No I think this is way off. I am sure she would say you are taking things out of context. If your military takes steps to use force in order to protect civilians of their government, that is justified. She says that in all of the works I've read by her. However, if you use force to extract lets say - taxes, that is unjustified. Or if the government coerces individuals based on say religion or anything other than protecting its people, its unjustified. She calls for a minimalist style gov't
@Harikus: She does call for a minarchist govt, but the definition of a state is an entity that has a monopoly on the initiation of force. A state by definition is tyrannical. You can argue from a pragmatic standpoint that anarchism wouldn't work, but the moral argument is still that the logical extension of the opposition to initiation of force is anarchism.
I am unsure as to what sort of force a minimalist state uses against its citizens? When reading the Virtue of Selfishness, she specifically outlines what her ideal system would be like. I may have missed it, but I didn't see any. The military would exist to defend from threats both foreign and domestic, and police would exist to protect individual liberties. Any support from the people would be voluntary when concerning courts, military, and police.
@Harikus: What about the people who don't want a military or police? If they would be forced to pay for it and obey their laws, this is tyranny. If there is no force to pay for it, then you can't really call them government. They'd be more like private defense companies, which would be the model of an anarcho-capitalist society.
I think anyone who has read Ayn Rand at length and understood it, they would know one - the police and courts would be paid for on a voluntary basis. two - Only valid laws that exist would be laws that defend your rights. I am not sure where this idea came from, but doing whatever you want whenever you want has nothing to do with rights. Rights are inherent to the fact that you exist. Tyranny exists when rights are violated, regardless of the source (private or public).
@Harikus: I have read plenty of her, but if we are using the same definition of what a state is, the idea that a govt can protect rights is contradictory and not realistic. Who would choose what rights a person has? The state? The majority?
I'd also like to ask how you can infer rights from existence. It seems like you're trying to derive an ought from an is. I know Ayn Rand has claimed to solve the is-ought problem, but I think she fails completely at it.
Voting does not take away our right to oppose the majority. If you don't want a Hitler to run your country, go out and vote against him (or her). And then go home and wash the evil off your hands. It's over and done with. Ayn Rand voting or being a part of a majority (which we all are to some degree) does not mean she can't make a case against majority group think any more than a prisoner can't file a complaint about being beaten by a prison guard.
Ayn Rand regarded anarchy as a form of totalitarianism. 300,000,000 tyrants instead of one. Anarcho-capitalism would be a contradiction in terms. Ayn Rand also never took a pragmatic approach to anything. She did not regard government as inherently evil. It is only supposed to do certain things (police, military, courts), which is good. Anything outside of, or less than, that is wrong.
A population remains mostly docile until extreme force is initiated against them. Only a small group are sensitive to the nuances and differences between various systems of economy or governance.
I think your right, Ayn Rand did have deep failures in politics. One the one hand she was for the Non-aggression principle and yet supports a government, she chooses the lesser of two evils and also says "In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
If you live in Las Vegas then prostitution is illegal if you live anywhere else in Nevada it's legal. If you live in San Fransisco Homosexuals can get married, other places it's illegal.
What do you call an organization that comes to your house to either kill you or you pay them off? Most would call that a mob I'd call it a Government.
@Harikus: All there is now is mob rule. If we could organize our societies in a voluntary manner and keep ourselves protected, this is to be preferred to the current state.
I think you've got it reversed: libertarianism shares elements of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Libertarianism is a movement that started (largely via the efforts of Murray Rothbard) AFTER Rand introduced her philosophy to the world. Rothbard took Rand's non-aggression principle, tore away all of the philosophy that LED to the principle, and presented the principle as an alleged "axiom" (i.e., a self-evident thing for which which evidence neither need nor can be marshalled...(cont'd).
...he did that so that he could patch together a political movement (later, a party of the same name) that brought together people of conflicting metaphysical, epistemological, and/or ethical philosophies, by presenting "liberty" (intentionally underdefined, deliberately ambiguous) as the value that all good "libertarians" (a term he took from the leftist anarchists of the 1800s) cherish...(cont'd).
...(cont'd) Rand rejected libertarianism outright not simply because it FAILS to explain why "liberty" is good, but because it DELIBERATELY DENIES the importance of a commitment to the very things that make freedom possible: reality, reason, and oneself.
Libertarianism is a political ideology. Nothing more, nothing less. There's nothing about libertarianism qua libertarianism that denies the importance of reality and reason. The fact that many self-professed libertarians have no coherent philosophy doesn't mean that their political ideas themselves are any different from what Rand believed.
"Politics" as a concept is not synonymous with philosophy, so there is a need for a word that refers to the political ideas and nothing else.
"There's nothing about libertarianism qua libertarianism that denies the importance of reality and reason." I disagree: libertarianism expressly denies that any given philosophical underpinning for "liberty" is false, or that any underpinning is better than any other. That's why libertarians assert that Objectivists are "just one kind of libertarian" (google my debate with Peter Jaworski)...(cont'd)...
...it is also why libertarians list a hodge podge of rationalist, empiricist, pragmatist and other writers - whose metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics contradicted one another's - as "great libertarian thinkers in history": e.g., Locke, Bentham, Mill, Mises, Rothbard, Paine, Jesus, "God", etc. (i.e., essentially anyone who allegedly commented approvingly on "liberty")...almost none of whom, incidentally, ever regarded themselves as "libertarian".
Let's distinguish between the many nutjobs who are libertarians and the core definition of libertarianism.
Let's say that I as an O'ist denote my political ideas as X. Mr. Smith also shares my political ideas: X. But he arrived at X because he wants to be different and he hates taxes.
X is still X. It doesn't change when nutjobs champion it and it doesn't become non-X when arrived upon irrationally. It is what it is.
So the concept of libertarianism denotes only the political ideas, not how they are arrived at. That doesn't mean that the concept of l'ism is *against* having a means to arrive at those ideas; just that those means are not part of that concept.
Ah, see, I disagree that the word "libertarian" refers to a political philosophy. I think it is more accurate to say that "libertarianism" is a word that refers to a (flawed) STRATEGY for achieving greater liberty. Specifically, the strategy is: bringing together those who - for any reason at all - want more "liberty", no matter how they might define liberty. Indeed, because they leave "liberty" largely underdefined, libertarianism lacks even a specific political philosophy....(cont'd)
...(cont'd) The non-agression "axiom" is not a political philosophy (nor is it an axiom): it's just a PRINCIPLE that libertarians (erroneously) THINK is, or call, a philosophy. Similarly, "liberty" is not a philosophy: it is a value...(cont'd)
Weird. I always saw the axiom to be I own myself. Liberty is just the logical conclusion to it. Is that what it is, Objectivist who aren't anarcho-capitalism are Strawman bullies? ..Jesus a libertarians?..please! Come on, stop lying to yourself and open your mind a little.
Yes I red it. Thank you. A proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be self-evident. If someone can stop be him. I would love to see that. But I'm sure I'll get another Objectivist rationalisation like usual.
...(cont'd). Keep in mind that Rand regarded political philosophy as: ethical philosophy as applied to social situations. Accordingly, if a political movement denies the importance of justifying its political commitments with a GIVEN philosophy, its political commitments do not (by Rand's standards) constitute a political philosophy, per se.
That definition of libertarianism is arbitrary. No one else in the English-speaking world is referring to "strategy" when they talk about libertarianism.
I agree that there are serious problems involved in teaming up with subjectivists to get things done. But that observation doesn't magically change the definition of L'ism. When we start making up our own definitions we create package deals, with the popular definition being one thing and ours being another. It serves only to confuse.
Thank you for the clarification. i don't think this contradicts any of my conclusions, but it does address a mistake I made in my introduction. However I would also state that i would use nine9's definition of what i meant.
To avoid confusion, I often use the word "libertarian" in a general sense that means "non-aggression principle" which would include market anarchists.
I think politics is the area that she lacked the most.
In 'Atlas Shrugged' she makes a distinction between businesses that use the state to gain power and ones that actually succeed on their own. Yet she was an apologist for corporations that came about because of gov't intervention. She supported the real life Orren Boyles and Jim Taggarts. I think that was on of her worst missteps.
No I think this is way off. I am sure she would say you are taking things out of context. If your military takes steps to use force in order to protect civilians of their government, that is justified. She says that in all of the works I've read by her. However, if you use force to extract lets say - taxes, that is unjustified. Or if the government coerces individuals based on say religion or anything other than protecting its people, its unjustified. She calls for a minimalist style gov't
Harikus 2 years ago
@Harikus: She does call for a minarchist govt, but the definition of a state is an entity that has a monopoly on the initiation of force. A state by definition is tyrannical. You can argue from a pragmatic standpoint that anarchism wouldn't work, but the moral argument is still that the logical extension of the opposition to initiation of force is anarchism.
andyissemicool 2 years ago
I am unsure as to what sort of force a minimalist state uses against its citizens? When reading the Virtue of Selfishness, she specifically outlines what her ideal system would be like. I may have missed it, but I didn't see any. The military would exist to defend from threats both foreign and domestic, and police would exist to protect individual liberties. Any support from the people would be voluntary when concerning courts, military, and police.
Harikus 2 years ago
@Harikus: What about the people who don't want a military or police? If they would be forced to pay for it and obey their laws, this is tyranny. If there is no force to pay for it, then you can't really call them government. They'd be more like private defense companies, which would be the model of an anarcho-capitalist society.
andyissemicool 2 years ago
I think anyone who has read Ayn Rand at length and understood it, they would know one - the police and courts would be paid for on a voluntary basis. two - Only valid laws that exist would be laws that defend your rights. I am not sure where this idea came from, but doing whatever you want whenever you want has nothing to do with rights. Rights are inherent to the fact that you exist. Tyranny exists when rights are violated, regardless of the source (private or public).
Harikus 2 years ago
@Harikus: I have read plenty of her, but if we are using the same definition of what a state is, the idea that a govt can protect rights is contradictory and not realistic. Who would choose what rights a person has? The state? The majority?
I'd also like to ask how you can infer rights from existence. It seems like you're trying to derive an ought from an is. I know Ayn Rand has claimed to solve the is-ought problem, but I think she fails completely at it.
Thanks for the lively debate.
andyissemicool 2 years ago
Voting does not take away our right to oppose the majority. If you don't want a Hitler to run your country, go out and vote against him (or her). And then go home and wash the evil off your hands. It's over and done with. Ayn Rand voting or being a part of a majority (which we all are to some degree) does not mean she can't make a case against majority group think any more than a prisoner can't file a complaint about being beaten by a prison guard.
fungku777 3 years ago
Ayn Rand regarded anarchy as a form of totalitarianism. 300,000,000 tyrants instead of one. Anarcho-capitalism would be a contradiction in terms. Ayn Rand also never took a pragmatic approach to anything. She did not regard government as inherently evil. It is only supposed to do certain things (police, military, courts), which is good. Anything outside of, or less than, that is wrong.
soldaten48 3 years ago
Rands ideas will never take hold anywhere anytime. Neither in socialist canada or in socialist america.
elar4563 3 years ago
Were that true, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
PaulMcKeever 3 years ago
A population remains mostly docile until extreme force is initiated against them. Only a small group are sensitive to the nuances and differences between various systems of economy or governance.
Harikus 2 years ago
I think your right, Ayn Rand did have deep failures in politics. One the one hand she was for the Non-aggression principle and yet supports a government, she chooses the lesser of two evils and also says "In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
IItothe222345helomot 3 years ago
The non-aggression principle is what makes government necessary.
PaulMcKeever 3 years ago
How is that? You need some one who has a monopoly on legalized force to step up and stop people from using force?
IItothe222345helomot 3 years ago
You need a single, objective system of law to prohibit/punish the initiation of coercive physical force.
PaulMcKeever 3 years ago
And you think that the Government is Objective and universal?
IItothe222345helomot 3 years ago
I know that multiple, differing systems of law, operating simultaneously over the same geographic area, could not be Objective.
PaulMcKeever 3 years ago
If you live in Las Vegas then prostitution is illegal if you live anywhere else in Nevada it's legal. If you live in San Fransisco Homosexuals can get married, other places it's illegal.
IItothe222345helomot 3 years ago
Right. Now imagine that the prostitution laws of all 50 states applied in Nevada simultaneously. That's anarchism.
PaulMcKeever 3 years ago
No, because in an anarchy there wouldn't be a mob rule to make a law against victimless "crimes"such as prostitution.
IItothe222345helomot 3 years ago
What do you call the criminal organizations that currently operate, each according to their own system of law, if not "mobs"?
PaulMcKeever 3 years ago
What do you call an organization that comes to your house to either kill you or you pay them off? Most would call that a mob I'd call it a Government.
IItothe222345helomot 3 years ago
In anarchy, all there would be is mob rule. There would be no checks or balances to speak of against tyranny via majority.
Harikus 2 years ago
@Harikus: All there is now is mob rule. If we could organize our societies in a voluntary manner and keep ourselves protected, this is to be preferred to the current state.
andyissemicool 2 years ago
I think you've got it reversed: libertarianism shares elements of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Libertarianism is a movement that started (largely via the efforts of Murray Rothbard) AFTER Rand introduced her philosophy to the world. Rothbard took Rand's non-aggression principle, tore away all of the philosophy that LED to the principle, and presented the principle as an alleged "axiom" (i.e., a self-evident thing for which which evidence neither need nor can be marshalled...(cont'd).
PaulMcKeever 4 years ago
...he did that so that he could patch together a political movement (later, a party of the same name) that brought together people of conflicting metaphysical, epistemological, and/or ethical philosophies, by presenting "liberty" (intentionally underdefined, deliberately ambiguous) as the value that all good "libertarians" (a term he took from the leftist anarchists of the 1800s) cherish...(cont'd).
PaulMcKeever 4 years ago
...(cont'd) Rand rejected libertarianism outright not simply because it FAILS to explain why "liberty" is good, but because it DELIBERATELY DENIES the importance of a commitment to the very things that make freedom possible: reality, reason, and oneself.
PaulMcKeever 4 years ago
Libertarianism is a political ideology. Nothing more, nothing less. There's nothing about libertarianism qua libertarianism that denies the importance of reality and reason. The fact that many self-professed libertarians have no coherent philosophy doesn't mean that their political ideas themselves are any different from what Rand believed.
"Politics" as a concept is not synonymous with philosophy, so there is a need for a word that refers to the political ideas and nothing else.
nine9s 4 years ago
"There's nothing about libertarianism qua libertarianism that denies the importance of reality and reason." I disagree: libertarianism expressly denies that any given philosophical underpinning for "liberty" is false, or that any underpinning is better than any other. That's why libertarians assert that Objectivists are "just one kind of libertarian" (google my debate with Peter Jaworski)...(cont'd)...
PaulMcKeever 4 years ago
...it is also why libertarians list a hodge podge of rationalist, empiricist, pragmatist and other writers - whose metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics contradicted one another's - as "great libertarian thinkers in history": e.g., Locke, Bentham, Mill, Mises, Rothbard, Paine, Jesus, "God", etc. (i.e., essentially anyone who allegedly commented approvingly on "liberty")...almost none of whom, incidentally, ever regarded themselves as "libertarian".
PaulMcKeever 4 years ago
Let's distinguish between the many nutjobs who are libertarians and the core definition of libertarianism.
Let's say that I as an O'ist denote my political ideas as X. Mr. Smith also shares my political ideas: X. But he arrived at X because he wants to be different and he hates taxes.
X is still X. It doesn't change when nutjobs champion it and it doesn't become non-X when arrived upon irrationally. It is what it is.
nine9s 4 years ago
So the concept of libertarianism denotes only the political ideas, not how they are arrived at. That doesn't mean that the concept of l'ism is *against* having a means to arrive at those ideas; just that those means are not part of that concept.
nine9s 4 years ago
Ah, see, I disagree that the word "libertarian" refers to a political philosophy. I think it is more accurate to say that "libertarianism" is a word that refers to a (flawed) STRATEGY for achieving greater liberty. Specifically, the strategy is: bringing together those who - for any reason at all - want more "liberty", no matter how they might define liberty. Indeed, because they leave "liberty" largely underdefined, libertarianism lacks even a specific political philosophy....(cont'd)
PaulMcKeever 4 years ago
...(cont'd) The non-agression "axiom" is not a political philosophy (nor is it an axiom): it's just a PRINCIPLE that libertarians (erroneously) THINK is, or call, a philosophy. Similarly, "liberty" is not a philosophy: it is a value...(cont'd)
PaulMcKeever 4 years ago
Weird. I always saw the axiom to be I own myself. Liberty is just the logical conclusion to it. Is that what it is, Objectivist who aren't anarcho-capitalism are Strawman bullies? ..Jesus a libertarians?..please! Come on, stop lying to yourself and open your mind a little.
neutrinoide 3 years ago
"I own myself" is not an axiom. Read up on the definition/nature of axioms.
PaulMcKeever 3 years ago
Yes I red it. Thank you. A proposition that is not proved or demonstrated but considered to be self-evident. If someone can stop be him. I would love to see that. But I'm sure I'll get another Objectivist rationalisation like usual.
neutrinoide 3 years ago
...(cont'd). Keep in mind that Rand regarded political philosophy as: ethical philosophy as applied to social situations. Accordingly, if a political movement denies the importance of justifying its political commitments with a GIVEN philosophy, its political commitments do not (by Rand's standards) constitute a political philosophy, per se.
PaulMcKeever 4 years ago
That definition of libertarianism is arbitrary. No one else in the English-speaking world is referring to "strategy" when they talk about libertarianism.
I agree that there are serious problems involved in teaming up with subjectivists to get things done. But that observation doesn't magically change the definition of L'ism. When we start making up our own definitions we create package deals, with the popular definition being one thing and ours being another. It serves only to confuse.
nine9s 4 years ago
Thank you for the clarification. i don't think this contradicts any of my conclusions, but it does address a mistake I made in my introduction. However I would also state that i would use nine9's definition of what i meant.
aaron0883 4 years ago
To avoid confusion, I often use the word "libertarian" in a general sense that means "non-aggression principle" which would include market anarchists.
Thanks for pimping my channel though. :)
XOmniverse 4 years ago
I think politics is the area that she lacked the most.
In 'Atlas Shrugged' she makes a distinction between businesses that use the state to gain power and ones that actually succeed on their own. Yet she was an apologist for corporations that came about because of gov't intervention. She supported the real life Orren Boyles and Jim Taggarts. I think that was on of her worst missteps.
Rorshak1313 4 years ago