About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

About Objectivism, part IV: Politics

By Massimo Pigliucci

[Part I of this series was on Objectivist metaphysics; Part II on epistemology; and part III on ethics]
Well, here we are, at the end of my mini-series concerning Objectivism, the philosophy originated by Ayn Rand. According to Objectivists themselves, their politics stems directly from their ethics, as it should be if ethics is to be of actual value in the guidance of life, as opposed to a purely academic exercise. Not surprisingly, considering the many problems we have seen when examining Objectivist ethics, I will find plenty to take issue with when it comes to Objectivist politics.
According to The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, by Ayn Rand et al., laissez-faire capitalism is “the only moral social system,” a conclusion that they derive from their conception of rights, to which therefore we need to turn. Objectivists recognize one fundamental right, to life, and a small number of derived rights, including to liberty, to property and to the pursuit of happiness. Objectivists are very clear about the fact that they think of these as rights to action, not to specific outcomes (so, of course, you have a right to pursue happiness, but not to a guarantee of being happy).
There is a large and sophisticated philosophical literature on rights, which is predictably largely ignore by Objectivists, including serious analyses of whole sets of rights that Objectivists simply do not recognize (almost without argument): expansive human rights, group rights, and a fortiori animal rights.
Rights, of course, are a human construct, so technically speaking there is no such thing as “natural” rights. At most there are natural desires (to life, property, happiness, and so on), and which of these — if any — we codify into rights is a matter of human reflection and agreement. It follows that it is hard for the Objectivist to claim a sharp line dividing certain kinds of rights from other kinds, a problem that often affects a philosophy whose main trust is that there are objective ways to precisely carve human reality.
Consider, for instance, the idea of a right to pursue happiness. To begin with, of course, we could easily get embroiled on exactly, or even approximately, what “happiness” might mean. Surely, to a considerable degree, the word means different things to different people. Moreover, are we talking of the emotional status, or of a more intellectual contentment with one’s achievements and quality of life (what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia)? But more importantly, why should we have a right to it, meaning that society at large should be organized as to maximize the likelihood that we can, in fact, pursue happiness?
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that we should have that “right,” but I don’t see a reasonable way to distinguish it from, for instance, a right to education. I’m pretty sure that most people would desire that too, and certainly everyone would benefit from it. And education is not an outcome (the right isn’t to getting a degree, or passing an exam), it is an action that leads — under proper circumstances — to a favorable outcome.
By far, the weakest point of the Objectivist conception of rights is that they limit themselves to what are called negative rights, and dismiss anything that philosophers classify as positive rights. Negative rights are so-called because they are defined by what you have a right to be defended against by other people’s (or the government’s) interference, and they of course include all the rights discussed above: right to life and property, but also freedom of speech, of worship and protection from violent crime. Positive rights are more expansive, and therefore loathed by Objectivists. They include the right to education, health care, retirement benefits, housing and a minimum standard of living.
The problem is that — again as plenty of philosophers have pointed out — negative rights often become meaningless unless they are accompanied by positive rights. The obvious example is the pursuit of happiness: you may have that (negative) right, but without (positive) rights to education, decent wages, healthcare, etc. chances are that you might be unable to pursue happiness in any meaningful way. The negative right becomes hollow, and almost a mockery of the whole concept of rights. (Similar considerations apply to the rights to property and even to life: with negative rights only, you may end up barely alive and possess close to nothing under a wide range of scenarios made possible by laissez-faire capitalism.)
From the Objectivist’s exceedingly narrow view of rights it logically follows that their ideas about the proper role of government are equally narrow: police, armed services, and courts of law, and that’s about it. Even some of my Objectivist friends (oh yes, I do have some!) grudgingly admit that those restrictions simply won’t do. We need regulatory agencies to control, for instance, the quality of our air and water, or of our food, or the functionality of our sources of energy (especially nuclear plants, but also oil drilling operations). If simply left to the “wisdom” of the market, countless people would suffer, become ill, or die before the companies responsible for whatever bad practice were forced out of business, even under the best (and often entirely unrealistic) assumptions about the efficiency of market forces.
[I should note at this point that I am not advocating any more government intervention or regulation than is strictly necessary. I am neither a socialist nor a communist — terms that many Americans confuse despite the stark differences between the two ideologies. But I am most certainly glad that the government, using my tax money, takes care of all sorts of things that I don’t or can’t do, and that I sure as hell wouldn’t trust a private company to do.]
It should also come as no surprise that Objectivists find themselves defending specific political actions that are, in my opinion, bizarre and often unethical. To begin with, Objectivists consider the environmental movement to be hostile to technology and therefore to humanity itself (as stated by Rand in "The Anti-Industrial Revolution," published in Return of the Primitive.) This is a bizarre claim, at best a silly confusion between environmentalists and Luddites, and really deserves very little commentary.
Objectivists are also opposed, naturally, to public education, antitrust laws, and even child labor laws (on the latter, see Ayn Rand as cited by Anne Wortham in The Other Side of Racism. Ohio State University Press). One can see the logic: if laissez-faire capitalism is the only moral social system, then anything that limits in any way the degree of laissez-faire is immoral. Setting aside for a moment the ugliness of a world where children have to work under whatever circumstances “the markets” set for them, even Adam Smith — you know, the guy who gave us the basic theory of capitalism and the idea of an “invisible hand” in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — realized that one cannot trust human nature and do without regulations entirely.
The basic idea of laissez-faire capitalism, of course, is that we let businesses and private interests in general compete with each other. We set in motion a system analogous to natural selection (the invisible hand), and at the end of the process, only the “best” will be left standing. There are three fatal flaws to this approach: first, even if everything works as laissez-faire capitalists say it will, the quantity that ends up being maximized by the invisible hand is economic efficiency, not happiness or justice, or social welfare (in the broad sense of the term). Second, the process is (ironically) exceedingly inefficient, just like natural selection (which, incidentally, is not an optimizing process, only a satisficing one — it results in the minimal outcome that is compatible with the objective). Lots of resources, and more importantly lots of lives, are going to be squandered before “the best” emerges. Thirdly, competition works — as any ecologist would tell you — only when there are many small players of roughly equal strength in the arena. But players in a capitalist game are allowed to buy each other, becoming larger and larger, and fewer and fewer, until we are left with the sort of plutocracy that currently controls the United States of America, the most capitalist country in the world, and the one Western nation with the highest degree of social inequality, crime and poverty. Nicely done.
Perhaps we should remember the words of Adam Smith, when he said that “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” A pretty accurate prediction of what is unfolding before our own eyes.

65 comments:

  1. Yes, the conception of 'negative rights' is way too limited to cash out ethics in any useful way. The best thought experiment along these lines that I have heard, is "stuck down a well".

    I would speak in defense of their claim that the environmental movement has large factions that are hostile to humans and technology, and ultimately anti-science. Witness the efforts by Greenpeace, among others, to essentially ban Chlorine - element 17 of the periodic table. Witness also the hostility among environmental groups to nuclear power, which is precisely the energy source that will (I predict) save our bacon from AGW. Of course this is not a critique of environmentalism per se, but a proposal for how environmentalists can do better. Something tells me objectivists are against the whole enterprise regardless of environmentalists' mistakes.

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  2. Hi Massimo,

    Excellent points, and I appreciate your discussion of laissez-faire capitalism and the ideology surrounding it: I love economic prosperity just as much as the next person, but I often have to make clear in my conversations with others that I am not willing to quash justice in the process.

    I believe this worship of the "invisible hand" is very dangerous and is a symptom of America's problem today. Private markets (i.e., free enterprise) are very important for any nation's economic health - many economists second that. What many people fail to realize is that there is a wide spectrum of opinions among economists regarding the function and size of government regulation. In other words, "pure" economic ideologies of any type simply do not work, and Objectivists really need to leave their Ayn Rand ivory towers and get their hands dirty with real philosophy, psychology, public policy, economics, and history.

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  3. Ayn Rand might be even more dangerous than Sam Harris.

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  4. Dr. Pigliucci,

    Well said. :)

    I've been waiting on Part IV for a while, now I can send the set around to folk. :D

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  5. We might also note the self-congratulatory aspect of people comfortably ensconced in the middle class attributing their success to their own work ethic--even though the US ranks near the bottom of industrialized nations in social mobility.

    Then there's the tribal element: all things good to us and ours; all things bad to them and theirs. This is exposed most plainly in the debate over the estate tax. Conservatives don't seem to realize they're defending the rights of dead people because they're assuming even a freeloader is deserving by dint of heritage.

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  6. Excellent, a good summary off all the ways in which it simply does not work in practice, and is self-contradictory or self-destructive. I think, however, that this is a complete understatement:

    with negative rights only, you may end up barely alive and possess close to nothing under a wide range of scenarios made possible by laissez-faire capitalism.

    With negative rights only, you may (and many will) end up dying of starvation or an easily treatable infection, and that is that with your right to live. But of course an objectivist will say that if you die because of your bad luck on the market and everybody else being too greedy to help you, your right to live has not been broken through an act of violence by a fellow human, so that does not count. Hollow indeed.

    The great problem is, of course, that they have a completely unrealistic view of the world, and so an essay like yours will bounce right off. All the problems you describe with laissez-faire capitalism will be waved away with "no, it would totally work, but it has never really been tried", which always sounds eerily like those Trotskyist sects going around saying the same of communism. So I do not expect any objectivist to change their mind reading this, but it is a splendid synopsis for those sitting on the fence.

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  7. Alex, thanks. Well, the fence sitters are always my target, never the true believers.

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  8. Massimo, may I suggest you critique critical rationalism next?

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  9. hmm, what do you mean by "critical rationalism"?

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  10. In the link I posted criticizing negative freedom, a commenter says something I find all too common in libertarian/objectivist thought:

    "...This does not mean freedom from the laws of nature. If I am stuck down a well and there’s no one around to throw me a rope, no matter how you try and spin it that does not represent any lack of political freedom; it represents a lack of intelligence on my part in getting stuck down there."

    Note two things: one, the commenter missed the point entirely and failed to really address the thought experiment. Two, note the redefinition of happenstance as moral desert in order to avoid the nasty implications of the idea.

    If you get stuck down a well, you're stupid and you deserve it. Classic Just World fallacy, but very creepy nonetheless. It would be more creepy if I actually thought the commenter abided by this principle in daily life, but it seems clear compartmentalization is happening.

    However, on the political level, we see opposition to AGW precisely because it is the type of problem that appears difficult to solve without government intervention, so hardcore libertarians/objectivists prefer to believe the problem cannot possibly exist.

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  11. Massimo, see the description in: http://www.reasonpapers.com/pdf/24/rp_24_1.pdf

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  12. hmm, oh, yes, I have criticized Popper elsewhere, and frankly at this point it feels like beating a (literally) dead horse. But I may revisit the issue in a different context in the future.

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  13. "(M)ay I suggest you critique critical rationalism next?"

    That'd be cool. I tend to read Popper and agree with everything he says. A four part "what Popper got wrong" would be useful.

    I think you'd do better than the article hmm linked to, though. (It's basically the "no true Scotsman" defence of induction. It was once recommended to me by Popper's collaborator David Miller of Warwick Uni as a great example of people simply missing the point).

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  14. Isn't protection from violent crime a positive right? The government must do something here, right?

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  15. The difference between negative and positive rights isn't about government doing something,mince the police or the military would have to do something to protect your life or property. It's the difference between non interference and entitlement.

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  16. ianpollock,

    Only just read your side comment about nuclear power. There are very good reasons to be hostile to it; even if I would trust any company not to cut corners with safety measures, the problem of secure long term storage of nuclear waste remains completely unsolved - we are talking thousands of years here, a time frame that our minds are simply unfit to contemplate -, and there is simply not enough uranium on the planet to make it a long term energy source anyway. From what I read, it seems if we used it as intensively as we use fossil fuel, we would reach peak uranium even faster than peak oil.

    Now if you are talking about fusion, maybe... but that is rather hypothetical at the moment, and will probably remain so for a few decades at least. Using massively less energy and further improvements in energy storage and photovoltaic cells would be the best solution.

    If you want to showcase the loopy side of the environmentalist movement, maybe radical opponents of GMOs would be better specimens.

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  17. Thank you Prof. Pigliucci for an incisive critique of Objectivism. As a former Ayn Rand fanboy myself, this series resonated with me on a personal level.

    Apart from the philosophical/intellectual aspects of the matter, there's one thing I'd like to add that you and the respected commenters haven't touched on: Objectivism can turn a (esp young, immature and impressionable) person into a sanctimonious, judgmental, rigid and unsympathetic dick.

    While I was under Objectivism's seductive spell of moral absolutism via pure reason, I nearly threw away a 15-year-old friendship because I thought my friend possessed inexcusably immoral (because 'unreasonable') traits. I was prepared to excommunicate someone who was like a brother to me simply because he didn't conform to the John Galt/Howard Roark ideal of Rand and her acolytes.

    Sure, maybe my interpretation of Objectivism was flawed, or excessive, given my youth at the time. But I do not doubt that many of its core tenets (so excellently dissected by yourself Prof. Pigliucci) actually encourage people to be sanctimonious, judgmental, rigid and unsympathetic. And that's the all-too-personal price we pay when we allow such emotionally oppressive ideologies to dictate our ethics and relationships with others.

    By the way, I rescued my friendship after repenting of my Objectivist ways. I can only hope that Prof. Pigluicci's criticism of this potentially toxic philosophy leads not a few Objectivists back to a more expansive, compassionate and, yes, reasonable way of living and being in this world, while persuading the fence-sitters from going down the Randian road at all.

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  18. Alex, I'm no techno-optimist myself (in fact, I tend to emphasize political solutions), but have you checked out the IFR? It's not currently in commercial operation, but I suspect that a breeder design of this type would circumvent many of the usual objections to nuclear power (including the "peak uranium" concern that you mentioned).

    Just to keep this comment on topic, whether or not this particular technology ever reaches the market, this is exactly the sort of basic R&D that normally takes place in the public sector (i.e. before it's released to the profit-seeking private sector). So much for the innovative magic of laissez-faire!

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  19. I am a partidary of the welfare state, as much as this is practical. But to base an ethical system on either negative or positve rights, does not seem appropriate to me. As a matter of fact, i am surprised at not seeing a little more discussion on these types of rights.
    What may be a positive right for one person (e.g. ,education), may be the supression of a negative right for another (the teacher,or the patient and the doctor, etc). Every positive right implies the obligation of a member of society to provide it. It is easy to discharge this obligation on the state, forgetting that the sate is nothing more tan the citizens and in the end, are those who will have the given obligation. Any obligation to provide a positive right to a third person, implies the supresión of some negative right for another.
    But this is where the error of absolute objectivism lies. Ethics, a purely human construct do not necessarily have to be based on individual rights. Man is not an independent and isolated being, it is a member of societies and evolutionary groups, with a neural make up, partially inherited (and partially nurtured), which dictates its likes and dislikes, possibilities and limitations. Any ethical system that does not take into account these factors is doomed to fail.
    Pau Cortes

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  20. Alex SL said...

    "and there is simply not enough uranium on the planet to make it a long term energy source anyway."

    Not so Alex. Uranium is quite common. More common than silver in fact. We will never run out of it. Granted recovering it may take more effort in some cases but there is no shortage of Uranium.

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  21. "Objectivism can turn a (esp young, immature and impressionable) person into a sanctimonious, judgmental, rigid and unsympathetic dick."

    Atlas Shrugged was required reading at my high school's IB program, so I saw a few examples of this (some temporarily, at least one that became a long-term obsession). Although I don't think Atlas Shrugged is good philosophy or good literature, I think it does, of course, have an inspirational and liberating message to many people, insofar as it glorifies the individual, and in particular the completely independent, self-sufficient, (super-genius) man, standing as an inviolable sovereign upon any corner of the earth. One problem with this is that it makes all of philosophy seem very simple, when it is not, and promotes a particular simple view of human interactions, which is inaccurate (in both respects being quite similar to religious doctrine). I noticed this latter problem before even being aware of the bizarre "metaphysics" of Objectivism. Rand characterizes altruism as a way people have of enslaving themselves to each other, but in fact altruism seems to be something we are naturally driven to do. (To borrow from Raymond Smullyan, who introduced the question to me but surely did not invent it, is altruism properly defined as sacrificing one's happiness for others, or as deriving some indirect pleasure from pleasing others despite a clear direct cost to ourselves?)

    There are, I'm sure, some Objectivists who are just not very empathetic at all. But for the remainder, it seems to me that trying to re-frame one's altruism as being only a form of reciprocity (or worse, an irrational product of indoctrination) is actually to do more violence to one's own identity and personality than the original feelings of altruistic obligation that Objectivism sees as a threat. Or to put it more bluntly, feeling empathy and even responsibility for the sorrows or joys of others, even when they are strangers, seems to be part of the human condition in somewhat the same way as lust or hunger are, and labeling any such feeling as "irrational", and thus inappropriate to satisfy, is to miss the fact that they are basic instinctual motivations, not models or propositions.

    "Uranium is quite common. More common than silver in fact. We will never run out of it."

    I think that the word "never" makes this a dramatic overstatement, but I will second that the world supply of uranium is sufficient to meet the world's energy needs for a considerable time.

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  22. Sean,I agree that there are positive aspects to Objectivism, like its advocacy of reason, individualism (i.e. sovereignty and freedom of the individual), science and material progress. This is why I was careful to refer to it as a 'potentially' toxic philosophy, and that it 'tends' to turn people into dicks. I think once someone lets Rand into their brain, some residue will always remain, esp if it's a positive idea or concept that encourages them to better themselves. But as you and I know, the reductive simplicity of Objectivism prevents it from being adopted in its entirety without negative consequences for the individual (and others through her resulting actions and choices).

    I think Prof. Pigliucci commented elsewhere that he doesn't unfairly expect Ayn Rand to have been informed on neuroscience or evolutionary psychology as we currently understand them. But since we now DO know alot more than Rand did about the neuroscience and evo psyc behind altruism, reciprocity and cooperation among socially complex animals including humans, we really have no excuse to uncritically accept Objectivism in its 'orthodox' form. Otherwise we're no better than religious fundamentalists who cling to dogma regardless of modern scientific knowledge that blatantly refutes a good portion of their ideology.

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  23. Let me preface my comment by saying I largely agree with this post about objectivism and politics, but I wanted to comment on the degree of capitalism and disparity. I agree that in general, the more capitalist a country the more there tends to be disparities between the rich and poor (among other measures), but lets give this some perspective. Most of the other "Western countries" (a vague term I don't care for and appears to unnecessarily exclude countries like Japan) also have varying degrees of capitalistic systems. It's not the case that less capitalism is always better... there appears to be a balance and trade-off when you shift to either end of the spectrum. There must be a sweet spot of lessening disparities and allowing for the benefits of capitalism. Let's also not forget the demographic differences between the U.S. and these other countries with less disparities. Many of these other countries are very homogenous (Scandanavian countries, Japan, etc). The U.S. has had a recent history of struggles with immigration and racial relations. These are confouding social factors when just comparing degree of capitalism.

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  24. Darrik-

    Does it really "turn" them into dicks (as you stated) or does it allow someone to feel justified in being what they already are? Its more likely a case of confirmation bias for most people, and a person who is self-centered and indifferent towards others may be attracted to this line of thinking.

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  25. @Alex: What jcm and Thameron said. Molten Salt Reactors are also very exciting.

    When I say nuclear is going to save our bacon, I don't mean to say the choice is costless; but it does dominate every other choice out there.

    The problems with coal are obvious. Hydro is great but there are only so many rivers and it's hella disruptive to ecosystems. Renewables are also great, but they're never going to be able to supply a very substantial fraction of demand unless we devote a lot of land to them, and once we do that we've got the same problem as hydro. I really want funding for fusion research, especially inertial confinement, but we can't count on that, so... yeah. The environmentalist Stewart Brand (of "Clock of the Long Now" fame) pitches nuclear rather well in his book "Whole Earth Discipline," and here.

    Anyway, better get back on topic. :)

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  26. We will never run out of it.

    Thameron,

    You seriously just wrote that? Never? Even in a few thousand years? Oooookaaaay. (Makes one wonder why there are so very few countries that mine it. Note also that we must restrict your optimism to those deposits that are easily mined, the minimal requirement being that they do not cost more energy to extract than can be won from them.)

    The only energy source we will (as good as) never run out of is the sun.

    Sorry to have gone so far off-topic.

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  27. Very interesting, although your analysis of laissez-faire capitalism seems kind of superficial. The competitive process is not static – it is, as you say, a process. New market contestants enter, old ones die out – if they are unable to meet consumer demands as well. It thus has no ‘end’ at which the “best” are left standing. It is a constant process. Economic efficiency or a perfect market is NOT the ‘end-goal’ of laissez-faire capitalism (or any form of capitalism), it is the most idealized version of markets. It is a version of markets which every economist, even AynRandists, know they will never reach. But the pressure that arrives from the competitive process is thought to move supply and demand closer to this ideal points, maximizing social welfare (in, as you imply, a narrow sense).
    I also find your ‘three fatal flaws’ pretty flawed, apart from the first. What do you mean when you say the competitive process is ‘exceedingly’ inefficient? Are you talking about rent-seeking behavior? Exceedingly inefficient compared to what? Compared to public management? That seems ridiculous. Your third ‘fatal flaw’: competition does not work only ‘ when there are many small players of roughly equal strength’, this is not at all a requirement for competition to work. It just works better if those are the circumstances. Even in markets where monopolists dominate markets, one or two entrants can have significant impacts on price levels. Again, market conditions are never perfect, supply and demand are never perfectly matched and prices are never the same as marginal costs, but competition is widely thought to move markets in a certain direction.
    In my opinion, the single most fatal flaw in laissez-faire capitalism is how it ignores that the effect of market failures and other imperfections in the Efficient Market Hypothesis can be greater than the beneficial effects of the competitive process. This is especially the case in natural monopoly markets, and markets that have network effects. But it is apparent also in markets where players are able to profit from transactions in capital markets without bearing the cost of its related risks. Or any market in which consumers possess an information disadvantage compared to producers (which is to say, every market). Or the fact that individuals can not be trusted to only make rational decisions.

    AynRandists always seem like 101-economists to me. They’ve been seduced by the simplistic perfectionism of the supply-and-demand schedules that make up the first pages of their textbook, but never bothered to read on.

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  28. cc,

    yes, I agree that there must be a balance between extreme capitalism and extreme socialism. Personally, I like the Scandinavian model. Speaking of which, I don't understand why people bring in American multiculturalism as a problem here. I understand that multiculturalism and immigration carry their own problems, but why on earth should that have anything to do with regulating the markets and insuring a more fair society?

    Nate,

    I'm constantly amused by how people accuse me of being naive, apparently expecting a (rather substantial, if I may say so myself) series of blog posts to be written with the rigor and in-depth treatment of an academic article.

    Regardless, of course markets are not static, but they do tend to reach what in ecology is called a dynamic equilibrium (not an oxymoron). The specific big players may change from time to time, but there will be a small number of large players left after the initial, truly competitive, phase.

    > Exceedingly inefficient compared to what? Compared to public management? That seems ridiculous. <

    On what grounds do you find this "ridiculous"? Managed capitalism (again, European model) works a hell of a lot better, both in terms of the economy itself (no "too big too fail" bullshit allowed), and more importantly in terms of social wellbeing. Yes, Europe is going through a tough time right now (in case you haven't noticed, so are we), but the standard of living of most Europeans is stratospherically higher than that of most Americans.

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  29. cc,

    Yes, it's possible that, like alcohol, certain ideas don't actually transform a person, but merely bring out what was inherent in them to begin with.

    Running with this confirmation bias factor (and hopefully not getting too out of topic), I wonder if Objectivist politics mainly appeals to those who are predisposed to the ideals celebrated by Rand: the self-made individual free from external interference (whether from government or society), worldly success and its attendant rewards (financial, social, romantic), 'rational' selfishness (only look out for Number One), and a pinched view of justice (the rich/successful and poor/unsuccessful deserve their respective circumstances due to their actions and principles).

    If you are by nature a person who doesn't hold these ideals in high regard, then perhaps Objectivism wouldn't quite rock your world, so to speak.

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  30. Massimo et al,

    "Rights, of course, are a human construct, so technically speaking there is no such thing as “natural” rights."

    The ambiguities in this statement betray the fact that you do not actually understand the nature of political rights nor the facts of reality upon which they rest and from which they derive. And since Rand defines capitalism as the politics in which government protects individual rights, then by extension, you do not understand her politics enough to put together a meaningful critique. Instead, like those legions of knee-jerk critics who populate the blogosphere, you depend on colloquial assumptions never evidenced, but long taken for granted, and you apply them as if they would constitute a sustainable argument, when they are really just empty characterizations or, worse, whining over the impending loss of some unearned entitlement as Rand's influence rises.

    In stating that rights are a human construct and not natural, you did not detect the different contexts (and specify yours) in which one can identify the source of political rights as human or natural. You see nothing natural, because you regard rights as arbitrary human devices that serve pragmatic agendas. Rand identified rights first as human moral principles (rights as moral imperatives) necessitated by a recognition of certain facts about the fundamental nature of man that I outlined in the Ethics segment. The application of those moral imperatives to the question of the proper conditions for and relationships among men living and interacting in a society, necessitates that the exercise of physical force in human interrelationships be regulated by a neutral third-party institution (government) per specific objectified principles (political rights). The purpose of identifying those principles that specify how the government and the populace may and may not use force is to enable for every individual human being autonomy from interference by fallible others in the application of their own reason to their own actions in the production and voluntary exchange of values in the service of their own life.

    In this context, rights are natural in the sense that they are derived from and rest on certain facts of reality about the nature of man. They are not natural in the sense of being a gift from God, except in the sense that those who do believe in a God would have to acknowledge that He created man's nature and the dependence of rights per Rand on that nature would make them in an obtuse way a product of God. The same goes for those who do not believe in God but assert arbitrarily that they are a natural biological endowment.

    The problem with those "natural rights" concepts is that rights quickly morph into something intrinsic and inalienable in a physical sense, rather than, as Rand explains them, something contingent on a particular human situation (living in an organized society). Rand's rights are alienable in the sense that, in the absence of that situation, political rights would be a useless concept (i.e. when there are not enough of a populace to assemble a neutral third-party institution), but inalienable in the sense that, when in the context of an organized society, the validity of each individual's political rights is inseparable from the facts of his human nature.

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  31. part 2 of 4:

    The primary facts about human nature pertinent to ethics, politics, and rights are that reason directed action is man's only capacity for life, and that, as a corollary of his volition, all men are fallible. Therefore, the application by an individual of his reason and effort in the pursuit of his life requires autonomy from the ability of fallible others to interfere with his autonomy by initiating physical force against him. It is crucial to understand that it is only aggressive direct or indirect physical force or the threat thereof that can negate one's autonomy. Indirect force involves the withholding of values due others that necessitates the use of defensive force to retrieve them. Examples would be contract violation and fraud.

    The word "force" in phrases like "social force" and "economic force" is a metaphor used to exaggerate by connotation. No matter how unduly influential social and economic pressures on one's autonomy can be, ultimately autonomous choices are simply those that may be made from all available options as measured by the chooser against their relative contribution to his own life.

    A perpetrator of physical force, however, can coerce the choice of an alternative he regards as beneficial to himself but you regard as detrimental to you, by adding an even more detrimental result (fine, imprisonment, death, etc.) that he can effect by his means of force to all other options, regardless of how you measure them.

    Rand: "Force and mind are opposites: morality ends where the gun begins."

    Thus, the bedrock on which a moral government rests is the recognition of the single most fundamental socio-economic (political) alternative: freedom v. force. The moral line Rand drew and substantiated between freedom and force is what separates her laissez-faire capitalism from all prior and contemporary politics that are alleged to be capitalism, but are actually pragmatic mixtures of capitalism with statism—i.e. mixtures of freedom with force.

    This is why accusing Rand's capitalism with the failures of past so-called capitalist governments red flags the ignorance of the accuser. The only accusations that are valid are those that demonstrate that the government used force aggressively and not as an act of defense. For instance, if you want to accuse her erstwhile friend, Alan Greenspan, of embracing the use of force against the people, she would side with you, because the Federal Reserve is an instance of the government violating the rights of banks, businesses, or individuals to issue their own currency and set their own interest rates, all of which are non-coercive actions that may not be outlawed and handed over to a government instituted coercive monopoly.

    Ayn Rand's radical capitalist government is charged solely with the task of protecting individual rights by removing from all human interaction the use of physical force or the threat thereof to gain, withhold, or destroy tangible or intangible values that any individual acquired by creating them or in voluntary trade, i.e. without resorting to force.

    The significant result of Rand's moral line between freedom and force is that every judgment of any political principle or action will be that it is moral or immoral depending on whether it condones or implements an initiation of force against individual autonomy. And that judgement, being a moral one, will necessarily trump all so-called "practical" considerations, because the immoral can never be practical.

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  32. part 3 of 4:

    For instance: when someone like Bill O'Reilly is confronted by a libertarian like Judge Napolitano with the question of whether the private use of marijuana should be legalized or not, Bill grasps that he has no argument against the relationship between the smoker and his weed that might trump his own embrace of the concept of a right to one's own life. So in order to dictate to others that they must act by his own personal ethical values, he conjures up the impracticality of legalizing pot—that it could influence or affect children or lead to crime in the streets. The Objectivist does not go there. Smoking marijuana does not involve coercion by force, so it must be legal, unregulated, and untaxed, regardless of any other factors. Force is the only legitimate concern of the government of a free society.

    Now apply the above to your social-political conclusion:

    "I don’t see a reasonable way to distinguish it [the right to pursue happiness] from, for instance, a right to education."

    Since there is no such thing as a right to violate a right, the rights to pursue happiness and an education are both limited to non-violent actions. Every individual therefore has a right to pursue happiness and to pursue an education by whatever means they choose, so long as those means do not constitute a use of physical force in order to achieve them.

    That means that one has the right to pursue and achieve happiness and an education only to the extent that it is at one's own expense or at the expense of another who voluntarily accepts that burden. No person has the right to impose an involuntary burden on anyone else ever. There simply may not be any unchosen obligations. The guarantee individual rights impose is that all human interactions shall be voluntary. Every contradiction of that guarantee is an act of tyranny.

    Public education by taxation coerces childless couples (among others) to fund the education of children whose education is a responsibility of their parents and no others. It relies on coercion by force and is therefore immoral and not a right but an act of theft. If no one in a society can figure out how to educate children without resorting to immoral coercion, then they cannot turn to coercion and at the same time claim that it is necessary because it is more practical. The immoral is never practical and coercion is always immoral.

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  33. part 4 of 4:

    And now apply it to your economic-political conclusions:

    "first, even if everything works as laissez-faire capitalists say it will, the quantity that ends up being maximized by the invisible hand is economic efficiency, not happiness or justice, or social welfare ..."

    This complaint is an erroneous hodgepodge!

    a) Economic efficiency means the availability to all of greater values for lower prices—nothing wrong with that.

    b) Happiness is not a product of any kind of government. It can only result from the achievement of one's own values by one's own efforts—a process enabled by capitalism and interfered with by statism.

    c) What could be more just than the capitalist guarantee of universal individual autonomy?

    d) There is no such thing as "Social welfare" beyond the benefit of living in a society in which some may not coerce others to fulfill their own desires at their expense. A "social" benefit must be both demonstrably valid and universally beneficial without exceptions.

    "Second, the process is (ironically) exceedingly inefficient, just like natural selection (which, incidentally, is not an optimizing process, only a satisficing one — it results in the minimal outcome that is compatible with the objective). Lots of resources, and more importantly lots of lives, are going to be squandered before “the best” emerges. ..."

    Under capitalism, all exchanges of value must be voluntary. Consequently, no voluntary transfer of values can occur except when both parties value that which the other party is offering greater than that which they are giving up as the price to gain it. It is inherent to every voluntary exchange that both parties profit as measured by their personal scale of values.

    That means that every single voluntary exchange of values is an instance of the "best" emerging that pressures those who offered too little or asked too much to move on to a different offering or price and become the best in another instance and in a different way.

    Beware that the only alternative to this natural system is to dictate values of other men by force.

    "Thirdly, competition works — as any ecologist would tell you — only when there are many small players of roughly equal strength in the arena. ..."

    Your ignorance of history is appalling. There is a long list of instances in this country and the world of tiny startup businesses riding the preferences of the masses for their products to victory over a giant of industry to the benefit of all, just as Sam Walton's Five&Dime replaced the Woolworth empire.

    Note also that Sam died the richest man in America, having elevated the standard of living of this country's poorest more than all the public programs and private charities that operated during his lifetime. Nicely done.

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  34. "I understand that multiculturalism and immigration carry their own problems, but why on earth should that have anything to do with regulating the markets and insuring a more fair society?"

    I think there is an argument out there that is concerned with social welfare programs. Basically it says that people support them in more homogeneous societies because they benefit people like themselves, there is ethnic solidarity, as opposed to benefiting allegedly undeserving " the other". I am not making the argument, but maybe there is something to it?

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  35. I did not mean to call you naive, and if I thought you were I would surely not keep coming back to this site read your articles! Just trying to have an ‘argument among friends’, no offense intended.

    We probably agree with each other for the most part, but I have problems with your wording. Phrases such as ‘there will be a small number of large players left, after the initial, truly competitive phase’, for instance, still seems to imply you think markets reach an end, or goal. I don’t think that is correct. Markets fail, markets disappear, merge, split up or change due to new innovations. They are in a constant process of being revised. The way I see it, there are no set of ‘phases’.

    Furthermore, managed capitalism is not what I meant with public management. When you said ‘the process’ is exceedingly inefficient, what do you mean? I assumed you meant ‘the competitive process’, as you can see in my comment. Is that what you meant? I’d say that competitive pressures are still at the core of both laissez faire capitalism and managed capitalism, the latter includes regulatory oversight that acknowledges and corrects for the many market failures that we know exist. Thus I do not understand what you mean with 'exceedingly inefficient'.

    I’m from Europe, by the way. Glad you prefer (at least some) of our ways.

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  36. Nate, no offense taken, I'm used to much worse on this blog! ;-)

    I do think we agree on most points. Yes, new markets do form, but because multinational companies "diversify," there is a tendency for the same (small) number of players to be around and control most of the capital. That's not good.

    Efficiency here refers not simply to economics, but to human suffering and welfare. Remember that Rand thought that unregulated capitalism is the most moral system. Clearly, it isn't.

    I really do think that Europeans, by and large, got it right. Yes, the US is a dominant economic power, but so would the EU be, if the bastards finally agreed to seriously work together...

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  37. Michael,

    I am getting soooo tired of being lectured by you about what I apparently don't understand anyway, it's hard to express in words. Still, this is a forum for discussion, so I felt obliged to let your *four* part (four!?) response be posted. You might want to consider getting your own blog, it's very satisfying, especially the abuse you get from people who immediately conclude that you are stupid as soon as you express an opinion different from theirs.

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  38. Massimo,

    Nowhere did I call you stupid, nor would I for your opinions, since I do not deal in opinions. I am only concerned with facts. Furthermore, I never attack persons—only what appears to be incorrect ideas and thinking. You are trying very hard to make my comment look like an insult when that which I stated about your analysis of the Objectivist politics is an assertion of facts I hold to be true. If you disagree with them, rebut them. Facts can't be insults, and indignation certainly doesn't rebut them.

    I am highly critical of your posts because you and your cadre of commenters are the ones attacking Rand for not being rigorous at the same time you all are peddling some of the fluffiest critiques of Rand on the internet. They are so predictable, any Objectivist who has been around for a while could write them on a sheet of paper and give them to you before you post them.

    For instance, you have worked your way through Objectivism's take on four branches of philosophy. Although the philosophy is a tightly bound hierarchical system of interdependent ideas, especially pronounced in the relationships between politics and ethics, you have given no indication you were aware of such or its significance to the issues you were busy taking potshots at randomly as if no one of them was dependent on any other idea in the philosophy. Where's the rigor there?

    As for the four parts, if you hadn't made so many errors, it could have been much shorter. Actually you should be thanking me for such a comprehensive comment. I have included ideas in there that would take years for anyone to unearth and assemble into an explanation like this. Now, the next time you want to whack Rand, you have this treasure trove of Objectivist answers in your lap. You can develop rebuttals for everything I have said here in your series on your own time and put together a far superior critique in the future. That would, of course, not be a value to you if you were only interested in degrading her, which, more than once in this series, I have been sorely tempted to believe.

    I did not exert the effort it took to write that post to degrade you or anyone else. Unlike altruists, Objectivists never try to up their self esteem by degrading others. It's a vice we call "being other-directed." I write my comments solely in order to develop my ability to explain complex ideas clearly and efficiently. As a gratuitous fringe benefit, I am also able thereby to teach anyone who will engage in discussion (plus any lurking honest minds on the sidelines) ideas they may not yet have encountered or processed in so organized a manner.

    And the one idea that you need to learn and haven't yet is that you have monumentally underestimated Ayn Rand and Objectivism. The longer you allow that to continue while Rand's influence is undisputedly rising around you and the discussions of her ideas deepen, the more marginalized your thinking will become.

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  39. Michael seems to be taking a preaching-to-the-choir tone, where his arguments clearly will only be of interest to people who accept the value of basic Objectivist tenets. That's odd, because the people here are clearly not the choir.

    When reading Objectivist rhetoric, it feels like I'm looking at a empiricist/rationalist split. So many things which I would regard as questions to be settled through testing and observation, instead seem to be treated through definitions, axioms, and rationalist derivations therefrom. (Not least the natures of social interaction and of human (and animal) reason.)

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  40. Michael's writings really remind me of myself circa 2000, hardcore Trotskyite. Hermetically sealed inside a beautiful ideology.

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  41. Michael,

    Just like the last time, I cannot help calling this a Gish Gallop, but I will try to address at least some of the points.

    part 1: Rand and her followers have a very simplistic view of human nature and human needs. Reducing everything to safeguarding a human from "interference by fallible others in the application of their own reason to their own actions in the production and voluntary exchange of values in the service of their own life" ignores a large number of dimensions of the human predicament, of which I will for the sake of simplicity only mention the whole "being born as a helpless child" aspect.

    parts 2&3: Like all objectivists and most libertarians you are remarkably blase about the fact that an impoverished human has only a hypothetical freedom: he could do all manner of things, if he only had the resources, but he hasn't, so he can't. And you only define force used to take some surplus wealth away from the rich as morally evil, but of course not the force used to keep the poor down after they were guiltlessly born into a society where a few others have monopolized all resources. Which of course only makes sense as long as you completely ignore the question of the legitimacy of the initial acquisition of these resources, and as long as you at least implicitly pretend against all evidence that the rich have personally deserved their riches, and the poor their poverty. The "force" used to levy taxes does not suddenly pop up in a vacuum. You could really gain a lot from reading through the interesting essays Ian Pollock kindly linked to above.

    And oh joy, you are actually using the Trotskyist "it has never REALLY been tried" canard. Who would have thought: me, an atheist, a clairvoyant after all! Rand's radical capitalist government would collapse in a hunger revolt as good as instantly. We do not even need to do the experiment, it follows from economic principles and human nature (and such an experiment would be useless anyway, because after every failure the ideologue would still argue that it would have worked if only this detail had been done differently, ad infinitum). If you turned, say, the USA into Randian wonderland tomorrow, by the end of next year at the very latest millions of jobless would be starving to death, and when humans have the alternative of dying or becoming looters or revolutionaries, even very peaceful people will chose the second option. That is also part of human nature. But I imagine you assume that charity would pick up the slack? Well, the only way to democratically establish Randian wonderland in the first place is to have a majority of egomaniacs in your country who consider charities evil, so there would not be sufficient charity anymore. Or perhaps you assume that totally free capitalism will magically rain millions of sufficiently well paying jobs from the sky for everybody to survive, even if these jobs would be completely superfluous to produce all the goods that can be sold, especially now that you have just completely destroyed a great deal of the purchasing power in your country? I surely hope you are not that disconnected from basic economic realities.

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  42. part 4: Happiness ... can only result from the achievement of one's own values by one's own efforts - a process enabled by capitalism and interfered with by statism.

    I do not quite see how I could achieve my values (? - ambitions, perhaps?) through my own efforts in your dreamland when, say, I was born into poverty, my parents could not give me an education, nobody wants to hire me, and all land is already privately owned. How would I get access to anything to make my luck? Even if somebody hires me (and thus leaving somebody else to starve instead), having no education and living in a country without welfare and presumably without unions to push up salaries a bit, I would likely only earn enough to eat 1.5 meals per day and live in a cardboard box under the bridge. Your sterile concept of justice is not the only thing humans value; a life in dignity for everybody has to be weighed against it.

    There is a long list of instances in this country and the world of tiny startup businesses riding the preferences of the masses for their products to victory over a giant of industry to the benefit of all

    Classical perception bias, counting a few hits and discounting millions of misses. How about all the hard-working dishwashers who did not become millionaires, and all the cases where a large chain drives a small shop out of business with long-term unaffordable dumping prices just because it has the deeper pockets?

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  43. I think there is an argument out there that is concerned with social welfare programs. Basically it says that people support them in more homogeneous societies because they benefit people like themselves, there is ethnic solidarity, as opposed to benefiting allegedly undeserving " the other".

    Sheldon and Prof. Pigliucci,

    After trawling the interwebz, I found this. The 'Identities' section examines the issue of ethnic diversity/homogeneity and its effects on social welfare spending.

    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Yu7XeOS0glIJ:socsci.colorado.edu/~smithms/Freeman.doc

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  44. "I understand that multiculturalism and immigration carry their own problems, but why on earth should that have anything to do with regulating the markets and insuring a more fair society?"
    - Well, it should have little to do with regulating markets to make a more fair society. Bringing up immigration and multiculturalism is a reaction to the simplistic comparison of the more homogenous nations to the US in terms of disparity.

    Certainly, having these additional pressures affects 1. the ease at which equality can be achieved, 2. the possible mechanisms that will be effective to achieve a more equal society and 3. the public's attitude towards these various mechanisms.
    These problems are not unique to the US, but the number of immigrants is highest here. The attitudes of many european countries have also change as they have more issues with immigration (not that this is necessarily a good thing). The point is its easier to have equality when most people are starting off from a similar situation. I don't mean any of this to be an excuse, but a glossed-over fact (in that it was not mentioned in this post) that is very relevant to the disparity issue.

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  45. Let me try to put the point more concisely: I don't think that it is a concidence that the Scandanavian countries: 1. have the most homogenous populations and 2. appear to have a good balance/ fairness in their economic/political systems. Its easier to be have such fairness and lack of disparity in this setting. Thats not to say that they don't have "better" systems in some ways that promote fairness (and probably worse in others), but that is only part of the equation. There surely is something to learn from other countries, but it is simplistic to think that their system (or even something very similar) would work here.

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  46. cc and others,

    interesting argument about Scandinavian societies being more homogeneous, I'm sure that plays a role. Of course, that does not undermine at all my point that they have a better, fairer society. It simply means that racism (and sexism?) has a tendency of getting in the way of that. Not really surprising.

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  47. Re: heterogeneity vs. social solidarity, consider that, of the two major US political parties, the less ethnically diverse one (e.g. see here) is also the one that champions a version of market fundamentalism (as economist Paul Krugman argues in today's column), which overlaps quite a bit with libertarian/laissez-faire philosophy (albeit, with more of a Chicago influence than an Austrian one - unless your last name is Paul). By contrast, the more ethnically diverse one is also the one that champions a version of social democracy (read: European-style economic policy; albeit, not quite as openly left as the European counterparts).

    That said, it seems to me that the purported conflict between heterogeneity and social solidarity is more "real" for one part of the American population than it is for the other - and (e.g. judging from its love of tax cuts - especially for those who can most afford to pay) it's not because it's any more fiscally responsible than the other.

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  48. Sean: When reading Objectivist rhetoric, it feels like I'm looking at a empiricist/rationalist split. So many things which I would regard as questions to be settled through testing and observation, instead seem to be treated through definitions, axioms, and rationalist derivations therefrom.

    That is a very roundabout and flattering way of describing ideological blindness, isn't it? One starts from a few enticingly simple and "obviously true" assumptions and builds a beautiful edifice of thought, carefully shielding it from any evidence that could interfere with it. And as you point out very clearly, that does not necessarily work if you are trying to answer questions that can only be answered empirically, like "would a society like that be stable?"

    Where I have to disagree with you is calling such a pipe dream "rationalist". As TVtropes puts it so succinctly: Authors also routinely conflate "logical" with "reasonable" or "rational". To be logical, something has to meet very strict requirements. For a plan to be reasonable or sensible, it just has to get you in the direction you want to go by avoiding the stuff you don't want to happen. The rational plan, in the strictest sense of "rational", is the one that best achieves this. It is therefore by definition impossible for the plan with the best chance of working to be irrational, no matter how crazy it sounds when you first hear it.

    Meaning that in this case, ignoring empirical data because objectivist ideology is such a "tightly bound hierarchical system of interdependent ideas" that it simply cannot contain a logical flaw is definitely not rational. Anything can be logical if you start with false premises.

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  49. I should have been more clear, Alex; I was referring to the (now outmoded) empiricist/rationalist split, and in particular the capitalized Rationalists who attempted to derive much certain knowledge about the world from deductive reasoning about God and the nature of substance. (Of course they also respected empirical knowledge, but in formulating their philosophies it seemed to generally play a supporting role.)

    Obviously I don't think this has much to do with what we now mean by being "rational"; the arrival of science having changed a lot. Indeed, I'm quite supportive of the more modern, pragmatic definition (I'd actually seen that TVtropes article before, by the way, although I would refer to LessWrong).

    Rather, what I meant, in my roundabout and perhaps unintentionally flattering way, is that Objectivist arguments often read like anachronistic throwbacks to the bad old days, when the spectre of scholasticism still loomed over Europe. At that point, this style of reasoning was in many respects a clear improvement. Nowadays, it is a step backward; we understand much better that there is more to reason than consistency and coherence and intuitive appeal.

    There is some irony, of course, in the fact that Objectivism is rabidly empiricist. Despite this, I see parallels between certain types of metaphysical arguments from Rand and Descartes. Both wanted to get somewhere in the most fundamental and unquestionably way they could (the destination largely decided beforehand), and they both attempted to do so primarily by finding sufficiently obvious fundamental principles as axioms, and applying clear deductive reasoning to them. But since many of these arguments involve additional unacknowledged premises, theory-specific definitions of words, and a low density of categorical syllogisms, "obvious" and "clear" are often subjective appraisals which only appear objective through a form of projection; someone who is not particularly receptive to the statements will note that they appear to be mere unsupported assertions. Rand really seems to come off the worse in this comparison, at least because she was so quick to attack the rationality of those who doubted her arguments.

    It's a bit of an odd thing, isn't it? A rabidly empiricist worldview, born in the twentieth century, which bases very few of its conclusions about human nature or the structure of society on any scientific study thereof. Perhaps the root of the problem is that to take any flaws of the mind seriously is seen as an attack on objective knowledge, and thus as self-defeating. That the fallibility of human reasoning is a complex and situational question, and not a binary question of reliable/unreliable or certain/uncertain, seems to be largely ignored in Objectivist epistemology. Which makes it easier to ignore other complex questions about conflicting, insufficient, or invalid evidence, instead relying entirely on whatever arguments seem intuitively satisfying.

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  50. @Alex and Sean:

    I don't think I am able to add much to your discussion other than what I said/implied in my first comment: Objectivists need to do real research if their ideas are going to be taken seriously, which, given the empty and stilted rhetoric above, I find difficult to envision.

    And just for the record: Switzerland, a thoroughly socialized country in the sense that its government provides a substantial amount of public services (an embodiment of the collectivism Objectivists fear), has one of the most competitive economies on the planet.

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  51. The conception of capitalists accumulating money indefinitely, and therefore forming a plutocracy, is flawed.

    http://incessantdissent.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/positive-sum-vs-zero-sum/

    However, there is the danger of regulatory capture.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

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  52. @ Sean (quantheory):

    "Michael seems to be taking a preaching-to-the-choir tone, where his arguments clearly will only be of interest to people who accept the value of basic Objectivist tenets."

    Since when are statements of fact "preaching" in a blog that is "a forum for discussion" per its owner?

    Given the dearth of attempts to rebut my assessments of the facts or assert others in the comments to this post, your judgment that only Objectivists could be interested (in facts) has, at least in present company, a grain of truth to it.


    "When reading Objectivist rhetoric, it feels like I'm looking at a empiricist/rationalist split. So many things which I would regard as questions to be settled through testing and observation, instead seem to be treated through definitions, axioms, and rationalist derivations therefrom."

    Objectivism most definitely rejects any "testing and observation" system of those whose axioms are, by their own admission, arbitrary assumptions and who can't be bothered with anything so precise as defining their terms. But it also rejects rationalist derivations that reify concepts. It regards rationalism v. empiricism as an instance of the false mind-body dichotomy, consistently opposing both sides of its every instance in favor of objective integrations.

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  53. @ Alex SL,

    "part 1: Rand and her followers have a very simplistic view of human nature and human needs. Reducing everything to safeguarding a human from "interference by fallible others in the application of their own reason to their own actions in the production and voluntary exchange of values in the service of their own life" ignores a large number of dimensions of the human predicament, of which I will for the sake of simplicity only mention the whole "being born as a helpless child" aspect."

    Am I now supposed to guess in what way you secretively think that the Objectivist politics ignores "being born as a helpless child"?

    In general, a capitalist government would recognize as a legal claim against the parents their obligation to raise their children to self-sufficiency and to guarantee children's individual rights as the living human beings that they are from the moment their umbilical cord is severed. Children of deceased parents may be adopted or aided by others, but would have no claim against anyone other than as stated in the contract of the adoptive parents that the government would oversee and secure.

    -----------------

    "parts 2&3: Like all objectivists and most libertarians you are remarkably blase about the fact that an impoverished human has only a hypothetical freedom: he could do all manner of things, if he only had the resources, ..."

    All of the impoverished humans with only a hypothetical freedom of which you are aware exist(ed) in societies in which men were not free from government intervention. By what means do you derive from that the conclusion that a society in which men were completely free would necessarily prevent a poor person from improving the quality of his life? Unlike all the societies you have known, in a free society, every man completely controls the resources of his own mind and his body.

    The history of even relatively free societies contain countless examples of men who, with no more resources than that, raised their own standard of living to incredible wealth by producing values others wanted, to their benefit as well. In a free society, there is no way to acquire wealth other than by offering more value for less cost than others can. Under a capitalist government that guarantees all exchanges to be voluntary, all values are earned.

    ------------------

    "And you only define force used to take some surplus wealth away from the rich as morally evil, but of course not the force used to keep the poor down after they were guiltlessly born into a society where a few others have monopolized all resources."

    Objectivism unequivocally condemns and seeks to prevent coercion against any human being for whatever reason or purpose without bias for or against wealth. Furthermore, if you will review the primary virtues of the Objectivist ethics, attaining wealth is not one of them. Please check your facts before making such scurrilous accusations.

    -------------------

    "The "force" used to levy taxes does not suddenly pop up in a vacuum."

    True. It requires the impatient greed of those whose purposes are incapable of earning the voluntary financial support from others so they embrace the politics of statism and the morality of thieves to take it by force (present company included).

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  54. @ Alex SL,

    "And oh joy, you are actually using the Trotskyist "it has never REALLY been tried" canard."

    It is necessary to point out that Rand's capitalism is a radical departure from present and past political systems when no commenter is able to grasp the difference between it and a partially capitalist government infected with statist ideas and policies and ignorantly asserts that nothing would change if men were truly free, except for the worse.

    The awful economic errors and consequences we are presently enduring are not the product of a government that has removed coercion from the interactions of men in this society. They are the result of the fascistic crony-capitalism equally embraced and furthered by Presidents Bush and Obama. If you can name one government that did implement her politics, you can become the first atheist saint, because you will have performed a miracle.

    --------------

    "Rand's radical capitalist government would collapse in a hunger revolt ... blah, blah, ... I surely hope you are not that disconnected from basic economic realities."

    It is child's play to compile a list alleging the horrors that would occur on implementing a particular political system, but a highly complex and sophisticated intellectual task to explain and demonstrate how its specific principles would bring that about. You have mastered the former, but so far have shown no indication that you might ever be able to pull off the latter.

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  55. @ Alex SL

    "I do not quite see how I could achieve my values (? - ambitions, perhaps?) through my own efforts in your dreamland when, say, I was born into poverty, ... etc., etc."

    Your entire comment re part 4 of my original comment is off topic. It is nothing more than a confession of your inability to grasp the nature of free-market economics. That raises two problems:

    problem 1) To rectify that deficit would require a 10- part reply that would shatter Massimo's tolerance altogether. So I will just assign you some remedial reading where everything you are wondering will be answered in full. For a quickie course, read Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson." For a more comprehensive, in-depth explanation, read Ludwig von Mises's "Human Action".

    problem 2) You cannot validate or invalidate a political system by reference to economics, which is not a branch of philosophy but rather a derivative science that explains how a given politics will lead to particular actions and consequences in the process of creating and exchanging values. Politics is the branch of philosophy that extends individual ethical principles into the context of a society of individuals. As such, it is a normative science dependent on ethics.

    A proper human ethics would be one that begins with the fundamental nature of human beings, defines the kinds of conditions and human actions prerequisite to a successful human life consistent with that nature, and assembles a hierarchical code of values to guide one's spontaneous actions toward the fulfillment of that life. From those principles is a proper politics formulated that will enable the unimpeded pursuit of those ethical values by every person in a society of men. The economics that is consistent with a moral politics will explain how men governed by it will be enabled to achieve a successful life in accordance with their application of their reason and action to the production and trade of values.

    If one concludes that the free-market economics that logically follows from the implementation of a capitalist government that removes all initiated force from human interactions will result in conditions that will cause negative consequences to the pursuit of life of individuals, that does not necessarily invalidate the politics. Rather, it would be a signal that one must retrace the logical steps back to the ethical foundation in search of the source of the contradiction. If one can revalidate the ethics and its extension to the politics, then the problem lies with one's false conclusions about the procession of consequences from implementing that politics.

    So you and your fellow commenters who are so quick to sing the statist litany of alleged capitalist horrors have not even begun to make a cogent argument against the Objectivist politics. To do that you will have to break through Rand's logical chain linking the ethics to the politics to the economics, which would require being fairly well versed in all three, for which I won't hold my breath while waiting.

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  56. Re heterogeneity and social solidarity: Rand's capitalism, being the product of an ethics that demands universal human autonomy irrespective of any and all other factors, is the ultimate exemplar of political egalitarianism and rests on the single set of attributes common to all. It would also most likely result in the most diverse of societies, since immigration restrictions constitute an initiation of force and the government would not be permitted to impose them.

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  57. @Alex SL,

    "One starts from a few enticingly simple and "obviously true" assumptions and builds a beautiful edifice of thought, carefully shielding it from any evidence that could interfere with it."

    So far, in this series, this describes the ideology of Massimo, you, and the other commenters perfectly.

    ------------------

    "To be logical, something has to meet very strict requirements...."

    Yes. It has to be non-contradictory, internally within itself and externally to the reality we experience as sensory data.

    ------------------

    "The rational plan, in the strictest sense of "rational", is the one that best achieves this."

    The "rational" is not defined by what is achieved, but rather by how it is. The rational is that which results from the correct use of one's conceptual capacity.

    -------------------

    "Meaning that in this case, ignoring empirical data because objectivist ideology is such a "tightly bound hierarchical system of interdependent ideas" that it simply cannot contain a logical flaw is definitely not rational. Anything can be logical if you start with false premises."

    Since, per the Objectivist epistemology, all concepts are derived from empirical data, this comment is a non-starter.

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  58. @ Sean (quantheory),

    "Rather, what I meant, in my roundabout and perhaps unintentionally flattering way, is that Objectivist arguments often read like anachronistic throwbacks to the bad old days, when the spectre of scholasticism still loomed over Europe."

    Until you document a specific idea of Rand/Objectivism that commits a fallacy of scholasticism, this comment goes into the non-starter bucket with Alex's.

    -------------------

    "At that point, this style of reasoning was in many respects a clear improvement. Nowadays, it is a step backward; we understand much better that there is more to reason than consistency and coherence and intuitive appeal."

    Yes, thanks to Ayn Rand, we now know that reason must bear a necessary relationship to objective reality, may not be arbitrary in any way, and may not share its capacity as our exclusive tool of cognition with mystical concoctions or emotions.

    ---------------------

    Miscellaneous:

    "they both attempted to do so primarily by finding sufficiently obvious fundamental principles as axioms, "

    Are you trying to say that only an obscure fundamental principle could be a valid axiom? Just how would the obviousness (and to whom?) of a principle impact its status as an axiom?

    "But since many of these arguments involve additional unacknowledged premises"

    Don't you mean that you have read so little of Rand that you never made it to where they were acknowledged? You can correct me if I am wrong by naming some of those premises.

    "theory-specific definitions of words,"

    Well, all definitions are contextual. If you have something else in mind, cough it up.

    "someone who is not particularly receptive to the statements will note that they appear to be mere unsupported assertions."

    ... since, being unreceptive, that someone did so little delving. You can always list a few, you know...

    "A rabidly empiricist worldview, born in the twentieth century, which bases very few of its conclusions about human nature or the structure of society on any scientific study thereof."

    Philosophy IS a science. And it is the one on which all other applied sciences depend. To attempt to derive or develop or validate a philosophy with an applied science is a contradictory inversion.

    "Perhaps the root of the problem is that to take any flaws of the mind seriously is seen as an attack on objective knowledge ..."

    You can have inherent flaws in the mind or you can have truth. You cannot have both. Truth is a futile and useless concept in a mind with inherent flaws.

    "Which makes it easier to ignore other complex questions about conflicting, insufficient, or invalid evidence,"

    ... none of which you can name.

    "instead relying entirely on whatever arguments seem intuitively satisfying."

    I can't think of anyone whose philosophical principles and conclusions have been less "intuitively satisfying" than those of Ayn Rand. She is the unexcelled champion at erecting intellectual hurdles around her ideas.

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  59. @ Mark, re your earlier post you cited:

    "I love economic prosperity just as much as the next person, but I often have to make clear in my conversations with others that I am not willing to quash justice in the process."

    Nor is an Objectivist. But an Objectivist will not corrupt justice by resorting to coercion in its name, something that all political philosophies and systems other than Ayn Rand's condone and exercise today. Justice prevails when all values that are owned are earned in voluntary exchanges. So the benefits of charity can be earned, but not if coerced.

    The function and size of government regulation is not an economic question, but rather an ethical and political one, because it is an issue of freedom v. force. And that alternative is fundamental and does not lend itself to compromise any more than one may compromise life with death. At this level, it is a fallacy, therefore, to say, "'pure' economic ideologies of any type simply do not work,"

    An ideology of any kind is, by definition, a body of truths, and you simply cannot have too many of those in an ideology. A "pure" ideology would be one that is entirely true, and to say that such an ideology would not work if implemented, is a bona fide self-contradiction that cripples your thinking about it and a whole lot more.

    Also, like Massimo and the others, you greatly underestimate the breadth of Rand's grasp of intellectual history as well as her ability to ferret out the common denominators into concepts that empower one's ability to identify important relationships among formerly disparate fields of knowledge. In ethics it is her reigning in the mushy definition of altruism. In history, it is the universal interdependence of dictators and mystics she labeled "Attila and the Witch Doctor" In politics, it is its derivation from ethics and the fundamental alternative of freedom and force. In esthetics, it is the psycho-epistemological value of concretizing one's view of life that cannot be otherwise externally experienced.

    The depth and breadth of Rand's philosophy has proven to be beyond the ken of academia. They didn't see it coming and they can't see it now as it enters their world like a stealth bomber about to disintegrate its singular target. This series Massimo has assembled is an eloquent testimony to the bankruptcy of her opponents. There is throughout, an abundance of laughter, ridicule, arguments from intimidation, and floating conclusions. Their view of the content of Objectivism is composed only of colloquial assumptions and wishful but false expectations of what it says and means. The one thing that has been uniformly absent from the comments, is a logical line drawn between the actual ideas and all that they have hurled against them. This is not intellectual rigor—its more like rigor mortis.

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  60. To quote one of Paul Krugman's favorite quotes:

    There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

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  61. Couldn't have said it better myself.

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  62. I'm amused that Michael treated my comments as if they were attempting to disprove Objectivism, as opposed to personal musing about why so many of the arguments don't seem to fly.

    "Until you document a specific idea of Rand/Objectivism that commits a fallacy of scholasticism, this comment goes into the non-starter bucket with Alex's."

    The level of reading comprehension here is quite extraordinary. The concision and thoroughness, incredible. Truly those of us who do not wish to engage with Michael are merely brute cowards who cannot withstand his blistering logic.

    "Truth is a futile and useless concept in a mind with inherent flaws."

    O flawless one, he who has never experienced pareidolia or confirmation bias, whose every dream is lucid, teach us the way so that we also may become as inerrant as the great Rand.

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  63. I believe my comment was too long to post, so I've done it on the SGU forums. Here's a link:

    http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,32796.msg887877.html#msg887877

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  64. Randroids love to toss about "theft" and "tyranny." Little do they know they are making the Worst Argument in the World. http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_worst_argument_in_the_world/

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