Posted on 01/05/2005 11:22:24 AM PST by annyokie
ping later
It's only altruistic if you get no value from it.
But the only value Rand recognized was $.
In deferred pleasures and lost earnings does the investment in a child have a material payback ? No it does not.
.....Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it.....
Well put. As a blind individual now variously called leftist, Rat and Looter you are led astray by not only your inability to see, but by your total misunderstanding of the world. Intellectual vacuity describes your rant. You were as wrong then as you are now.
Yep, for that I will honor her. I can only wish that she had done it from a believer's perspective.
Do you like David Horowitz at all?
"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber — go!'"
I love Ayn Rand. But that's a funny line!
She is also best dismissed as a political philosopher. As a means of shocking people into seeing the existence of bad guys her books do provide a valuable service. She was neither the first, nor the best, at describing those folks, but she was able to reach a wide audience.
But aside from the "raw power" of her novelistic introduction to a certain class of people (of which every single one of us is a member at some level), Chambers absolutely nails the problems with her political philosophy. It is noxious when put into practice, for the reasons he sketches out.
The reason for its toxicity as a political philosophy, is that it is based on Ms. Rand's Objectivism -- and for that, a bit of rudimentary reasoning reveals it to be a fundamentally irrational philosophy. One simply cannot look at the real world, and come up with the allegedly "absolute" principles she claims to have discovered.
I know much less about him than I do Rand. But the talks I've seen him give (mostly on C-SPAN) have been rather good. He too understands the lefties, but that's because he was once among them. Rand's understanding was at a much deeper level. She's the theorist, he's a popularizer, or so it seems to me.
Money was not the only value Rand recognized.
She did respect it though.
Many of her characters, if not most of them, in Maslows terms were more interested in "self actualization" - building buildings their way, composing music they liked, there was one who joined Galt et al just being beautiful and fascinating for its own sake. Money was a means, not an end.
And she was of course blind to too many things.
Her political philosophy was a distilled essence of modern libertarianism, and it did not rest, or need to rest, on Objectivism.
Objectivism itself is much more forgettable than her works.
You know nothing of Rand to say that the only value she considered was money.
The plan is revenue neutral.
I would put it that Horowitz understands the left as persons; read "Radical Son". Most of his complaints about the left are personal - i.e., as a compendium of human failings and a very human misdirection of ideals. He hasn't got much of a critique as to premises.
Thomas Sowell in "The Vision of the Anointed" has a more comprehensive argument to explain the left, psychologically.
For an argument against leftist ideology as ideology, from a libertarian point of view, one needs to go to the likes of Bastiat, Hayek, Von Mises, etc. And Rand.
As Marx was to theory, so Lenin was to tactics.
That may be a useful analogy when discussing Rand and Horowitz, although I don't know if Horowitz is an atheist, as was Rand.
I don't think Horowitz is a libertarian, he does not have a statement of well defined ideology really, but I think that he is not religious.
I see. Have children so YOU can become smarter.
If someone came on television and uttered this sort of "philosophy" we'd all instantly recognize them for the moral freak they are; put it into a 1200 page book with big words and you are a "philosopher".
No, she was a perpetual adolescent with a precocious vocabulary.
Allow me . . .
After wrestling through the thousand plus pages of "Atlas Shrugged", I decided to postpone my efforts on "The Fountainhead". I think Whittaker Chambers sums it up rather nicely in this piece.
What is up with the rant at the end of your post? Did I miss a sarcasm tag in there somewhere or did some mean Christian take away some freedom of yours again?
Fair enough. I was thinking less of libertarianism than conservatism when I tried to synthesize the two.
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