[NatureGirl]

Thank you. It's always good to see a straightforward explanation of Ayn Rand's principles. I always worry that people just don't get what "sanction of the victim" really means.

And as to her predictions coming true - I don't think that a week will go by, here on FR, where I won't read something that sounds as if it's right out of Atlas Shrugged.

[lelio]

She understood first-hand the horrid consequences of evil philosophies and the importance of defending the right ideas for the right reasons.
I was thinking of her this morning when I heard an English commentator on NPR this morning saying that the rift in European - American talks over the middle east can be traced back do our dealings with Russia and the cold war (that was just an example).
Well what happened there? We're the only ones to stand up to the Evil Empire and where are they now? If we left it up to the mealy mouthed europeans we would still have that despot of a country around. We stood up for what is right and damn those social relativists that think communism is fine for certain cultures.

[Japedo]

Ayn Rand & Liberty Ping!!

[NEWwoman]

I read Atlas Shrugged during the time the Clinton admination was pushing Hillary's Health Care Plan.

The book was so prophetic. She had the Clinton "whining of America" pegged.

[lelio]

But Rand maintained that capitalism must be defended first and foremost on moral grounds.
Thankfully some people are catching on to this that previously said "Its the best way to feed all the people." Well a Marxist could claim the same thing and the only way to find out who was right was to try it. Multiple ruined economies and starving people in Russia proved who was right in that argument, but that doesn't stop the leftists from saying "Well Russia didn't have X so it didn't work..."

[Tauzero]

"Many great supporters of liberty such as economists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman justified the capitalist system because it produces more material goods and services than planned or socialist systems and, to the extent that governments try to control economies, those economies will stagnate or collapse."

Rather than justifying capitalism, what Hayek primarily did was to show that the goals of socialism are epistemologically impossible.

Unfortunately for objectvists, Hayek's epistemology, which is mostly Kantian, no more supports objectivism than it does socialism.

[dubyagee]

Just finished The Fountainhead; getting ready to start We The Living. I'm a Christian, but contrary to many on this forum, I find I am a fan of Ayn Rand's writing. She was very good at getting into the heart of man. The good and the evil.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

.

[robertpaulsen]

"Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's most popular novel, that ranked number two to the Bible as the most influential book in America by a recent Library of Congress/ Book of the Month Club Reader's poll."
---capitalism.org

[Noumenon]

IT's long past time for Atlas to shrug....

[Nuke'm Glowing]

It's funny. As soon as the Roman U.S. Imperial Congress passed that spending bill for over $200 million to stop us all from getting fatter, I thought about Ayn and her writings. Then I thought about Orwell. Guess they are both coming true, one day at a time.

[Bob J]

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[Kevin Curry]

On March 6, 1982 writer and philosopher Ayn Rand died.

Of lung cancer. She had had her first lung removed about ten years earlier. Too foolish, stupid, or stubborn to figure the obvious out, she smoked like a damp mattress on fire. She despised people who did not smoke and said so often. She despised most things wholesome.

She butted into her sycophants' private lives, trying to force some to marry merely on her whim and say so--pressuring others to divorce. She was a sort of atheist Reverend Moon, sucking her simpering admirers for money, cadging them for smokes, always on the lookout for an opportunity to pontificate on the preposterous moral-blind conceit that holds that good and evil is a mere function of consent or lack thereof.

She wasn't a novelist. She was a modestly gifted caster of potboilers. Although she despised religious conservatives, her overwrought scribblings were more preachy and self-righteous than anything Bill Sunday ever pitched from the pulpit.

And those were her good points.

[First_Salute]

Bump.

[Willie Green]

Unlike plants or lower animals, human beings have a unique rational capacity that each of us must choose to exercise if we’re to survive and prosper. We need to discover how to produce food, how to cure diseases, how to construct shelters and how to build skyscrapers. This means that we each must be free to act on the judgments of our own minds.

Cannabis destroys human rational capacity and good judgement.
It should remain a banned substance.

[Willie Green]

Rand observed that individuals can deal with each other in one of two ways: though mutual consent or by initiating force. Capitalism is the social system based on mutual consent and respect for the rights and dignity of each individual.

Herein lies Rand's fundamental error.
Capitalism is not a social system, it is an economic system that equates human labor with raw material as just another input commodity to be exploited for profit. Similarly, "respect" for customers is merely lip-service. Customers are not treated as individuals, they are a revenue source to be exploited through bland product standarization coupled with mind-numbing advertising propaganda.

[kidd]

Ayn Rand thought that the Libertarian party was ridiculous.