"Reality exists as an objective absolute--facts are facts, independent
of man's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears."
Facts are expressed by language which is structured by man's feelings,
wishes, hopes and fears. For example, the Chinese language, unlike the
English language, has no words for "cute" animals such as bunnies. The
language was developed to express facts about animals that should be
preserved for their own sake.
This means that a "fact" cannot be split into mere language and the
unexpressed and unpictured fact laying beyond it. It means that a
language (such as that of laissez-faire capitalism or Stalinism) which
in Orwell's sense is a Newspeak, which seeks to evade areas of human
reality (such as the meaning of "poverty" constituted as "not having
enough money to survive" [what the word means] "and consequently
participating in the underground economy, in which force and fraud
continue undetected") by not having words in which to express that
reality, is one that in which "facts" aren't simple "facts".
"Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material
provided by man's senses) is man's only means of perceiving reality,
his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic
means of survival."
Cf. Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum. In fact, "reason" can
give no reason for not engaging in anti-social conduct.
"Unreason" divides in fact into bodily feelings and emotions based on
facts such as Nussbaum's example of "I feel sad because my Mom has
died". We reason based on the latter type of fact/emotion.
Ayn Rand in fact never confronted Hume's example of the perfect crime.
Pure reason would not only allow the "objectivist" to commit a murder
such that she was sure she could get away with it: it would
normatively command the person to do so.
"Man--every man--is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of
others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to
others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own
rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral
purpose of his life."
Well, tell that to the Marines. Tell that to the men who died on Iwo
Jima, or Fallujah.
Here, Rand relabels selfishness (considered bad by the ordinary
person) as good. By saying I "must" exist in a maximally flouri****ng
way and "may not" be altruistic, and using ordinary language, Rand is
saying that it is "good" to be "selfish".
Any number of arguments can be marshaled against such nonsense. One is
that engaging in philosophical discourse requires a level of
cooperation and trust which selfishness destroys.
"The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It
is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and
executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free,
voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may
obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no
man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The
government acts only as a policeman that protects man's rights; it
uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who
initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system
of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet
been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way
and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church."
Do recall Rand's strong statement. I "must" exist to pursue my own
rational self-interest.
"Rational" often becomes a weasel word by which the more candy-assed
libertarians seek to evade the attention of the cops, because they'll
tell you that torturing quite small animals isn't "rational", without
explaining why.
Unfortunately no philosopher, rather a crazed *****, Rand never
realized that self-interest comes in a variety of lurid flavors and
styles.
Applied to economics, it in fact becomes the objective of each and
every actor in laissez-faire to find a tem****ary market failure.
Game theory alone has proven that two-person games, to which
libertarian economics tends, have a winner and a loser and are zero
sum. This means that in an ideal market with no failures, intelligence
or good looks would have no bearing on the outcome. The overall
outcome would be a pure bell curve with an equal number of idiots at
the successful and the failure extrema, and this is confirmed by
American results, in which uncultured slobs like Sam Zell and Donald
Trump are well-to-do purely by chance.
But endowed with intelligence to see the zero-sum game of either
speculating uselessly or working for a paycheck, people seek to create
new markets and market failures in their self interest. The market,
like the language, is a human creation and like language is ever being
rigged at the micro-economic level.
But a new market is necessarily created by secrecy during the time in
which you're setting it up lest some other guy see your new market and
horn in. Secrecy is a form of fraud, and fraud is a form of force
which Randroid economics disavows.
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