Thread: Ayn Rand
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Unread 04-22-2010, 09:17 PM   #9 (permalink)
Beebs
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Your friend seems pretty contradictory Blonde; if you randomly read a short selection from there it stands about a 50% chance of looking like he is trying to be socialist but he tries to shoe-horn his ideas into being about personal freedom. Any good and coherent thoughts he have seem to be quite by accident; for him to claim that his thoughts line up with Ayn Rand 95% of the time is just downright insulting to her.

This general idea of considering successful people "evil fat cats" and what have you, it is just tired and annoying; you can't talk about wanting freedom in the objectivist sense and then talk about how horrible it is that people spend money to advertise, the two go hand in hand. Same for special interests really; people use that term as a horrible slander, in reality it is the most effective voice for many free market ideals.

His bit on taxes seems to be pretty close to right, not particularly eloquent, but much better than the rest of his ramble.

The idea that the upper class is overtaxing the middle class is just baffling, first off it is factually hard to reconcile with the fact that the top 5% of earners pay half of all taxes while the bottom 50% pays something like 3%. The people voting for the insane tax rates are not the people actually making money, that is quite clear.

It isn't the productive people of the world who vote for socialism, it is those who wish to take what those people have earned, those who want to buy votes by what boils down to armed robbery of the productive members of society to pay off the moochers.

He keeps harping on how easy it would be to get rid of the justice system; forgetting for a moment the problems that brings for peoples personal freedoms and liberty, it just reeks of naivety in terms of application. If you look at things like the drug business or protection/extortion shakedowns, you will realize that certain people are always going to become quite powerful and become at least as oppressive as any police force.

The statement that it is "never" in anybodies best economic interest to go to war again shows a pretty naive understanding.

Oh god, he uses the word "sheeple," is he 12? It is increasingly hard to take this guy even remotely seriously.
More than likely this is just his flavor of the week in terms of personal belief, I'm sure fairly soon he will stop performing coat hanger abortions on Objectivism and go back to being really pissed off at the cop at school who caught him smoking.

Next he moves on to talking about how what the government calls "regulation" is bad for business, which along with being an affront to personal freedom it certainly is. While he is talking about business there seems to be an undercurrent talking about how businesses are too big, that only physical production is real business, and things of that nature, maybe I am reading too much into it though. If he is trying to say that modern business, that isn't necessarily based on making "things" or physical goods, is bad, it is just another example of saying he wants freedom but not actually meaning it.

The guy quite clearly doesn't have any real understanding of what he is talking about, just a bunch of random statements that don't really fit together and don't actually fit the ideals he claims he supports.
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