Carol Baum: Welfare CEOs are Just Like John Galt
Bloomberg columnist Carol Baum puts together a baffling analogy:
The hero of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is smiling because he’s seen it all before: the government’s intervention in the private sector; the constraints placed on business in the name of the people; the desperation on the part of government bureaucrats when they realize their leverage is limited; and — this part is still fiction — the decision on the part of business leaders to walk away from the enterprises they built. [...] The government needs Liddy and Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit and Bank of America’s Ken Lewis to continue working to restore their firms to prosperity in the same way the looters in Rand’s novel need Hank Reardon and Francisco d’Anconia and Dagny Taggart, respectively, to run their steel mills, copper mines and railroad.
Atlas Shrugged is a stupid book, Ayn Rand is a stupid woman, and John Galt’s ideas are stupid. That said, none of them are nearly this stupid. Rand’s novel isn’t about a world in which executives who build companies based on a lot of incorrect decisions, then pay themselves millions of dollars while bankrupting their firms, then come to the government hat-in-hand asking for bailouts, then find that the bailers-out want to attach some strings to their hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds and then go to hide out in Galt’s Gulch. That doesn’t make any sense at all.
If the folks running Citigroup and Bank of America and AIG were good at their jobs, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. That’s the point. But they weren’t good. They lost staggering sums of money. Their companies went broke. They had to beg for taxpayer dollars. You don’t get to do that and then turn around and “go Galt.”
159 Responses to “Carol Baum: Welfare CEOs are Just Like John Galt”
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March 19th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Wow. It’s like they see themselves as some sort of self-appointed aristocracy. Of course, unlike the aristocracies of old, they didn’t get where they were by winning on the battlefield, they got there by bullshitting other people into giving them money. Not really very flexible, and adaptable, and free market-y, and creatively destructiony are they?
So I suppose that means they’re just sticking to the script.
max
['Dammit, my bullshit worked last time! I can't figure out what's wrong. Huh.']
March 19th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Don’t go off the deep end.
Liddy didn’t destroy AIG.
Pandit didn’t destroy Citi.
Lewis is only partly responsible for B of A. He wanted to back out of paying way too much to buy Merrill and the government wouldn’t let him.
Thain didn’t destroy Merrill.
I don’t know if any of them are good at their jobs. Lewis paid WAY, WAY too much money to buy CountryWide. that was a huge mistake. Lewis paid too much for Merrill but he wanted out of the deal when he realized he made a mistake.
So, how do you know that those execs are not good at running their companies. I know they are far better than the people they replaced.
March 19th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
What a marvelously stupid view of Ayn Rand’s masterpiece. Meanwhile, stupid, Liddy was not responsible for AIG’s decline.
March 19th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Where’s Rush in all this? (The band, not the drug addict radio guy.) They’re huge Rand dorks; Neil Peart even dedicated one of their albums to her (the one about some dude in Futureworld who finds a guitar in a cave and the government won’t let him rock, or something). I’m surprised the right wing hasn’t trotted them out like Chuck Norris or Charlton Heston or the other B and C list celebs they sometimes go to.
March 19th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
“So, how do you know that those execs are not good at running their companies. I know they are far better than the people they replaced.”
He doesn’t. Matt is stupid.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Rush (the band) is from Canada, so that makes them socialists, eh.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Jack Bauer would TOTALLY kick John Galt’s ass.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Hilarity is ensuing on this thread! These CEOs’ carping about string-attached federal money is just like going Galt because maybe their companies’ failure isn’t their fault!
March 19th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Ayn Rand was not stupid. Wrong and blinded by ideology, yes. Stupid, no.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Also stupid: People who take Rand seriously.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I wish all the people who keep talking about Galt would just go Galt already.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Those CEOs may not be responsible for the failure of their companies but they are still begging for taxpayer money.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
In defense of Ayn Rand (and that’s the last time you’ll see me say that), in her books the heroes were people who actually made and built things, like railroads and buildings. The financiers — the kind of guys who would sell and re-sell the same mortgage 20 times — were always the villains.
They’re a bunch of James Taggarts trying to convince everyone they’re John Galt.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Megan McArdle of the despicable magazine – The Atlantic – prays to Rand 3 times a day.
Now that is stupid.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Beyond Rand’s other numerous stupidities, she had no idea what modern corporations actually do, or even the bare basics of how they operate. The great corporate innovators of her era like Gerard Swope, John J Raskob and Alfred P Sloan were precisely NOT the inventor / entrepreneur figures a la Galt. Indeed, Alfred Sloan forced out William Durant out of GM, a figure far more like Galt than Sloan was. By the time of the 1920s, the era of inventors / entrepreneurs (if there ever really was such an era) had already long departed.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
самое интересное…
Bloomberg columnist Carol Baum puts together a baffling analogy: The hero of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is smiling because[...]…
March 19th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Galt represented someone who was great at what he did, and then comes the Randian blah blah blah permeating the rest of the book. These assholes represent the antithesis of Rand’s heroes…narcissistic, incompetent,consciousless assholes. Then having the gall to claim the Galt mantle, unf*****gbelievable. These people should eat shit and die.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
John Galt? The famous comic book character from the fifties? I thought John Galt went off in a huff and on strike? One doesn’t necessarily associate that sort of thing with this sucking around, trying to “capitalize” on the chaos and misery you helped create, by extorting the last available dollars from a teetering, propped up company that you’ve ransacked. If we’re going to update John Galt for these times for AIG, I vote we call it “Atlas Filched”.
And the ludicrous premise behind Galt’s (and like-minded, other “Creators’”) threat of quitting the game and taking their ball home with them is that they’d be missed. Rand’s pulp fantasy had it that the rest of us mopes and leeches would be lost without them, these Titans of Industry. If AIG Management stomped off in a hissy-fit they’d be doing us all a big favor. I for one wouldn’t miss their voracious looting, overmuch.
Selective confiscation of private property? Under the circumstances, it seems prudent for the government to freeze all these bonuses, to all of these characters, each steadfastly maintaining their innocence. Let them plead hardship or sue the government and demand immediate payment, clean-handed as they are. Some of these birds should be having their hat-sizes measured so they can have the right fit of raincoat.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
For the life of me, I don’t know how anyone over the age of 15 can read the ridiculous Rand and not die of sheer boredom.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
“Liddy didn’t destroy AIG.
Pandit didn’t destroy Citi.
Lewis is only partly responsible for B of A. He wanted to back out of paying way too much to buy Merrill and the government wouldn’t let him.
Thain didn’t destroy Merrill.”
OK. Still, I bet there would be ZERO difference in the world if all of them up and left to hide in the hills. None. If they were giants in their fields, truly irreplaceable men (and DeGaulle had the final say about the reality of “irreplaceable men” — the graveyards are full of them) they might be able to unfuck their companies. But they can’t. At best they’re irrelevant caretakers in the middle of an economic collapse. At worst, they are complicit in it.
With Supermen like that, who needs Supermen?
March 19th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Ayn Rand was not stupid. Wrong and blinded by ideology, yes. Stupid, no.
I’ve read some of her stuff. Definitely stupid. Also wrong and blinded by ideology. But I think the stupid came first.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
btw: If anyone wants to sample more of Baum’s vast storehouse of knowledge, let me guide you to this brilliantly prescient tome from 1997, to which she was a contributor:
“The Last Democrat. Why Bill Clinton Will Be The Last Democrat Americans Elect President.”
http://www.amazon.com/Democrat-Clinton-Democrat-Americans-President/dp/0963873210/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237501325&sr=1-3
heh heh heh…
March 19th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
She is a lunatic.
For at least the last 15 years on Thanksgiving, she has republished on Bloomberg a column of hers that claims that the Pilgrims starved when they shared land in common, and only prospered when they embraced “private property”
March 19th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
The pathetic hero worship they can still command from their groupies is revolting.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Why the fuck are these cultists still around bothering us? Please, go fucking Galt already. That means shutting the fuck up and going the fuck away.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Ayn Rand was not stupid. Wrong and blinded by ideology, yes. Stupid, no.
No, she was stupid.
Dude invents a perpetual motion machine–cutting edge physics.
Society wants to tax his profits, though, so he takes his ideas and leaves.
Apparently, he’s the only one in the world capable of building such a machine, so when he’s gone, so is the machine.
Now, of course, in the real world, what happens is that a dozen or so other inventors, knowing it can be done, and having some basic grasp of cutting edge physics, manage in a few years to duplicate his perpetual motion machine, and the world goes on happily without Mr. Galt.
Of course, Galt could patent his machine, getting a government-enforced monopoly on it. But that involves icky government.
In the book, Rand actually adddresses this problem–some dirty altruist manages to duplicate Rearden’s invention, the Rearden metal. Rearden doesn’t sue for patent infringment–instead, a friendly pirate blows up the infringing plant.
And that’s why Rand is stupid.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Damn that Ed Liddy. He completely destroyed AIG, he continues to pay himself a massive salary and bonsues, and then refuses to appear for Congress. If only he would retire.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
By the time of the 1920s, the era of inventors / entrepreneurs (if there ever really was such an era) had already long departed.
Nah, it never went away, there are always inventors and entrepreneurs. They just move to the next bleeding edge, that’s all. By the 1920s it was radio and telecommunications. By the 1940s and 1950s it was business machines. By the 1960s business machines morphed into computers.
And time and time again, the entrepreneurs were bought out/succeeded by the “captains of industry” types. The serial entrepreneur is a real phenomenon.
What Rand got wrong was assuming that the hugely wealthy guys were always the inventors. Usually, they weren’t. They were just good at running companies. Strangely, this is a skill that is actually taught in colleges.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Wow. It’s like they see themselves as some sort of self-appointed aristocracy.
I think you’d love Philip Agre’s 2004 essay on conservatism.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Matt is exactly right that any of our Masters of the Universe who compare themselves to John Galt are probably delusional though I think it far more likely that they have simply never read the book (there is no Classics Illustrated) and are still awaiting Brad Pitt’s heroic impersonation of their masturbatory fantasies.
It is the FINNEGAN’S WAKE of our constipated Barbarians.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
Rea, you’ve obviously never actually read the book. You call Rand stupid, when you can’t even recall the basics of the plot correctly?
March 19th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Rand is dead. But the entitlement culture of these millionaire freaks and their groupies is still here. One of the great things about the AIG blackmail payouts is that the light is firmly fixed on these organizational men, and it shows them to be minor rentseekers, with no aptitude to make a move that is in the public good, or that benefits anybody except a small, likeminded group of rich mafiosi. They even admit it – Andrew Sorkin’s column defending the bonuses fell back on the premise that they are monster rentseekers, and that they will blow apart some financial bomb if they aren’t paid off. Now, I’m pretty skeptical about your average Babbit businessman, but I don’t think of them as simply villainous. The freaks at the head of the banks are. What good have they ever done, at all, for anybody? Oh, I’m forgetting the shareholder value of governing a drop in stock prices of 95 percent. Galts to the very fingertips.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
The closest thing to “Going Galt” that I can think of is that hedge fund dude, Andrew Lahde, who made 1000% profits betting against subprime loan backed securities… then sold it all, published an annoying and boring screed before going off to spend the rest of his fabulously wealthy life smoking pot.
Though obviously the collapse was happening with or without him… he’s perhaps someone you’d want to question about what to do about it… in between bong hits.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Hey, a boy can hope.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
I remember picking up “Atlas Shrugged” in my late teens specifically because I’d heard it would be a deep challenge to how I thought about everything. After about a dozen pages, each worse than the preceding, and flipping through the remainder to see if some random page suggested it would be worth continuing, I gave up hope. No author so inept at creating recognizably human characters would be able to illuminate some crucial aspect of human nature for me, let alone amuse me. To this day, besides “Ulysses,” it’s the only Major Novel I have abandoned reading before finishing — and I blame myself, not Joyce, for my giving up midway through “Ulysses.”
Maybe it’s unfair, even ignorant, for me to judge people who’ve actually finished “Atlas Shrugged” and admire it, but I can’t help feeling that the book exists only to flatter the reader who already thinks of himself as an Ubermann of whom the messy world is barely worthy. Rand’s craven hero-worship is just embarassing. If you want to wrestle with philosophical individualism, try Nietzsche. At least the dude’s a good writer.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
go galt actually means “whine like a baby”.
It’s some of that neo-con esoteric writing.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
“And time and time again, the entrepreneurs were bought out/succeeded by the “captains of industry” types. The serial entrepreneur is a real phenomenon.
What Rand got wrong was assuming that the hugely wealthy guys were always the inventors. Usually, they weren’t. They were just good at running companies. Strangely, this is a skill that is actually taught in colleges.”
But that in itself is indicative of how Rand didn’t understand what corporations (the dominant institution of late-stage capitalism) actually do. There’s an entrepreneurial cycle – relatively rapidly, industries grow from their innovative volatile beginnings to more stable states. Inventing or creating rapidly becomes much less useful in that stable environment – where managing large organizations well (or, more accurately, at least better) becomes not only more necessary, but also more profitable.
Not understanding what modern organizations actually do indicates that Rand had no effective understanding of the real modern economy. If her economics was in any way correct, we would predict that corporations would be a failed organizational form. (Indeed, we would predict that such large modern bureaucracies as the modern state apparatus would also be failed organizational forms). Instead, we see that modern organizational forms such as the corporation are not only not in decline, but have been continually growing for more than 130+ years.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Whoopsy. Make that “embarrassing.”
March 19th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Whoah, that’s really funny! Vikram Pandit is John Galt after all. And I thought I’d heard it all by now…
March 19th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
May I point out that, in the real world, most people stop getting their philosophy from novels around the age of 15?
March 19th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Atlas Shrugged is a stupid book, Ayn Rand is a stupid woman, and John Galt’s ideas are stupid. That said, none of them are nearly this stupid.
That quote is fucking money.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Matt: “Ayn Rand is a stupid woman.”
Compared to who? You?
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!!!
This is what a degree in philosophy gets you.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
People keep comparing the Galt wannabees to spoiled children threatening to “take my ball and go home” when they start losing the game.
The problem with this analogy is that we’re talking about people who don’t even own the ball anymore.
It’s more like “Give me your ball now so I can take it and go home.”
The really weird part is that the government seems to be agreeing that these people should be treated with respect.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Inventing or creating rapidly becomes much less useful in that stable environment – where managing large organizations well (or, more accurately, at least better) becomes not only more necessary, but also more profitable.
Real history, of real creators, showed some people just on the cusp of the “grey flannel suit” corporate era who suffered for their stubborn individuality, such as E. Howard Armstrong and Philo Farnsworth. (Not that Armstrong, especially, wasn’t done dirt.)
I find those histories much more entertaining, and cautionary, than anything from Ayn Rand.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
For the life of me, I don’t know how anyone over the age of 15 can read the ridiculous Rand and not die of sheer boredom.
You got that right. One page was enough for me.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
The only person who could remotely fit that profile is Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan. He genuinely has handled the crisis well and had been positioning JPM for several quarters prior to the failure of Bear for the inevitable crash.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Why not chew over who is the best Batman or the real Elphaba?This obsession with who wears the mantle of a fictional fantasy character from a second-rate novel is strange.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
OK, so Liddy didn’t crash AIG, and Pandit didn’t crash Citibank.
But neither did they build those companies. They are just caretakers, not entrepreneurs, and they are replaceable. Their leaving would be like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water. A little surface disturbance and then nothing is changed.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
You don’t get to do that and then turn around and “go Galt.”
Personally, I think they should be required by law to “go Galt.” Remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer was on strike from the bagel shop? This would be even more ridiculous.
Bring.
It.
On.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Part of what makes “going galt” so incredibly stupid is that if anyone “went galt,” all they would do is create an opening for someone else to step in and make the money.
Every big Bank CEO goes Galt? A couple of VP’s are going to get promoted – and who knows? They may not be so stupid as to take massive risks and destroy their company.
Some dentist in bumfuck goes galt and decides to see 20 fewer patients each week (a partial galt) – some kid fresh outta dental school has a great opportunity to start building his own practice.
Crappy wingnut columnist goes Galt? There’s probably a thousand crappy wingnut columnist wanna-be’s waiting in the wings of the wingnut welfare system salivating for the opportunity.
All going Galt would do in the real world is give someone new a shot to prove that they can do it better.
Stupid people. It’s a fantasy novel. Of course, these are rightwingers.
Another real world example of someone sorta-going Galt is Bill Gates. He retired, turned the company over to some B-school nitwit, and then Microsoft faces its first layoffs ever. Of course, he just decided he wanted to play the part of billionaire tycoon, and try to apply his brain to solving the problems of the world instead of meeting quarterly profit expectations.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
I read Ayn Rand, I thought it was fiction. Only years later did I hear folks took it seriously. It was a fun read sort of like a comic book of a novel.
I suppose the bonuses were too much but we ought to stop rewriting laws and creating policy based on hyped up interpretations of a single point in a complex situation.
Are we sure who gets this money and how much? All I read is that someone should burn. The news value of all of this may create an environment that hurts our ablity to fix the main problems.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Ayn Rand was stupid, but she could fuck like a wildcat.
Andrea Mitchell, she’s just a dolt.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
many good thoughts about Rand here, this one is one of the best.
Let’s think about a field of commercial endeavor which is not outdated and most suited to seeing how Rand’s capitalist heroism tracks the real world: computer technology.
Who would be the Hank Rearden of Apple Computer?
If you said “Steve Jobs”, you’re right.
But he’s not the guy who actually created the first Apple computer, the ‘Rearden metal’ analog in our, er, analogy. Jobs was and is a marketing/deal-making guy. Wozniak was the electronics genius. It was he who assembled the first Apple computer and Jobs went out and sold it.
If Atlas Shrugged truly tracked real life, Hank Rearden would be the CEO and founder of Rearden Steel – which would most certainly be a public company – taking the credit for what one of his engineers came up with (and certainly Rearden would deserve a measure of credit since he provided the capital and facilities to finance the research and development).
Then Rearden starts believing his own PR releases and goes Galt. The board of directors would fire him, issuing a press release declaring that while they appreciate his contributions to the firm, he most certainly is not irreplaceable (in softer language than that of course). The engineer who came up with Rearden metal would be rewarded with stock options, a nice title and a fatter salary lest he move to a competitor.
Rearden becomes a hermit in Galt’s Gulch, using his stock in Rearden Steel to finance a laughable libertarian blog where he bitterly denounces his real and imaginary enemies, and probably funds an objectivist think tank.
If you look at the history of invention in the industrial age, it is littered with examples of brilliant inventors who got there first and then failed at marketing their invention or had their invention stolen by sharp businessmen… like Hank Rearden.
Alexander Graham Bell cribbed from Meucci.
Marconi muscled the radio patents from Tesla with help from Edison and Andrew Carnegie.
Sarnoff and Zworykin tried very, very hard to steal Farnsworth’s television patents.
The automakers stole Robert Kearns’ intermittent windshield wiper invention and it took over 25 years of fighting them virtually single-handedly to get the credit and payments he deserved.
There are many more such figures who were brilliant inventors but either failed to capitalize on their work because they lacked the business and marketing savvy, or had their work stolen by others.
The notion of the heroic all-in-one CEO and inventor is almost purely a figment of Rand’s imagination and there are very, very few such figures in real life.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
MY, I assume you won’t get this far down (I didn’t!), but man, awesome post. All is forgiven.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
Is somebody stopping the Go Galt assholes from going Galt? If so, shame on them. If not, get with the going Galt already.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
“Rand’s novel isn’t about a world in which executives who build companies based on a lot of incorrect decisions, then pay themselves millions of dollars while bankrupting their firms, then come to the government hat-in-hand asking for bailouts, then find that the bailers-out want to attach some strings to their hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds and then go to hide out in Galt’s Gulch.”
While that’s true, it’s important to note that Ayn’s novel is creating a myth designed precisely to cover for real executives, who indeed behave just this way. In a way, then, Carol Baum’s evocation of it is perfectly fine. They’re just two slightly different forms of the same self-deluding lie.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Who is John Galt?
March 19th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
D’Angelo got this right on The Wire. “Hey Mr. Nugget!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvq3Pf3j61c
March 19th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Nice post, Matthew. Who on the Journolist fed it to you?
After all, you’ve never read the book. Original post here, so that you can sanitize it after the fact.
PS: Atlas Shrugged is softcore masochism porn. *I* know this, because *I* actually read it.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
No.
Though there are two serious flaws in Rand’s novel, the ideal isn’t either one of them.
Great flaw number one is the absolute, horrifying, abject and total lack of any sense of a hint of a sense of humor. Who wants to live in that world?
Number two is more important: All of her protagonists are “morally” and “ethically” perfect, much like the idealized and deified version of Christ. Anyone with eyeballs can see this is nonsense.
I’m 50 now, but when Mom was assigned to write something about Atlas Shrugged when I was a yout, I took it upon myself to read it. It had a great influence on my worldview for some time, way back when I was an idealistic kid and believed that humans had the capacity to behave as the protagonists in the NOVEL did. Life has taught me it isn’t so.
I’ve read it more than once, but not for a long, long time. The ideal still resonates with me, but we’re going to have to do some serious genetic and social engineering to get where Galt is.
I laugh so hard at the people threatening to “go Galt.” Gosh darn it, do us a favor and have at it. You’re embarrassing yourself, and worse, me.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
As a matter of full disclosure, I have a first edition, commemorative edition.
The concept, the ideal, is not without merit. It just isn’t achievable.
And man, what a serious drag of a party guest she must have been. Have a laugh, Ayn! What is life without some laughs, even at you your own self?
March 19th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Well, I hear Ayn’s longtime companion was a man 25 years younger than she was. Guess the humorless old bat had something going on!
March 19th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
The irony of Atlas Shrugged is that it is a turgid, worthless, amateurish novel about excellence. Anyone who treats it as some sort of life manifesto should have his/her head examined.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
“Though there are two serious flaws in Rand’s novel”
This is true. She can’t write and her ideas are stupid.
Her “philosophy” boils down to: “the rich are entitled to be greedy, erm, because, erm, because, hey want a blowjob?”
I’d say it’s a good rule of thumb in this life to consider everyone who thinks Rand is a philosopher and not a clown to be irredeemably stupid. I’ve never seen a counterexample.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Thank you!
March 19th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
John O, there is a third, essential conceptual flaw at the center of the book, this bullshit idea that one human can do everything. Even in 1000 BC a single person could not credibly claim that he did everything himself — you may have invented a water pump, but your pump incorporates bronze which someone else figured out how to make; you may have invented a better plough, but someone else invented agriculture, and another person invented taming cattle or horses.
Regardless of whatever BS idea Rearden or Galt came up with, they’re building on a scientific and engineering tradition of thousands of years; along with a social tradition just as long. Of all the many many many stupidities of the conservative-libertarian world view, this hero-worship of an archetype so clearly unconnected with any sort of reality has to be the stupidest. It’s not just wrong in the sense that reasonable people can disagree about it, or that it could be right has been shown, empirically, to be flawed; it’s wrong in the same way that it’s wrong to claim that ice is made of ammonia, or that 2+2=7 — it just has absolutely no connection with reality in any sort of way.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Matt,
My personal opinion of Rand/Atlas isn’t relavent to this comment. But your opinion is certainly not at all, it couldn’t have been more than a week or two ago that you made similar remarks about the book while admitting that you had NEVER read it. I let it slide then, but this is twice in a short span of time that you are judging a book and an author after openly stating you haven’t even read the material. I enjoy your opinions but I lose tons of confidence in them reading this unjustifiable garbage again. Just saying, it makes me wonder what else you are commenting on that you have never read or researched. Your priority should be to maintain credibility, this type of thing does quite the opposite.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
I’d say it’s a good rule of thumb in this life to consider everyone who thinks Rand is a philosopher and not a clown to be irredeemably stupid. I’ve never seen a counterexample.
And therein lies the typical argument from bigoted and ignorant leftists, most of whom never even read the book. Let me paraphrase most of the comments here, including the original post: “I am SMART. Anyone who disagrees with me is STUPID.”
Obama gave Gordon Brown a DVD set that only plays on American DVD players = ACCIDENT. Bush does the same thing = STUPID.
That’s some amazing logic you folks on the Left employ. Of course, if you ignoramuses considered the “nuances” that you are such big fans of, you wouldn’t leap to such “stupid” conclusions. You would realize that Rand’s background growing up in a statist, repressive society that was revered by many academic and political elites of her time had a monumental influence on her works. You boneheads would also realize that she deftly attacked the cultural assumptions that altruism for the state and for the church is NOT always noble – this was actually quite groundbreaking at the time.
Cardboard characters and lack of humor have f#ck all to do with the rather revolutionary philosophy she put forth championing individuality.
You might disagree with her, you might not even like here….and your keyboard shouts of “stupid” do, in fact, prove who is stupid.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
George, it’s par for the course for folks like Matt. It’s cool and hip for a knee-jerk Leftist to trash Rand. Then you get comments like the above which essentially pat you on the back and say “Right on man!”
I’ve met a few “intellectual” lefties myself here in San Francisco and they are all equally clueless about what Rand actually wrote or believed. The proof is typically the same – they have no idea that she consistently critiqued crony capitalism.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Right Mike. So Rand’s ideas aren’t stupid. Answer my point regarding the fact that, in the real world, as opposed to Randian fairy land, everything new created by individuals, whether artistic, scientific, or technological, is built on thousands of generations of previous work.
And, BTW, have you read Keynes? Das Kapital? Mao? Mein Kampf? If not, do you adhere to the rule that you never comment on issues related to these books?
As for your claims regarding altruism. These might be ground breaking if, by groundbreaking, you mean repeating the insights of Malthus, as rephrased by Ricardo, 150 after the fact while not acknowledging him.
Depending on what others did before you — it’s not just for Galt you know; Rand did the same damn thing.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Just wanted to cite my comment. Here is you just two weeks saying you have never read the book you are now trashing:
This with about 4 other posts the past two weeks. Get off it Matt, you’ve never even read the book.
@Mike (comment above) exactly why I had to call this crap out. Way to go everyone jumping on in agreement, most of you probably haven’t even read page either.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
This article is stupid. George Soros is stupid. So is Matt regardless whether heeee went to Haaarrrvard.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
renato -
Unlike most other current CEOs, Jobs was there at the creation of Apple – it wasn’t just Woz.
And, speaking as an engineer – who, like my brethren (and sistern), views Marketing as the closest thing to Teh Dark Side in this reality – being an excellent marketeer is not easy, and requires lots of smarts and a fair amount of creativity. Just not the engineering type of creativity.
Look, Jobs is not Christ reborn, but he pretty much got Apple turned, after Sculley and Spindler and Amelio and the rest of those scheisskopfs managed to fuck it up to a fare-thee-well.
Lou Gerstner is another example. Many people – myself included – thought bringing in a guy from the food and tobacco industry (i.e., no computer background) would lead to a major clusterfuck, and IBM would go the way of Osborne et al. Obviously, I was totally wrong.
That being said: Liddy, Pandit, Lewis are not the titans of industry that Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser would have us believe they are. They might serve a useful purpose, though: if they decide to “Go Galt”, maybe all the wingnuts who are talking about going Galt will decide to follow those guys. I don’t see a downside to that possibility, do you?
March 19th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
I’ve met a few “intellectual” lefties myself here in San Francisco and they are all equally clueless about what Rand actually wrote or believed. The proof is typically the same – they have no idea that she consistently critiqued crony capitalism.
Except for the part where Matt specifically points out that Rand did not endorse crony capitalism, and the part where he says that the crony capitalists who talk about “Going Galt” are actually much stupider than Rand’s ideas… you might have a point.
I’ll freely admit that I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged. But I’ve read synopses of the book by both fans and critics, and I’ve read several Rand essays. I think this is pretty well sufficient to judge the quality of her ideas and the concept of “going Galt”. It’s a clever plot device for a science fiction novel, but anyone who thinks that its universe of heroic inventor-industrialists correlates in the slightest with the real world is stupid, and I don’t mind saying so. It’s nice that Rand hated crony capitalists, but the real-world outcome of the politics she endorsed is crony capitalism. So I don’t feel bad about calling her stupid.
I did read the Fountainhead, which is a very, very stupid book that managed to be somewhat entertaining if you skimmed past the monologues and managed to ignore the fact that her hero was a despicable twat.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Maynard,
in the real world, as opposed to Randian fairy land, everything new created by individuals, whether artistic, scientific, or technological, is built on thousands of generations of previous work.
Ja, und? I’m not sure what your point is? Are you saying that this fact somehow negates the individual achievement built upon the foundation of others? Please elaborate.
As for your claims regarding altruism. These might be ground breaking if, by groundbreaking, you mean repeating the insights of Malthus, as rephrased by Ricardo, 150 after the fact while not acknowledging him.
Depending on what others did before you — it’s not just for Galt you know; Rand did the same damn thing.
It’s all about context. Consider the environment at the time of her two most successful books (1943 and 1957). Consider the prevailing wisdom among many of our cultural elites at the time – many of whom thought the Soviet Union had a pretty good thing going. Consider that she not only bucked their assumptions but that she also injected a countering philosophy of individualism into the the contemporary mainstream with bestsellers. That qualifies as pretty damn groundbreaking to me.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
It’s nice that Rand hated crony capitalists, but the real-world outcome of the politics she endorsed is crony capitalism. So I don’t feel bad about calling her stupid.
Care to elaborate on how her politics leads to crony capitalism? Seriously.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
she not only bucked their assumptions but that she also injected a countering philosophy of individualism into the the contemporary mainstream with bestsellers. That qualifies as pretty damn groundbreaking to me.
Only if you count knee-jerk contrarian grandstanding as some kind of intellectual achievement. In this, I will grant, Ayn Rand was decades ahead of her time.
March 19th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
“in the real world, as opposed to Randian fairy land, everything new created by individuals, whether artistic, scientific, or technological, is built on thousands of generations of previous work.
Ja, und? I’m not sure what your point is? Are you saying that this fact somehow negates the individual achievement built upon the foundation of others? Please elaborate.”
So the point is that it is pathetic and childish to claim that, because you and you alone created some object (art, technology, whatever), you and you alone deserve all profits flowing from that object, have the right to completely determine how the object is used, etc etc. There is a vast room for negotiation here as to exactly how much benefit you deserve. If society were to say, for example, that your particular innovation incorporates, through some calculus, 1% of new ideas on top of 99% prior ideas, and thus your profits should be taxed at 99%, this is not a priori ridiculous. In other words, the optimal level of taxation is an empirical matter, it is not some moral imperative that an entrepreneur deserves 100% of his profits.
Likewise for labor relations. If you can create your device without the input of other human beings, well good for you. And if you do require other human beings, well then you might claim your marvelous input is worth a million times their input, but they have opinions too, and if their opinions differ from yours, the extent to which, and the mechanisms by which society should adjudicate this difference of opinion are an empirical matter, not a moral matter, because it simply IS NOT THE CASE that you did it all by yourself.
And so on, and so on.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:00 am
“Care to elaborate on how her politics leads to crony capitalism?”
Not especially. I’m a little too old for a late night dorm political argument and you didn’t bring a plate of brownies.
Suffice it to say that I’m going to discuss the way that deregulation, high-end tax cuts, and low interest rates, promoted by people such as Alan Greenspan (who cites Rand as an influence) to liberate the creative genius of capitalism, led inexorably to the speculative bubbles, financial chicanery, self-dealing, Ponzi schemes, and lack of corporate accountability that trashed the economy and led America’s titans of capitalism to inexorably crawl down to Washington and beg for a bailout from the only institution left to save them from their own vices.
And you’re going to counter with some variation of “True objectivism has never been tried” and you’ll blame the financial crisis on the government meddling in the housing market instead of deregulation and tax cuts, and you’ll probably say that Rand would have disapproved strongly of the financial chicanery and lack of accountability, and influence-peddling, and government meddling, and scorned the people who begged for a bailout, and say she disdained this sort of people and they were the basis for most of the villains in Atlas Shrugged. But you won’t be able to locate a planet on which Rearden Steels outnumber GMs and Citibanks.
And we’ll bat it back and forth for a while and never agree about anything and call each other names. And it will be tedious and pointless. So let’s just leave it at that.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:09 am
I’m a 33 year old, single attorney who makes just at $200k a year. I generally work 70 hour weeks, with that work spread over all 7 days and holidays. I earn my money.
I’ve decided to hire tax and investment advisers this year to minimize my current and future tax obligation. I’ve also decided that my ultimate goal is to minimize my taxes, not maximize my return, because I am so disgusted with what the federal government does with my, and at least some of your (a LOT of folks don’t pay ANY federal income tax) money.
To put it another way, I will forego a dollar in income to prevent the federal government from getting another 80 cents from me. This is a version of going Galt. Several of my colleagues have the same attitude.
To put this in perspective, I only seek to do, legally, what the leading lights of the Democratic administration have done illegally – pay less taxes. Geithner – signing oaths to pay taxes to get the dough than blowing it off. Rangel – where to start?!? Daschle – pathetic. Rahm Emmanuel – free housing, no tax paid for the in-kind income. All the other nominees that pulled out due to tax problems. These people don’t pay the taxes that they enact into law. Treasury has 18 slots that are Presidential appointments; 1, Timmy, is filled. The other 17 are vacant. With no nominations made by Obama?!? What?!? Are you kidding me?!? Meanwhile, Obama is filling out NCAA brackets and getting called out on his lack of priorities by Coach K at Duke. This is f’g embarrassing and terribly, terribly scary. .
I’ll follow the law because I believe in the rule of law and I believe in my country. But I’ll be damned if I take a single f’in word of criticism about my attitude towards taxes from this administration, Democrats, ensconced politicians generally (including Republicans), or the people who support them.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Herb,
You’re a fucking retard.
If I were an attorney working for a competing firm, I would be so happy to be competing against you. You’re willing to forgo work now, or not work as hard on your client’s cases, which means that I, as your competitor, get a great competitive advantage.
So while you’re stuck failing to advance your career and reputation, I’m cleaning up.
You, sir, are a moron.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:19 am
As an accountant who formerly worked in taxes, I’ll give you a little free advice.
The best way to not pay any federal income tax is to stop working.
Altogether.
You might still need money. I’ve heard that Walmart’s hiring. Stockers. Can you lift semi-heavy containers? The pay is so low that you may be exempt from income tax.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:27 am
“I’m a 33 year old, single attorney who makes just at $200k a year. I generally work 70 hour weeks, with that work spread over all 7 days and holidays. I earn my money.
I’ve decided to hire tax and investment advisers this year to minimize my current and future tax obligation. I’ve also decided that my ultimate goal is to minimize my taxes, not maximize my return, because I am so disgusted with what the federal government does with my, and at least some of your (a LOT of folks don’t pay ANY federal income tax) money.
To put it another way, I will forego a dollar in income to prevent the federal government from getting another 80 cents from me. This is a version of going Galt. Several of my colleagues have the same attitude.”
Hmm. This is the attitude to facts that makes you a successful lawyer? Where to start?
(1) You’re in the 80% marginal federal income tax bracket? WOW! You are special.
(2) You seem to think only income taxes are real. (Since you couldn’t have your rant about so many people [how many exactly?] who don’t pay income tax if you included things like excise taxes or payroll taxes.) OK, let’s take out payroll taxes, and by the same token we’ll take out what those pay for — medicare, soc sec, and other non-discretionary. If we play these sorts of games we arrive at the discretionary federal budget, 54% of which is military. Since the US is already spending more than the rest of the world *combined* on military, I’m happy to slash that to 1/3rd. How about you? No? Oh, so your opinions about how to spend the budget are sacrosanct, but mine are stupid? So much for democracy, I guess.
(3) A normal person would conclude that, if you are making $200K a year, and don’t positively enjoy your job, it’s only sensible to take some time off and have a break. This is the rational choice. If you want to frame it as a political statement, go for it, but it comes across as somewhat self-serving.
(4) Interesting that you have stated explicitly that your goal in life is to minimize the money you give to the federal govt, NOT to maximize your return. Should we conclude from this that you have explicitly rejected such views as homo Economicus, that humans (eg CEOs) are best motivated by larger salaries, that human motivations are more complex than can be measured by dollar amounts, etc? How did your republican friends react when you told them this?
March 20th, 2009 at 12:28 am
Herb, if you would rather earn less money in order to pay less taxes, be my guest. In fact, if you wish to withdraw from society entirely and live in a cave somewhere to deprive us entirely of your creative contributions as a lawyer, I encourage you to go right ahead and do so.
But don’t you dare take 20 minutes off of work to fill out NCAA brackets… or do anything even remotely fun during the 98 hours per week that you, by your own admission, do not work. That would be a terrible, terrible distraction from your all-important role in driving mankind to new heights. And you might even get lectured on your misplaced priorities by a man who is paid over a million dollars per year to coach basketball.
If you participate in an NCAA pool, the shirkers win. Remember this, Herb.
March 20th, 2009 at 1:55 am
Thanks, Matt, and commenters. I’ve been waiting years to see Rand so spectacularly ridiculed.
And, @Herb, I gotta agree with Maynard and Jerry101: you’re a fucking idiot. Your knee-jerk, sub-juvenile reaction to your tax “situation” is, well, I don’t know — a cry for help? I recommend therapy, or going Galt. Seriously. I understand you’re hurt that the mean government is picking on you, but dude, it’s not personal…. As Maynard pointed at, you probably like the gov’t paying for explodey things, anyway, right?
Oh, and the Coach K/NCAA bracket thing:
“Fox, AP hype Duke coach’s purported criticism of Obama, ignore praise”: http://mediamatters.org/countyfair/200903190004?show=1
March 20th, 2009 at 3:37 am
Here is a shorter translation of Matt: “Rand is stupid, but those communists and government officials are just so yummy! I can’t get enough of them!”
March 20th, 2009 at 7:11 am
Appointing a Federal Reserve Chairman who was a disciple of Rand, and who served for 20 years- now that is stupid.
March 20th, 2009 at 7:24 am
Matt Yglesias is a stupid man and his ideas are stupid. I never have read a word he has written even today and never will but as I understand it he is stupid.
March 20th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Watching the objectivists reduced to mewling and whining in this thread is a joy to behold.
More please Matt.
March 20th, 2009 at 9:31 am
If you guys hate her this much, that confirms just how right she was. In 100 years her work will still be read and admired while this stream of bilge will be long forgotten. Justice, that!
March 20th, 2009 at 9:40 am
If you guys hate her this much, that confirms just how right she was.
“They laughed at me, just like they laughed at Einstein!”
“Yes, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
Who let the junior high kids into the thread?
March 20th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Well, I did read the book. Admittedly, 28 years ago, when I was 15. And your claim I got the plot wrong would be more impressive if you indicated how I got the plot wrong.
March 20th, 2009 at 9:55 am
“In 100 years her work will still be read and admired”
You have this part right, at least. Rand is and will likely be for some time very appealing to many 15-year-olds and those who never outgrew that mindset. In fact, she specifically mentions this in the Atlas Shrugged preface.
Fortunately for our society, most people do outgrow that mindset.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:02 am
I think “I’m going Galt” during the Obama years is to the right what “I’m moving to Canada” was to the left during the W. years.
Which mostly proves that the band Rush controls us all.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Cardboard characters and lack of humor have f#ck all to do with the rather revolutionary philosophy she put forth championing individuality
But Ayn Rand wrote novels, not philosophical treatises. And cardboard characters and lack of humor–not to mention contrived plotting, turgid prose style, and a general contempt for humanity that makes Celine look like Mother Teresa–have a lot to do with her achievement as a novelist. Or are cardboard characters, etc., permissible and even desirable in a novelist if said novelist is on the right ideological side? Well then, don’t complain to me about left-wing “political correctness” infecting literature.
(Not to mention that Rand had a sad, limited, piss-poor idea of human individuality. But that’s another story.)
March 20th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Going Galt after reading Atlas Shrugged is somehow akin to moving to the Shire after reading Lord of the Rings. This meme has now had it’s fifteen minutes.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:25 am
“Going galt” occurs, metaphorically speaking, in organizations which alienate talented people and don’t reward their contributions. The thing is that these alienated people go someplace else to be productive; they don’t go to “Galt’s Gulch” and drop off the face of the earth.
In other countries, if productive people don’t feel like they’re being valued, or if the environment is too difficult for them, they move to other countries in search of better opportunities. Only the Randroids seem to think that it would be realistic for anyone to just “drop out” out of spite.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:32 am
You mean Gestalt not Galt, right?
March 20th, 2009 at 10:38 am
I can’t remember if my passing desire to be John Galt came before or after my passing desire to become the Kwisatz Haderach.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Herb:
Why not just tell your boss to give you a pay cut? Or if you’re in solo practice, why not charge your clients less? I don’t think you need tax experts to help you with this one if you’re really willing to forgoe a dollar to get you out of the extremely rare 80% tax bracket.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:50 am
I despise the elitist pseudointellectual cult of the Randroids. The only Randroids I’ve ever met have been creepy, lifeless middle-agers–not a wedding ring among them–who hung out on college campuses from which they had graduated at least 15 years earlier, still trying to indoctrinate the freshmen and still hanging out in the college clubs with their new “friends.” They would stage anti-Earth-Day protests that, thanks to their age and general fringeness, were utterly hilarious.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:55 am
So let me get this straight. the government hired Liddy to run AIG after it blew up. Because of someone else’s bad decisions. He gets paid $1 per year to do so.
Then that same government drags him in front of congress to explain the bonuses that they (congress) had already approved because when the news broke, their email inboxes filled up.
government had to bail out AIG becuase they owed every financial institution in the world money and everyone would default if AIG could not pay.
AIG owed everyone money because nobody (i.e. regulators) was watching them when they wrote almost a trillion dollars worth of CDS, mostly against mortgages.
Nobody was watching because at the time because everyone in government thought it was a great idea for people to own their own houses, even if they could not pay for them.
Everyone who was buying a house also thought it was a great idea because house prices kept going up. Prices always go up, right?
So the people who bought the houses, who couldn’t pay for them, who were given money by the banks, who rolled the mortgages into securitized pools, who insured those pools with CDS from AIG, who sold the insurance while government stood by,who then had to bail out AIG to save the world, and in the mean time approved the bonuses, which hired Liddy to help them, who told government about the bonuses, who ignored the warnings until people found out, who got pissed off at who was getting paid, who complained to the same government, who dragged Liddy in front of him to berate him, who pointed out that he already told them about this, who now are trying to look “outraged” and reassuring at the same time so the *rest of the financial system does not blow up…
All those people are calling Liddy stupid?
The only stupid decision I see was when he agreed to take this insane job.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Re: Herb.
Granted, it’s been 33 years since I read it at age 15, but I thought lawyers were a class of people Ayn Rand despised? Weren’t they part of the parasite class? Ironic, no, that the people claiming to want to go Galt are the people least like her heroes?
March 20th, 2009 at 11:06 am
With all due sarcasm, I have to agree with those who think Rand’s writing is groundbreaking, since everyone knows that the western tradition has a dire paucity of thinkers who assert the primacy of the individual. Thank God Rand came along to promote this hitherto unheard of and alien proposition.
The problem with Rand as a novelist is at once her great attraction as a novelist: an absolute absence of any sense of nuance or contradiction or even tension within her argument. She draws a radically simplified world in bold, dark lines that are easy to read and allow for no ambiguity. It’s the narrative equivalent of using very large type. This radical simplification is part of what makes it so attractive to adolescents (and immature adults).
Compare Atlas Shrugged to a universally respected “philosophical” novel, like The Brothers Karamazov, and the difference will stand in high relief. Rand essentially wrote polemical, not philosophical, novels.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:11 am
The only Randroids I’ve ever met have been creepy, lifeless middle-agers-not a wedding ring among them-who hung out on college campuses from which they had graduated at least 15 years earlier
This was my experience, as well. But don’t you get it? When “philosophy matters”, that means that getting a mortgage doesn’t matter, having a functional career doesn’t matter, and having a family doesn’t matter.
I remember once that one of these Randroids who was as you describe, worked for an undergrad publication and managed to score an interview with a famous and normally inaccessible professor. The interviewer kept asking him what he thought of Ayn Rand and how his thoughts fit into Rand’s philosophy. He sounded rather embarrassed by the whole thing and explained how he doesn’t normally base his thoughts on the views of a single philosopher.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:14 am
“Ayn Rand is stupid.”
I’m just glad to see that in print. I read The Fountainhead and kept looking for Astin Kutcher. What a piece of trash. A pedantic, moral lecture of a book based on a framework so farcical it belongs in the fantasy section. If human beings acted in all sorts of ways that human beings actually don’t then we could draw Rand’s moral lessons. Instead we’re left with 1000 pages of boring, poorly written dreck populated by characters so hollow and unreal I’m surprised Oliver Stone hasn’t made a movie about it.
I still occasionally accuse my wife of trying to “destroy” me. It still makes her laugh after five years.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:16 am
In other countries, if productive people don’t feel like they’re being valued, or if the environment is too difficult for them, they move to other countries in search of better opportunities.
Interestingly, for the last century or so the most popular destinations for such people has been the US – even when marginal tax rates could hit 90% for the highest earners. There may be a lesson about how bad a deal achievers really have in this country.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:23 am
If only this were so. Have you read any of the response to the Watchmen? Jonathon Livingston Seagull? Adults praise narrative fiction, prose and film, and derive philosophy from it all the time.
Herb, I made almost twice as much as you for a couple of years, I’m a democrat, I was (obviously) in the highest bracket and filled out a 1040A with (obviously) no deductions, and I don’t pay federal taxes now, and I’ll criticize your attitude about taxes. You’re a selfish, self-justifying, infantile jerk.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Rand might not have been stupid but a quick look at her personal life shows that she was disturbed enough for an episode of Jerry Springer … just look at how Rand reacted when her boy-toy decided he wanted a women who was still young enough to bear children.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Well done Matt. The last paragraph is the best summation of the disconnect which we are seeing in those that steered the economy into this mess. The delusion that the financial ideologues and predators exhibit is a symptom of their inability to grasp the reality they have created. All of these bankers, traders and brokers gone wrong refuse to accept that they have killed their golden goose. It is our own economic peril we risk by letting them continue with their now discredited ideology and methodology. Time to make these finance dogs heel.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Herb, what is this 80% tax bracket of which you speak? The irs says you pay 24% on the first $160,000, and then 35% after that.
‘you’re entitled to own your opinion, not your own facts.’
And if I were you I’d work 40 hours a week and smell the roses, obviously you are stressed out and need a break which would probably improve the quality of your work.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I suspect John Galt was actually a pseudonym for Tom Swift, so Rand didn’t have to pay royalties.
Working title for Atlas Shrugged: “Tom Swift and His Atomic Razor”
Isn’t “going Galt” just code for stiffing your Applebee’s waitress?
March 20th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
He invented a perpetual emotion machine? Like there isn’t an almost infinite supply of emotion already? You want a source of infinite energy? Just hook up a generator to irony, now spinning in its grave at about 20,000 rpm.
My twentieth weddin anniversary is coming up, don’t tell me about perpetual emotion. Even the terror has worn off by now.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Matt,
Why do you call Liddy a “Welfare CEO”? Are you not aware that he was hired by the government (for a dollar a year) after the government rescued AIG? He’s not the one who screwed things up there; he’s leading the clean-up crew.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I said when there first was talk of “Galting,” that if it were a plausible alternative, then–looking at the clusterfuch that has ensued, one would be compelled to believe the “best and the brightest” had “gone Galt” sometime in 1981, when they anticipated the unmitigated disasters that Raygun’s ascension presaged. That’s when they said “Fuck it!” and split…
The fools, dolts, pervs, and otherwise mortally damaged cretins who pretend to sling around the garments of Randayn faux-”seriousness,” glamor and morality are the dregs, the leavings, the dross.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I was considerably past the age of 15 when I first read “The Stranger” (I am now mid-60s). I was in my 30s when I finally worked my way through “Also Sprache…” I was moved and informed both, in my late 40s, by Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael” books, because they seemed to lay out clearly –and so attractively– the ‘primitivist’ position in anthropology.
Objectivism is to philosophy what Rush is to politics: initially attractive but, upon reflection, inherently, and ultimately, repellantly dishonest.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Also stupid: morons who haven’t read the book, but says it’s stupid.
Yeah, I’m looking at you, Matt.
Also Morons: Clowns who blame Liddy for being a company-looting millionaire, when in fact Liddy was brought in to SAVE AIG AFTER the big screw-ups, and his salary is $1 (ONE DOLLAR) a year.
Stick that up yer pipe and smoke it, dumb-ass.
Yeah. I’m talking to you, Matty-boy.
Dumbass.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
We are being blackmailed by the banks,no?
Obama described them as suicide bombers with dynamite strapped to they chest and a finger on the button.
what does that mean?
Not good at their jobs??
If you were trying to bankrupt the govt and drown it in the bathtub the way Grover Nordquist always dreamed isnt that what you would do?
You really think they didnt know what was going on?
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED?
March 20th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I think many of the people who are claiming that Rand was stupid because a “strike” of the talented would not work might be more credible if they demonstrated any understanding that the strike story is a metaphor, and is not meant to be taken literally.
If Rand thought for one second that convincing a relative handful of talented people to “strike” would crash the modern welfare state into barbarism, she would have attempted to lead such a strike. The strike story is simply meant as a metaphor for the role of the individual power to reason in human affairs. Rand believed that the power to reason was the defining characteristic of man’s nature, that when violence [private or state-sanctioned] stood against reason man would suffer, and that if reason were somehow withdrawn man’s civilization would collapse. The magic-realist milieu of the novel, which is set in a sort of tinker-toy industrial America of no real discernible time period, is designed to serve as a setting for this metaphor, and not to reflect actual conditions at any moment in history. The metaphorical nature of the tale also renders complaints about non-naturalistic characterization a bit moot either, since it’s not supposed to be a character study – you may as well complain about the lack of characterization in Aesop’s tales.
Rand’s philosophy basically boils down to a handful of “planks” that most of the people calling her stupid would actually find uncontroversial: that the physical world available to our senses is the only one relevant to human affairs, and that supernatural or “noumenal” realms are either non-existent or irrelevant; that reason is the only appropriate tool for interacting with or gaining knowledge about the world, and that faith, intuition and emotion are not tools of cognition; that there can be no such thing as “value” without an individual valuing agent; and so forth. She had been widely reviled almost exclusively because of the libertarian political conclusions she drew from her philosophical premises – and that’s a lot like declaring Marx “stupid” because you don’t like his political conclusions.
March 20th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Brian Says:
March 20th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
You’re claiming she’s the individualist obverse of Marx? The materialistic inverse?
Interesting. Still stupid. But maybe marginally more intersting…
March 20th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
The stupidity of Atlas Shrugged is that it shows an astonishing blindness toward central banking. Is it at all surprising that Alan Greenspan was a disciple of Rand’s and went on to run the Federal Reserve?
March 20th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Joe, I don’t want to be drawn in to defending Objectivists as a movement here, because at this point they’re a disreputable hybrid of micro-party Mensheviks and grasping cultist pseudoScientologists, but it’s a bit unfair to blame Greenspan on them.
Greenspan has been anathema to these people for decades, since he first took a job working for Nixon. Like all goldbugs, Objectivists hate the Federal Reserve, so one of their number becoming Fed Chairman is a lot like a former Hustler editor becoming head of Focus on the Family. Bad blood all around.
March 20th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Rand saw the world through the prism of the Russian revolution, but in typical Russian fashion she took an idea, fell in love with it, and then elevated that abstraction to a point where it became pure dogma. Her books are capitalism as envisioned by a second rate Dostoyevsky knock off. In terms of personality ironically she wasn’t very different from Lenin. Had she been born 10 years earlier she probably would have joined the Bolsheviks.
March 20th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Ok… as someone who’s read Atlas Shrugged *twice*, let me inform all of you dolts that John Galt, and the main characters in her novel were NOTHING like the jackasses running the financial companies right now.
If any of you had actually read the damn thing, you’d realize that the vast majority of businessmen in the novel she rails against constantly as evil.
What kind of businessmen? The kind who go to government to get “help” for their industries. The kind that push regulations on other companies to make their own position stronger. The kind who, when they fail due to incompetence (and the burdens of the regulations they themselves helped to create), then go to government looking to force the taxpayers to bail them out.
In short. These CEOs of failed companies like AIG were EXACTLY the villains in Atlas Shrugged, NOT it’s heroes.
1. And Matt/etc…. It doesn’t f***ing matter whether or not John Galt used knowledge generated by millions of people for centuries to create the perpetual motion machine in the book. Why? Because without Galt the machine still doesn’t exist.
Sure, maybe someone else can come up with the idea too – so what? Then they can do whatever they want with their version of it. Give it away, sell it, license it, destroy it… their choice. Galt’s choice, given the alternative of being the subject of force (and later torture I might add), was to keep it for himself and the people who he knew would respect it.
There is ZERO comparison between the CEO’s of the failed corporations & the heroes of Ayn Rand’s novels. The response of a Randian hero to failure is to plan ahead, mitigate losses, pick themselves up and try again – not to whine and conscript others to pay for their mistakes. *THAT* was the central fucking point.
2. Invocations of Alan Greenspan as a member of Rand’s group are disingenuous at best, probably out of ignorance but largely (I’d bet) out of spite.
Why? Because Rand was CATEGORICALLY against the Federal Reserve system, for starters! When Greenspan left to join the ranks of government regulators (something which was completely oppositional to Rand’s core philosophy) he was CUT from the “inner circle” entirely! Greenspan isn’t a “devotee” of Rand, though he may have been one decades ago, his years as a policy maker were 100% against what she advocated. Greenspan represents virtually none of Ayn Rand’s core principles as expressed in Atlas Shrugged.
You want to talk about stupid? Shit… the logical fallacies on this board alone are staggering! Ad hominem, ad hominem, poisoning the well, red herring, guilt by association, ad hominem, bare assertion, argument from fallacy, appeal to authority…
Jeesh…
And you know what’s the most hilarious part of all? I am neither an “Objectivist” nor do I think the prose writing of Atlas Shrugged or her characters are even very good! I guess the only difference is that I don’t mistake bad prose & idealized character dichotomies as the same thing as bad arguments.
March 20th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
1. The Greenspan sockpocket wins with this:
Ayn Rand was stupid, but she could fuck like a wildcat.
Andrea Mitchell, she’s just a dolt.
2. The reference to the D’Angelo Barksdale was priceless.
3. This is sarcasm at its finest:
With all due sarcasm, I have to agree with those who think Rand’s writing is groundbreaking, since everyone knows that the western tradition has a dire paucity of thinkers who assert the primacy of the individual. Thank God Rand came along to promote this hitherto unheard of and alien proposition.
March 20th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
>You mean Gestalt not Galt, right?
Gesundheit, maybe?
March 20th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Sean -
Not to discourage your enthusiasm, but Matt himself seems to be saying that comparing the executives in question to Ayn Rand characters is foolish. He already acknowledged what you’re demanding he acknowledge.
March 20th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Ayn Rand is someone to be gotten over by 9th grade.
March 20th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Well then, let’s take it step by step.
No, Dude invents a machine which is able to extract useful working energy from static electricity in the atmosphere. This is no more a “perpetual motion machine” than lightning is. The energy in question comes from the facts that the Earth spins, has an atmosphere, and has a Sun. None of these are perpetual, nor violate “conservation laws”.
No, the company where he worked had decided into a company-town communist prison nightmare, as detailed in the book, and rather than give this invention over to them, he abandons them wholesale.
Here’s the relevant quote regarding his “breaking point”, where the company representative tries to lock everyone into a mutual suicide pact (if you will):
[Fair Use excerpt]
“‘This is a crucial moment in the history of mankind!’ Gerald Starnes yelled through the noise. ‘Remember that none of us may now leave this place, for each of us belongs to all the others by the moral law which we all accept!’ ‘I don’t,”
said one man and stood up. He was one of the young engineers. Nobody knew much about him. He’d always kept mostly by himself. When he stood up, we suddenly turned dead-still. It was the way he held his head. He was tall and slim-and I remember thinking that any two of us could have broken his neck without trouble-but what we all felt was fear. He stood like a man who knew that he was right. ‘I will put an end to this, once and for all,’ he said. His voice was clear and without any feeling. That was all he said and started to walk out. He walked down the length of the place, in the white light, not hurrying and not noticing any of us. Nobody moved to stop him. Gerald Starnes cried suddenly after him, ‘How?’ He turned and answered, ‘I will stop the motor of the world.’ Then he walked out. We never saw him again.”
The machine in question hadn’t been fully completed at Twentieth Century Motor Company at the time, so he left with the his concepts and understanding only. He left the prototype behind. The machine wasn’t “gone”, otherwise it never would have been found later in the story.
As the book points out, there were insights into physics which were simply not understood by others at that time. Someone is hired to attempt to duplicate it from the remains he left behind, but fails until Galt shows up, erases a collection of the engineer’s equations, and replaces them with a much smaller equation… which gives the engineer the insight he needed all along to understand how a completed device of this type would actually work.
Given the rest of what transpires in the book, it’s not hard to understand why Galt would be unwilling to hand off the secrets of his insights to the government. He needed no government-enforced monopoly to succeed on his terms, nor would anyone with sense who lived in such circumstances trust that the monopoly would actually be enforced by the government in question.
This could not be more wrong. No “dirty altruist” duplicates Rearden’s formula. The government extorts a “Gift Certificate” from Rearden via a blackmail attempt, wherein Rearden turns over all rights to the metal to the government “voluntarily”. The government then hands out the rights for everyone else to make it.
Ragnar Danneskjold blows up the factory rather than allow this government “takings” to stand.
And that’s why “rea” is so very, very wrong in this misrepresentation of what’s in the book. Did you get anything right?
A “friendly pirate” blew up a factory. That looks like it, really. And you wonder why people point out that it seems likely you never actually read it at any depth?
It’s so hard to see parallels from Rand’s dusty tome to today, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like Congress just passed a Bill of Attainder or something which amounts precisely to an ex post facto law… which is nothing more than an unconstitutional “takings” against the bonuses contractually guaranteed to AIG employees as retention incentives (not performance bonuses).
March 20th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
“the company where he worked had decided into a”
should read
“the company where he worked had decided to turn into a”
March 20th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Wow, what an intelligent use of the word “stupid.” Such a thoughtful post. I am pursuaded. No straw men to be found here. Just lot’s of intelligent discussion. Way to go, Matt! And all these poor commentators who seem to have been personally injured by Rand. Go ahead get out all the anger! Yell “stupid” all you want! As deeply flawed as Rand’s thinking was, her books will remain very popular and will continue to influence people, for better or worse. So go ahead and prepare more of these kinds of posts. So productive and smart.
March 20th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Here’s a thought experiment: suppose John Galt and the other heroes of Atlas Shrugged had simply died around page 100. Would the world of the novel have still collapsed without them, or (in the real world) would their boards of directors just have chosen new CEO’s? If Alexander Graham Bell had not invented the telephone, would there not be telephones today? On the other hand, if Beethoven had not written the 5th symphony, NOBODY would have written the 5th symphony, though we’d still have Schubert. So much for the superiority and indispensibility of the Uberkapitalist.
March 20th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Well played VekTor – Now, will anyone actually take the 2 minutes to read what you wrote and understand that the people vilifying the characters and the ideas in the novel have no clue what they were actually about?
I imagine not.
As for “Chaim Rosemarin”, I have to point out that, speaking in my capacity as a classically trained, graduate-degree holding music composer. You’re an idiot.
No, Beethoven’s 5th wouldn’t have been written if Beethoven didn’t write it… but there were hundreds of contemporary composers who might have written something else we revere in his absence. Likewise, had Graham Bell not created the telephone, maybe we’d have one, maybe we wouldn’t – surely we’d have some similar form of communication, but you’re comparing apples to wildebeasts.
The correct way to phrase what you said, was:
If Beethoven hadn’t written the 5th, would someone else have written a symphony?
Yes.
If Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t created the telephone, would someone else have invented a comparable form of long-distance communication?
Yes.
But no one else would have written the 5th Symphony, and no one else would have made Bell’s telephone.
But hey – why don’t we just vilify everyone who creates anything useful. That should be well keeping in the recent American tradition of mocking anyone who has individual drive, talent or ideas.
March 20th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
For all the comparisons about John Galt / Hank Rearden and modern CEO’s (GM, Chrysler, AIG, etc), (where the better comparisons are to Orrin Boyle and James Taggart), no one compares the villians and their actions to what the government is doing now. (Wesley Mouch, Fred Kinnan, Cuffy Meigs and Mr Thompson)
Galt’s frustration was that people who work and invent (drive the economy) are denigrated and insulted, and the lazy people who use laws and social guilt to leech are exhalted, even when it’s bankrupting the country. Rand points out that society continued to demand “its fair share”, even when it’s unsustainable.
All of the panicked legislation, retaliatory taxes, nationalization, double standards and contradictory legislation mentioned in the book, as reflected in the government’s behavior in the last year (considering the oil market and the financial meltdown) isn’t mentioned, but we’ll spend hours denigrating Ayn Rand’s personal sex life and theories of banking. Amazing.
Most of the insults to Rand make her point: You feel entitled to other people’s money and hard work, and you’ll break your arm praising yourself about how much of a patriotic taxpayer you are.
March 20th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Wayne, the people praising Rand and threatening to “Go Galt” are the very model of leeches and parasites that they’re supposed to be against. Yes, it’s still a stereotype of the typical adult objectivist libertarian, if he has a job, being a middle manager engineer at a defense contractor, but the ones threatening to take their big salaries and walk away are, in fact, the very corporate sleaze that serve no purpose. The difference is that Rand’s books are designed to make the readers think that they are the entitled ubermensch upon whom the economy depends.
So let them go galt. the sooner the better.
March 20th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Tyro, so you’re saying Orrin Boyle is going go close Amalgamated Steel and go hide somewhere if he doesn’t get his million dollar bonus for laying off 20,000 people. As if Nardelli (of GE, Home Depot and Crysler infamy) is claiming that he’s Galt? Gotcha.
I never thought of myself as a Randian ubermensch. I’m happy to have a job, and I know that I’m a labor commodity. But while I’m not saying that I’m going to take my ball and go home, neither am I saying that I’m due someone else’s money because, well, I exist and I *need* other people’s money, without the indignity of having to work my ass off for it.
March 20th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
The people threatening to “go Galt” only seem to have gotten around to the talking-forever-and-ever-and-ever part. I wish they’d hurry up with the total-disappearance part.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
What Bryan and Sean said, though I think Sean goes too far.
Greenspan’s history with Rand is very interesting. I think it’s key to understanding his character and generally complimentary.
Greenspan was among Rand’s first inner group. He knew her personally, he went to her meetings with her acolytes. He liked a lot of what she had to say. But, even at the time, he disagreed with some of what she said, too. And for that reason he sort of remained in the background, listening more than participating in the discussions.
And, as Sean says, later when he moved in the professional direction he did, he was ostracized by the Rand crowd that he formerly had been a part of.
Nevertheless, it’s wrong to claim or imply that Greenspan repudiated Rand’s views. He selectively repudiated her views, conveniently her views on macroeconomics and central banking. There’s a reason that so many people know that Greenspan is a Randian—he describes himself that way and speaks of her largely positively.
It’s unfortunate, though, that the same people aren’t aware of the limits to his madness…unlike the Randroids we encounter on the net everyday. Greenspan is wrongly compared to them.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
The only people who threaten to “go Galt” are ones whose absence would never be missed. I suspect most of them could not correctly change a flat tire.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Yes, Greenspan “selectively” repudiated Rand’s views, but the selections he made were some of the most fundamental!
I mean, it’s not just that it’s a disagreement over macroeconomics (though it is), it’s the root difference between a free-market, and a planned economy.
I don’t see how anyone can look at the Federal Reserve system and still pretend that it represents a free market. Alan Greenspan himself spent years (and many writings) recommending that it be abolished. That would make me like him if he wasn’t also it’s agent, setting interest rates, driving inflationary monetary policy and generally setting up the conditions to create ever-more-painful bubble & bust cycles.
This isn’t freedom, it isn’t a free-market, it isn’t “laissez-faire” and it sure as hell isn’t a failure of Ayn Rand’s ideological points.
And for the record, I disagree with Rand on a number of points, and probably agree with you on the whole “Randroid” thing, having known a few myself. But the idea that anyone would be out there equating her ideas as something influential on the current political scene is laughable!
“We’re all Keynesians now”? We’ve all *been* Keynesian’s for almost 100 years. Rand’s economic positions have only lost ground since the 50s, not improved. The entirety of our government has been steadily more centralized, power concentrated in the hands of a few, regulations being increased, tax rates increasing, new taxes being created, we’ve got smoking bans, trans-fat bans, bans on riding bicycles without a helmet… Crikey, this world is so far away from what Rand wanted to see that to even remotely try to equate her with the “cause” of the economic problems we’re facing right now is nothing short of malicious and ignorant.
Plus, as Ron Paul pointed out the other day, it’s just a distraction! $165M was a fraction of one percent of the money that’s gone to AIG… It deserves a fraction of 1% of our outrage. 99.9% of our outrage SHOULD have been directed at government for A. taking tax payer money to reward private corporations for faililng (something Rand vocally & passionately opposed – as do all of the Austrian & Chicago school economists btw), and B. for not even taking the time to do some goddamn due diligence once they did decide on unconstitutionally redistributing money & printing fat amounts of cash.
I don’t give a shit about the bonuses personally – I care that the government has condemned me, my future children & grandchildren into a world where the dollar is worthless, prices skyrocket and their lives positively suck compared to the promise of this country’s founding ideals… Maybe you guys should show some outrage about that instead of calling Rand “stupid”.
March 20th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
As opposed to genius socialists and their awesomely effective economic ideas?
March 20th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Sean @ 134
Speaking as an engineer, you’re wrong about both the telephone and Beethoven. The telephone at its most basic consists of a microphone and a speaker at each end connected by wires. Someone else would have invented that whether Bell was around or not. In fact, a lot of other people were working on it at the same time and Bell got to the patent office first. And Beethoven writing his fifth symphony did not crowd out anyone else in composing. It is probably likely that any great works that would have been written had Beethoven not lived were written anyway. We got Beethoven in addition to what others would have produced not instead of it. As for vortek, it doesn’t matter what Ayn Rand thought about whether someone else could have made the same invention as Galt. She know as little about technology as she does about how actual humans behave. In the real world, the chance that someone else can duplicate an invention given knowledge of its existence approaches 1. The most probable situation if no one else can duplicate the invention is that it’s cold fusion and doesn’t really work in the first place.
March 20th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
I’m not sure I know where this thread is going. I believe the consensus is that Rand is stupid. Thanks for your input.
March 20th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
You’re missing the point entirely. “rae” offered the observation about the “real world” approach to this, but in the process missed entirely the context in which Rand’s story point took place. The world in Atlas never had the invention to duplicate in the first place. There were no dozen scientists who “knew” it could be done. There was no completed working prototype for them to reverse-engineer. From the perspective of the outside world in the story, the invention never existed… it was stillborn. It was an idea they were never given.
In proper context, the point offered as backup to the contention that “Rand is stupid” (because the story doesn’t match the real world) is a ludicrous one to make… it’s a strawman assertion about storyline elements that don’t actually exist. The “stupid” part of the story which is alleged… isn’t there. Scientists in the real world don’t regularly “duplicate” things of which they have no knowledge whatsoever.
That is the point… namely, that the summary provided by “rae” is so woefully off-base that it’s entirely reasonable for someone to assume “rae” never actually read the story in the first place.
As I said earlier, this is why “rae” is so very wrong.
Strawmen like this are useful only to the extent that one is willing to be intellectually dishonest enough (or vacuous enough) to employ them.
March 20th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Buzz79,
You rather missed the point. The comparison isn’t “Telephone to Identical Telephone” anymore than it is “Beethoven’s 5th to Schubert’s exact replica of Beethoven’s 5th”.
It’s composition -> composition, communication -> communication.
I don’t care about the specifics of the engineering involved, that really isn’t the issue period. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was a specific, exact thing in history. No single person would have ever made it *exactly* the same way.
A composing analogy might be that various periods in music history there were codified rules on how certain things should be done, take the Baroque Suite for example – no matter Bach wrote several, so did Vivaldi, so did Scarlatti, and on and on… Not a one of them is the *same*, but the principles & form they used to create them are.
Whether or not someone else could have written something equally moving as the 5th Symphony for example, is immaterial. It was Beethoven who did it, and it’s Beethoven who we honor for it.
Beethoven couldn’t have written what he did without his influences and all the musical history that had come before him. He stood on the shoulders of Mozart just as Graham Bell stood on the shoulders of previous inventors who’d created microphones, developed the ability to transmit information by wire, etc.
WHO CARES!??
*THAT* is the point. Galt’s invention is fictional, so? The point that I was reacting to was the idea that just because someone needs the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years to create something new, doesn’t make that object any less new or it’s specific inventor any less important.
It was a poor argument. Not everything is just as good as everything else… Furthermore, not honoring, and not rewarding those of us who have achieved exceptional things is not only remarkably disrespectful to the people who’ve made our lives better through their innovative ideas – but it’s also a really sure way to drive innovation & creativity out of our culture. Especially since the majority of people here seem to think that every person is just as good at everything as every other…
Sure, why not just swap out one of these big company’s CEO’s with a random guy on the street. I’m sure they’ll do just fine.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
You don’t have to be the rare genius to invent something. Simultaneous discoveries and inventions are not rare.
I have an uncle who was on the TI team that engineered their first microchip. Whoopi-do. Like most engineers, he got laid off when they went into production.
March 21st, 2009 at 4:54 am
I think Bob the Angry Flower has this one covered nicely:
http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif
March 21st, 2009 at 8:55 am
“Going Galt” requires a large group of people to organize and strike…wait, isn’t that what unions do? I thought unions were bad…
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I can’t take seriously any article that, in an elementary school way, proclaims Ayn Rand to be stupid. You may not agree with her philosophy, but she’s anything but stupid. And as you should know, there are many thousands of very intelligent people who adore Ayn Rand.
Frankly, I’m tired of liberals avoiding a debate on the merits and instead opting for the “__________ is stupid” ad hominem attack. It’s old – try understanding the real facts and arguments at hand, and contributing constructively to the discussion.
March 24th, 2009 at 6:49 am
Wow, what an outpouring of ‘progressive’ vitriol.
Hope you are all enjoying yourself in the echo chamber.
Matt’s post was on a par with his usual mode of character assassination – see his outrageous accusation on bheads that Eli Lake doesn’t care about human rights in China. Matt Welch called him on it and he went red in the face and his voice (already comically high) went up a few more octaves.
As for Rand, I assume that all of you who are slagging her are intimately familiar with her theory of concept formation, her meta-ethics, aesthetics, etc. If not, you might want to check out this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rands-Normative-Ethics-Virtuous/dp/0521705460/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237891691&sr=1-1
Odd that the C.U.P. would publish a book on such a nut. Oh, and the author has also published articles on Rand in peer-reviewed journals. Pretty stupid, huh.
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March 31st, 2009 at 2:34 am
The whole point of Rand’s novel is that it shows what would happen in such an extreme situation. This implies that her characters are extreme, as well as the world she has created for them. People in this economy should not be worried about a few ingenious inventors “going galt” and cause the lights to ultimately die in New York City (as what happens in the novel). However people should worry about some of the brightest workers refusing to sacrifice their life to produce for a government that fails to support them. When the government prevents the brightest from making the top salaries (whether you feel they deserve them or not), the most talented and brightests workers will leave, and the nations productivity will drop. Atlas Shrugged is a novel of extremes. The lights may not go out in New York, but people will undoubtedly feel the negative effects of Obama’s collectivist policies.
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