>>>You’ve allowed such men to occupy positions of power in your world by preaching that all men are evil from the moment they’re born. When men believe this, they see nothing wrong in acting in any way they please. The name of this absurdity is ‘original sin’.<<<
I have to disagree strongly with Rand here.
If men were not born as fallen, sinful creatures, Socialism and other forms of Collectivism would probably work just fine. People would work just as hard, gain knowledge and skills useful to society, engage in commerce that provides jobs and needed goods and services, all out of the goodness of their hearts. There would be no freeloaders or slackers, to take advantage.
Just as many people would , for example, go to medical school and become doctors, or start businesses, even if they knew doing these things would do little or nothing to increase their wealth.
A big part of the genius of Capitalism is that it recognizes that men are sinful, and are largely motivated by their wants and desires, as opposed to by the goodness of their hearts. It recognizes that, for most part, people will do the least amount of work and take the least amount of risk to get what they need and want.
Greed is not “good”, but it is real and motivates people to be productive. By removing the incentive to be productive, Socialism causes society to suffer all the ill effects of greed, but not benefit from the positive side effects.
“You’ve allowed such men to occupy positions of power in your world by preaching that all men are evil from the moment they’re born. When men believe this, they see nothing wrong in acting in any way they please. The name of this absurdity is ‘original sin’.
I have to disagree strongly with Rand here.
If men were not born as fallen, sinful creatures, Socialism and other forms of Collectivism would probably work just fine.”
She is not saying they weren’t “born as fallen, sinful creatures” but that the belief that they ARE sinful, etc., enables them to act on it...I don’t see that as a disagreement in the belief in original sin as much as in the result of believing it, as I read it, but that is just my opinion...I think the work is complicated and is more an attack on collectivism than Christianity and as such, persoanlly, I try to separate the two out...