1: Were does the right to private property come from?
2: Whats the common Objectivist opinion on strikes, do you believe the government should intervene to protect companies from strikes?
3: I noticed the forum rules say “Participants agree not use the website to spread ideas contrary to Objectivism. Examples include religion, communism, “moral tolerationism,” and libertarianism.” why the hostility to libertarianism? I understand there are differences between it and objectivism but both pretty much follow the same course of “less government , more freedom”.
4: I noticed a lot of Objectivists (including Ayn Rand herself) are ardent supports of Israel , however doesn’t the fact that Palestinian land was taken and given to Jewish settelers when Israel was founded clearey violate the “right to private property”.
*please excuse any grammer or spelling mistakes , English is not my first lanquage*
- The most fundamental answer is “the law of identity” as applied to man’s nature and the facts of reality. A quick walkthrough of what this basically means that we examine man and see that he is a being of a specific nature, and therefore has certain requirements and needs for survival and flourishing life. In ethics, we look at these requirements and proscribe norms to guide in how to accomplish that. We also see through ethics that since man’s life is the ultimate value, ever man is an end in himself, not the means to any further end. So when we combine these realizations, that man survives in a certain way, and that if he is to survive and thrive, he needs to do certain things, thus we arrive at the concept of rights. Since these moral norms come from man’s nature, all rights are an indissoluble whole, such as the right to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc.
Not only do we look at man’s nature, but also the world around us. We see that we do not live in the Garden of Eden or in some Heaven and we do not float about like ghosts in some immaterial world. So given the kind of being we are, and reality being what it is, we arrive at the realization that the only way to implement man’s rights, including the right to life, liberty, etc., is the concept of private property. So the right to private property is implicit in all rights, as without ownership and control over our minds and physical bodies, and over our own lives and work, then no independent action would be possible at all. For example, the abstract “right to free speech” is not some vague concept floating around, but the private property right of an individual to write a newspaper collumn, or to purchase a concert hall, or buy airtime on radio or television, or to assemble on some property you have permission to be on, and without the individual property rights involved, there would be no objective way to implement “freedom of speech” without some contradiction or conflict.
Key to understanding this would be reading four articles:
The Objectivist Ethics
Man’s Rights
The Nature of Government
Collectivized “Rights”
- Since every man has a right to his own life, and must live by his own rational judgment, then it is certainly possible that men can come into conflict over value-judgments. The whole point of a government, according to Objectivism, is to ensure that each man can live by his judgment, without forcing or sacrificing others. If two men agree on some value, they can trade. If they disagree, they still can only deal with each other by means of reason, not violence. One can only secure his rational self-interest through production and exchange, not parasitism and violence.
In a strike, we basically have the management which evaluates the labor services of workers to be a certain amount he is willing to pay, and you have the workers themselves which evaluate their labor services to be a certain amount they want to be paid. In a free society, the law of supply and demand determines prices, including the price of labor services. There is no intrinsic “fair price” or “just wage” or whatever that in the eyes of God or the central planners constitutes the inherently “right” price or wage. Men have a right to organize into unions, provided no one is forced to join, and provided no management is forced to deal with them. Management has a right to ignore the union demands or fire workers and seek others that are willing to work at the wages offered. The fact that the workers are demanding to be paid more is simply their pursuit of their own economic self-interest, as the management trying to pay a low price for labor services is pursuing his. Just like when you go to the store, for any other purchase, you want to pay less, the seller wants to get more. The law of supply and demand solves the problem. If the buyer’s demands are too high, the seller will go somewhere else. If his demands are unjustified, then you will find a cheaper seller. There is no rational reason for any intervention. The only role of the government in the event of a strike is the general police forces and law courts to protect people from the initiation of violence and to protect contracts.
This issue is addressed in Rand’s book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Chapter 5 “Common Fallacies About Capitalism,” in the third section “The Role of Labor Unions.”
- Believe it or not, Objectivism isn’t primarily even about politics. Libertarianism is basically the attempt to arrive at freedom without delving into philosophy. Needless to say, Objectivists just generally think this is wrong. Freedom, to the Objectivist, isn’t some axiomatic or self-evident thing, it has to be adduced from reference to an ethics and its roots in metaphysics and epistemology So they don’t accept the approach of the libertarians, nor the conclusions of all the different types of libertarian, which ranges from anarchists to religionists to drug-users to nihilists, and all sorts of various idiots and plain scum. Aptly enough, while most libertarians consider all these philosophically disperate groups to be libertarians, but they don’t even accept Objectivists as a type of libertarian, because they insist too much on there being one rational justification for political liberty (i.e. the same reason why most people reject Objectivism: because they stubbornly insist on one reality and truth, and won’t let you have your whims.)
A key article to understanding this is “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty” in Ayn Rand’s book The Voice of Reason.
- Snerd’s answer above was pretty much succinct on this. We don’t consider this “Palestinian land” or belonging to the Palestinian people. By defending Israel, we are defending the homesteading principle and the rights of European settlers to homestead and (as they mostly did) buy up land and erect a civilized Western nation amidst wilderness. Jewish settlers did the same, as did Boers in the Transvaal, as Spanish settlers in Argentina, or as the various Europeans did in North America for that matter. The fact that some religious fanatics and racists declared war on them and some got kicked off their land is all the more reason to support the Israelis. We are not, as some neoconservatives and such often are, “Israel Firsters,” or support Israel out of some sort of religious eschatological attachment. Our support only goes as far as moral values we have in common, namely in defending Western civilization against mysticism and tribalism.