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Your close, not quite there. Way left is the Communists. Then the Fascists, then the Socialists. Then you have various levels that aren't quite socialist, middle ground, then you're on the right. Ironically Communists, Fascist and Socialists hate each other. All three kill lots of people and destroy culture, societies, good stuff. All in the name of so called equality. Here's a good place to read the diffs http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexi...

Fact is, being an American right now puts you in the top 1% of the world. Just think about that a minute. 99% of the world is worse off? You betcha. Yet people bitch, moan and complain about everything. America has so many first world problems.

In America if we got rid of the socialist parts, it would be a whole lot better. OMG, a whole lot less BS.

Fascists and Communists are at opposite ends of the spectrum. They're both authoritarian but- Fascism is the far right and Communism is the far left.

Your close, not quite there. Way left is the Communists. Then the Fascists, then the Socialists. Then you have various levels that aren't quite socialist, middle ground, then you're on the right. Ironically Communists, Fascist and Socialists hate each other. All three kill lots of people and destroy culture, societies, good stuff. All in the name of so called equality. Here's a good place to read the diffs http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexi...

Fact is, being an American right now puts you in the top 1% of the world. Just think about that a minute. 99% of the world is worse off? You betcha. Yet people bitch, moan and complain about everything. America has so many first world problems.

In America if we got rid of the socialist parts, it would be a whole lot better. OMG, a whole lot less BS.

Full disclosure: I read all of Atlas Shrugged. I also read The Fountainhead, but it's not very good. I am not an Objectivist, and I am not a Libertarian.

Ayn Rand never agreed with Libertarians. In fact, she said she'd be more likely to come to an understanding with a Marxist than a Libertarian: http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-...

Objectivism says you should do what's objectively in your best interest. Libertarians do what's in someone else's (Koch Industries, most likely) best interest and hope that somehow the benefits will flow to them.

Ayn Randian here. I like this because it cuts away huge swathes of state apparatus, all the civil servants and evaluators deciding who is worthy or not. [...]

You're aware Ayn Rand hated Libertarians, right?
http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-...

People constantly attempt to paint Libertarians as Objectivists, but to Ayn Rand they were very different, and anarchy was anathema to her:

"All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies who are anarchists instead of leftist collectivists; but anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That’s worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. " -- Ayn Rand

Personally, I think it should require a test before you are allowed to read Ayn Rand; you must at least recognize that the people in her books where caricatures, rather than representations of real people, or you could easily be sucked into the flawed philosophy of Objectivism, with no way to realize that it was flawed, and more than a Christian is capable of recognizing that "Intelligent Design" is just a renamed version of Creationism, dressed up in different clothes and a fake mustache.

Either way, you are either an Objectivist or you are a Libertarian, but you are not both.

Educate me, then. And try to keep Rand out of it.

Not my job, but just to point you in the right direction, Ayn Rand had no love for libertarians http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexi...

Oh look. Here's a whole _page_ of Ayn Rand quotes about compromise

In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit

or...

Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates, compromise [on basic principles] does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexi...

Many folks have a go at the idea that they can somehow tame evil or compromise with it without being tainted too much. I'm not sure this has ever really worked out.

There is a lot to like about the Richard Stallmans of the world. They are clear about the what and the why, and they stick to their guns.

You are wrong.

Read this to see why. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/selfishness.html

I read your link because it sounded like a bunch of crap to me. In the comments, there is this:

1. Ayn Rand died of heart failure, not lung cancer.

2. Ayn Rand did not get her name from her typewriter. The exact origin of her last name has not been unequivocally proven, but research now suggests that Rand is actually an abbreviation of her given last name.

3. Ayn Rand was financially capable of paying for her own medical expenses but made use of the Medicare and Social Security systems as this was in her rational self interest. She did not say "it was wrong for everyone else to do so." She addresses the issue here:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government_grants_and_scholarships.html

So Might Is Right, then. Corporatocracy.

No, the opposite of that, if by "might" you mean arbitrary violence.

"Might makes right" is what we have today; with trillion-dollar governments, some with nuclear weapons, having tremendous influence over the public opinion through control of schools and universities, media licensing, economic controls, "family law", "intellectual property" (not to be confused with real Property Rights), fiat currency, and countless other monopolies. Governments always have tremendously more influence on the mind of the voter than the voter can ever have on the government. Democracy is a propaganda tool, the ultimate "opium for the masses", fooling them into a belief that they are in control. Voting provides the rulers with useful feedback, like which puppets are the most popular, only strengthening their rule.

"Corporatism" is what we have today - not because of "evil corporations", but because of the government whose powers they are encouraged to utilize. If some corporations try to swim against the current of government-created market incentives, they shrink and go extinct, and a less principled competitor inevitably fills the gap. Governments have tremendous influence on the marketplace, which powerful cronies can use to their advantage. Taxation and regulation gives benefits to large businesses over small, and old over the new. Cronyism is the result of socialism, not capitalism - it cannot exist without the power of the state!

In the free market, a corporation is nothing more than a voluntary agreement between individuals. This Web-site is a corporation, and so is a marriage, a Linux users' group, a not-for-profit as well as a for-profit business large or small, etc.

Large-scale voluntary cooperation (aka corporations) are the driving force of all modern progress. Do you honestly think that the only alternatives to corporations, which are "cottage industries" and Soviet-style manufacturing monopolies, could have given you smartphones and now self-driving cars?! The latter didn't even want to produce jeans lest their ideological power be threatened by them, and their cars (in spite of many designs being copied from the West) were nothing but a joke!

The governments' power comes from a wide-spread delusion about its "divine rights", but no such delusion can ever exist around private corporations. No one would pay taxes to say Walmart for unwanted services! No one would let Citibank force them to use a currency that it can then devalue! Very few would agree to join Shell Oil's army, and probably at a very high cost. And the marketplace would never allow Toyota the construction of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines (without paying tremendous liability / insurance costs, which would make the construction of such weapons, much less ballistic missiles, utterly impossible in a free market).

The power of governments is now gradually slipping away, in spite of democracy, and all thanks to technological evolution, which is powered by corporations world-wide, and which governments are powerless to deny. The Internet is a trap that governments had no choice but allow, and which they cannot control. For the first time, they don't know what to do about Wikileaks, Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Tor, or private networks beyond their reach...

Where evolution is headed, whether you like it or not, is individualism - that is the predominance of every individual's negative Rights over his or her life! And reason, validated by Evolutionary Pragmatism, is the source of all Rights.

--libman

I find it curious that you gave the correct definition of socialism in your other post, but then get capitalism wrong like that.

It's not so curious when you remember that different people from different schools of thought become accustomed to different definitions. But I can see how that lends itself to confusion when people try to communicate across ideological divides. I was referring to capitalism in a sort of Ayn Rand sense. But you're right that I should have made that clear, and I do recognize that your definition is at least as valid.

The Tea Partiers hate the Libertarians because Libertarians believe in a small government that lets people do things that make them feel funny; while the Tea Partiers believe in a big government morality police, as long as they don't have to pay for it.

You're talking out of your ass.

Both the "Tea Parties" and the "Libertarians" (especially if you mean small-l libertarians, who are not necessarily big-L Libertarians, that is supporters of the U.S. Libertarian Party) are diverse and amorphous groups of people, who overlap to some degree. There are very few accurate generalizations that you can make about either group. If you want to provide constructive criticism, then you should avoid vague labels and criticize specific philosophies and view-points instead.

Plenty of people at Tea Party rallies are as much against "right-wing social engineering" and warfare statism as they are against welfare statism. And plenty of perfectly principled libertarians would support reasonable contractual restrictions on drugs, alcohol, guns, lewd behavior, etc in their neighborhood associations, private schools, businesses, churches / secular voluntary cultural institutions, etc.

Also, Ayn Rand thought abortions were awesome. How else are you going to keep the untermensch from breeding, preach at them?

Unless you can reference a quote that I don't know about, then I must assume that you, again, are talking out of your ass...

There is a big difference between being pro-choice, as she was, and supporting any sort of anti-natalist eugenic bullshit, which she most certainly didn't. We live in a very large and resource-rich solar system (to say nothing of the things beyond), and there's plenty of room in it for everyone, even idiots, just as long as they can agree to follow the rules of capitalism and respect the Rights of others.

I am an atheist, a big Ayn Rand fan, and I am opposed to a prohibition on abortion, but I must say that her view that a fetus has no rights is flawed. Scientifically a fetus is a helpless human being, only circumstantially different from a born baby. What is clear is that it doesn't have any "positive right" to "occupy" the mother's body against her will, but the mother having the right to evict the fetus doesn't equate with the fetus not having a negative Right to life. Since at present levels of technology such an eviction is guaranteed death, then abortion should be legal.

I am a pro-natalist (I see people (who can afford them) having more babies as a good thing), and I don't see how any rational person who studies the current demographic trends and their economic consequences could possibly come to a different conclusion. If (or, rather, "when") in the future we'll have the technology to safely transplant fetuses and/or grow them in an artificial environment, then killing a fetus would be a truly pointless and sadistic thing to do! Even without laws mandating live extraction of the fetus, I think that in the future there'll be a super-abundance of Pro-Life charities willing to pay the mother for the fetus to be extracted unharmed, and to pay for it to be grown to maturity and adopted. (This would be especially true in a rational society that recognizes stronger Parents' Rights (which transfer in case of adoption), and stronger moral responsibilities of grown offspring to take care of their (adoptive) parents, thereby giving people more of an incentive to have and adopt children.)

The need for abortion is yet another "political problem" that science and technolog

In today's world, everything is interfered with by the state, and all people, not just businessmen, must make do the best that they can under these circumstances. Are you also going to vilify doctors, lawyers, and farmers for their inevitable government entanglements?

Corporations (and even limited-liability corporations) can exist without governments as we know them today, with a system of polycentric jurisprudence to recognize Rights (including Contractual Rights) and competing law enforcement agencies to defend them.

Of course, as government power is gradually phased out, these minarchist institutions would be among the last monopolies to go - 99% of government is the welfare / warfare statism that is much easier to replace with free market institutions (or, in some cases, do away with entirely). Even in an optimistic scenario, the transition to a pure free market would take decades (with some regions moving faster than others), as people need time to adjust. Libertarians need to learn to differentiate their noble ivory-tower vision from rational gradualist tactics, and identify political priorities. Grandstanding statements like "then we'll talk" are good rhetoric, but can make for very bad policy.

--libman

I consider myself somewhat of an authority on socialism, having been born in the USSR and having read much about socialist and free market economic theories. My verdict on the word "socialism" is that it's not an attainable state of being, but a relative ranking on a continuum of to what degree individual Rights (including Property Rights, Parents' Rights, etc) are being violated.

I think in numbers; words are just the primitive glue that ties numbers together. What politicians call themselves and what slogans they use doesn't matter - what matters are the results. A so-called "Economic Freedom Index" (which should be adjusted a bit from the "Tax Misery Index") can be used as a crude estimate of degrees of socialism - except of course you wouldn't find a ranking for Bill Clinton's dream policies, as they would have been if he had zero opposition in all three branches of the U.S. government. Bill Clinton is a fairly balanced politician (compared to Obama), but I think his ideal America would be closer in economic freedom to France (#67). As someone who thinks that even Hong Kong and Singapore (#1-2) have much room for improvement in the pro-capitalist direction, I can very easily call Clinton a socialist. Everything is relative.

More to the point, my comment about Clinton falling into the "Let's Build A Pyramid" pattern is very much valid. The idea of interstellar flight has that same effect of stimulating the "wow impulse" of the populace, while actually being quite low in the ranked decision-matrix of where capital ought to be allocated for optimal civilizational growth. The real world isn't StarTrek, and in the foreseeable centuries we'll remain very much tied to this one solar system. The free market, which operates within a framework of reality-based economic signals and intensives, would probably rather use space for vast long-term projects to bringing down the price of energy (taking pollution liabilities into consideration) and rare metals, which human industry so desperately needs. This would lead to ever-cheaper electronics bringing down the Digital Divide, cheaper electric cars (and someday flying cars), cheaper water filtering / desalination plants to irrigate the deserts, cheaper greenhouse agricultural robots to feed the world, etc, etc, etc.

Politicians have no intensive to actually solve problems - especially if those problems create the fear (ex. environmentalism) that helps keep them in power. They have to advertise themselves as solutions to those problems, while keeping the problems alive perpetually. Their incentive is to provide "bread and circuses", like the subject of this article. Of course public funding of this particular project hasn't been discussed yet, but it's rather obvious that Bill Clinton is no champion of insisting on 100% voluntary funding - he's a politician down to his core. The same phenomenon already applies to smaller research projects currently in existence - planting flags and mapping the far reaches of the universe gets priority, while more practical and timely research involving orbit-to-surface energy transmission and near-earth asteroids is largely ignored...

You don't need to care for all the other people individually - that much is, of course, impossible. You can, however, care for the aggregate, especially when you yourself are also a part of it, and its well-being directly reflects on yours.

That's a selfish idea if I've ever heard one ;)

I am absolutely convinced that the majority of Rand's opponents have never read a single of her books. Rand was once asked to clarify the whole "selfish" controversy on a talk show in the 70's and she said, paraphrasing: "How about I use a different word: self-esteem, would you be more comfortable with that?"

What most people miss is that Rand was just as much against pop-philosophies that she called "altruist" as she was promoting an alternative, particularly the ideas contained within "altruist philosophies" of using selfishness as a scapegoat for all of humanity's ills. Because she saw that most of the prevailing philosophies were not just advocating for benevolence and kindness but were teaching people that they were essentially worthless and needed to submit themselves entirely to something greater than themselves. As evidence I submit any story where the main protagonist achieves hero status by killing himself at the end to save others.

You kind of hit the nail on the head without even realizing it. To care about your family, your society, your country, your environment is a selfish act because you are acting for your own individual preservation. It is selfish to love someone because their existence, their virtues, their company gives you personal, selfish joy. It is rational to want your family, your friends and your peers to flourish and prosper because it means a higher standard of living, not just for them but for everyone, yourself included. And Rand promoted rational self-interest (and clarified that all the time: source).

It's altruist philosophies that have equivocated the idea of having your own selfish interests at heart with being incompatible with the interests of others. Rand was very careful to clarify this and the fact that so many people openly attack her using a complete lack of understanding of what she meant when she promoted the idea of selfishness as a virtue is as close to proof as you can get that these people have never actually studied anything she wrote.

You've established the first part, but you haven't found any support for the extension to patents and copyright in Rand's work. The example of Reardon Metal doesn't help - that's a physical, bricks-and-mortar company that's being signed over, not a bunch of patents.

Did you actually read the book? It was very specifically the patent to the metal that was signed over. The company was not called Rearden Metal, it's called Rearden Steel, and Rearden retained control over it after "gifting" the patent.

Also, Rand had explicitly stated her views on copyright, patents and other forms of intellectual property in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" - there's a whole chapter there devoted to the issue - and it's in full support of the concept. In fact, she went so far as to claim that the right to own ideas is a natural right, rather than a social contract. Here are some salient quotes from it.

No, your position is false and in fact, clearly indicative of psychosis.

Your position is not merely unproven, it's presented as a sheer Bare Assertion Fallacy. Your position is true because you say it's true, period.

Since it's your stance insofar as presented that is -formally- irrational, and thus demonstrably indicative of mental illness, perhaps some reconsideration of the notion of "winning the argument automatically by means of psychological labeling" would be worth consideration.

Since I'm confident you'll assume I'm theist and therefore dismiss me out-of-hand, here's a link from a fellow strident atheist who is also a rather systematic individual well-versed in the nature and scope of valid argument, on this very question. I hope you'll find it useful.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/psychologizing.html

Ayn Rand would disagree.

Okay, attempt to bluff that you have some content where you clearly have none, or you'd present it... by... not presenting and instead giving vague "i disapprove" non-arguments.

Here you go. You clearly need this.

Yes, it would be "not evil" under the circumstances. This is probably as clear to you as anyone right while you claim the opposite, but yes, the interests of the millions would outweigh the individual interest here. So, yeah, your claim's broken, as you know as you go ahead and lie otherwise. If you could be less obvious about it that'd probably be good, though.

And yes, not acting to prevent an action is not morally equivalent to committing the action (I assume you don't want to further your demonstrations of personal hypocrisy by having me ask about your personal moral culpability that there are starving children in the world).

What's that? You can't alter the situation for starving children without examining the wider effects of that? Right, absolutely, and as I said from the outset, the implication of removing free will from humans outweighs precluding all the instances where something "evil" is done, by humans.

So yes, human act: evil. God: good. God not preventing evil: No logical connection to the human act due to different implications, and moral status indeterminate until all the effects are factored in. Only being capable of knowing all the effects for a given case, and so the sole possible determiner of whether something is objectively "good" or "evil": God. Concluding God not acting on case of evil is logically connected, much less the required inference from the human's act being evil: Complete non-sequitur.

Does that clarify? Hopefully, because nobody's going to be able to make it easier for you to understand than the easiest possible something could be for you to understand.

I didn't notice libertarians express any disinterest when their corporations got government bailouts, paid for by taxpayers.

Were you looking for it at all?

I've never heard of a libertarian complain that the government interfered in blocking union workers from aggressive strike behavior.

Not all libertarians are anarcho-capitalists. Randians for example would not mind the government stopping violent thugs.

I've never heard of a libertarian complain that he didn't wish to receive Social Security or Medicare, when eligible.

When a robber offers to return some of what he stole from you it's not immoral to accept it back. Most libertarians believe that the same thing applies to the state and what it taxed from you.

Sorry, wrong link: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html

And this is how I know you didn't understand it. You are in agreement with her when you think you are arguing against her: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anarchism.html [aynrandlexicon.com] Her entire point is that the government's duty (the only moral duty) is to prevent initiation of force by anybody against anybody else, and here you are arguing that without government, someone (corporations) will be able to use force against someone (I guess individuals?). She agrees! Laissez faire capitalism is not anarchy. Itn fact it cannot exist without the rule of law, which means government.

The problem is that Rand convolutes physical violence and economic coercion when she talks about the government controlling you, but then turns around and only addresses physical violence when it comes to what we can do to each other. She's changed the definition of "force" mid-argument, and you've fallen for it wholesale.

This is completely wrong. Bill Gates has billions of dollars. In a society where there is rule of law and the government monopolizes physical force, can he make you do whatever he wants? How?

You can't really pick an example from within our controlled economy and have it say anything about a laissez faire system. If all regulation today were dropped, Bill's corporation could stomp out products competing with his, and then they could control how you or anyone else interacts with a computer. Or, if he took a more personal dislike to you, he could purchase every piece of food out from under you when you try to buy it until you submitted. At that point, he would have as much control over you as the government does now (the government can't actually currently make you take whatever arbitrary action it desires)

Industrial revolution era abuse of lower classes? Is this how they were abused: http://images.tdaxp.com/tdaxp_upload/real_income_per_person_in_england_md.jpg [tdaxp.com] You can draw a chart exactly like that for every aspect of the standard of living, life expectancy, child mortality, income, education etc. By today's standards worker conditions during the industrial revolution were bad. But, and this is very important: they were enormously better than the conditions that preceded the industrial revolution. In fact, short of invention of agriculture, industrial revolution improved the life of ordinary people more than anything else in the history of human race. If that is what you call abuse, then your expectations are unrealistic. Note that this huge improvement in people's lives was accomplished entirely by private sector with government in England wisely staying mostly out of the way, something that current governments could learn from.

The awesome thing about your chart is that it is not descriptive at all of the quality of life for the bottom quintile of income earners during the same time period. That graph could look like that even if the poorest people got twice as poor, provided the people at the top made enough more money. Even if everything you say is true, though, that does not actually mean that the workers were not being abused. The point of comparison isn't what life would be like if the technology had not been invented. There is not a single shred of evidence you can produce that having laws to protect workers actually stifles innovation (The united states ranks #40 in patents granted per capita, far lower than socialized countries like Sweden and Norway), so they would have gotten the quality of life improvements the technology provided whether they had to work in inhumane conditions or not. The only point of comparison is how those workers would have done if factory owners were not allowed to walk all over them. What you are claim

I actually formed my opinion of Rand by (wait for it) reading her work.

I am glad to hear that, although it is unfortunate that you didn't understand it.

neglects to address what we are supposed to do when corporations, in the vacuum of power created by a government that does not participate in the economy, are powerful enough to enact that same force

And this is how I know you didn't understand it. You are in agreement with her when you think you are arguing against her: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anarchism.html

Her entire point is that the government's duty (the only moral duty) is to prevent initiation of force by anybody against anybody else, and here you are arguing that without government, someone (corporations) will be able to use force against someone (I guess individuals?). She agrees! Laissez faire capitalism is not anarchy. Itn fact it cannot exist without the rule of law, which means government.

money is just a big abstraction for the power to make people do things, which Rand loathes so much

This is completely wrong. Bill Gates has billions of dollars. In a society where there is rule of law and the government monopolizes physical force, can he make you do whatever he wants? How?

When you give the economy free reign, you move first to industrial revolution-era abuse of the lower class, and then eventually into hereditary dictatorship (or feudalism)

Industrial revolution era abuse of lower classes? Is this how they were abused: http://images.tdaxp.com/tdaxp_upload/real_income_per_person_in_england_md.jpg

You can draw a chart exactly like that for every aspect of the standard of living, life expectancy, child mortality, income, education etc. By today's standards worker conditions during the industrial revolution were bad. But, and this is very important: they were enormously better than the conditions that preceded the industrial revolution. In fact, short of invention of agriculture, industrial revolution improved the life of ordinary people more than anything else in the history of human race. If that is what you call abuse, then your expectations are unrealistic. Note that this huge improvement in people's lives was accomplished entirely by private sector with government in England wisely staying mostly out of the way, something that current governments could learn from.

If you don't let your government participate in the government in any way, eventually the private sector will amass enough power that it can tell the government no

So, this the problem you have with laissez-faire capitalism. The purpose of the government, as you see it, is to regulate private sector in order to make sure no company gets too rich and too powerful to overpower the government? Because if it does, it is going to disregard the laws, courts and police and use force against individual citizens (by forming a private army?). You seem to believe this to be so self evident, that the onus is on anyone who disagrees to demonstrate why this wouldn't happen.

I think this is nuts. Every example so far known of gross abuse of individual citizens' rights has come from the only place where it can realistically come from: unrestrained government. Every example of countries approaching something like laissez-faire capitalism (Britain in 18th century - industrial revolution, Hong Kong in the 20th, US in the 19th century) has been a huge success. None of them have led to companies building armies and overruling governments.

P.S. I just replied to the points you made. I didn't go into the real point of Ayn Rand's philosophy which is the moral underpinnings of all this, immorality of all initiation of physical force.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/civil_disobedience.html :)

The point is that in a purely free market as espoused by many libertarians, sans tax and regulation, they don't HAVE to pay for the external costs like pollution.

That is simply not true. Can you name some examples of those "many" libertarians who promote not having ANY taxes and regulation? Is Ayn Rand libertarian enough: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/government.html The mainstream view of libertarians (not anarchists) is that you cannot have liberty for all individuals without government providing laws and law enforcement that protects all individuals from harm caused by others (in this case by pollution). That is the main (some would say the only) proper role of the government. There is nothing inconsistent about it. If you have anarchy, you cannot have liberty for everybody because the first person with more power than you can and probably will take your liberty away from you. Anarchy and liberty are incompatible.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.html

Well I think what we mean by "libertarian" is not very well defined and this is why it is commonly confused (at least I think that is the appropriate word) with anarchism. The difference is that what I call libertarian or classical liberal view of the government is as an umpire, protecting individual liberty by monopolizing the use of force in a way that is governed by objective laws (see Hayek, Rand, Friedman, Smith, Mises, Bastiat, etc etc) while the anarchist viewpoint is that the government should be removed altogether. Frankly, I wish that the anarchists would simply start calling themselves anarchists instead of libertarians because what you believe is not within the tradition of libertarian thought and was denounced by all the ladies and gentlemen I mentioned above, especially Ayn Rand http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anarchism.html

"The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over."

"Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions."

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube."

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/appeasement.html

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compromise.html

"The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over."

"Do not confuse appeasement with tactfulness or generosity. Appeasement is not consideration for the feelings of others, it is consideration for and compliance with the unjust, irrational and evil feelings of others. It is a policy of exempting the emotions of others from moral judgment, and of willingness to sacrifice innocent, virtuous victims to the evil malice of such emotions."

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube."

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/appeasement.html

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/compromise.html

Gee wiz, how will Commiedot cover IE9, the most revolutionary Web browser since Microsoft won the browser wars and invented the technologies behind AJAX in the late 1990s? Will they mention Microsoft's embrace and leadership with HTML5 and progress toward 100% Acid3 compatibility? Will they mention awesome developer tools / profiling / Visual Studio 2010 integration that makes Firebug look like a retard on a tricycle trying to race the space-shuttle? Will they solemnly admit that an early pre-alpha version already blows Firefox 3.6 out of the water in terms of performance? (And the Windows version of Firefox runs faster than the Linux version, even through Wine, and Windows graphics card support is much better than Linux / Solaris / *BSD, so the difference with an all-FLOSS desktop would be even greater, especially on new hardware.)

Nah, not a chance, they have their socialist anti-Microsoft agenda to promote! First they'll dig up a story about Google Chrome trying to do some 3D acceleration (which would be pretty hard without the level of hardware vendor support that Microsoft has earned over the years), and then they'll whine that it won't run on a 10-year-old operating system... I'd like to see how well the 2011 versions of the top FLOSS browser binaries work on Red Hat 6!

Yet again we see capitalist software achieve its market share on the basis of merit. Yet again we see socialist software playing second-hander catch-up with the aid of government force (ex. the forced EU browser ballot screen, etc). But, just like the former claims that the Soviet Union will surpass the American economy, the socialist software model continues to fall flat - consumers are willing to pay more for quality, convenience, and innovation (which often leads to a lower total cost of ownership), and companies like Microsoft are able to invest that money to hire the top developer brains this world has to offer, thus perpetuating the positive feedback cycle of wealth creation. Government-subsidized European college hippies(which is where most socialist software originates) steal tax money from companies like Microsoft, which is the only reason their development model didn't end up on the ash heap of history just quite yet!

Economics is just a completely arbitrary, man-made system of resource allocation.

To a socialist, maybe - just as sciences like geology and cosmology have no sway with a young earth creationist. But to a capitalist, on the other hand, reason is the basis of all knowledge!

Europe decides to allocate its resources to communications infrastructure, America decides to allocate its resources to a few rich people to do with as they wish.

Europe and America are not sentient organisms with a functional capacity to reason. They are abstractions for millions of human beings, each of whom has an autonomous capacity to think, act, and experience consequences of one's actions. A vague abstraction cannot own resources - those resources have been created (or homesteaded / brought into the human economy), sold, bought, transformed, etc by specific individual human beings!

In a rational (and therefore free) society, people own themselves and the consequences of their actions (aka "capital"). No one may "decide" how to allocate their minds, bodies, and fruits of their labor except them!

By the way, there's no such thing as a free market, capitalism can't exist without strong government intervention in damn near everything.

You couldn't be more wrong. The correlation between absence of government intervention and economic freedom is almost a truism, especially when you accurately define "government" as any institution that violates Natural Rights, no matter if it's a modern parliament or a Somali warlord.

The more government you have, the less freedom and less economic growth.

I haven't seen that movie yet, but I heard it's about the "evil corporations" trying to screw the natives, or in this case a planet of blue-faced aliens, out of their natural resources...

Like most evil in the world, this is an issue of government force, not of technology or capitalism! The public has no wide-spread delusions about the "divine rights" of corporations to initiate aggression against others, they only have this delusion about government! No one would allow a corporation to control a school their children go to, pledge allegiance to a corporate flag, involuntarily pay taxes to a corporation, allow it to inflate their currency, fight a war for it, etc, etc, etc. Capitalism doesn't need government, but it does require a universal recognition of individual rights, including the right to own property - no matter your skin color, and no matter what planet you are from!

I haven't seen that movie yet, but I heard it's about the "evil corporations" trying to screw the natives, or in this case a planet of blue-faced aliens, out of their natural resources...

Like most evil in the world, this is an issue of government force, not of technology or capitalism! The public has no wide-spread delusions about the "divine rights" of corporations to initiate aggression against others, they only have this delusion about government! No one would allow a corporation to control a school their children go to, pledge allegiance to a corporate flag, involuntarily pay taxes to a corporation, allow it to inflate their currency, fight a war for it, etc, etc, etc. Capitalism doesn't need government, but it does require a universal recognition of individual rights, including the right to own property - no matter your skin color, and no matter what planet you are from!

Everything I do is pointless, so I spend my life passing time until I eventually die. Everything's temporary to make more of my life vanish out from under me without me noticing too much; the time in between is horribly empty, and nothing really completes me in a worthwhile way.

`The form in which man experiences the reality of his values is pleasure . . . . A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.` - Ayn Rand

there is a whole school of thought (I don't subscribe to it, but it exists, and is valid as any other) that contends altruism leads to suffering, and only hurts in the long run.

There may be more than one school, but Ayn Rand thought that. She distinguished a difference between altruism and kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others.

Falcon