Maken
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Posts posted by Maken
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If they say, "They can't do that," then I'd say, "Why not?" Whatever crazy story they may try to make up about how desperately isolated they are, how tyrannical the cheese factory owner is, blah blah, long hours, blah blah, few natural resources, blah blah, fact is these people in this area managed to make livings before the cheese factory existed somehow, so that proves it can be done somehow.
Very good point indeed. Its just the altruism in people that makes debating/arguing fruitless. They have been blinded all their lives by this idea that government intervention is a necessity for equilibrium and success and without government intervention, the evil capitalist will take over and exploit every living being until everyone dies.
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People never would need the cheese factory to be their only way to make money even if moving would be difficult. There's a bunch of people there, surely they need more food than just cheese and they need clothing, housing, art, et cetera. All they have to do is start producing other things people would need and want and they then could start trading with others for what they need and want. If needed, they could even devise their own money system instead of always directly bartering and use that among themselves and only barter or use money from the cheese job in any case they somehow could get stuff from the rest of the world somehow even though they can't move. The flaw of this cheese factory scenario is it assumes people are stuck dependent on the factory and at its mercy or that of the government because it assumes to treat value like a static quantity that you've just got to get from somebody else when in fact you can create value anew where there had been less or none before. Cheese factory not paying you enough for your services? Do or make something else with what is available to you instead or in supplement.
Yea I see what you are saying here. Just get the typical, "They can't do that" response so its more or less pointless to argue with ignorance. But I agree with you indeed.
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Obviously in a laissez faire capitalism economy there would be no such thing as a minimum wage law, as that requires government intervention and control. In retrospect this is a good thing, mainly because it does not put a price or limit on the minds of the employer and it will ultimately decrease unemployment, as more people could be hired based on their work ability and not their "right" to work.
But what if there was a small, rural community. Say there is 1 conglomeration of a factory there and the only thing this community produces is, say, cheese. Having a more or less "monopoly" on jobs for this community, it could do what most statists and altruists like to call "exploit" the workers, being as they would have no other place to work and they would have to find a job there.
Being as they are in this position, the factory could set its wages at, just a random amount, $1.50 an hour. In today's inflatted society, one cannot reasonably live on $1.50 per hour and therefore this would be "exploitation" and would require government intervention.
I ran into this scenario today when talking about monopolies and minimum wage with a friend and this is the story she told me. I didn't really know what to say besides the idea that they could move to a new location. She merely just presumed that people in this situation cannot even afford to move.
Knowing that minimum wage does not solve the issues here, as even if the wage was "regulated" to be a mandatory $3.00 an hour, the company would only hire back half of its employees to even out its budget. This is how I explained that minimum wages do not solve and I ran into the road block of, "And that is also why government intervention is needed, so they could be FORCED to hire back employees at the new minimum wage".
More or less I am just looking for input on this and what a good argument would sound like. Sorry if I lost some of you along the way, feel free to ask for clarification.
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Well, he was implying that throughout the 5 million years that humanity existed, 25,000 of the most recent had classes. I doubt they're referring to the trophic levels.
I guess this person just doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
You assumed he did?
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I'd still like to know how the person who made this post found out that "classes" existed 25,000 years ago, which predates the earliest known part of the neolithic revolution
Maybe he was referring to animal classes, aka the food chain?
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This is so weird, I was going to post a post JUST like this.
This thought came up last night because I thought it was kind of ironic that if you were to die for a free market society to take over, it would be almost altruistic of you?
I came to the conclusion that you would have to look at in terms of the Objectivist view on sacrifice. If you value the progression of society to a full free market society (which would benefit friends, family, etc) then it really wouldn't be a sacrifice. We all must realize we will die eventually, and as being a rational being, we should try to extend the length at which we will live, but I think this would be a worthy cause to die for personally, seeing as I would be making a significant contribution for a free market world.
It would, be of waste however, if the general public were not educated as to what it means to have a free market society and what it takes to maintain it. If you left the public uneducated to the process and values/morals of a free market society, the altruist would eventually consume the mind of society again.
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I am glad everyone enjoyed reading a bit about the "other viewpoint" and getting a good laugh at it. They sure do hate capitalism over there, and they REALLY hate Ayn Rand.
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I was looking for some info about monopolies and Ayn Rand's view on them in the free market and I stumbled upon a Communist website (much like this one but for Communism obviously). Curious, I read their FAQ that defines Communism. Below is a link, I find the glaring holes in the theory and its mutated idea of "morality" to be quite funny. How many gaps can you spot?!!?
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See this thread for a related discussion.
Thank you
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Well lets just use this as an example.
Say after we tally up all the necessities a school would need (janitors, teachers, paper, books, etc), what would the prices hit in order for this school to become a profitable venture? Lets just say they got it down to $3,000 a student per year in order to make profit. Wouldn't that be very expensive and rather difficult to pay for?
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Three points.
First, we currently have a public education system -- and its worst failures are in the inner cities, with respect to exactly the kinds of children for whom you are professing such concern. Literacy rates among black inner city children today are actually lower than they were among slaves in the antebellum South -- when it was actually illegal to teach blacks to read. Trying to defend public education on the grounds of the needs of the poor in the slums is a sick joke. Any society which had the political will to force a public education system to operate effectively in the slums would have the will to provide voluntary charitable support for the education of the poor.
Second, there are ample instances of people with little to no formal education achieving great success in life. These hypothetical children, who have evil parents and who cannot find any charitable support for their education, would no doubt achieve less than they could have. But so what? I'm achieving less than I could have had I been able to afford to attend Harvard. That doesn't entitle me to force someone else to pay my tuition at the point of a gun.
Third, the pathologies of the slums are in large measure created, supported and exacerbated by the lack of freedom. Why bother to get your child an education when he's just going to go on welfare anyhow? The myriad opportunities for advancement that freedom provides to people at all economic levels makes the value of an education more apparent, and serve to motivate more parents even in poor parts of society to try to educate their kids because the connection between education and success would be more apparent to them. There was a time when poor families aspired to send their kids to college. There could be again.
That was a beautiful response
I agree with all of this, just wanted some opinions and ideas and you nailed it.
Thanks for the link to the website too, was quite an interesting read!
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Even in our current culture there are philanthropists who fund scholarships to provide educations to poor children. A free society would be much more prosperous, and such philanthropy would likely be much easier to come by if necessary. In brief, in a free society if such children exist there is nothing to stop you from helping them. (This contrasts with our current society, in which your productivity is cut in half by pointless government regulation and half of what you do produce is taken from you by force through taxation, resulting in your having to live on something like a quarter of the wealth you could have had.) The kind of hypothetical parents you describe are such a corner case they're hardly worth considering; any society in which the majority of people were so irrational and nihilistic as to treat their children in such a manner would collapse into anarchy or dictatorship in short order.
One other rhetorical point: the 'what if bad people screw things up' argument cuts both ways. What if some bizarre pedagogical cabal seizes control of the public school system, grossly failing to provide a proper education to the children placed in their care? What if, as a result, massive numbers of children grow up with no knowledge of history, science, art, or even basic literacy? What could you do to protect your own child, trapped in such a world, forced to support the very comprachicos who are crippling his mind? And, as a bonus question, what is the difference between the educational nightmare sketched above and the state of the American public schools today?
I think cases like which I provided are uncommon in a "middle class" setting, but what about when you get to the slums of the nation? The few children there that do attend school do so only because it is free to them more or less. Their parents, based on the fact that they live in the slums, probably wouldn't even pay for them to have an education. This is neglect but not in a traditional way. Are these kids not to get a shot in life because of their parent's bad judgment calls?
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There's no need for an alternative; that isn't a valid objection. One person's negligence cannot justify violating another person's rights. If it could then you could argue for enslaving everybody on the grounds that some people will use their freedom self-destructively. If you see a child that you think should be better educated than it is, offer to pay for the additional education using your own resources. Don't force other people to pay for it at the point of a gun. If the child's parents are so negligent that they are causing an objectively provable irreparable harm to the child (e.g. by locking it in a closet or something like that), that's child abuse and warrants loss of custody. Below that standard, it's none of your business. One person's 'negligence' is another person's free-range parenting.
Wow that is a great way to look at it. Need cannot be a claim more or less?
And I am saying, just what if educational made a capitalistic turn and a set of parents refused to send their children to school to save a penny, though it would not be in the child's interest not to get an education.
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Obviously the idea of a "nationalized educational service" is something Objectivists do not like. The problem is, is there a viable solution?
One could say that we should just make education a private field and let competition control prices, but what about children with negligent parents?
I was just arguing this point with someone today and I could not, for the life of me, come up with an alternative.
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For us, people outside the USA, this news is catastrophic because it sends a message to the rest of the world: if the USA, the beacon of individualism, has chosen this collectivist path, it is because that path should be the right one.
After this, I do not see how in Mexico and the rest of Latin America we will ever consider the "right to health" as a fallacy. I can hear them saying "You see? Even the Americans have realized that people who are well off should provide for those worse off".
Our only hope relies on that 51% or so of voters who do not support this Law. I hope that through their voting they can correct quickly enough the course things are taking, but I am now skeptical. Why? Because once the majority gets benefits from looting the minority, they will hold fast to the evil system.
Just like the frog that does not jump from the bowl with water if it is being heated up slowly enough, you may not feel the need to escape until it is too late.
We can derive a lesson from Venezuela's experience. Hugo Chavez has been imposing a Marxist dictatorship so gradually, so slowly, so gently, that people living there have kept the illusion that this is not really happening, that it will never happen. That somehow, at some point, Chavez will just stop.
And remember, Chavez has been elected and re-elected once and once again by democratic means.
Why? Because the parasites are always larger in number than productive people (until a breaking point is reached and the whole system crashes).
For atheist's God sake, Americans, start designing plan B.
Plan B may be the creation of a new land of freedom in one of the States (Texas? Hawaii? Utah? You name it) and get this State out of Big Government.
The Founding Fathers whose names are so precious to you are just the first of any series of Founding Fathers who will come next, as needed, to defend freedom.
Future generations could recall YOUR names with the same devotion.
If there was in history a Zionist movement that brought millions of Jews to a new State, Israel, Why couldn't a similar international movement bring together free men from all over the world into a new Zion?
Yes lets all secede in Texas!
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It's not law yet. It still has to go to committee to reconcile the House and Senate versions and be signed into law by the Messiah.
We gotta be optimistic as Objectivists! Maybe it will fail reconciliation and not go anywhere?!!?!
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I'll trade you my bread ration card for your vodka ration card, Comrade.
1984 :|
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I don't know what I did to deserve Marxism in my Christmas stocking.
You just made my day a little brighter! Hoorah for the few reasonable people left in the world.
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http://www.latimes.com/business/nationworl...0,7801371.story
The senate passed a healthcare reform bill 60-39 which "extends coverage" to 31 million Americans. By this they mean that you are now required by law to have health insurance and insurance companies are required by law to cover all preexisting conditions....but don't worry...your premiums will go down.
It makes me sick.
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I know what you mean. The thing that really irks me is the lack of technological innovation that's inevitably going to happen. I was really hoping that by the end of my life, humans would have much longer lifespans, but now... I don't know about that.
I totally agree with you on the whole "technological stunt" that is bound to happen. The whole idea of the "right" to health care is what is really sickening. I know most (if not all) the people on this forum agree with me, it just sucks still.
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Actually sick to their stomach over the idea of a Nationalized Health Care?
Maybe I am overreacting a bit, but I am only a junior in High School and when I first heard about the Health Care Bill being passed in the House, I was almost in tears with anger... I think it might be the most awful thing ever conceived of in American History.
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Enjoying your website
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Yea I pretty much understand that RATIONALITY equates to being a human. I don't mind them discussing terms or logistics, it is food for thought really.
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I read up on the term of "Lobbying" on the Lexicon but it only gave a definitive explanation about what lobbying is and it more or less just mocked lobbyists.
Can anyone explain to me what Rand would have said about Lobbying in today's society: (ie lobbying over health care, bailouts, etc).
Here is what the Lexicon provided:
“Lobbying” is the activity of attempting to influence legislation by privately influencing the legislators. It is the result and creation of a mixed economy—of government by pressure groups. Its methods range from mere social courtesies and cocktail-party or luncheon “friendships” to favors, threats, bribes, blackmail.
Thanks
Minimum Wage
in Political Philosophy
Posted
I see, so is this $1.50 an hour worth their time and their work effort is what you are more or less saying?
Their work and production is a product and they should sell it at a reasonable price, if they choose to work for such a little salary, that is their fault?