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Monday, August 2, 2010 - 11:48amSanction this postReply
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Quote from the above linked article in the WSJ written by Stephen Moore.

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Monday, August 2, 2010 - 11:55amSanction this postReply
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Totally off-topic, but the Snackadium posted on July 17th at ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com is full of win. The Meat Tank runs a close second.

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Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - 7:28amSanction this postReply
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I apologize for posting on-topic here, but I have to take issue with the premise.

If you actually understand the story, you have to ask: Who's quitting?  It seems to me that the best and the brightest are all moving to state capitals to enjoy the boom in government.  At least, state capitals, and the nation's, are doing well, with high incomes going to people with advanced educations.  So it seems.

Of course, we know that all this means is that the wealth is being drained into those entropy pits.  It is not productive money. 

But if Atlas were shrugging, educated people would not be flocking to government jobs.

Also, if Atlas were shrugging, the apparent problem would not be "unemployment" (so-called) but demands for skilled people.

Moreover, in the book, the point is made that if any businessman had said three (now four) generations ago that he was working for his own profit, not the public good, he would have saved us a lot of grief.  Well, the "public be damned" is a misattributed cliche, so it needed to be said more than once.  The fact remains that the anti-trust laws, the federal reserve, the income tax, restrictions on gold, etc., etc., there was never a time when the govenrment was short of laws.  If that is the standard, then Atlas was always shrugging.

But it is not the standard.

The story is not about growing regulation -- though there is that -- but the response to it.
Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.
The world of 2010 is not much different than that of 1957.  Economic lunacy was never in short supply.  What has been lacking then and now is a response to it.


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Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - 10:07amSanction this postReply
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Michael: I apologize for posting on-topic here

I will forgive you for that lapse, but please don't commit that faux pas again, mmmm-k?

But if Atlas were shrugging, educated people would not be flocking to government jobs.

Plenty of smart, educated villains in Atlas Shrugged (and The Fountainhead, too). Wesley Mouch, Dr. Floyd Ferris, and Lillian Rearden -- none of them are morons.

Go to most any university or state capitol or to DC and you will find lots of bright, well-educated statists who remind one of Atlas Shrugged villains.

The thesis of Atlas Shrugged is not that of Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons", which says society is being undermined by idiots. Atlas Shrugged posits that the undermining of freedom can be done by brilliant people who have embraced collectivism and altruism (as that term is narrowly defined by Objectivists).


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Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - 3:35pmSanction this postReply
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Plenty of smart, educated villains in Atlas Shrugged (and The Fountainhead, too). Wesley Mouch, Dr. Floyd Ferris, and Lillian Rearden -- none of them are morons.  ..  Atlas Shrugged posits that the undermining of freedom can be done by brilliant people who have embraced collectivism and altruism (as that term is narrowly defined by Objectivists).

Sure, fifty years ago.  We grew up.  We had kids,  Now they are parents.  The political world today is pretty much as it was a hundred years ago.  Dr. Kelley's thesis that we are living Atlas Shrugged now.    We are not, at least not any differently than it was lived in the 1880s or the 1980s. 


Jim, we touched on this before.  You are not alone here in feeling that ideas motivate people because you believe that you were motivated by Ayn Rand's ideas.  I assert that you were who you were when you found them.  Ed Thompson attempted to "refute" that by pointing out that he discovered Ayn Rand when he was over 40.  Therefore, he was not influenced by her ideas as would be a teenager. (My post pointed out that Rand does not convert adults, but shapes adolescents.)   Rather, he was validated by Rand's ideas.  I maintain that this only proves my point.  He was not rationally argued out of a position that he was not rationally argued into in the first place.

Whether you are an individualist or a collectivist is not merely a matter of intellect.  If that is all that were involved, philosophy among the Greeks would have made the same leaps that engineering did 100 years ago.  It is not just a matter of empiricially verified intellectual paradigms.  

 Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Marxism  By Thomas Riggins
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5323/1/32/

this is based on Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science.  Consider the factors that go into making a person what they are as an adult.  For Marxism substitute Objectivism.  You get the same answer.

"Collectivist ideas" is not "Marxism."  Marxism is an "ism."  People can be collectivists and reject Marxism for the same reason that people who say they believe in free enterprise reject Objectivism.  It is not the politics: it's the metaphysics.  People who reject science reject critical thinking.  You believe that that they can be changed with good ideas, but they are impervious to ideas.  That's why Ayn Rand preferred Marxists to conservatives.   Most people are conservative and what they want to conserve is the present social order, whatever it is.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 8/03, 3:37pm)


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Sunday, August 8, 2010 - 11:20amSanction this postReply
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Most people are conservative and what they want to conserve is the present social order, whatever it is.
..........

Yes, the status quo - which is actually what a conservative is [not the free-enterprise [to them] small government freedom myth, which was an add-on ], one who craves the status quo, the perpetual state of whatever is, as a form of stability, of familiarity, of stasis...

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