So you would prefer to remove government from the equation and leave society to the direct control of the wealthy and well-connected families and individuals at the top?
Straw man. I suppose you would prefer to remove private enterprise from the equation and have the government confiscate all property and means of production, to be ruled by well-connected families and individuals at the top?
We'll agree that the USA doesn't get it right nowadays, but that simply means we should fix the government, not aim for perpetual anarchy and right of strength.
No need for the anarchy straw man. I'll just prop up my totalitarian state straw man and tell you we should fix the government, not aim for total government control over all rights and property.
1. What is an overall tax rate that does not qualify as "overly burdensome"?
Wrong question, as you know. The burden has nothing to do with the rate, but with the code. If you're middle income, you work from 1/3 - 1/2 of your time for the government. If you're wealthy, you can pay no taxes at all, or get tax credits for NOT growing crops on the 1200 acre estate you had no intention of growing crops on, hire tax accountants to take advantage of other benefits, or if you're really well-connected you can get a lot of funding from the treasury to create jobs in other countries.
2. Your claim that "we had all of that before 1913" seems questionable:
And yet it's true, so you simply tried moving the goal posts. Most of the "solutions" you mention after 1913 were to address problems that didn't exist before then, and speculating that the federal government HAD to have 20% of all the private income to address them is pure speculation. There was plenty of welfare before the welfare state, but it was done VOLUNTARILY (and much more efficiently) by philanthropists. Your default assumption is that every problem requires government to solve it. Mine is that most problems are a result of government, including much of the pollution problem (the vast majority of EPA super-sites military bases). We even had plenty of pure scientific research, but you seem to think that requires a government committee. Social Security was a government solution to a problem created by government. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913, and it bankrupted the country by 1929. The VA still does a lousy job of taking care of veterans, but it solved the problem of the actual military services being burdened with caring for servicemen, like they should have done. Don't even get me started on Lyndon Johnson's horrible policy decisions. You seem fond of SS, but entirely forgiving of Johnson for raiding it. And OSHA is nothing but another tool for targeting political opponents, like the IRS has now admitted to being. What did they do for me when I was unable to work do to RSI? Nothing. Useless waste of money that I contributed to for 20 years and then told me "tough shit".
We were much better off before people started relying on the benevolence of faceless bureaucracies.
No, I mean 1913. The 1861 tax was temporary (it was repealed the following year), a failure for revenue generation (it was allowed to expire in favor of tariffs, which generated revenues more reliably), and in 1895 SCOTUS declared the provisions taxing income from property were illegal. Also, it didn't pay for any of the things the OP mentioned - it was a temporary tax used only for killing 700,000 Americans.
So taxing income from anything except wages was actually illegal until the 16th Amendment was ratified. The people went along with ratification because it would "always only affect the very wealthy".
That's what the warlords told their slaves, and what the kings told their serfs, what the Aztecs told the parents of the children they sacrificed. It's the old argument from tyrants that it's for the "good of the people" that people must suffer. The suffering is never for the rulers, of course.
How amusing that the changes you seek would destroy social mobility and send us right back to the days of feudalism that you're so desperate to avoid, where the poor live only at the charity of the rich. Your sig is well-earned.
It's telling that you think that, because it is entirely wrong. Social mobility has been declining in the US in direct correlation with the size and power of the federal government. We are living in a subtle form of elitist control, a collaboration between big business and government implemented by wealthy and well-connected families and individuals at the top of both the corporate boards and the government bureaucracy. THAT system is what is returning us to the days of feudalism, and the only way to counter that is to reduce the size and scope of the federal government.
We had all of that before 1913, when the income tax was implemented. I never said I opposed taxation, and I don't. I do oppose overly burdensome taxation, and that is what we have now. Our current tax system is not based on generating revenue for the things you listed, it's designed for social engineering of the people, for promoting wars, providing privileges to certain corporations and industries, and general control of the populace.
In the USA, 99% of the means of production is owned by 0.1% of the population. Can't see why that is a priory any better.
And 92% of all statistics are made-up, including this one. Production in the US is still primarily driven by small business, not large corporations. The more regulations from Washington pile up, however, the easier it is for corporations to shut out any competition.
We have had unregulated markets before, this is not new. They have always resulting in absolute concentration of wealth at the cost of the liberty, health and safety of the common man.
I keep seeing this claim, but I have yet to see an actual example.
#1 - What do you say to the phrase "Taxation is the price we pay for civilized society"?
That's what the warlords told their slaves, and what the kings told their serfs, what the Aztecs told the parents of the children they sacrificed. It's the old argument from tyrants that it's for the "good of the people" that people must suffer. The suffering is never for the rulers, of course.
Ezra Klein is disingenuously being deceptive. He quotes a Hayek passage that saying that a "comprehensive system of social insurance" can be supported as if Hayek was talking about health insurance, which is of course laughably false. He was talking about a limited safety net and government support for victims of natural disasters and the like. It's just BS. Hayek's grudging nod to the necessity of a bare-minimum welfare mechanism for the very neediest in society was not an endorsement of the kind of welfare state currently in evidence, with the IRS enforcing pages of Cadillac health benefits for any "qualifying" insurance, and taxing every implementation of any health provider or consumer up and down the line.
#3 - What other forms of liberty deserve protection? The right to vote? The right to participate in society? The right to have your money, and not your skin color or gender or sexual preference, determine whether or not you can patronize a business?
Individual liberties all deserve protection, collectivist liberties are justifications for tyrannical leadership. Voting, having a say in governance, and other "participation" in society is a necessary duty of individuals for any free society. The current overly burdensome government is a result of too little participation by too few. In the "society" that you seem to be advocating, that "money" isn't even "yours" - it's just an allowance from your ruling overlords.
Note that racism and other forms of discrimination was institutionalized by the very same government that you seem so willing to put in place as the sole arbiter of fairness. It was the moral and religious institutions in the United States that fought for the end to slavery and championed civil rights for all races, and they were opposed at every step by the federal government and the Democratic party. Governments do not have morals, and when they enforce the morals that the most vocal and powerful participants in the political process it's not always a good thing. I happen to think that even were it legal, no business in the US could survive today openly discriminating against people because of race or sexual orientation. And that's the way it should be. The people have the real power, after all, and government is simply a coercive force. They can force businesses to do things you like today, just as they forced liberty-minded people in the 19th century to return slaves to their owners.
Taxation to support a social safety net is not a violation of liberty. For an argument why, you might consider reading F.A. Hayek.
This is the same argument that has been going on for 400 years: collectivism vs. individual rights. Hayek was a Collectivist. He viewed the State as the ultimate authority, and preservation of the collective as the ultimate goal, even if individuals must suffer to preserve it. But that's a disastrous policy, because when rights of the collective are elevated above the rights of individuals, there are no barriers to tyranny. Ultimately, the opposing arguments (notably by John Locke) emphasized consent on the part of the governed, and preservation of each individual's natural rights. Governments must either respect and preserve the natural rights of the individual, or they are illegitimate and to be ignored or replaced.
Do your children exist in a vacuum? Those poor you seem to be trying to elicit sympathy for are the same ones you are accusing of being clamouring parasites. This is the total lack of insight that makes her whole philosophy so laughable.
Clamouring, yes, but they are simply tools of the corporate and NGO parasites that are the real beneficiaries of the theft of labor from the working class. And they would be better served with support of identifying and utilizing their talents so they can prosper, not kept in poverty with handouts so they can be used as fodder for supporting greater amounts of control over the populace and used as cannon fodder by the Military-Industrial complex.
A permit that was meant to deal with ecological repercussions... is it really about disrespect, money, a... copyright angle, or all of the above?
The answer is yes, and it applies to virtually every government "permitting" process you can name that doesn't deal specifically with industrial development. It's already reached ludicrous proportions and it's only going to get worse. When they demand a permit (that you may or may not get) just to move a pile of dirt from one side of your residential yard to another, you know it's about more than some bogus "ecological repercussions" - that was just the foot in the door.
If you appear to be gay, than will increase your chances of being hired by me (gays don't have as many family distractions and can work longer hours).
So are you also more likely to hire men, because they won't be getting pregnant and needing time to have babies and care for them? Do you pass on older people due to similar lifestyle justifications?
laissez-fair economics do not work in a global market place.
And yet, it has, throughout history, produced the greatest prosperity for the greatest number of people than any other system in the world. Hell, it's what brought Europe out of the Middle Ages, during a time when the rulers jailed and killed people for vagrancy.
Ron Paul is a libertarian the same way Robber Barons where libertarians. You can't take whats mine, but I'm more important then you so I can take whats yours.
That's an odd view. What is Ron Paul trying to take away from you?
Real morals? What are "real morals"? Does that mean sacrificing the needs of your own children for a faceless bureaucracy that promises to help some strangers' children? I think that is what Rand was trying to say is truly the immoral idea. Yes, her terms are inflammatory - they are meant to incite. But when you see the bureaucracies spending more money on a single drone used to kill brown people in a foreign country than they do on feeding the poor in an entire city, it's understandable to feel that the "parasites" who are "clamoring" really are morally bankrupt.
Maybe you should look into it some then come back and let us know what you discover. I would have thought a libertarian would be into educating himself, of course I always forget that leading principle "do as I say, not as I do".
My own libertarian view is more like "I'll do what I want", where you get the idea that "do as I say, not as I do" is any principle that I espouse, I don't know. I think you're just being purposefully critical without really having anything to criticize.
This is a DISCUSSION board. I really did not expect to be called names like "idiot" and "obtuse" simply for asking a question. The reaction seems a little over-the-top. It's for that reason that I have done a little research. There are, it seems, a lot of fringe folks that promote Rand's ideas of objectivism and think it's the best thing since the writings of Plato, and there is another group of fringe folks that seem to view her ideas as dangerous and will wax poetic about how horrible Rand was as a person and describe her writings as everything from teen angst tripe to ramblings of drug-addled criminal.
I'm assuming the entire "hypocrite" argument is that Rand's view of government assistance is that it is evil and no one should ever use it, yet she herself took advantage of Social Security and Medicare late in life. But it seems according to Rand's own writing her viewpoint has not been articulated correctly. Her position on public welfare is stated in her article “The question of Scholarships,” published in The Objectivist, June 1966:
“Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others–the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it.”
Rand's record with respect to relying heavily on public assistance is very well-documented and well-established. That you continued a thread here with name-calling and not any actual research is, well, interesting.
First, let me state I am not a follower/fan/devotee of Rand or Objectivism, although I did read Atlas Shrugged many years ago. I have no agenda to defend her or her ideas, but because of the disproportionate reaction to my simple comment, I've decided to follow up a bit.
Not sure why it's incumbent on me to "research" something - I didn't offer a dispute, I simply asked what the controversy was. If you're annoyed that I didn't go read an Ayn Rand biography, the correct response is none at all, not berating me for asking for clarification.
Since you have at least provided a general description of the issue, I did a little research. It seems that Rand's actions are not, in fact, inconsistent with her philosophical writings. Her position on public welfare is stated in her article “The question of Scholarships,” published in The Objectivist, June 1966:
“Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of others–the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it.”
Now if you want to talk about something "interesting", look at all the comments on here following an apparently highly motivated agenda to discredit this (long dead) person and everything she said. It's almost like there is a concerted effort to ensure that those ideas are not discussed, like they are dangerous to the status quo and need to be suppressed from any kind of critical examination.
Thanks for at least answering the question instead of berating me for wondering what the source of the controversy was.
I really don't see this as much of an issue, though. I mean, it would be like being opposed to random murders, and supporting the execution of serial killers. That's not hypocritical, it's justice. You can be opposed to government confiscation of earnings of labor for support of a ponzi scheme, and still realize that your only recourse for reclaiming your earnings is to make a claim. That is, you can be opposed to a system and still work within the system to change it.
No, I'm not. Since you didn't bother to check who you were responding to and you don't seem to any more about her than the fact she wrote some books (philosophy is something of an aggrandisement don't you think?), I guess I'll just assume you're an idiot.
Is that all she did the whole time she was alive or are you being purposefully obtuse? Think I'll assume the latter.
You're the one that claimed she was a hypocrite. AFAIK what she "did" was write novels and books on her philosophy. Since you didn't bother to explain your criticism, I guess I'll just assume it's unjustified.
...it doesn't actually look like Paul is guilty of anything but refusing to accept a settlement that was unreasonable in the first place.
"You want this one? You can have it for free - but this one over here we've added a shit-ton of value to so we want some compensation (below free-market rate IMO) for it."
Doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to me, even ignoring the fact that RP likes to tell people that he's something close to a pure libertarian.
How do you arrive at the judgement that $250,000 is "below free-market rate"??
Some skeptics like Richard Muller didn't dispute the climate change's basic premise. He just didn't think there was enough evidence to draw a conclusion. With more evidence (including some he gathered himself), he has reversed his position.
Slashdot Mirror
So you would prefer to remove government from the equation and leave society to the direct control of the wealthy and well-connected families and individuals at the top?
Straw man. I suppose you would prefer to remove private enterprise from the equation and have the government confiscate all property and means of production, to be ruled by well-connected families and individuals at the top?
We'll agree that the USA doesn't get it right nowadays, but that simply means we should fix the government, not aim for perpetual anarchy and right of strength.
No need for the anarchy straw man. I'll just prop up my totalitarian state straw man and tell you we should fix the government, not aim for total government control over all rights and property.
1. What is an overall tax rate that does not qualify as "overly burdensome"?
Wrong question, as you know. The burden has nothing to do with the rate, but with the code. If you're middle income, you work from 1/3 - 1/2 of your time for the government. If you're wealthy, you can pay no taxes at all, or get tax credits for NOT growing crops on the 1200 acre estate you had no intention of growing crops on, hire tax accountants to take advantage of other benefits, or if you're really well-connected you can get a lot of funding from the treasury to create jobs in other countries.
2. Your claim that "we had all of that before 1913" seems questionable:
And yet it's true, so you simply tried moving the goal posts. Most of the "solutions" you mention after 1913 were to address problems that didn't exist before then, and speculating that the federal government HAD to have 20% of all the private income to address them is pure speculation. There was plenty of welfare before the welfare state, but it was done VOLUNTARILY (and much more efficiently) by philanthropists. Your default assumption is that every problem requires government to solve it. Mine is that most problems are a result of government, including much of the pollution problem (the vast majority of EPA super-sites military bases). We even had plenty of pure scientific research, but you seem to think that requires a government committee. Social Security was a government solution to a problem created by government. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913, and it bankrupted the country by 1929. The VA still does a lousy job of taking care of veterans, but it solved the problem of the actual military services being burdened with caring for servicemen, like they should have done. Don't even get me started on Lyndon Johnson's horrible policy decisions. You seem fond of SS, but entirely forgiving of Johnson for raiding it. And OSHA is nothing but another tool for targeting political opponents, like the IRS has now admitted to being. What did they do for me when I was unable to work do to RSI? Nothing. Useless waste of money that I contributed to for 20 years and then told me "tough shit".
We were much better off before people started relying on the benevolence of faceless bureaucracies.
You mean 1861? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1861
No, I mean 1913. The 1861 tax was temporary (it was repealed the following year), a failure for revenue generation (it was allowed to expire in favor of tariffs, which generated revenues more reliably), and in 1895 SCOTUS declared the provisions taxing income from property were illegal. Also, it didn't pay for any of the things the OP mentioned - it was a temporary tax used only for killing 700,000 Americans.
So taxing income from anything except wages was actually illegal until the 16th Amendment was ratified. The people went along with ratification because it would "always only affect the very wealthy".
That's what the warlords told their slaves, and what the kings told their serfs, what the Aztecs told the parents of the children they sacrificed. It's the old argument from tyrants that it's for the "good of the people" that people must suffer. The suffering is never for the rulers, of course.
How amusing that the changes you seek would destroy social mobility and send us right back to the days of feudalism that you're so desperate to avoid, where the poor live only at the charity of the rich. Your sig is well-earned.
It's telling that you think that, because it is entirely wrong. Social mobility has been declining in the US in direct correlation with the size and power of the federal government. We are living in a subtle form of elitist control, a collaboration between big business and government implemented by wealthy and well-connected families and individuals at the top of both the corporate boards and the government bureaucracy. THAT system is what is returning us to the days of feudalism, and the only way to counter that is to reduce the size and scope of the federal government.
We had all of that before 1913, when the income tax was implemented. I never said I opposed taxation, and I don't. I do oppose overly burdensome taxation, and that is what we have now. Our current tax system is not based on generating revenue for the things you listed, it's designed for social engineering of the people, for promoting wars, providing privileges to certain corporations and industries, and general control of the populace.
How about the current citizens of NH that "don't get it"?
They should be very wary of those libertarians - they want to take over their government and then leave them alone.
In the USA, 99% of the means of production is owned by 0.1% of the population. Can't see why that is a priory any better.
And 92% of all statistics are made-up, including this one. Production in the US is still primarily driven by small business, not large corporations. The more regulations from Washington pile up, however, the easier it is for corporations to shut out any competition.
We have had unregulated markets before, this is not new. They have always resulting in absolute concentration of wealth at the cost of the liberty, health and safety of the common man.
I keep seeing this claim, but I have yet to see an actual example.
#1 - What do you say to the phrase "Taxation is the price we pay for civilized society"?
That's what the warlords told their slaves, and what the kings told their serfs, what the Aztecs told the parents of the children they sacrificed. It's the old argument from tyrants that it's for the "good of the people" that people must suffer. The suffering is never for the rulers, of course.
#2 - http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/hayek_on_social_insurance.html , what do you have to say?
Ezra Klein is disingenuously being deceptive. He quotes a Hayek passage that saying that a "comprehensive system of social insurance" can be supported as if Hayek was talking about health insurance, which is of course laughably false. He was talking about a limited safety net and government support for victims of natural disasters and the like. It's just BS. Hayek's grudging nod to the necessity of a bare-minimum welfare mechanism for the very neediest in society was not an endorsement of the kind of welfare state currently in evidence, with the IRS enforcing pages of Cadillac health benefits for any "qualifying" insurance, and taxing every implementation of any health provider or consumer up and down the line.
#3 - What other forms of liberty deserve protection? The right to vote? The right to participate in society? The right to have your money, and not your skin color or gender or sexual preference, determine whether or not you can patronize a business?
Individual liberties all deserve protection, collectivist liberties are justifications for tyrannical leadership. Voting, having a say in governance, and other "participation" in society is a necessary duty of individuals for any free society. The current overly burdensome government is a result of too little participation by too few. In the "society" that you seem to be advocating, that "money" isn't even "yours" - it's just an allowance from your ruling overlords.
Note that racism and other forms of discrimination was institutionalized by the very same government that you seem so willing to put in place as the sole arbiter of fairness. It was the moral and religious institutions in the United States that fought for the end to slavery and championed civil rights for all races, and they were opposed at every step by the federal government and the Democratic party. Governments do not have morals, and when they enforce the morals that the most vocal and powerful participants in the political process it's not always a good thing. I happen to think that even were it legal, no business in the US could survive today openly discriminating against people because of race or sexual orientation. And that's the way it should be. The people have the real power, after all, and government is simply a coercive force. They can force businesses to do things you like today, just as they forced liberty-minded people in the 19th century to return slaves to their owners.
Taxation to support a social safety net is not a violation of liberty. For an argument why, you might consider reading F.A. Hayek.
This is the same argument that has been going on for 400 years: collectivism vs. individual rights. Hayek was a Collectivist. He viewed the State as the ultimate authority, and preservation of the collective as the ultimate goal, even if individuals must suffer to preserve it. But that's a disastrous policy, because when rights of the collective are elevated above the rights of individuals, there are no barriers to tyranny. Ultimately, the opposing arguments (notably by John Locke) emphasized consent on the part of the governed, and preservation of each individual's natural rights. Governments must either respect and preserve the natural rights of the individual, or they are illegitimate and to be ignored or replaced.
Do your children exist in a vacuum? Those poor you seem to be trying to elicit sympathy for are the same ones you are accusing of being clamouring parasites. This is the total lack of insight that makes her whole philosophy so laughable.
Clamouring, yes, but they are simply tools of the corporate and NGO parasites that are the real beneficiaries of the theft of labor from the working class. And they would be better served with support of identifying and utilizing their talents so they can prosper, not kept in poverty with handouts so they can be used as fodder for supporting greater amounts of control over the populace and used as cannon fodder by the Military-Industrial complex.
A permit that was meant to deal with ecological repercussions ... is it really about disrespect, money, a ... copyright angle, or all of the above?
The answer is yes, and it applies to virtually every government "permitting" process you can name that doesn't deal specifically with industrial development. It's already reached ludicrous proportions and it's only going to get worse. When they demand a permit (that you may or may not get) just to move a pile of dirt from one side of your residential yard to another, you know it's about more than some bogus "ecological repercussions" - that was just the foot in the door.
If you appear to be gay, than will increase your chances of being hired by me (gays don't have as many family distractions and can work longer hours).
So are you also more likely to hire men, because they won't be getting pregnant and needing time to have babies and care for them? Do you pass on older people due to similar lifestyle justifications?
laissez-fair economics do not work in a global market place.
And yet, it has, throughout history, produced the greatest prosperity for the greatest number of people than any other system in the world. Hell, it's what brought Europe out of the Middle Ages, during a time when the rulers jailed and killed people for vagrancy.
Ron Paul is a libertarian the same way Robber Barons where libertarians. You can't take whats mine, but I'm more important then you so I can take whats yours.
That's an odd view. What is Ron Paul trying to take away from you?
People with real morals stand up for them.
Real morals? What are "real morals"? Does that mean sacrificing the needs of your own children for a faceless bureaucracy that promises to help some strangers' children? I think that is what Rand was trying to say is truly the immoral idea. Yes, her terms are inflammatory - they are meant to incite. But when you see the bureaucracies spending more money on a single drone used to kill brown people in a foreign country than they do on feeding the poor in an entire city, it's understandable to feel that the "parasites" who are "clamoring" really are morally bankrupt.
Maybe you should look into it some then come back and let us know what you discover. I would have thought a libertarian would be into educating himself, of course I always forget that leading principle "do as I say, not as I do".
My own libertarian view is more like "I'll do what I want", where you get the idea that "do as I say, not as I do" is any principle that I espouse, I don't know. I think you're just being purposefully critical without really having anything to criticize.
This is a DISCUSSION board. I really did not expect to be called names like "idiot" and "obtuse" simply for asking a question. The reaction seems a little over-the-top. It's for that reason that I have done a little research. There are, it seems, a lot of fringe folks that promote Rand's ideas of objectivism and think it's the best thing since the writings of Plato, and there is another group of fringe folks that seem to view her ideas as dangerous and will wax poetic about how horrible Rand was as a person and describe her writings as everything from teen angst tripe to ramblings of drug-addled criminal.
I'm assuming the entire "hypocrite" argument is that Rand's view of government assistance is that it is evil and no one should ever use it, yet she herself took advantage of Social Security and Medicare late in life. But it seems according to Rand's own writing her viewpoint has not been articulated correctly. Her position on public welfare is stated in her article “The question of Scholarships,” published in The Objectivist, June 1966:
Rand's record with respect to relying heavily on public assistance is very well-documented and well-established. That you continued a thread here with name-calling and not any actual research is, well, interesting.
First, let me state I am not a follower/fan/devotee of Rand or Objectivism, although I did read Atlas Shrugged many years ago. I have no agenda to defend her or her ideas, but because of the disproportionate reaction to my simple comment, I've decided to follow up a bit.
Not sure why it's incumbent on me to "research" something - I didn't offer a dispute, I simply asked what the controversy was. If you're annoyed that I didn't go read an Ayn Rand biography, the correct response is none at all, not berating me for asking for clarification.
Since you have at least provided a general description of the issue, I did a little research. It seems that Rand's actions are not, in fact, inconsistent with her philosophical writings. Her position on public welfare is stated in her article “The question of Scholarships,” published in The Objectivist, June 1966:
Now if you want to talk about something "interesting", look at all the comments on here following an apparently highly motivated agenda to discredit this (long dead) person and everything she said. It's almost like there is a concerted effort to ensure that those ideas are not discussed, like they are dangerous to the status quo and need to be suppressed from any kind of critical examination.
Thanks for at least answering the question instead of berating me for wondering what the source of the controversy was.
I really don't see this as much of an issue, though. I mean, it would be like being opposed to random murders, and supporting the execution of serial killers. That's not hypocritical, it's justice. You can be opposed to government confiscation of earnings of labor for support of a ponzi scheme, and still realize that your only recourse for reclaiming your earnings is to make a claim. That is, you can be opposed to a system and still work within the system to change it.
No, I'm not. Since you didn't bother to check who you were responding to and you don't seem to any more about her than the fact she wrote some books (philosophy is something of an aggrandisement don't you think?), I guess I'll just assume you're an idiot.
Cute. So both of you are full of shit.
Is that all she did the whole time she was alive or are you being purposefully obtuse? Think I'll assume the latter.
You're the one that claimed she was a hypocrite. AFAIK what she "did" was write novels and books on her philosophy. Since you didn't bother to explain your criticism, I guess I'll just assume it's unjustified.
Much like Ayn Rand supporters justifying her actions.
I'm confused by this. Are objectivists ideologically opposed to writing novels?
...it doesn't actually look like Paul is guilty of anything but refusing to accept a settlement that was unreasonable in the first place.
"You want this one? You can have it for free - but this one over here we've added a shit-ton of value to so we want some compensation (below free-market rate IMO) for it."
Doesn't seem terribly unreasonable to me, even ignoring the fact that RP likes to tell people that he's something close to a pure libertarian.
How do you arrive at the judgement that $250,000 is "below free-market rate"??
There are shenannigans here.
Well this really explains the methodology of the whole thing. Should be +5, "the rest of the story".
Some skeptics like Richard Muller didn't dispute the climate change's basic premise. He just didn't think there was enough evidence to draw a conclusion. With more evidence (including some he gathered himself), he has reversed his position.
Wrong, it was not a "reversal". His position never really changed.