On Apr 25, 10:51=A0pm, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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
no=
t
> > millions of people being willing (at least initially) to sacrifice
thems=
elves?
> > What was the Nazi system, and the Soviet one? =A0If there was not a
will=
ingness
> > to sacrifice oneself to the "greater good" neither of these systems
woul=
d
> > 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:
>
It didn't but common sense tells us that only the willingness to
sacrifice kept it
going. The majority of soldiers
> (1) The cause happens tem****ally before the effect and you got it
> backwards
The cause of most of the deaths was the actions of people who
volunteered for
self-sacrifice (not neccesarily of their lives but of their safety and
a large part of their
lives) by enlisting.
> (2) Don't blame the victim. There's a strange theory here that victims
> "enable" their victimizers.
>
Without the sanction of millions of men willing to die for "their
country" (although
the only country to benefit was the United States, which did so by
staying out of it)
the victimizers would have been able to victimise a lot less people.
>
> > > 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.
>
> ...how does the anonymous donor express his own values?
By donating anonymously knowing that it serves his values to do so.
> 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.
>
Dream on. Hook was wrong about everything and you didn't refute a
single point.
>
>
> > > "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
wor=
kers
> > 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?
>
Have you tried agricultural labour as practiced pre-industrial
revolution?
At least the mine workers got paid regularly and could therefore count
on
eating.
> >=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
th=
em to do it
> > for a second day but it's embarrassing to have to accept a refusal.
>
> The fact is you could do neither.
Thanks for that irrevelent claim about something you know nothing
about.
> Nonetheless, a long time ago before Mama's boys like you,
You really make yourself look stupid when you insult people you know
nothing about.
> 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,
Yeah you'll notice the poor people tended to avoid it and only rich
dickheads thought
it was fun. I doubt very much they volunteered to do any plowing
without tractors. If
there is something you actually know about trying talking about that.
> whereas factory work is something people have to be forced, whether by
Sta=
linist
> terror or the wage slavery of the free market, to do.
By "wage slavery" you mean of course the freedom to make choices
that get you enough
to live comfortably on.
>
>
>
> > > 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
le=
d
> > 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.
>
Yes it does because it makes all labour more useful. I do
understand the
word you don't.
> 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.
None of the above is relevant.
>
> These private costs in fact exceed the deliberately exagerrated costs
> of government regulation when it comes to hiring people.
And that's relevent to the industrial revolution how exactly?
> 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.
>
More assertions that are neither proven nor relevant.
> 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.
The general trend though was for labour to get more valuable
relative to
goods. This fact is undeniable when you consider the explosion of
cheap
goods produced.
>
> As Marx in fact demonstrated,
No he didn't because Marx didn't demonstrate a single economic
principle, he
just lied about them.
> 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.
Err.... no. If that was true wages would have gone down to pre-
industrial
revolution levels.
> 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 all cases? Bull****.
>
> 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.
Wow that's exactly wrong. They don't have to run through hub
cities with full planes at all. In fact Southwestern ignored the "hub
and
spoke" system and got rich. The reason why they fail (and they do it
often) is that they keep getting into price wars. They try to reduce
costs
by investing forcing other companies to invest as well to reduce costs
and
compete, but they can't get back the costs of the overinvestment.
>
> 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,
Why not? The point is that it's exogenous to the market because
it's
not a market phenomina.
> 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.
>
And why are you using that as an argument for making more government
for them to control?
> Human beings are unable to contract, over more than one generation, to
> "ignore that man behind the curtain"
Which is exactly the opposite of what Rand advised.
> and to treat even a small and
> unobtrusive government merely as a defense force and enforcer of
> private contracts.
That's not what "ignoring the man behind the curtain" means.
> 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.
Well no,
>
> 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.
But do they constitute a market failure or a failure of market
regulation?
After all they're heavily regulated. One possible solution has been
to allow
price-fixing by the airlines (which would mean less regulation). If
this
is the answer then government was the problem. Prove it isn't.
> Passenger trans****tation in
> general means buying equipment which cannot stand idle,
No more than any other industry and considering it's seasonality
less than
many industries.
> 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.
And how exactly do you think you pay for capital equipment except by
satisfying paying customers?
>
> 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.
I very much doubt that is true. May I ask how it was measured?
> 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.
Better for who? Certainly not the American taxpayer who has been
funding
that useless piece of crap for decades. It does not provide a service
passengers
are willing to pay full cost for so why is that "good"?
> 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.
>
Non sequitur, the ICC did in fact do a lot of things that made
passenger
service less profitable because that's what regulators do. As Rand
commented
the extent of government control closely relates to the extent of
losses in the
railroad industry (as well as fraud and incompetence).
> 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.
>
In other words socialism does good by providing little service that
customers
want thus conserving resources and therefore saving the enviroment.
> You need to do your homework.
No you do.
>
> 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.
No idiot it preaches that you should not hurl yourself off cliffs
of any
kind. You really should trying talking about things you are not
totally
ignorant of.
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