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The American State Religion

Got one more for ya...
 
Daniel DeLuca said:
I am curious who here has watched the movie, "Atlas Shrugged"?
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Haven't seen the movie, but I read the book three times (skipped that 60-page sermon the last two times, though!).
 
Daniel DeLuca said:
Rockefeller's innovations brought us goods we didn't even consider having. Gasoline was considered to be a waste product because it was too volatile. Using pipelines to transport fuel, was a concept no one had ever considered before. The only reason Vanderbilt invited Rockefeller to the initial meeting, was the fact that there were more trains available than were necessary for passenger traffic.

In general, people fared much better when the innovators of the 19th century began producing goods and bringing them to market. The price of goods went down and the standard of living went way up. Rather than using a steam driven automobile, which was prone to catch fire, the so-called Robber barons innovated a starter switch, which made it much easier to start an automobile. The fact is, those so-called robber barons were not even barons to begin with. A baron is someone born into wealth, but while that could be said for J.P. Morgan, it could not be said for people like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Edison, or his protégé, Tesla, who incidently made it his life goal to make electricity free for everyone. To claim that they were robbers, is based on gross ignorance of many of the industrialists, whose attempts at wealth, involved getting grants from the federal government, but their ventures were abysmal failures. The most successful businessmen of the 19th century, did not rely on government subsidies. In fact, Vanderbilt was successful in putting Collins out of business, and driving him into bankruptcy. Collins was robbing the American taxpayer blind!

It was a revisionist historian, Matthew Josephson, in the 1930s who invented the myth that the capitalist industrialists were robber barons. He was extremely sympathetic to Communism, and he was heavily influenced by Charles Beard, a professor who was known to promote Socialism. "The Robber Barons", was written in 1932, when industrialists were being demonized as scapegoats for the Depression, that was caused by the Smoot-Harley tariffs, high interest rates, making it difficult to get capital for investments, and high taxation.

Here is an excellent link to an article that explains that Josephson was not a true historian, but rather an elitist who created a false history out of whole cloth:

https://fee.org/articles/how-the-myth-of-the-robber-barons-began-and-why-it-persists/
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The article itself is grossly inaccurate, but neolibertrians fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.

"The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons."

That's absolute nonsense. The Robber Barons was written in 1934, and FEE's article ignored the overwhelming evidence contemporary to the era, including Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company, Louis F. Post's, The Ethics of Democracy, Lincoln Steffens's series, The Shame of the Cities, a series of books by Henry George showing how these burgeoning monopolies were not a products of free enterprise, but products of privilege, and The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding, in 1873. All of these authors were fiercely anti-socialist, and Henry George was prominently featured in Liberty and the Great Libertarians, which can be downloaded from the Mises website.

Far from being an era of entrepreneurship, it was an era of monstrous fortunes amassed through unfettered political corruption, mostly in the form of land grants, monopoly franchises and monopolizing natural resources such as coal and iron reserves. As asinine as comments by Stalin-apologist Matthew Josephson might have been, using him as a straw man by saying that he is the reason we think of the late 1800s as the age of robber barons is asinine in the opposite direction.
 
sun said:
The article itself is grossly inaccurate, but neolibertrians fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.

"The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons."

That's absolute nonsense. The Robber Barons was written in 1934, and FEE's article ignored the overwhelming evidence contemporary to the era, including Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company, Louis F. Post's, The Ethics of Democracy, Lincoln Steffens's series, The Shame of the Cities, a series of books by Henry George showing how these burgeoning monopolies were not a products of free enterprise, but products of privilege, and The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding, in 1873. All of these authors were fiercely anti-socialist, and Henry George was prominently featured in Liberty and the Great Libertarians, which can be downloaded from the Mises website.

Far from being an era of entrepreneurship, it was an era of monstrous fortunes amassed through unfettered political corruption, mostly in the form of land grants, monopoly franchises and monopolizing natural resources such as coal and iron reserves. As asinine as comments by Stalin-apologist Matthew Josephson might have been, using him as a straw man by saying that he is the reason we think of the late 1800s as the age of robber barons is asinine in the opposite direction.
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He wrote the book. To claim that it is asinine in the opposite direction, is ridiculous, when he coined the phrase! Burt Folsom has explained where Ida Folsom was coming from. Her father was an oilman who did not prosper so much in the industry. She was disgruntled. I posted the video. If you had watched it, you would have seen that. Her accusation was that Rockefeller "low-balled" her father. His assets simply were not worth all that much! Folsom has broken down the difference between entrepreneurs who profited from land grants, and those who took no subsidies and received zero land grants...men like James J. Hill, who built the Northern railroad....men like Vanderbilt, who beat out a government backed monopoly, flouting the unjust and most likely unconstitutional law that granted the monopoly to his competitor, in the process.

The problem with liberals like yourself, is you conflate the business men who used political ties to get ahead, with the true entrepreneurs, whose innovation brought us the great progress, which were the stepping stones to where we are today! It is no coincidence, that the most advanced innovations we have today, were invented in the United States of America. Other countries, with their leaders, who think they know everything, keep putting their thumbs on the scale. You vote for people like Biden, who want to end fracking and ultimately end oil production, when the efforts to do so in places like California, have been so costly that they cannot afford to maintain the infrastructure of their electrical grid. Most of the fires that have been started out there, have started because of the outdated equipment that is used in the transmission of electricity. They don't have the money to upgrade their equipment, because they are wasting it on green energy. Green energy is not anywhere near as efficient as energy produced by fossil fuels! That is just one example of where some industries cannot make a profit, without government intervention! We call those leaders, "crony capitalists".
 
Daniel DeLuca said:
I am curious who here has watched the movie, "Atlas Shrugged"?
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I tried and didn't understand it. :confused:

I mean I get the overall point of resisting big government but the three part movie is too long and too boring. It's not a good movie.
 
It shows the inherent flaws that have historically been shown when government puts its thumbs on the scales of what would otherwise be free economics. You see gross incompetence, time and time again, because it is not the highest quality that gets rewarded, but instead, the well connected. In the end, the best and brightest entrepreneurs shrug, and find an escape, and leave the rest of the world (Atlas holds the weight of the world on his shoulders) to fend for themselves.
 
Francisco D'Anconia: "If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders-what would you tell him to do?"
Henry "Hank" Rearden: "I . . . don't know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?"
Francisco D'Anconia: "To shrug."
 
I had a co-worker who told me that he had a Solar Panel for his car! He said that the sales-person had told him that it would save him money on the cost of gasoline. He must have missed the part about him being a "sales-person". He was convinced that it did, and nothing could convince him otherwise. I asked him if he had done a Cost-Benefit Ratio Analysis on it. He had no idea what a CBRA is! I told him to think through what those words mean.

It is clear that the average voter is clueless when it comes to "investing in green energy". It is so sad that they don't understand the difference between a good investment and a bad investment. They just assume that if it is an investment, there are no risks, and it will pay off somewhere down the road, and it doesn't matter to them if that "somewhere down the road", is so far down the road, that by the time it does pay for itself, it needs to be replaced due to normal weather conditions or wear and tear. It doesn't even matter to them if there are better investments that could pay for themselves much sooner, or have residual dividends. It doesn't even matter to them if the cost of the capital to invest in such things, (i.e. the interest rate or the Federal Bond yield) outpaces the ROI! They just hear the word "invest", and they think, "Meh! Why shouldn't we?" SMH!
 
Daniel DeLuca said:
I am curious who here has watched the movie, "Atlas Shrugged"?
Click to expand...

I haven't but I am familiar with her book.

I think Ayn Rand takes Nietzsche and puts him on steroids.
Survival of the fittest.
Nietzsche was influenced by the whole Darwin thing of 'Only the strong survive'.
I think this needs to be tempered with social empathy.
Sure we want people to be able to stand on their own two feet... 'Work makes Free'... but not to the extent that we kick homeless people living in a sack on the street.
Ayn Rand is a grotesque caricature. Not a direction to be followed. In the Bible it states that the human heart is wicked and deceitful and that is true.

In short, both Kant and Hegel (and also all the French and British Enlighteners) correctly viewed the individual as inextricably linked with society, in dialectical unity with it. Never was their individualism posed as a way to escape society or "exceed" it. Self-interest was, in them, never counterposed to common interest, as in Rand. Rand sees things in black and white: that which serves the "self" as good, that which serves the "common" as bad. That's why Rand's version of individualism is a decadent one.

In Rand, the individual's activity becomes detached from its social basis, turning purely inwards and cultivating one's own, private peculiarities and wishes as absolute values. The puffing up into an end in itself of purportedly self-sufficient individuality cannot alter, let alone annul a single social commitment. That's why all Rand's "heroes" look the same and altogether they look so unrealistic, because real life simply doesn't work in the way Rand thought.

In the end, I think culture needs a balance between the individual and the collective. They balance each other out. They correct the vices and errors of each other. "The individual as inextricably linked with society" is a concept I agree with -- until something goes horribly wrong with that society. I don't agree with Rand that society should be fully atomised since we will always be bound by ties of culture, blood, and history. But i do think individual personal and economic freedom is fundamental to creating a worthwhile society.

https://evonomics.com/rand-meets-david-sloan-wilson-atlas-hugged/

https://evonomics.com/what-happens-...GVr8R0NBp1eZOiZeB48C4CmvgUffoJNE6K0YUoVWIqffA

https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2013/02/ayn-rand-and-rational-beings.html
 
Daniel DeLuca said:
It shows the inherent flaws that have historically been shown when government puts its thumbs on the scales of what would otherwise be free economics. You see gross incompetence, time and time again, because it is not the highest quality that gets rewarded, but instead, the well connected. In the end, the best and brightest entrepreneurs shrug, and find an escape, and leave the rest of the world (Atlas holds the weight of the world on his shoulders) to fend for themselves.
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These are some good articles to read:

http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2013/02/finding-correct-balance-between-state.html

https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2007/11/ayn-rand-and-adam-smith.html




Rand made a contradiction in trying to separate what she understand as altruism and selfishness, in essence she claimed that altruism cannot come from a position of self-interest, which is false, self-sacrifice can be motivated by self-interest, accordingly to her definitions. Because self-interest is not equivalent of self-preservation (yes, suicidal person exists).

She tried to define the reactive conduct of "goodness" and named it "altruism", then she defined selfishness as the rational conduct in general. What she dismisses is that there could be reactive and rational conduct of "evilness". She claimed that altruism is the equivalent of learned morals and society rules, and exacerbated the opposite with almost no ethical consideration. This is the reason why the examples she made of a greatman were a rapist in novel and a murdered in real life, both very independently minded, selfish as Rand would put it, but rapist and murderer at the end, and that was more ethical in her world view, than altruism under her defintion. "Free" of external influence in their desitions (like being totally free of influence would be possible).

Finally, she may have wrongly selected the terms or intentionally tried to create confusion, so her public would think that this philosophy was so special that few people could understand it, but in reality, at most, was a marketing stunt.

https://evonomics.com/evolutionary-biology-proves-ayn-rand/

https://evonomics.com/why-laissez-faire-lovers-are-anti-capitalists/
 
sun said:
In the end, I think culture needs a balance between the individual and the collective. They balance each other out. They correct the vices and errors of each other.
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I have often said that both capitalism and socialism are essential parts of life and are not in contradiction to each other. Socialism is how we naturally relate to family and close friends. Capitalism is how the family / tribe relates to other families / tribes. Both are essential parts of life.

Problems occur when either is applied in its wrong place. When parents pay their children for chores for instance, teaching kids to only do things if they are paid, thus bringing capitalism into a place where socialism should be the norm. Or when governments attempt to take from one family and give to another, by force, as involuntary socialism - applying socialism to a situation where capitalism should be the norm.

Correctly applied, socialism and capitalism not only balance each other out, but form a comprehensive whole - a resilient and functional society.

You're correct that the collective is an important aspect of society. However, the major problem in modern politics is that we have the wrong collective. The natural collective is the family or tribe, and voluntary associations such as churches. Socialism works well in such contexts. But the citizens of a country are not a natural collective, as many have nothing to do with each other, and the boundaries of that collective are formed artificially and often unfairly. Socialism will ultimately have serious problems when applied to it.
 
sun said:
I haven't but I am familiar with her book.

I think Ayn Rand takes Nietzsche and puts him on steroids.
Survival of the fittest.
Nietzsche was influenced by the whole Darwin thing of 'Only the strong survive'.
I think this needs to be tempered with social empathy.
Sure we want people to be able to stand on their own two feet... 'Work makes Free'... but not to the extent that we kick homeless people living in a sack on the street.
Ayn Rand is a grotesque caricature. Not a direction to be followed. In the Bible it states that the human heart is wicked and deceitful and that is true.

In short, both Kant and Hegel (and also all the French and British Enlighteners) correctly viewed the individual as inextricably linked with society, in dialectical unity with it. Never was their individualism posed as a way to escape society or "exceed" it. Self-interest was, in them, never counterposed to common interest, as in Rand. Rand sees things in black and white: that which serves the "self" as good, that which serves the "common" as bad. That's why Rand's version of individualism is a decadent one.

In Rand, the individual's activity becomes detached from its social basis, turning purely inwards and cultivating one's own, private peculiarities and wishes as absolute values. The puffing up into an end in itself of purportedly self-sufficient individuality cannot alter, let alone annul a single social commitment. That's why all Rand's "heroes" look the same and altogether they look so unrealistic, because real life simply doesn't work in the way Rand thought.

In the end, I think culture needs a balance between the individual and the collective. They balance each other out. They correct the vices and errors of each other. "The individual as inextricably linked with society" is a concept I agree with -- until something goes horribly wrong with that society. I don't agree with Rand that society should be fully atomised since we will always be bound by ties of culture, blood, and history. But i do think individual personal and economic freedom is fundamental to creating a worthwhile society.

https://evonomics.com/rand-meets-david-sloan-wilson-atlas-hugged/

https://evonomics.com/what-happens-...GVr8R0NBp1eZOiZeB48C4CmvgUffoJNE6K0YUoVWIqffA

https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2013/02/ayn-rand-and-rational-beings.html
Click to expand...
Well, you gotta remember that while the movie was based on the book, and the movie itself was directed in consultation with one of the Atlas Society leaders, it is not a complete reproduction of her work. I don't recall seeing Nietzsche philosophy espoused in the movie itself. I brought it up, because the movie does an excellent job of contrasting the politically connected corporatists with the private entrepreneurs. So the movie itself, if my memory serves correct, doesn't delve into all of Ayn Rand's philosophy. It is fascinating however to look at how corporatists, who are indeed looking out for self interests, have proven to be more than willing to take advantage of the taxpayer, when the opportunity presents itself. I have worked for small companies where I interacted with the CEOs on a regular basis, who don't take a dime from the federal government, and I know firsthand the quality of the products that they produce, as I had a hand in developing and improving on them. If they produce lousy or overpriced merchandise, they don't make the sales! They successfully compete with the larger corporations, because they can come in under the cost of what those larger companies are charging.
 
frederick said:
Now if people weren't wretched sinners at heart and didn't sin in practice, this might be a nice world to live in.
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I think that we will get that worked out in the Millennium. Something to look forward to.
 
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Family is where it works.
 
Daniel DeLuca said:
but they certainly did NOT stifle innovation in the 19th century!
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This is laughable. How many stories are there of patents bought up and shelved by the oil industry? Did innovation save the rust belt when all our jobs were shipped overseas? You bring up patents but they're a common way competition is destroyed; they no longer encourage innovation, they stifle it and are now a way to get protection money out of real innovators. Not only that but because monopolies take all the air out of the market any such innovation can't compete.

Innovation is pointless when there is no market to compete in. Monopolies ultimately destroy markets and keep out or suppress all competitors.
 
Daniel DeLuca said:
It shows the inherent flaws that have historically been shown when government puts its thumbs on the scales of what would otherwise be free economics
Click to expand...

Government still has a roll. And monopolistic practices are just as perverse in their effects on the market.

FollowingHim said:
You're correct that the collective is an important aspect of society. However, the major problem in modern politics is that we have the wrong collective. The natural collective is the family or tribe, and voluntary associations such as churches. Socialism works well in such contexts. But the citizens of a country are not a natural collective, as many have nothing to do with each other, and the boundaries of that collective are formed artificially and often unfairly. Socialism will ultimately have serious problems when applied to it.
Click to expand...

The citizens of a country are not a natural collective, they are paperwork exercise. But the nation of a country is. That's what countries originally were: nation-states. The territory in which a nation exercised it's self determination through collective government. But now we're mostly stuck with multinational empires and colonial mash-up jobs.

The problem with capitalism is it is hyper-individualistic. It is the law of the jungle applied to economics. If 1 man can maximize his profit by capturing the entire market and enslaving the nation that is good and rewarded. If an industry can make more profit by shipping all the jobs overseas and undercutting product quality that is good and rewarded. If corporations can make more profit by overthrowing the political system of a nation and installing their own rules that is good and is rewarded. If a corporation can make more profit by causing a drug epidemic that kills a half a million people that is good and will be rewarded.

All of these are ways in which the collective good of the nation is subjugated to the personal profit of a few. This is called capitalism. Liberty. Individualism. In truth it is oligarchy; or that is what it becomes. Slavery. The libertarian fantasy of the market protecting us from these abuses is just that, a fantasy. The market cannot protect us from oligarchical control and monopolistic practices; the market enables it.

If there are not governmental checks on the market then the market is used to enslave the many for the profit of the few. A tool of oligarchical control.
 
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