Posted on 02/02/2019 2:07:03 PM PST by huckfillary
Tomorrow is Ayn Rand’s birthday. A lot of people read and become taken with Rand as teenagers. In polls, her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are routinely near the top of “most influential” lists, and organizations like the Ayn Rand Institute, the Atlas Society, and others study and promote her ideas with missionary zeal. What gives? Why?
In some circles, she is loved. In many others, she is hated. After all, she led what looks like a pretty miserable life punctuated by a long and bizarre affair with her protege Nathaniel Branden. As Bryan Caplan put it, many of her followers were (and are) “sour.”
But Caplan also puts Rand squarely in the Russian-Philosophical tradition of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy and the romantic tradition of Victor Hugo. Rand’s style made a lot more sense to me after I had read The Brothers Karamazov, and you can tell from Les Miserables that she was reading and re-reading it as she was writing Atlas Shrugged.
But most interestingly, and here again I agree with Caplan, Rand clearly understands what would later be called public choice theory—she published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, and it wouldn’t be until 1962 that the foundational text in public choice theory, James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent, would be published—and she has a very keen grasp of predictable but unintended consequences.
I don’t love Atlas Shrugged because I see myself as some kind of hero in the old of John Galt, Henry Rearden, Dagny Taggart, or Francisco d’Anconia. The book captivates me because of how well it all holds together. To borrow the title of a book by the conservative lion Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences. Atlas Shrugged is excellent precisely because it traces and explains exactly how some ideas lead to different consequences.
Consider just one of the villains from Atlas Shrugged: Eugene Lawson, the “banker with a heart” who made loans based on applicants’ “need” and not on the profitability of the loan. I put “need” in quotes because like a lot of economists I don’t really believe in “needs” because there are substitutes everywhere and a lot of different ways to solve problems.
In any event, Lawson makes loans based not on the careful evaluation of the creditworthiness of the borrowers and the expected profitability of their proposals. He is not, in short, like the heroic, compassion-bankrupt banker Midas Mulligan.
But alas, Lawson finds himself—and his depositors, and his customers—ruined. He doesn’t learn, of course, and finds ways to blame everyone but himself for his problems. It’s a pattern I recognize in myself and try to fight or avoid. Eugene Lawson? Not so much.
What’s most interesting in her discussion of the “banker with a heart” is that Lawson is also clearly a banker without a brain. And even this might be too kind: Rand argues implicitly that he doesn’t have a heart, either.
On what basis? The philosopher David Schmidtz has said that if your argument is that your heart is the right place, it isn’t. In Lawson’s case, he’s fundamentally rejecting a binding constraint on reality: you can’t prosper by producing things that are worth less than the resources used to produce them. What’s more, every dollar Lawson wasted on a bad project was a dollar he could have lent to someone abler or someone with a better idea. It’s hard to see how this would have led to an outcome worse than the poverty and misery Lawson’s enlightened, heart-led lending left in its wake.
Atlas Shrugged is captivating because it shows us some of the limitations of meaning well. You can’t reshape the world according to your aesthetic when that aesthetic is at odds with objective facts and constraints on reality like “something must be produced before it can be consumed.” Stubborn efforts to ignore these constraints on the part of characters like Eugene Lawson, James Taggart, and Wesley Mouch created a world that finally collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. And that, I think, is the book’s most important lesson: reality is non-negotiable, and efforts to resist are bound to end badly
Officer Barbrady will not be wishing her Happy Birthday, LOL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j56IiLqZ9U
Old. O-l-l-l-l-l-ld. Bent over old.
It epitomizes the results of imposing socialism into the workplace where capitalism was the guiding principle previously.
The successful car company succeeds under its founder but when he dies and leaves it to his worthless, shiftless kids, they decide to change the economic model that drives the business from capitalism to socialism.
In the process thy run the company into the ground and it goes out of business. It is a perfect example of what happens when these politicians like AO-C want to institute the same system in the US. It will fail and fail big time.
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is one of my all-time favorite books. There are so many things to learn from it. I've read it three times and discover that there is more to it every time I re-read it.
IMHO, a current example is the electric car...
Don’t have anything to add that isn’t in my tag line.
1) The Anti-Dog Eat Dog Rule - This regulation required highly efficient businesses to reduce their efficiency to be more in line with the least efficient businesses (and WAS enforceable); and,
2) The Equalization of Opportunity Bill - This Bill (which eventually became law and was applied to Hank Rearden's multiple businesses) required someone who owned more than one business to give all but one of their businesses to other people, so as to "equalize the opportunity" of business ownership.
Happy Birthday, Ayn!!
I like Francisco’s Money Speech.
BMFL
With looters taking over the democratic party leadership, we need Ayn now more than ever. Prepare for confiscation in 2021.
ANTHEM is my favorite. Oh and it didn’t hurt that RUSH put it to music with 2112.
‘Her atheism is wrong but she gets almost everything else right.’
really...? how about this...
‘An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).
Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?”..’
‘She rattled my cage and provoked a crisis in my thinking and for that I am grateful to her.’
right; she didn’t believe in God, which of course is meaningless as it is merely her own opinion (and mine), but she does believe in murder, which of course does matter, because, well, people die...
We, The Living is her best novel, IMHO
I belong to that select few who actually read the entire John Galt speech. Bow before me.
I value Rand up to a point, but I cannot accept her atheistic stance: If there is no external, superior moral absolute, then on what basis can she make any moral evaluation?
She implicitly, if not explicitly, argues that her philosophy (via John Galt) is ultimately more morally valid. Why? And why would it matter?
If there is no God, then nothing matters.
Okay, she was wrong on abortion apparently. But if she were still alive, I’ll bet she would be susceptible to arguments based on the personhood of the unborn baby now that we know — thanks to science — that a fetus is a lot more like a person than a blob of tissue. She had an open, honorable mind and would grapple with contrary evidence, I think.
‘If there is no external, superior moral absolute, then on what basis can she make any moral evaluation?’
you can’t imagine a situation in which ethical behavior is possible without reference to sourcing from an unknowable entity which is postulated to exist outside of time and space restraints...?
‘If there is no God, then nothing matters.’
that’s an opinion you have no empirical nor epistemological basis for making...
I think better examples would be windmills and solar cells.
Why does your link go to The Artful Dilettante “about” page?
There is so much in the book that is relevant to today's politics.
Rand was prescient in her vision of America of the future when it was written in 1957.
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