Cool article on Rand vs. Rothbard (on government)

[Mnrchst]

http://mises.org/daily/4698

I surmise the author is in Rothbard's camp and deliberately misrepresented Rand's and Rothbard's views in order to covertly promote anarcho-capitalism, but I'm wise to his slight of hand. He presents the discrepancy as "Rand said people don't have complete freedom of choice and Rothbard says they do" in order to make Rothbard's political position seem better.

Obviously, people do have complete freedom of choice, but what the author fails to mention is that people are "condemned to be free" as Sartre would put it. We cannot choose to not value ourselves in the sense that we always value what we desire because we're desiring it. Even if someone says "I choose to kill myself because I hate myself", they're still valuing themselves is the sense that they're choosing an action that they desire as opposed to alternatives they don't.

So this is what Rand means when she says that people are always valuing themselves, not that they're always valuing rational things, or that they don't have free will.

So how this relates to the political debate: Rand recognizes what exists--people are always valuing themselves, and, therefore, there are objective values (i.e. you cannot value without valuing your life, because you cannot value without existing, and even if you choose suicide because you're in a concentration camp, you're still valuing your life because you value your own life enough to not want to suffer as opposed to continuing to suffer unnecessarily).

Therefore, because there are objective values (which we deduce from this, like 'don't murder', etc), it makes sense to say that a society should have one set of laws, even if judges and cops compete with one another for funding (because they can only get them from donations), because there needs to be this objectivity in order for there to be a moral society--a society that recognizes that values are objective and that there are therefore things that are objectively wrong (this of course doesn't demonstrate that Minarchist society's laws will be good, but this problem exists in an Anarcho-capitalist society as well, so it's a moot point. No Minarchists ever say "If 51% of the population vote that it's right, then it is").

Rothbard basically says "Sure, you can value the anti-yourself, even though you have to exist in order to value anything. People have free will, right?" He's rebelling against reality. 'Why can't people believe whatever they want?' Well, they can, but it's not necessarily going to correspond with reality, which is what it is whether you like it or not.

And now we see how this translates into politics: If there are no objective values, then why would you have one set of laws? This wouldn't jibe with the notion that all values are fundamentally subjective. Instead, you ought to have agencies compete over their various sets of laws, because everyone should be able to compete over what values are good and bad with force, because everyone's values are just as good as anyone else's. As a result, the "market" of everyone's views should determine which laws get enforced and which don't.

[Eiuol]

The article is rife with problems in its claims about Rand, so I didn't even read all of it. I'm not sure if you're saying that Rand said people always value themselves, or that the article did, but that's not even true. In many cases she argued that some people don't value themselves much or at all, and that's what altruism is characterized by (selflessness).

Edited March 4, 2012 by Eiuol

[Mnrchst]

You're right. What I meant was that they cannot value outside of the context of being alive. In other words, they're not valuing themselves, but they're valuing their own pleasure (which they get from not valuing themselves, as in altruism).

What are the errors the article makes about Rand? (other than it's assertion that she doesn't really believe in free will).

Edited March 7, 2012 by Mnrchst

[Hairnet]

Although his terminology is clunky, his characterization Rand's ideas on contract and government are pretty good.

Although he acts as though Rand does not believe in rights separat of a government. This is wrong. The reason why Ayn Rand supported this sort of contractual frame work was to hand the specific right of the use of the retaliation of force. An individual must recognize rights in others, and then form groups in order to protect those rights. Without this, no kind of due process can be possible. If someone is assaulted, and their is no justice system, their only recourse is to take it upon themselves and their gang to deal with the problem. A preexisting contractual system allows for due process to exist because people agree to some extent on how a case like that should be handled. That is why Rand's system is better. Sure you have rights in natuer, but that doesn't matter because without a government, any attempt to protect and enforce them will end in disaster.

Its a good article.

Ayn Rand doesn't believe in that subjectivist kind of free will that people like Mises and Rothbard believe in. Your conciousness makes decisions and creates you subconciousness which in turn create desires and evaluations. It all comes down to existence exists. Our mind is not independent of the world, so the only decision we get to make is the kind of ideas we have.

Since Mises and Rothbard follow in the same sort of rationalist-subjectivist vein of Kant, I doubt they think that conciousness has any direct connection to reality.

Edited March 7, 2012 by Hairnet

[Eiuol]

"To begin with, Rand would say that you are wrong because you have defaulted on a promise contained in a contract. "

This is where it starts to get odd. I'm supposing the author means morally wrong, but I'm not sure where the reason for refusing to follow through with the hen exchange is wrong is that it's fraud, not that it is wrong because someone is defaulting on a contract per se. An explanation would involve mentioning fraud, and then in turn why fraud is wrong. Perhaps I'm being nitpicky, but the article is about political freedom, not contract law. In some sense, the article is pointing out fundamental differences in views on propety, but goes in another direction than I expect at this point.

I'm not sure where "For a Randist, a promise creates an obligation" comes from right after the contract part, especially since the author simplies to imply that Rand would say *all* promises are obligations. What kind of promises are we even talking about? "A Randist judge would have to defend, in court, a contract in which a man sells himself to be a slave: once a man made a contractual commitment to be a slave, and to forego any further freedom of choice, he has to abide by his promise." Once I see this, I can't take seriously most of what this writer is saying. A judge operating on Objectivist principles probably would say such a contract is invalid because enforcing it would be a rights violation. The "slave" does not have to abide by this kind of "promise". This kind of line is what makes the article bad.

Further problems are what Hairnet mentioned.

"For Rothbard, values and their hierarchy are not the product of perception alone, though, clearly, his writing implies that awareness of the facts is highly relevant to your choice of values."

And yet another problem, because values aren't even said by Rand to be products of consciousness, only products of *choices* of identifications that you made. There are more problems; the article is bad to the extent that most explanations of Rand's ideas are incorrect, even if the author disagrees.

Edited March 8, 2012 by Eiuol