen responsibility) as a guardian of these kids very seriously, and was willing to pay the ultimate price to preserve the integrity of that responsibility.
I think, particularly if you have kids whose safety you entrust to others every single day, that calling her a hero isn't a misuse of the term at all.
- Nicky, softwareNerd, tadmjones and 3 others
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You are equivocating between those who wish to offer competing services and those who are weilding force in unjust ways, amalgomating both under the title of "unauthorized." As argued above, that won't do because we don't assert that people should be allowed to weild force in unjust ways, nor that people should be allowed to weild force outside of objective law.
The problem is that whether some use of force or not is "just" is not readily apparent. We need some objective process for determining what is just and what is not. However, if there indeed is some process, with an enforcement mechanism, to determine whether certain protection agencies are operating in just ways or not, then we're already back to a system with a final arbiter.
I'm afraid I don't get what you're saying in regards anything else. That a band of robbers and murderers makes themselves known to each other and claim to be my agent says nothing about whether or not such arrangements are justified. Also, fancy highlighting aside, that Rand quote is actually tells us nothing whatsoever about what objective law actually is. I take it to mean that objective law is unambiguous, and clearly definable, and known beforehand. Okay then, I'm not opposed to that, we can agree those are good things, so how are these traits only available to governments? We are not told.Grames' point here was that under a system where any particular crime might conceivably be prosecuted under one of two different agencies, there is by definition no way to know beforehand what the particular punishment is, or even the substance of the law itself, because it could be the particular standards and strictures of the first agency, or the second. If in fact there is no difference between the two, then there isn't meaningful competition between them and we're not really talking about a polycentric legal system.
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Suppose that a claim is made in the following manner: men and women are different, and possess different fundamental natures according to their gender. A woman -- a "good woman" -- will act in certain ways according to her feminine nature (which, we are left to suppose, is derived from... the shape of her vagina, or the physical nature of the sex act, or her brain chemistry, or something). And any woman who acts apart from this supposed ideal is in rebellion against her nature, and thus... wrong or wicked in some vague manner.
But with respect to any gender-specific behavior that we would seek to offer prescriptive advice, or make general moral pronouncements (e.g. transsexuality is immoral; women should not ask a man out, but be asked; nor should she seek to be President; etc.)... doesn't it remain that any individual woman is not ethically beholden to her nature as "woman qua woman," but to her nature as an individual? That she must first understand herself, and then take those actions which are best for her personally, not simply as an instance of a type, but as a highly specific entity in an actual, real-world context? And where she finds that her individual nature is in conflict with that which is proposed to be typical of her, as a woman, that she must pursue that which is best for her as an individual -- the expectations of others for womanhood be damned?
Well, my first thought in this case is that the person theorizing about some characteristic being a fundamental element of femininity is simply wrong. That would certainly be my response to the idea that a woman should not want to be President. If we have actually discovered a fundamental characteristic of women, it should hold true for all instances of that concept (the exception is broken units, which I don't have a complete grasp on but I think is well explored in this topic: http://forum.objecti...?showtopic=1099). This is why we should be wary of claims about the fundamental nature of each gender which are based on nothing more than armchair theorizing and personal introspection. Personally, I think it's obvious that there are fundamental differences between men and women, but what they are, and which ones are truly fundamental rather than just generalizations, I have no clue.
The more I think about it, I think the broken units discussion might get to the core of what some of the issue is here. It could certainly be the case that there are instances of men and women who do not share the fundamental characteristics of their genders, in the same way that a broken unit generally is missing a characteristic that it should have. On the other hand, most of what is said about the "fundamental" nature of men or women is just people speculating based on their personal experiences. Serious claims should be backed up by serious, objective evidence.
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What would Ayn Rand say?
Why should he care?
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I haven't seen the movie, but I finished the book recently. Honestly, I wasn't impressed. It seems to me the entire premise of the book was built around, "What if I wrote a serial where the protagonists of each section had something to do, if even tangentially, with the other sections?" In fact, the author actually points out this premise in the book.
This is exactly what I thought of the movie, actually. The different storylines had only the thinnest connection to one another as far as plot goes. It was like the writers wanted to make it so subtle that the audience would get excited and feel smart when they spotted a connection from one storyline to the next, and as a result they made an effort to integrate them into the plot as little as possible. As a result, it comes out almost as 6 independent stories told at the same time. They weren't even thematically tied together all that well. The theme and structure of the movie was grand in conception, but the filmmakers relied far too much on the audience enjoying the activity of spotting the connections and recognizing the same actors in different roles, and as a result that's where the main mileage of the movie comes from (the same actors in different roles, and figuring out the connections). At the end of the day, there's just not as much there as promised.
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Good replies by sNerd and Nicky. I'll only add a historical aside about how we ended up with health insurance that operates through our jobs and our employers, when it is so clearly a bad system. Following WWII there were a number of wage controls which prevented employers from competing for workers through wage increases. Thus, firms found a different way to compete for workers: by offering more lavish benefits packages, including health insurance. Eventually the wage controls were lifted, but at that point employer-managed health insurance was the status quo. Later, this system was entrenched with tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance making it much more expensive to purchase health care independently. All this to say, we're stuck in a bad system, and it's attributable mainly to the unintended consequences of past government controls.
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So feel free to rely on the drug laws, just don't "literally" use them? Why are you clinging to that? Is it because you want to win the argument, or do you really not understand principles, and the role of context in principled thought?
What? I was pointing out that the blackmail idea still uses the drug law, even though you're not directly involving the police, so I don't see why it would be acceptable when simply calling the cops wouldn't be.
Rearden's desire to kill teachers
in Ayn Rand Book Club
Posted
... The book isn't about how bad being a thug is; that's a pretty obvious point to make. The world has always had thugs, and always will. The book is about philosophy, and in the case of the Wet Nurse, fresh out of college and full of ridiculous ideas, it's pretty clear where his philosophy came from. It's a pretty simple passage to understand, really.
You've picked a passage that's specifically about teachers and then... wondered why it's specifically about teachers? As with all writing, different passages focus on different things. You seem to want every passage to be a microcosm of the entire philosophy being put forth, and that's just ridiculous.