Posted on 08/28/2010 7:06:10 PM PDT by Mojave
This past spring, the Financial Industry Inquiry Commission held hearings on the world's recent financial crisis. The star witness was Alan Greenspan. The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan translated Greenspan's typically elusive testimony this way: "I didn't do anything wrong, and neither did Ayn Rand by the way, but next time you might try more regulation."
There were obviously many reasons for the Great Recession. But I believe Noonan got to the root of one particular evil.
Fortune magazine once labeled Greenspan "America's most famous libertarian, an Ayn Rand acolyte." (While Rand formally rejected libertarianism, libertarians nonetheless admire her.) But today, both libertarians and Randians are disassociating themselves from Greenspan as quickly as Wall Street.
You just blew my mind. Excellent smackdown to the “Jesus as communist” position.
Good one.
Liberals also reject their 'moral' self-obligations to others, relying instead on forcing others to fulfill those obligations in their place.
"Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values." --Ayn Rand
It would probably be more accurate to say that she gutted morality, rather than rejected it.
1. That is a gross oversimplification of Rand’s “Objectivism”.
2. It was governments attempt to be “compasionate” with other people’s money that triggered the sub-prime crisis,not capitalism, Objectivism, or any other kind of ism.
exactly
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive.
Ayn Rand
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
Ayn Rand
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Ayn Rand
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Ayn Rand
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
Ayn Rand
Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.
Ayn Rand
A is A. How do you oversimplify that?
“Burns is a liar.”
OK, what Rand quotes support your claim?
One must keep her morality and her economics separate.
She was brilliant with economics/freedom and deluded with her morality.
I wanted my daughters to read Atlas Shrugged but not the crap that filters through the good stuff. I got the Cliff Notes.
Don’t accept the premise of the article. Just because Rand didn’t support Alturism doesn’t mean she was opposed to charity, she was not.
Thanks. Ayn was a Kmart version of Nietzsche.
i have never heard your assertion, but dont doubt it has been put out there.
all of her works remain in print, no small feat for fiction/philosophy.
i am presently rereading the fountainhead and for the new intellectual.
many people are immediately turned off by her writing style, not to mention objectivism.
I wish I could sear that citation into my brain for dealing with Social Justice Christians.
Spot on!
“One must keep her morality and her economics separate.”:
May I beg to differ?
Morality, economics and politics all inter-relate. Read Rerum Novarum for an incredible, articulate for that point of view.
Well said!
If you have a problem with that there's something wrong with you, not Rand.
Name two of them.
And then she continues by saying if it makes you happy to help others, or to express love others, then you should do so. She just says that doing it solely because it makes you happy as a person is reason enough.
She *never* says that a person should not love a family, protect an elderly parent, or even help a stranger. She just says you should do it solely because it is what you wish to do. Never because you feel compelled by force, or some misguided sense of unearned obligation.
There’s no gutting of morality there whatsoever, unless of course, you think guilt or fear should be a person’s main motivation.
“Burns is a liar.”
Two quotes then, just two showing that Burns is a liar. Go ahead, post them!
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