On Apr 24, 11:09=A0am, Michael Price <nini_...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Apr 20, 11:56 pm,spinoza1111<spinoza1...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Standing as a philosopher
>
> > Numerous professional philosophers have questioned whether Ayn Rand
> > was, as she claimed and as her followers claim, a philosopher owing to
> > what the former considered her failings to adhere to philosophical
> > method, including fairly stating the views of her opponents, not
> > engaging in the informal fallacy of ad hominem (which by imputing the
> > character or the motives of an opponent, renders a philosophical
> > debate pointless), and not engaging in verbal transformations without
> > actual effect.
>
> > Sidney Hook, although a "socialist" in Rand's eyes, was a professional
> > philosopher who became an anti-Communist activist owing to the Moscow
> > show trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact of the 1930s, and more than
> > sharing her convictions about the evils of totalitarianism and the
> > value of capitalist arrangements in the main, was also more active
> > than her in disseminating information about the evils of
> > totalitarianism. Although Hook remained a democratic socialist in his
> > ideals until the end of his life, he realized by the 1960s that
> > capitalism was the best system for the era he found himself in, and
> > Hook received an award from President Reagan for his lifetime journey.
>
> > In a 1961 review of "For the New Intellectual" ("Each Man for
> > Himself", review of "For the New Intellectual: the Philosophy of Ayn
> > Rand". New York Times, April 9 1961), Rand's 1961 book in which she
> > most clearly stated the three main theses of Objectivism (Aristotle's
> > logic, the virtue of rational selfishness, and the value of
> > capitalism), Hook stated those views clearly and addressed them in a
> > way characteristic of professional philosophers, not questioning her
> > motives or those of her backers and followers and acknowledging truth
> > where he perceived it.
>
> > Hook summarized Rand's views at the beginning of the article:
>
> > "Pruned of its repetitions, her philosophy reduces itself to three
> > main contentions. The first is that 'all the disasters that have
> > wrecked the world' can be traced to a disregard for the Aristotelean
> > laws of logic especially the law of identity, A is A. This law [per
> > Rand] is not only the cornerstone of reason but the rule of all
> > knowledge. The second thesis locates the poisoned premise of all
> > modern ethical theory and practice in the principle of altruism, in
> > the belief that 'man is a sacrificial animal that exists for the
> > pleasure of others.' The third is that capitalism and the free market
> > are the highest expression of human reason and justice; any limitation
> > on them opens the floodgates of irrationalism, mysticism and force."
> > This repeats the three Rand theses found on the modern Web site of the
> > Ayn Rand institute. Hook addresses each in turn.
>
> > Hook first addresses Rand's implicit contention that a law of logic
> > can have philosophical im****tance.
>
> > "The extraordinary virtues Miss Rand finds in the law that A is A
> > suggests that she is unaware that logical principles by themselves can
> > test only consistency. They cannot establish truth. Inconsistency is a
> > sign of falsity, but as the existence of consistent liars and
> > paranoiacs indicate, non-consistency is never a sufficient condition
> > for truth." Hook then addresses Rand's views on selfishness or
> > altruism.
>
> > "Just as paradoxical is Miss Rand's second contention that the world
> > suffers from excessive altruism or unselfishness. I must confess to
> > not having observed this myself, but this is only one man's evidence.
>
> =A0 Really? =A0Then what was the first world war? =A0What was that if
not
> millions
> of people being willing (at least initially) to sacrifice themselves?
> What was
> the Nazi system, and the Soviet one? =A0If there was not a willingness
> to
> sacrifice oneself to the "greater good" neither of these systems would
> have
> got off the ground.
>
It's insane, literally insane, to say that the self-sacrifice of
soldiers in the First World War caused that war:
(1) The cause happens tem****ally before the effect and you got it
backwards
(2) Don't blame the victim. There's a strange theory here that victims
"enable" their victimizers.
>
>
>
>
> > Readers will be startled by Miss Rand's emphasis on egoism or
> > selfishness as the categorical imperative of moral life. But despite
> > the harsh accents with which the view is expressed, it is not as
> > horrendous as she makes it sound. It testifies to confusion rather
> > than wickedness, and to an extensive unfamiliarity with a whole
> > library of literature on the subject." Hook avoids the trap of calling
> > Miss Rand merely wicked since he's acquainted with the history of
> > misreadings of emergent philosophies from the outside in which,
> > confused by terms of art, the lay judgers of philosophers execute the
> > philosopher, forcing him to commit suicide in the case of Socrates,
> > accuse him of Godless mischief in the case of Spinoza, or harass his
> > public lectures in the post-Hook case of Singer. He realizes the
> > im****tance of Rand's implicit operator word "rational" as applied to
> > her "selfishness".
>
> > Unfortunately, he finds that once "rational" is applied to
> > "selfishness", it turns out to label the same sets of conventional
> > behavior as "rational unselfishness", concluding that Rand's sound and
> > fury signify no real change.
>
> =A0 I very much doubt that is true. =A0Rand's ideal were quite clearly
> about selfishness,
> with others being given things solely as a means to express one's own
> values.
=2E..how does the anonymous donor express his own values? Or does his
bequest become a vice because anonymous?
>
> > Hook even refrains from asking whether
> > the relabeling operation, being null, might mislead or corrupt the
> > young, extending Rand a post-Socratic charity that she did not extend
> > to her opponents.
>
> > Finally, Hook addresses Rand's very real and very non-verbal sup****t
> > for capitalism.
>
> =A0 What? =A0Since when has Rand been non-verbal about sup****ting
> capitalism?
> She really couldn't shut up about it.
Pity she didn't. Oooo you get a point because I made a typo. Enjoy it,
because you have lost this exchange.
>
> > "Ayn Rand's third proposition about the high morality of capitalism is
> > defended by a very old gambit: like Christianity, capitalism has never
> > been tried! 'All the evils popularly ascribed to capitalism were
> > caused, necessitated and made possible ONLY by government controls
> > imposed on the economy'...one is appalled by the reckless disregard of
> > historic fact. For example, the horrible forms of child labor which
> > sprang up with the industrial revolution were certainly not caused by
> > government controls.
>
> =A0 Well actually a great many of them were as Rand explained in one of
> her essays. =A0Hook's reckless disregard for historical fact is evident
> in
> his contention that the industrial revolution led to "horrible forms
> of child
> labour" when in fact it improved conditions of work for all workers
> including
> (indeed especially) children.
How is a child's condition of work improved when he goes from
agricultural labor in the open air to a coal mine?
>=A0Those who contend that the child
> workers
> of the mills had it bad are invited to spend one day doing the
> agricultural
> jobs they would otherwise have been doing. =A0I'd invite them to do it
> for
> a second day but it's embarrassing to have to accept a refusal.
The fact is you could do neither. Nonetheless, a long time ago before
Mama's boys like you, college kids willingly and happily worked in
Santa Clara and the San Joaquin valleys picking fruit because such
agricultural labor is good for the soul, whereas factory work is
something people have to be forced, whether by Stalinist terror or the
wage slavery of the free market, to do.
>
> > On the contrary, they were eliminated by
> > government controls."
>
> =A0 No they were eliminated by the increased marginal utility of labor
> which
> made competition for good factory workers more intense and thus led
> to better conditions.
You're misusing big words you don't understand. The marginal utility
is the positive or negative cost of adding one more abstract worker.
Mechanization does NOT smoothly increase this value in ANY way.
Today, for example, a new office worker requires a computer
workstation in most jobs. This means adding a new user to NT or Vista
which can represent an hour of work for the sysadmin, the cost of
course of the hardware, and, if the licensed number of users is at its
limit, a quantum jump in license fees. It also means real estate, and
this real estate can be very expensive when the firm has to locate in
a financial district in a financial industry, or a glamor district in
a glamor industry.
These private costs in fact exceed the deliberately exagerrated costs
of government regulation when it comes to hiring people. Much
technology is adopted irrationally or because of a self-feeding
process of technical addiction in which the company cannot present
itself as a serious player unless its technology, no matter how
expensive or even in the case of software bug-ridden and incompetently
developed, is of a certain type.
This is called "network externality".
At the time of the Industrial Revolution, plant innovations often
increased the marginal utility of specific forms of labor. The
spinning jenny devalued male labor and increased that of female labor.
Coal mining in limited spaces devalued adult labor and increased that
of child labor.
As Marx in fact demonstrated, the high and positive "marginal utility"
was not in the person, whose "marginal utility" could be and was
eradicated as fast as it increased by specific technical developments.
It was in the ability to use expensive equipment for an extra hour. In
all cases, it made more economic sense for plant managers, having gone
typically into debt to buy large scale machinery to replace small
scale distributed handicrafts, to run that machinery, except during
maintenance, 24/7.
In terms of scale, the 1840s plant manager was running a modern
airline. If you knew jack about business, and you don't, you would
know why airlines fail. It is because their owners owe millions for
airplanes, and must make a profit, NOT to improve service (which in
the airline industry always tends down) but to pay their debts. To do
so, they have to run full planes through hub cities no matter what.
Here in Hong Kong, Oasis airlines tried to do one goddamn thing and to
provide one goddamn service that we need: travel to London, avoiding
Gatwick. Cathay Pacific, however, didn't want an end to a monopoly
position and used the credit crisis to destroy Oasis, leaving the
actual consumer up ****'s creek.
Cathay Pacific's action was capitalism at its finest, in the context
of a region whose taipans seek rents and monopolies from governments
they control: cf. Asian Godfathers, a serious economic examination of
this process by Joe Studwell.
Of course, Rand would blame an exogenous "government" here. The
problem is that "government" isn't exogenous when the same people
control industry and government, and in any case (such as the early
American republic) where taipans don't control the government, it is
in their rational self-interest to seize that control.
Human beings are unable to contract, over more than one generation, to
"ignore that man behind the curtain" and to treat even a small and
unobtrusive government merely as a defense force and enforcer of
private contracts. This is because NOT doing something here, not
sending your sons into politics to pull strings, requires a passive
altrusim, a self-restraint, a self-control which is forbid by the
gospel of selfish wealth-maximization.
Marx, were he alive today, would say that the airlines constitute a
market failure and proves his point: capitalism does NOT produce the
greatest good for the greatest number. Passenger trans****tation in
general means buying equipment which cannot stand idle, and, as
American railroads learned, this means that the passenger's retail
comfort and convenience, the only "good" worth considering, was
subordinated in the railroads of the 1950s, and is subordinated on
airplanes today, to the business need to pay for the capital
equipment.
Which is why "socialistic" railroads are generally more humane than
railroads in capitalist industries, by the way. British railroads
provided in fact close to "the greatest good for the greatest number"
until they were privatised. Amtrak's service, despite capital
starvation from a Congress dominated by the auto industry, is better
than that provided by private passenger railways in 1970. The
railroads complained that their passenger service in 1970 was bad
because of "government regulation" in the form of the defunct
Interstate Commerce Commission: this was a baldfaced lie, because they
controlled the ICC through their Congressional lackeys.
National and "socialistic" flag carriers provided the greatest good
for the greatest number in scale to the rationality of high-speed air
travel which pushes as we now know against environmental limits: the
air traveler may in most cases be wasting fossil fuels when he could
arrive rested after a land journey by a rational surface trans****t.
You need to do your homework.
Randroidism is in fact the new Christianity in Nietzche's sense.
Nietzche explained Christianity as a slave morality. Randroids,
singing "we won't be fooled again", adopt a new slave morality which
preaches that the selfishness of their masters is a holy thing and
like lemmings hurl themselves off the white cliffs of Dover.
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