Submitted by: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
When I started as a college student about 50 years ago I took the Sociology I course as a required subject. There is little I remember from that course and less I remember about the instructor, except for his introductory words on the first day of class. To paraphrase him he said: “You will be taking a lot of courses in what are called the Social Sciences. Approach them all, including mine, with skepticism because they really aren’t science courses like those you’ve learned as a high school student. They will spend a lot of lecture time though trying to prove they are truly scientific, don’t believe them”. His clear meaning was that although the Social Sciences try to operate as if they are using the scientific method of experiments/research to prove theories, most of the work done is skewed to prove the theory of choice by those doing the research. In the five decades since that lecture my own experience and reading has taught me how true the advice from that long forgotten Sociology instructor is.
The social science that has my attention at the moment is Economics. I’ve read many an economist, from all points on the political spectrum and frankly while I favor those such as Krugman and Baker, I take most of what they say as opinion, rather than scientifically determined truth. Yes I’ve even read “Freakonomics” by Levitt and Dubner and the follow-up “Superfreakonomics” and while they were good reads I see them as not only bad science, but a conflation of economics with other social sciences that is superficial at best. This is really the problem with many economists and their theories. They presume to divine human behavior via the prism of economic theory. In the end their proofs are merely retrofitting their pre-judgments. That brings me to the “Austerity” movement which has hampered the recovery from the economic “depression” brought on by the wars and tax reductions of the Bush years, while it has also caused a crisis worldwide through its imposition upon many nations. The foundation research that has justified this “Austerity” movement came from two Harvard Professors: Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. A University of Massachusetts student Thomas Herndon found that their work was filled with mathematical errors in their research spreadsheets. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/reinhart-rogoff-austerity-research-errors_n_3094015.html Their spreadsheets were their “proofs” that economic austerity promotes economic recovery and this theory, long held by many economists, is the basis for the imposition of austerity onto so many Nation’s economies and is the source of bitter national debate in our own. Though I will present some overview and links amplifying “austerity’s” false assumptions, my interest is in presenting my view on why the powers that be have imposed this doctrine, whose effects fall squarely upon 99% of the people of these nations, leaving the wealthiest unscathed.
Thomas Herndon with others published a paper about Reinhart/Rogoff’s findings stating this:
“ The new paper, by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, set out to reconstruct the findings of an influential 2010 paper by Reinhart and Rogoff, called “Growth In A Time Of Debt.” Reinhart and Rogoff, both of Harvard, claimed that economic growth slowed fairly dramatically for countries whose public debt crossed a threshold of 90 percent of gross domestic product.
The problem is that other economists have been unable to recreate Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings. Herndon, Ash and Pollin now say they were able to do so — but only by leaving out big, important pieces of data.
Using the same spreadsheet that Reinhart and Rogoff used for their research, Herndon, Ash and Pollin found that “Growth In A Time Of Debt” was built around a handful of significant errors. Correcting for those errors changes the findings dramatically: Average GDP growth for high-debt countries jumps from negative 0.1 percent to 2.2 percent.”
What we see then is that calculation “errors” showed that GDP growth for high debt countries actual increased rather than decreased. Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) have been arguing that debt decreases GDP as the rationale for austerity and their argument seems not only unproven, but wrong. It gets worse.
The Harvard economists have argued that mistakes and omissions in their influential research on debt and economic growth don’t change their ultimate austerity-justifying conclusion: That too much debt hurts growth.But even this claim has now been disproved by two new studies, which suggest the opposite might in fact be true: Slow growth leads to higher debt, not the other way around.
In a post at Quartz, University of Michigan economics professor Miles Kimball and University of Michigan undergraduate student Yichuan Wang write that they have crunched Reinhart and Rogoff’s data and found “not even a shred of evidence” that high debt levels lead to slower economic growth. And a new paper by University of Massachusetts professor Arindrajit Dube finds evidence that Reinhart and Rogoff had the relationship between growth and debt backwards: Slow growth appears to cause higher debt, if anything.
As you can see from the chart from Dube’s paper below, growth tends to be slower in the five years before countries have high debt levels. In the five years after they have high debt levels, there is no noticeable difference in growth at all, certainly not at the 90 percent debt-to-GDP level that Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper made infamous. Kimball and Wang present similar findings in their Quartz piece.
This contradicts the conclusion of Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” which has been used to justify austerity programs around the world. In that paper, and in many other papers, op-ed pieces and congressional testimony over the years, Reinhart And Rogoff have warned that high debt slows down growth, making it a huge problem to be dealt with immediately. The human costs of this error have been enormous.
Even after University of Massachusetts graduate student Thomas Herndon found Reinhart and Rogoff’s work included errors and that their 2010 paper was missing important data, the researchers stood by their ultimate conclusion: that growth dropped off significantly after debt hit 90 percent of GDP. They claimed that austerity opponents like Paul Krugman have been so so rude to them for no good reason.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/30/reinhart-rogoff-debunked_n_3361299.html
What is so infuriating about R&R is the destruction that follows in the wake of there now debunked theories. The unemployment in Europe is has reached record high levels high levels, countries like Greece and Spain have rioting in the streets and a new neo Nazi movement is gaining popularity throughout Europe. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/eurozone-unemployment-record-high_n_3364881.html The cost in human suffering is incalculable, but these fatuous academic asses are not concerned with people, they are concerned with their reputations and they are concerned with catering to wealth. Their theories, rather than being the result of real research and experiment, are in effect self-fulfilling prophecies. This is NOT science; it is overweening egotism in tandem with uncaring self interest. This tale, however, gets worse. Huffington Pos contributor: Mark Gongloff wrote this article on Friday: “Austerity Fanatics Won’t Let Mere Economics Stop Them From Thinking They’re Winning” in it he writes:
“Like Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who hid on an island in the Philippines for 30 years refusing to believe Japan had lost World War II, austerity fanatics are never going to admit their failure. Instead, they are going to keep pushing the policies that are making millions of people in Europe and the United States miserable.
The latest example of their denial is a piece by Michael Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, entitled “Austerity And Its Discontents.” He declares that, far from being shamed by the recent discovery of errors in influential research by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, austerity fans have recently gained “the upper hand” in the global argument over austerity.
Rosen argues that Reinhart and Rogoff’s many loud rebuttals to their critics helped give austerians the “intellectual high ground.” He ignores that, in fact, Reinhart and Rogoff’s rebuttals have only compounded their errors. He also ignores that further research has debunked Reinhart and Rogoff utterly, revealing that their biggest mistake was in confusing the cause-effect relationship between high debt and growth. It turns out, contra Reinhart and Rogoff, that there is no evidence that high debt causes slow growth — in fact, the opposite might be true.
But then the austerians have never really needed the intellectual high ground. Their phobia of government debt is based mainly on the idea that debt is just bad because of course it has to be. It is bad when people take on a lot of debt, ipso facto the same thing is bad for government. We must eat our spinach, not our dessert!
Rosen is absolutely right when he points out that Germany, and the American Enterprise Institute, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Michael Kinsley, and the many, many other long-time fans of austerity have only redoubled their efforts to push austerity measures in the wake of the Reinhart-Rogoff debunking and re-debunking. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/austerity-failure-fanatics_n_3367787.html?ref=topbar
Now that I’ve presented the situation to you at least from my side of the fence, you can make up your minds about austerity. While I agree with many of the conclusions delivered by the writers quoted above my slant on it all is somewhat different. I believe that all economic theories and political theories, despite their validity, mask what is truly going on in our world today. It is easy of course to compare the call for austerity by conservatives under Democrats and the out of control spending and debt run up in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations. This comparison would lead one to believe there is fiscal hypocrisy at the bottom of this and that is true. However, the fiscal hypocrisy exist as much among Democrats as Republican’s as Max Baucus proved in his terms as Senator. Bill Clinton cut government to balance the budget. He aided in the erasure of Smoot Hawley and he hurt American jobs by signing NAFTA and CAFTA. President Obama has likewise played the fiscal conservative card, while complaining it has been forced on him. He has even put cuts of Social Security and Medicare on the table, although neither is related to the national debt.
What is happening here is the result of the wealthiest people and the largest corporations becoming international entities. The rise of the multi-national could well herald the decline and fall of the nation state. From the perspective of the “Haves” it makes perfect sense. Why be bound by the laws of a particular nation, when you can break free and roam the world as you please? Truly, to these multi-nationals and the people behind them, the world is their oyster. The only problems they have are government regulation, taxes and those pesky workers who want more wages. The solution is to bring the 99% to a level slightly above starvation. This ensures that they will work for any amount that helps them put some food on the table. It necessitates that social assistance programs be destroyed so the peasants will have no choice but to seek shelter from devastation at some low paying job that keeps them little above subsistence.
Imagine yourself as one of the Super Rich, or as the CEO of a huge multinational corporation. My guess is that most of them see themselves as extraordinary people, chosen by fate or God to be in their exalted positions. They are able to go anywhere in the world on a whim. They don’t have one palatial home they have five, some in the world’s greatest Cities and others in the world’s most beautiful places. They don’t have one luxury car they have twenty collectibles and a fleet of limousines to take them place to place, flanked by bodyguards. While it’s true some wealthy eschew these outward signs, usually it is done as some sort of reverse snobbery, like the Kennedy penchant for driving Oldsmobiles, or J.B. Hunt driving to work every day in an old Chevy, with a paper bag lunch prepared by his wife.
The rich are not like your and me and moreover they know it. The truth is austerity is one more step on the road toward worldwide feudalism. Our wealthy class has helped to plot this out and they are served by people like Reinhart and Rogoff as courtiers and henchmen. They are leading us to a chaos they believe will result in solidifying their hold on the world and their eventual Nobility. However, when chaos descends on society through the discontent of so many, even wealth might not be protection against the violent psychopaths that gain control. That’s what I think about austerity, what do you think?
Apropos of the subject, one of my all-time favorite Thomas Frank quotes:
And then the analysis:
George Orwell openly and frankly analyzed England’s class system under extreme economic duress in the 1930s. Many Americans today seem to think that they, as somehow “exceptional,” can just ignore their own class system as if it doesn’t exist and cannot erupt in outright fascism if they just close their eyes and pretend that it won’t.
To date, the ruling corporate oligarchy and its two right-wing political factions (the so-called “Democrats” and “Republicans”) think that they can wage an endless, phony, vicarious “war” against the powerless but world-threatening Abu Emmanuel Goldstein for the real but unacknowledged purpose of waging top-down class war against America’s own downwardly dropping (formerly middle class) proles.
George Orwell belongs to the ages, but Thomas Frank does a pretty good job of detailing the real and all-too-ugly condition of corporate oligarchy in America today.
As promised (or threatened) as a supplement to George Orwell’s analysis of social stratification and conflict under economic stress — i.e, “austerity, — from Thomas Frank’s What’s the matter with Kansas:
What he said.
Mike S.,
I knew that you would understand the thrust of my citation from Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. In no way did I mean to imply otherwise. I quoted Orwell at length for the benefit of others who might not have your background in the sociological and psychological literature.
I also knew that the “American exceptionalists” would object, claiming that what Orwell said of English social classes — more openly and frankly admitted by the English — could not possibly apply to America over the past sixty years or so. Nonsense. Americans notoriously suppose themselves somehow exempt from the laws of nature applicable to other peoples, even as their behavior consistently refutes their ideological parochialism. I could have quoted from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling or Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas? and One Market Under God for many other relevant examples of “austerity” and its effects on social stratification in American life. But I’ll get to those later. Orwell just got to the heart of the matter first and most eloquently. So I chose to begin with him. It usually pays to do that.
As an addendum to the example I gave above related to our own youth in the 1960s, millions of us young men wanted no part of the so-called “War in Vietnam.” This meant, among other things, that we quite naturally wished success upon any who tried to bring that hated disaster to an abrupt end. We considered Jane Fonda a total babe in Barbarella and Cat Ballou and wished her and the so-called “hippies” all the luck in the world. Whenever one of the right-wing fascist tools of the ruling corporate oligarchy tried to turn me against Jane Fonda and the “unpatriotic” anti-war protesters, I would retort:
“Oh, yeah! Sure! I want Jane Fonda and those protesters to fail so that the war will go on and I’ll get sent to Vietnam to get my balls blown off for the ruling corporate oligarchy! What use could I ever have for my own balls? How stupid of me! I get your point now! How could I ever have missed it? Damn all those people who want to stop the war before I can get to Vietnam and get my balls blown off for nothing! Curse them!
Oh, yeah. Sure. It really all happened just the way you say, Five-Deferment-Dick and Deputy Dubya. Sure it did.
I remember coming home from Vietnam to read where Army Air Force General Chuck Yeager (who first broke the sound barrier) had said to some magazine interviewer: “Those boys in Vietnam just had something missing in their character.”
Oh, yeah. Sure, General Chuck. I have a really lousy character because I survived your brain-dead debacle and came home with both my balls still attached. Of course, upon further reflection, I realize that I should have come home without my balls so that puss-gut “patriots” like you wouldn’t call me a “loser.” Oh, the sting of your contempt, General Chuck! How it makes me wish that I had not won the war the day I got my young ass out of it. Sure.
I served in the San Francisco Bay area off and on over a period of two years and I never had any “hippies” spit on me for going to Vietnam. I can say, on the other hand, that I did have a WWII “hero” spit on me for coming back — in a way that somehow left him feeling vicariously just a little let down about something or other. Like I @!#$%&*!# care.
The ruling corporate oligarchy tried to turn us working class cannon fodder against precisely those of our fellow citizens who most cared about us and wanted to save us from getting our balls blown off for nothing. Unfortunately, it worked in too many cases, mostly for the reasons that Orwell explained. It didn’t work in my case, though. And it didn’t work in millions of other cases. And the betrayed and traumatized veterans coming home from Vietnam II and Vietnam III (i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan) know exactly what I mean. Somehow, I don’t think trying to turn them against Jane Fonda and the “hippies” will work.
Michael,
Those that view veterans through the lens of jingoistic hagiography demean them and dehumanize them, seeing them as symbols and not as human beings.
Bron: That definition of determinism is, in my opinion, an extremely egotistical stance. It assumes we know everything about how things happen. We do not. That is why I pointed out the instances in the past when we knew something was happening we didn’t understand.
That is true today, the vast majority of physicists believe quantum mechanics and general relativity are mutually exclusive, and QM is probably right and GR is probably wrong, but they have no idea how to proceed from there. String theory, for example, is increasingly considered a dead end. In general, physics is not understood at its most basic level; even finding the Higgs boson hasn’t helped us in that regard; we do not know what Dark Matter is (or if it exists at all) and we do not know what Dark Energy is (if it exists at all). A significant number are looking at inflation as a metaphor more than an event; even because of the Higgs that completes the standard model: There is no room in the standard model for the “inflaton,” the hypothetical particle that existed for a trillionth of a trillionth of a second in order to provide the anti-gravity expansion of the big bang. (Something I do not believe happened anyway).
In the face of this ignorance, freely admitted by most physicists, it is egoism to believe we understand enough about physics to claim all things are either deterministic or completely random (which, btw, Gene, would also put the knuckles to “free will,” if decisions are ultimately not a choice.)
As a scientist, I am okay with an answer of “we don’t know.” I don’t know how free will arises, which is something I define as being able to choose a path into the future by an action. Things may look deterministic to us, but that doesn’t mean they actually are. Is Roger Penrose correct, are the microtubules that pervade our neurons actually quantum devices that can process wave functions and choose the one we wish to collapse? Maybe, they are the right size, and we do not know their function.
But “I don’t know” is good enough for me: I see the effects of free will in my life, it has obviously been exploited by evolution to enhance survival, so I believe it exists, even if we cannot yet explain it. When science can explain the function of every atom in the brain and physics has come to an end with a final theory of everything that predicts everything perfectly, then I might be swayed, but until then, I regard conclusions of determinism as just more evidence of our ignorance of physics and neural biology. It can’t be right.
Mike,
True enough. And it’s intimately tied to the the issue of legalism and the existence of free will. It has been posited that whether free will exists or not that we should treat it as real for society’s sake in the pursuit of justice because the benefits of justice to a society far outweigh any harm should free will prove to be a contrivance of consciousness.
Gene,
I agree about the need to exist as if free will is resl, whether or not it’s ultimately true. Belief in it is the glue thst binds a society. The opposite is just another way of saying ” the devil made me do it”.
As an American example of the above divide-and-rule principle that I know you remember from our youth in the 1960s, Mike: working-class kids found themselves sucked up in the Army draft or forced to enlist in one of the other military services while the sons of the privileged oligarchy and upper middle class got a pass. Yet anyone who protested this unfair conscription and stupid, vainglorious “war” found themselves beaten half to death by rampaging mobs of “hard hat” construction workers: the very working-class people whose sons would suffer and die for an ideological crusade that benefited no one but the privileged ruling oligarchy.
As Orwell said: “when the pinch came, nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies.”
The same applies to the self-styled “gun patriots” who fantasize about themselves as some sort of “last line of defense” against government tyranny. Since they have shown no sign to date of halting the US government’s relentless march towards tyranny over us — always under the banner of “war” (against something or other) — I claim that when the pinch comes, the US government will simply point them at their “undeserving” “freeloading” neighbors and quietly order them to “fire.” They will gladly obey. The US government does not in the least fear the self-styled “gun patriots.” The US government counts on them because the cynical ruling corporate oligarchy understands utterly what Ambrose Bierce meant when he defined “patriotism” as “combustible rubbish, ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.” If only the designated combustible rubbish understood the same meaning of that malignant misnomer.
As Orwell said: “It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready made Fascist party.”
So when “austerity” breeds the predictable “ready made Fascist party,” which it already has in many countries, the ruling corporate oligarchy will know precisely whom to aim it at. See the recently deceased (and rather short-lived) “Occupy Movement” for just one example.
“When in the course of human events …”
dMichael,
We are of the same age working class males. You were csught in the draft, I was rejected by the luck of having the beginnings of a bad heart and as in so much gain and loss go arm in arm. You were facing the beast of war and I faced the far less dangerous one facing tjose in the Movement. By the time I was draft eligible I already knew the score in this country. My greatest fear of going to war ironically was I didn’t believe I could mske it out of basic training alive!, much less face the terror of war. Bowing to authority has never sat well with me and I figured the trwiners would mark me for death. In different ways we were both exposed to the sham snd pretence of our country and in the end we are better for it. We’ve both succeded well in life becase we adhered to our own personsl standsrds. Having been so close ti it I’ve msde my piece with expectations thst will nevrr be, but I fear for my children and grandchildren as life deteriorates for all but an insulated few. When I was on the verge of desth 2 1/2 years aho I keeped repeating to myself “Do not go grntly into the dark, I haven’t snd I won’t. Peace to you.
michael murry:
how does the social stratification of English society in the first half of the 20th century have anything to do at all with the American psyche? We were and still are for the most part a meritocracy, where it is possible to rise above your station in life at birth. In fact most Americans rise above their birth class.
Contrary to what many here believe, it happens often. I think it has stopped happening because of the size of government and the amount of taxes they take from us. The rich dont take nearly 4 trillion out of the economy, they provide nearly 2 trillion to government along with the 2 trillion provided by those in the bottom 80% +/-.
Government which takes that sort of money out of the hands of the people is the problem.
Come on, look at Robin Hood. The people were destitute because the King was taxing the p*ss out of them.
Bron,
I don’t believe in determinism because it’s the type of idea that leads to a dead end. Even if it’s the way things are so what, how does it help humans to get through life?
Bron,
Not as an answer for Mike, but for one thing, determinism is contrary to quantum mechanics. Reality isn’t set moving into the future, it’s a probability matrix, but reality is set in the past by the collapse of the wave function. What was, is, but what will be is undetermined until it is observed (although in some cases it may be probabilistically predictable).
Mike S.,
Regarding your discussion of “austerity,” consider two paragraphs from The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell’s study of working-class English coal miners in 1937:
Consider the above as context for further discussion about the use of economic “austerity” as a political wedge dividing lower social classes on the basis of petty cultural differences while pitting them against each other economically so as to keep the ruling corporate oligarchy blissfully on top where it has always assumed it belonged by “divine right.”
Michael M,
Although Orwell writes it out so well, there is little there that I wasn’t aware of, or didn’t believe. There is so many nuances to social status that I feel It is impossible tp covey them in the space of a blog. I’m not as gifted a writer as you. I make up for my writing skill by adding passion and honesty to it, though as you might surmise not everyone thinks that of me. Part of being a good writer and especially as in your case a good poet is economy of words. Lacking that I don’t always fully explain the nuances of my thought. I fully agree with the context you give to the discussion of austerity. Growing up in the lower middle class economically, I was lucky to have very intelligent parents. Taking my cues from them I was a voracious reader at an early age. My reading and the vocabulary it gave me allowed me to be rather fluid classwise in my life socially. However, my roots and loyalty remain with the people as always and I never sold out when the opportunities came my way.
Mike Spindell:
Why not? re determinism.
tony c:
then we actually have something in common, we agree on a fundamental. Who would have thought?
tony c:
here is a good definition:
“Determinism is the theory that everything that happens in the universe—including every thought, feeling, and action of man—is necessitated by previous factors, so that nothing could ever have happened differently from the way it did, and everything in the future is already pre-set and inevitable. Every aspect of man’s life and character, on this view, is merely a product of factors that are ultimately outside his control.”
So what I was refering to is that any action we take is the result of our biology which is based on previous events. Which to some extent is true, we have an evolved brain which is wired to allow us to think about the future and take actions which will benefit us.
Bron: Then determinism is ridiculous. We ARE slaves to our biology in the physical sense, if your heart muscle ruptures and dies no amount of willpower or positive thinking will pump blood to your brain. If you are born with a defective immune system incapable of chelating heavy metals from your bloodstream, then lead and mercury will accumulate in your brain and interfere with signaling there.
But all of evolution speaks against determinism as a general philosophical matter in determining what typical healthy humans do.
Specifically, we can see that evolution has selected for intelligence, sight, hearing, and sophisticated olfactory processing numerous times in many species, often independently inventing it many times (some geneticists estimate sight has been invented from scratch at least a dozen times). There is only one reason for evolution to do that, intelligence and sight (remote sensing and tracking), hearing and olfactory provide information about the environment that makes a difference in survival and reproduction.
Sight, hearing and smell provide the data, integrated by intelligence to provide a decision, and good decisions lead to survival and offspring.
Only the ability to “choose a future” explains the existence of the complexity of our senses and brains (or animals senses and brains in general). That is the only way they make a difference. Any claim they are predestined goes against the laws of entropy.
I do not need to know precisely how there can be free will (in the prosaic sense of being able to choose whether or not to take an action) to believe that we have free will. Just like I do not need to know the formulas describing gravity in order to see and believe in gravity, and Darwin and many scientists after him did not need to know about genetic inheritance to believe in evolution, and before we knew about fusion, scientists did not have to know about fusion to believe that somehow the sun was providing enormous amounts of heat by some means other than any form of combustion with which they were familiar.
The evidence for free will, for being able to make choices that lead to different outcomes, is all around us. Any scientific reductionism that denies it is based on a flawed understanding of science, I don’t care how prominent the speaker is. We don’t know how the brain works, we do not have a unified theory of physics that never fails, and therefore we cannot reduce the question of free will to anything we can be certain about.
I do not believe the future is pre-defined, I do not believe our decisions are random. The two billion years of evolution of senses and intelligence itself speaks against that idea; those complex abilities evolved for a reason, and the reason is to help us choose our future (in the literal sense; the future ranges from one second from now to hundreds of years from now).
I’m no fan of determinism and no fan of the “Selfish Gene” theory either.
Gene H:
I am well aware of that. But thank you for bringing it up.
tony c:
determinism is the current philosophical “fad”. People say the science is proving we are slaves to our biology.
Sex does not equate with romance as a genre, Bron. Sex equates with erotica, a totally different proposition stylistically. On a technical level, Rand’s works can be fairly characterized as romantic.
Bron: Determinism or free will,
Why is that the choice? I don’t see “determinism” anywhere on the horizon. As a professional, I advise against putting any money you can’t afford to flush down the toilet on your version of free will; the chances of that happening are about one in a billion.
Mike Spindell:
you are wrong, Howard Roark cared nothing for money, it was his architecture he cared about. He would have been happy making a modest amount of money but doing the work he loved. In fact he gave up commisions if he wasnt able to design a building how he wanted to do it.
Howard Roark was not motivated by money.
There were only a few sex scences in Atlas Shrugged.
But I do agree that the philosophy is in need of a formal analysis which is starting to happen.
Determinism or free will, which will it end up being? I am putting my money on free will.
Are there no debtor prisons for their kind?
Bron: I doubt you can tell me anything for a “fact” about what Ayn Rand truly thought; and my reference was to sociopaths (even real-life psychopathic thrill killers) which in her writing she admired as being “free.” In her fiction she presents as heroes the sociopathic, and justifies their selfishness as heroic instead of despicable. In her talks she explicitly justifies selfishness to the point of letting people die if their survival does not provide any clear benefit to her; it is sociopathic to put a transactional value on human life like that.
Bron: The more regulation you have, the more the sociopaths can take. An honest man doesnt need regulations to chart his behavior.
Then the obvious extension of this logic is that we do not need any laws at all, because the more laws we have, the more the sociopaths can harm us. So we can just do away with laws against murder, theft, rape, fraud and enslavement; they do no good! They only help those that only care about themselves!
Honest men do not need such laws, they would not murder, steal, rape, defraud or enslave anybody!
Can’t you see how ridiculous that logic is? Laws are not there to restrain honest men, they are there to threaten dishonest men, dishonorable men, and sociopaths that are only restrained by real-world negative consequences of their actions. A smart sociopath commits crime only when the probable reward significantly outweighs the probable risk.
And if punishment for breaking laws is real, then that threat restrains the sociopath, and crimes they would have committed are not committed, and the victims they would have created remain unvictimized. That is why we pay taxes, to increase the probability we will remain non-victims.
Of course fools without any realistic imagination fail to see that invisible benefit of something not happening, they fail to realize the extent to which their children, family are still alive, not enslaved, and their bank accounts are not empty, all because of victimizations that did not happen because they pay taxes to enforce the laws and give at least the reasonably intelligent sociopaths reasons to choose less criminal routes to satisfy their selfish urges.
So fools without imagination think their taxes are wasted, when the waste factor is really comparable (or even less than) the waste factors typical of any large organization (corporate, church or charity).
Bron: A sociopath doesnt value his life, he just doesnt want to die. Bernie Madoff was probably a sociopath, look how well his life turned out.
For 90% of his adult life Bernie lived like a billionaire on stolen money. It is a mistake to focus on the last few years of any life and conclude they were miserable or unsuccessful; the moment of death is not what defines a life, or whether it was enjoyed. On average, Bernie’s life was far better and richer than he deserved, at the expense of others. Sociopaths value their own life above all else. “Reputation” is about what others think of them, and they do not care what others think of them. A dead son? He cares about himself, he probably thinks his son was weak and flawed.
Bron: You will never understand the Aynish as long as you live.
I understand the Aynish pretty well, it is you who will never understand what Ayn Rand was trying to accomplish, because you are too enamored of her message of selfishness to see it for what it is, an illogical subterfuge of redefinition and circular logic attempting to justify “selfishness,” the core of her sociopathy, so she could make money from it and escape vilification for it.