https://wiki.objectivismonline.com/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=GreedyCapitalist&feedformat=atomObjectivism Wiki - User contributions [en]2024-03-19T09:47:24ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.39.2https://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hierarchy&diff=9361Hierarchy2013-09-25T13:05:45Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Created page with "{{stub}} A hierarchy (in Greek ''hieros'', sacred, and ''arkho'', rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things. Hierarchy is a subset of context. Human knowledg..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{stub}}<br />
<br />
A hierarchy (in Greek ''hieros'', sacred, and ''arkho'', rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things. <br />
<br />
Hierarchy is a subset of [[context]]. Human knowledge is hierarchical, because higher-level abstractions depend on lower-level knowledge, all the way down to perceptual evidence. For example, in the simple case of the conceptual chain from the higher concept "furniture" to "coffee table":<br />
<br />
<center>'''Furniture [Abstract from Abstraction] -> Table [Concept] -> Coffee Table [Percept]'''</center><br />
<br />
<br />
{{E_Nav}}<br />
<br />
[[Category:Epistemology]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=9360Main Page2013-09-13T12:26:34Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>{|style="width:100%;margin-top:+.7em;background-color:#fcfcfc;border:1px solid #ccc;text-align:center;"<br />
|style="width:56%;color:#000"|<br />
<h1>Welcome to the Objectivism Wiki!</h1><br />
<br />
The purpose of this site is to create a hierarchical, user-contributed reference on the philosophy of Objectivism. You can contribute by visiting our [[Help:Guide to style|Guide to Style]] and clicking "Edit" on the left of any of the [[Special:Statistics|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}]] articles or begin a new page by clicking green links.<br />
<br />
<b>Note: registration has been disabled to prevent spam. Please email [http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showuser=1 DavidV] (heroic@gmail.com) to request an account.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
<center><div style="width:50%;"><span style="font-size:28px;">'''[[What is Objectivism|What is Objectivism?]]'''</span><br />
<br />''"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." -'''[[Ayn Rand]]'''</div></center><br />
<br />
<center><h2>Branches of Objectivism</h2></center><br />
{| id="AutoNumber1" style="border: none; text-align:center; " width="100%"<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff;" rowspan="2" colspan="2" width="43%" height="31" |<br />
<big>[[Metaphysics]]</big><br />''The study of the universe and its nature''<br />'''[[Axioms]]''': [[Existence]], [[Consciousness]], [[Identity]]<br />'''[[Corollary]]''': [[Causality]], [[Primacy of Existence]]<br />'''[[Reality]]''': [[Primacy of Existence]], [[Existents]], <br />the [[Metaphysically Given versus the Man Made]]<br />
| style="border: none" width="9%" | &nbsp;<br />
| style="border: none" width="9%" |<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff" rowspan="2" colspan="2" width="42%" height="30" |<br />
<center><big>[[Epistemology]]</big><br />''The study of knowledge''<br />'''[[Senses]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Consciousness]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Volition]]'''<br>'''[[Concepts]]''': [[Unit]], [[Concept-Formation]]<br>'''[[Knowledge]]''': [[Context]], [[Hierarchy]]<br>'''[[Reason]]''': [[Certainty]], [[Truth]], the [[Arbitrary]]<br>'''[[Objectivity]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Emotions]]'''</center><br />
|-<br />
| style="border: none; border-top: 1px solid; border-right: 1px solid" width="9%" height="50%" |<br />
| style="border: none; border-top: 1px solid" width="9%" height="50%" |<br />
|-<br />
| width="34%" height="19" |<br />
| style="border-right: 1px solid" colspan="2" width="17%" height="19" |<br />
| colspan="2" width="17%" height="19" |<br />
| width="34%" height="19" |<br />
|-<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff; padding:5px;vertical-align:top;" width="34%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Ethics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of virtue''</small><br />'''[[Man|Man's Nature]]''': [[Life]], [[value|Values]],<br>[[Reason]] as the primary means of survival<br>'''[[Egoism]]''': Selfishness as requiring [[principle|principles]]<br>'''[[Rationality]]''' as the basic virtue<br>'''[[Virtues]]''': [[Independence]], [[Integrity]], [[Honesty]],<br>[[Justice]], [[Productiveness]], [[Pride]]<br>'''[[Happiness]]''': [[Self-esteem]], Virtue as [[practical]], [[Sex]] </center><br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff; vertical-align:top;padding-top:5px;" colspan="4" width="35%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Politics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of social systems and nature of government''</small><br />'''[[Rights]]''': [[Government]], [[Initiation of Force]]<br>'''[[Capitalism]]''': Contrast to [[Collectivism]], [[Statism]]<br>[[Anarchism]], [[Environmentalism]]</center><br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff;vertical-align:top;padding:5px;" width="34%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Aesthetics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of art''</small></center>[[Objectivist Recommendations]]<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<center><h2>Other Topics</h2></center><br />
{|<br />
<!---To edit the contents of the boxes below, go to the Template links at the bottom of the current editing---><br />
|style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/AboutAR}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/OtherTopics}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/ConceptTs}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/Appendix}} <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
{|-<br />
|width="15%" bgcolor="#CCFFCC" style="border:1px solid #000000;padding:1em;padding-top:0.5em;"|<br />
<br />
<h3 id="lang">Notes:</h3><br />
* The topics are based on the [http://www.peikoff.com/opar/contents.htm outline of OPAR]. Additional topics or page content suggestions are added after the colon.<br />
<br />
* There is now an edited version of the United States Constitution being reworked to conform to objectivism, the main page for the subproject is [[New constitution|here]] [[User:Crazynas|Crazynas]] 15:10, 4 Jul 2005 (CDT)<br />
<br />
* Please see [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_i18n documentation on customizing the interface] and the [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide User's Guide] for usage and configuration help.<br />
<br />
* My [http://quotes.rationalmind.net/ quote database] may be a useful source. --[[User:GreedyCapitalist|GreedyCapitalist]] 19:09, 22 June 2006 (CDT)<br />
<br />
*Other projects on this wiki include: [[Book Recommendations]], [[Movie Recommendations]], [[Introduction to Objectivist Dictionary]], [[Forum rules]], and [[ObjectivismOnline| About ObjectivismOnline.Net]]<br />
<br />
|}<br />
<br />
{| <br />
| style="background:white; color:blue" | <b> • {{LOCALTIME}} • {{LOCALDAYNAME}} • {{LOCALMONTHNAME}} {{LOCALDAY}}, {{LOCALYEAR}} • {{NUMBEROFUSERS}} members • {{NUMBEROFFILES}} files uploaded • {{NUMBEROFPAGES}} pages • {{NUMBEROFEDITS}} edits • </b><br />
|}<br />
<br />
__NOTOC__</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=9359Main Page2013-07-15T11:40:53Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>{|style="width:100%;margin-top:+.7em;background-color:#fcfcfc;border:1px solid #ccc;text-align:center;"<br />
|style="width:56%;color:#000"|<br />
<h1>Welcome to the Objectivism Wiki!</h1><br />
<br />
The purpose of this site is to create a hierarchical, user-contributed reference on the philosophy of Objectivism. You can contribute by visiting our [[Help:Guide to style|Guide to Style]] and clicking "Edit" on the left of any of the [[Special:Statistics|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}]] articles or begin a new page by clicking green links.<br />
<br />
<b>Note: registration has been disabled to prevent spam. Please email [http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showuser=1 DavidV] (heroic@gmail.com) to request an account.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
<center><div style="width:50%;"><span style="font-size:28px;">'''[[What is Objectivism|What is Objectivism?]]'''</span><br />
<br />''"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." -'''[[Ayn Rand]]'''</div></center><br />
<br />
<center><h2>Branches of Objectivism</h2></center><br />
{| id="AutoNumber1" style="border: none; text-align:center; " width="100%"<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff;" rowspan="2" colspan="2" width="43%" height="31" |<br />
<big>[[Metaphysics]]</big><br />''The study of the universe and its nature''<br />'''[[Axioms]]''': [[Existence]], [[Consciousness]], [[Identity]]<br />'''[[Corollary]]''': [[Causality]], [[Primacy of Existence]]<br />'''[[Reality]]''': [[Primacy of Existence]], [[Existents]], <br />the [[Metaphysically Given versus the Man Made]]<br />
| style="border: none" width="9%" | &nbsp;<br />
| style="border: none" width="9%" |<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff" rowspan="2" colspan="2" width="42%" height="30" |<br />
<center><big>[[Epistemology]]</big><br />''The study of knowledge''<br />'''[[Senses]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Consciousness]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Volition]]'''<br>'''[[Concepts]]''': [[Unit]], [[Concept-Formation]]<br>'''[[Knowledge]]''': [[Context]], [[Hierarchy]]<br>'''[[Reason]]''': [[Certainty]], [[Truth]], the [[Arbitrary]]<br>'''[[Objectivity]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Emotions]]'''</center><br />
|-<br />
| style="border: none; border-top: 1px solid; border-right: 1px solid" width="9%" height="50%" |<br />
| style="border: none; border-top: 1px solid" width="9%" height="50%" |<br />
|-<br />
| width="34%" height="19" |<br />
| style="border-right: 1px solid" colspan="2" width="17%" height="19" |<br />
| colspan="2" width="17%" height="19" |<br />
| width="34%" height="19" |<br />
|-<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff; padding:5px;vertical-align:top;" width="34%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Ethics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of virtue''</small><br />'''[[Man|Man's Nature]]''': [[Life]], [[value|Values]],<br>[[Reason]] as the primary means of survival<br>'''[[Egoism]]''': Selfishness as requiring [[principle|principles]]<br>'''[[Rationality]]''' as the basic virtue<br>'''[[Virtues]]''': [[Independence]], [[Integrity]], [[Honesty]],<br>[[Justice]], [[Productiveness]], [[Pride]]<br>'''[[Happiness]]''': [[Self-esteem]], Virtue as [[practical]], [[Sex]] </center><br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff; vertical-align:top;padding-top:5px;" colspan="4" width="35%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Politics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of social systems and nature of government''</small><br />'''[[Rights]]''': [[Government]], [[Initiation of Force]]<br>'''[[Capitalism]]''': Contrast to [[Collectivism]], [[Statism]]<br>[[Anarchism]], [[Environmentalism]]</center><br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff;vertical-align:top;padding:5px;" width="34%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Aesthetics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of art''</small></center>[[Objectivist Recommendations]]<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<center><h2>Other Topics</h2></center><br />
{|<br />
<!---To edit the contents of the boxes below, go to the Template links at the bottom of the current editing---><br />
|style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/AboutAR}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/OtherTopics}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/ConceptTs}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/Appendix}} <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
{|-<br />
|width="15%" bgcolor="#CCFFCC" style="border:1px solid #000000;padding:1em;padding-top:0.5em;"|<br />
<br />
<h3 id="lang">Notes:</h3><br />
* The topics are based on the [http://www.peikoff.com/opar/contents.htm outline of OPAR]. Additional topics or page content suggestions are added after the colon.<br />
<br />
* There is now an edited version of the United States Constitution being reworked to conform to objectivism, the main page for the subproject is [[New constitution|here]] [[User:Crazynas|Crazynas]] 15:10, 4 Jul 2005 (CDT)<br />
<br />
* Please see [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_i18n documentation on customizing the interface] and the [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide User's Guide] for usage and configuration help.<br />
<br />
* My [http://quotes.rationalmind.net/ quote database] may be a useful source. --[[User:GreedyCapitalist|GreedyCapitalist]] 19:09, 22 June 2006 (CDT)<br />
<br />
*Other projects on this wiki include: [[Book Recommendations]], [[Movie Recommendations]], [[Introduction to Objectivist Dictionary]], [[Forum rules]], and [[ObjectivismOnline| About ObjectivismOnline.Net]]<br />
<br />
|}<br />
<br />
__NOTOC__</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=9358Main Page2013-07-15T11:40:09Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>{|style="width:100%;margin-top:+.7em;background-color:#fcfcfc;border:1px solid #ccc;text-align:center;"<br />
|style="width:56%;color:#000"|<br />
<h1>Welcome to the Objectivism Wiki!</h1><br />
<br />
The purpose of this site is to create a hierarchical, user-contributed reference on the philosophy of Objectivism. You can contribute by visiting our [[Help:Guide to style|Guide to Style]] and clicking "Edit" on the left of any of the [[Special:Statistics|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}]] articles or begin a new page by clicking green links.<br />
<br />
<b>Note: registration has been disabled to prevent spam. Please email DavidV (heroic@gmail.com) to request an account.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
<center><div style="width:50%;"><span style="font-size:28px;">'''[[What is Objectivism|What is Objectivism?]]'''</span><br />
<br />''"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." -'''[[Ayn Rand]]'''</div></center><br />
<br />
<center><h2>Branches of Objectivism</h2></center><br />
{| id="AutoNumber1" style="border: none; text-align:center; " width="100%"<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff;" rowspan="2" colspan="2" width="43%" height="31" |<br />
<big>[[Metaphysics]]</big><br />''The study of the universe and its nature''<br />'''[[Axioms]]''': [[Existence]], [[Consciousness]], [[Identity]]<br />'''[[Corollary]]''': [[Causality]], [[Primacy of Existence]]<br />'''[[Reality]]''': [[Primacy of Existence]], [[Existents]], <br />the [[Metaphysically Given versus the Man Made]]<br />
| style="border: none" width="9%" | &nbsp;<br />
| style="border: none" width="9%" |<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff" rowspan="2" colspan="2" width="42%" height="30" |<br />
<center><big>[[Epistemology]]</big><br />''The study of knowledge''<br />'''[[Senses]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Consciousness]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Volition]]'''<br>'''[[Concepts]]''': [[Unit]], [[Concept-Formation]]<br>'''[[Knowledge]]''': [[Context]], [[Hierarchy]]<br>'''[[Reason]]''': [[Certainty]], [[Truth]], the [[Arbitrary]]<br>'''[[Objectivity]]''' <nowiki>|</nowiki> '''[[Emotions]]'''</center><br />
|-<br />
| style="border: none; border-top: 1px solid; border-right: 1px solid" width="9%" height="50%" |<br />
| style="border: none; border-top: 1px solid" width="9%" height="50%" |<br />
|-<br />
| width="34%" height="19" |<br />
| style="border-right: 1px solid" colspan="2" width="17%" height="19" |<br />
| colspan="2" width="17%" height="19" |<br />
| width="34%" height="19" |<br />
|-<br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff; padding:5px;vertical-align:top;" width="34%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Ethics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of virtue''</small><br />'''[[Man|Man's Nature]]''': [[Life]], [[value|Values]],<br>[[Reason]] as the primary means of survival<br>'''[[Egoism]]''': Selfishness as requiring [[principle|principles]]<br>'''[[Rationality]]''' as the basic virtue<br>'''[[Virtues]]''': [[Independence]], [[Integrity]], [[Honesty]],<br>[[Justice]], [[Productiveness]], [[Pride]]<br>'''[[Happiness]]''': [[Self-esteem]], Virtue as [[practical]], [[Sex]] </center><br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff; vertical-align:top;padding-top:5px;" colspan="4" width="35%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Politics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of social systems and nature of government''</small><br />'''[[Rights]]''': [[Government]], [[Initiation of Force]]<br>'''[[Capitalism]]''': Contrast to [[Collectivism]], [[Statism]]<br>[[Anarchism]], [[Environmentalism]]</center><br />
| style="border: 1px #c6c9ff solid; background-color: #f0f0ff;vertical-align:top;padding:5px;" width="34%" |<br />
<center><big>[[Aesthetics]]</big><br /><small>''The study of art''</small></center>[[Objectivist Recommendations]]<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<center><h2>Other Topics</h2></center><br />
{|<br />
<!---To edit the contents of the boxes below, go to the Template links at the bottom of the current editing---><br />
|style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/AboutAR}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/OtherTopics}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/ConceptTs}} || style="border-bottom:1px solid #c6c9ff;padding-bottom:10px;width:25%;vertical-align:top;" | {{MainPage/Appendix}} <br />
|-<br />
|<br />
|}<br />
<br />
<br />
{|-<br />
|width="15%" bgcolor="#CCFFCC" style="border:1px solid #000000;padding:1em;padding-top:0.5em;"|<br />
<br />
<h3 id="lang">Notes:</h3><br />
* The topics are based on the [http://www.peikoff.com/opar/contents.htm outline of OPAR]. Additional topics or page content suggestions are added after the colon.<br />
<br />
* There is now an edited version of the United States Constitution being reworked to conform to objectivism, the main page for the subproject is [[New constitution|here]] [[User:Crazynas|Crazynas]] 15:10, 4 Jul 2005 (CDT)<br />
<br />
* Please see [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_i18n documentation on customizing the interface] and the [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide User's Guide] for usage and configuration help.<br />
<br />
* My [http://quotes.rationalmind.net/ quote database] may be a useful source. --[[User:GreedyCapitalist|GreedyCapitalist]] 19:09, 22 June 2006 (CDT)<br />
<br />
*Other projects on this wiki include: [[Book Recommendations]], [[Movie Recommendations]], [[Introduction to Objectivist Dictionary]], [[Forum rules]], and [[ObjectivismOnline| About ObjectivismOnline.Net]]<br />
<br />
|}<br />
<br />
__NOTOC__</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Arbitrary&diff=9355Arbitrary2012-03-14T11:35:13Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>A true claim (see [[truth]]) is one where the evidence indicates that the claim describes reality. A false claim is one where the evidence indicates that the claim does ''not'' describe reality. An arbitrary claim is one lacking any evidence, which is therefore neither true nor false. Arbitrary claims are, strictly speaking, not part of epistemology since they are not derived from reason. However, they are treated under epistemology because outside Objectivism, they may be ''used'' as an invalid means of gaining knowledge (more typical, denying knowledge).<br />
<br />
A common arbitrary claim would be a statement like "There ''might'' be a tiny moon orbiting Earth -- you don't know that there isn't". Arbitrary statements are invalid as part of reasoning, and are widely used in denying the possibility of [[certainty]], typically by asserting that one does not know that the arbitrary claim is not false.<br />
<br />
An arbitrary claim is one that, by its nature, is outside the province of evidence, i.e. it is a claim for which no evidence can ever be generated. For instance, the claim that god exists is arbitrary, because god is defined as a being beyond man's comprehension; that which man cannot comprehend can never be proved or disproved.<br />
<br />
The assertion of an arbitrary claim proves nothing and creates no obligation to disprove it. It should simply be identified as arbitrary and ignored.<br />
<br />
<b>See also:</b><br />
<br />
[http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/arbitrary.html Arbitrary -- Ayn Rand Lexicon]<br />
<br />
{{E_Nav}}</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Mind-Body_Dichotomy&diff=9354Mind-Body Dichotomy2012-02-25T16:57:43Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>Objectivism rejects the mind-body dichotomy, holding that the mind and body are aspects (sets of attributes) of the conscious organism as a single, integral entity. Though this doctrine may sound like a stance in the philosophy of mind — a doctrine concerning the relationship between consciousness (mind) and brain (body) — it is not. Rather, it amounts chiefly to the assertions that (a) conscious organisms have both mental attributes and physical attributes, and (b) both kinds of attributes may participate in determining the causal powers of the conscious organism. Whether attributes of either kind, or their causal powers, can be reductively explained is a question for what Ayn Rand called "the special sciences" rather than philosophy. Objectivism rejects both Marxian materialism and Christian spiritualism (Marxists hold that the material factors have metaphysical priority over consciousness; Christian spiritualists hold that reality is fundamentally spiritual, a view declared heretical by Catholic and Orthodox doctrines.) Objectivism rejects both views: both physical attributes and mental attributes of conscious entities have identifiable (that is, measurable) values. Because existence is identity, both exist, and neither is more real than the other. Though this doctrine may entail the rejection of eliminativism, Objectivism does not include any specific ontological or scientific explanation of the relationship between mind and body in the philosophy of mind. (Harry Binswanger, a prominent Objectivist philosopher, argues in his lecture course, "The Metaphysics of Consciousness," in favor of substance dualism. He rejects not only eliminativism and materialism, but even the property dualism of David Chalmers and the emergentism of John Searle. Binswanger's view is controversial in Objectivist circles. Other Objectivists who have written on philosophy of mind, notably Eyal Mozes and Diana Hsieh, favor Emergentism.[3])<br />
<br />
== See Also ==<br />
*[[Volition]]<br />
*[[Consciousness]]<br />
*[http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/soul-body_dichotomy.html Ayn Rand Lexicon: Soul Body Dichotomy]<br />
<br />
[[Category:Metaphysics]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Principle&diff=9352Principle2012-01-09T06:33:35Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{stub}}<br />
<br />
<blockquote>A principle is "a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend." Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by a means of principles that one can set one's long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and achieve it.</blockquote>["The Anatomy of Compromise", CUI, p144]<br />
<br />
Some principles of Objectivism:<br />
<br />
*[[Existence|Existence exists.]]<br />
<br />
*[[Identity|The law of identity.]]<br />
<br />
*[[Consciousness|Consciousness is conscious.]]<br />
<br />
*[[Causality|The law of causality.]]<br />
<br />
*[[Primacy of Existence|"Primacy of existence."]]<br />
<br />
*[[Primacy of Consciousness|"Primacy of consciousness."]]<br />
<br />
*[[Fact|Facts]] are not "malleable."<br />
<br />
*No alternative to a [[fact]] of reality is possible or imaginable.<br />
<br />
*Consciousness has identity.<br />
<br />
*[[Volition|Volition.]]<br />
<br />
*The faculty of reason is the faculty of volition.<br />
<br />
*The unit must be appropriate to the attribute being measured.<br />
<br />
*[[Measurement omission|Measurement-omission.]]<br />
<br />
*The definitional principle is: wherever possible, an essential characteristic must be a fundamental.<br />
<br />
*[[Crow-epistemology|Crow-epistemology.]]<br />
<br />
*[[Unit-economy]].<br />
<br />
*Thinking, to be valid, must adhere to reality.<br />
<br />
*"Existence is Identity; Consciousness is Identification."<br />
<br />
*The law of contradiction.<br />
<br />
*Human [[knowledge]] on every level is relational.<br />
<br />
*[[Knowledge]] follows a necessary order.<br />
<br />
*[[Rand's Razor|Rand's Razor.]]<br />
<br />
*The [[arbitrary]] cannot be cognitively processed.<br />
<br />
*[[Mind-Body Dichotomy|Mind-body integration.]]<br />
<br />
*Life as the standard of value.<br />
<br />
<br />
In [[ethics]], principles for behavior are known as [[virtues]].<br />
<br />
[[Category:Ethics]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&diff=9071Main Page2010-01-03T17:33:35Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Reverted edits by Cloverman (Talk) to last revision by GreedyCapitalist</p>
<hr />
<div>{|style="width:100%;margin-top:+.7em;background-color:#fcfcfc;border:1px solid #ccc"<br />
|style="width:56%;color:#000"|<br />
Welcome to the Objectivism Wiki. The purpose of this site is to create a hierarchical, user-contributed reference on the philosophy of Objectivism. You can contribute by clicking "Edit" on the left of any of the [[Special:Statistics|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}]] articles or begin a new page by clicking green links.<br />
|}<br />
<br />
{| cellspacing="3"<br />
|- valign="top"<br />
|width="55%" class="MainPageBG" style="border: 1px solid #c6c9ff; color: #000; background-color: #f0f0ff"|<br />
<div style="padding: .4em .9em .9em"><br />
<h4><br />
*[[What is Objectivism|What is Objectivism?]]<br />
<br />
*1. [[Metaphysics]]<br />
**[[Axioms]]: [[Consciousness]], [[Identity]], [[Causality]], <br />
**[[Reality]]: [[Primacy of Existence]], [[Existents]], the [[Metaphysically Given versus the Man Made]]<br />
<br />
*2. [[Epistemology]]<br />
**[[Senses]]<br />
**[[Consciousness]]<br />
**[[Volition]]<br />
**[[Concepts]]: [[Unit]], [[Concept-Formation]]<br />
**[[Objectivity]]<br />
**[[Knowledge]]: [[Context]], [[Hierarchy]]<br />
**[[Reason]]: [[Certainty]], [[Truth]], the [[Arbitrary]]<br />
**[[Emotions]]<br />
<br />
*3. [[Ethics]]<br />
**[[Man|Man's Nature]]: [[Life]], [[value|Values]], [[Reason]] as the primary means of survival<br />
**[[Egoism]]: Selfishness as requiring [[principle|principles]]<br />
**[[Rationality]] as the basic virtue<br />
**[[Virtues]]: [[Independence]], [[Integrity]], [[Honesty]], [[Justice]], [[Productiveness]], [[Pride]]<br />
**[[Happiness]]: [[Self-esteem]], Virtue as [[practical]], [[Sex]]<br />
<br />
*4. [[Political Philosophy]]<br />
**[[Rights]]:[[Government]],[[Initiation of Force]] <br />
**[[Capitalism]]: Contrast to [[Collectivism]], [[Statism]], [[Anarchism]], [[Environmentalism]]<br />
<br />
*5.[[Aesthetics]]: [[Objectivist Recommendations]]<br />
<br />
*6.About [[Ayn Rand]]<br />
**''[[We The Living]]''<br />
**''[[Anthem]]''<br />
**''[[The Fountainhead]]''<br />
**''[[Atlas Shrugged]]''<br />
</h4><br />
<br />
*'''Appendix: Dichotomies:'''<br />
**[[Mind-body dichotomy]]<br />
**[[Rationalism]], [[Empiricism]]<br />
**[[Intrincisism]], [[Subjectivism]]<br />
**[[Totalitarianism]], [[Anarchism]]<br />
**[[Mysticism]] and [[Skepticism]]<br />
<br />
</div><br />
<br />
|-<br />
{|-<br />
|width="15%" bgcolor="#CCFFCC" style="border:1px solid #000000;padding:1em;padding-top:0.5em;"|<br />
<br />
<h3 id="lang">Notes:</h3><br />
* The topics are based on the [http://www.peikoff.com/opar/contents.htm outline of OPAR]. Additional topics or page content suggestions are added after the colon.<br />
<br />
* There is now an edited version of the United States Constitution being reworked to conform to objectivism, the main page for the subproject is [[New constitution|here]] [[User:Crazynas|Crazynas]] 15:10, 4 Jul 2005 (CDT)<br />
<br />
* Please see [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_i18n documentation on customizing the interface] and the [http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide User's Guide] for usage and configuration help.<br />
<br />
* My [http://quotes.rationalmind.net/ quote database] may be a useful source. --[[User:GreedyCapitalist|GreedyCapitalist]] 19:09, 22 June 2006 (CDT)<br />
<br />
*Other projects on this wiki include: [[Book Recommendations]], [[Movie Recommendations]], [[Introduction to Objectivist Dictionary]], [[Forum rules]], and [[ObjectivismOnline| About ObjectivismOnline.Net]]<br />
<br />
|}</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Concept&diff=9062Concept2009-09-09T00:55:41Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>A concept is a mental integration of a set of two or more [[existents]], which share the same characteristics. This has the effect of pulling together many existents under one mental unit rather than dealing with many existents individually. While any one existent is composed of many characteristics, concepts abstract away only some of the specific properties of concrete examples. Man [[concept formation|creates concepts]] by understanding relationships of similarity and difference observed between existents; the [[unit]] is the Objectivist "bridge between metaphysics and epistemology" (ITOE p. 7). The essential fact which needs to be grasped in creating and acquiring concepts is that every existent has an identity (a nature).<br />
<br />
Similarities and differences in an existent's nature, which man perceives, form the basis for assigning the existent to a particular concept. Similarities in terms of [[commensurable characteristics]] are the basis for the definition of a concepts, and since concepts stand for two or more concretes, it must be possible to differentiate one concrete from another one which is subsumed under the same concept: see [[measurement omission]].<br />
<br />
A [[concept]] is just such a classification: a mental "integration" of at least two existents that share a common attribute or set of attributes (perhaps in different measures or degrees), each of which is for this purpose regarded as a unit of the concept. Once a concept is formed, it is given a specific definition and assigned a word; thereafter, it can be treated almost as a perceptual object, containing (or otherwise linking to) a wealth of implicit knowledge that need not be held explicitly in consciousness.<br />
<br />
These concepts are formed by means of "[[measurement omission]]". Concepts are formed by isolating specific attributes of two or more similar concretes(such as tables, to use Rand's example), and omitting the particular measurements involved. The concept of table, therefore, is formed by isolating the attributes(Rand's "Conceptual Common Denominators") that constitute "table-ness"----ie, support(s) and a flat surface upon which items may be placed----and omitting the specific measurements involved; height, weight, color, number of supports, diameter of surface, etc. Once a concept is formed, it is defined by identifying its "essential" characteristic(s); that is, the characteristic or characteristics on which, within the context in which the concept is being formed, the most other characteristics depend.<br />
<br />
The reference to "context" here is crucial. Since every concept is formed in a specific context, every definition is therefore contextual. If concepts are properly formed, then even though additional knowledge may require changes to one's definitions, one's later definitions will not contradict one's earlier ones.<br />
<br />
What is the role of reason in this process? Reason consists in forming concepts through the use of logic, what Objectivism defines as "the art of noncontradictory identification".<br />
<br />
Objectivism denies that the proposition is the fundamental unit of knowledge, arguing instead that concepts themselves constitute the building blocks of knowledge. So, in their way, do percepts, which consist of the knowledge that something exists. Concepts, however, consist of knowledge of what exists.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== See also ==<br />
*[[Concept-Formation]]<br />
*[[Epistemology]]<br />
<br />
[[Category:Epistemology]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Concept_formation&diff=9061Concept formation2009-09-09T00:54:24Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>The first step in [[concept]] formation, called ''differentiation,'' is to isolate two or more things as belonging together, as ''units'' of the same class. Where many theories of concept formation hold that such isolation begins by noticing degrees of similarity, [[Objectivist philosophy|Objectivism]] holds that it starts by noticing degrees of differences. At the perceptual level, everything is different; however, somethings are more different from others. The difference between two tables, for instance, is less than the difference between a table and a chair. Because two tables are less different from one another when contrasted against a third object, we group them together as ''units,'' as members of a group of similar objects.<br />
<br />
[[Ayn Rand]] defines similarity as: ''the relationship between two or more existents which possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree.'' Similarity is a matter of [[measurement]]. Going back to the table versus chair example, the difference between tables is a [[quantitative]] one-we can easily ''stretch'' one table into another, so we call them similar. The difference between tables and chairs, on the other hand, is [[qualitative]], so we distinguish between these as belonging to another group. Of course, at a broader level, even the difference between tables and chairs is quantitative-with enough stretching and pulling one could turn a chair into a table as well. However, the point is that the table-to-table stretching is much less than the table-to-chair stretching, so we consider one quantitative and the other qualitative.<br />
<br />
The second step of concept formation, ''integration,'' is based on a process Ayn Rand called ''measurement omission.'' In this step, we combine or integrate the units into a new, single mental unit by [[eliding]] the quantitative differences between the two units. We retain the characteristics of the units, but we elide the particular measurements-on the principle that these measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity. For example, when forming the concept ''table'' we retain the distinguishing characteristics-a flat, level surface and supports-but omit the particular measurements of those features.<br />
<br />
Based on this two step process, Ayn Rand defined concepts as: ''a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristics, with their particular measurements omitted.''<br />
<br />
<br />
== Errors of concept formation ==<br />
Not all supposed concepts represent genuine knowledge. In order to constitute knowledge, concepts must be formed validly, in accordance with certain non-arbitrary rules which must be adhered to if we wish to reach valid conclusions. These rules include the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and causality, as well as various principles intended to prevent pseudoconceptual groupings of entities that are not genuinely or relevantly similar.<br />
<br />
Apparent concepts that are not formed in accordance with these rules or principles are considered "anti-concepts" and are said to represent failures of integration. A major concern of the Objectivist epistemology is the identification and avoidance of such "anti-concepts", which are regarded as mental monstrosities that do not succeed in referring to any external reality whatsoever. Objectivism also opposes what it calls "floating abstractions", or concepts formed without proper connection to their concrete foundations. In all cases, the application of "Rand's Razor" is warranted; this razor states that all concepts must be resolved into their irreducible primaries.<br />
<br />
It is also an error to identify a concept too fully with one of its referents, i.e., to fail to generalize properly. In the Objectivist view, one who is thus "concrete-bound" (i.e. whose thinking is fixed at the level of concrete entities) is unable to use concepts properly. To be concrete-bound is to fail to achieve a fully conceptual consciousness.<br />
<br />
Objectivism refers to any attempt to apply a concept outside its proper scope as "context-dropping." One form of context-dropping is considered a major and dangerous fallacy: the "fallacy of the stolen concept." The stolen concept fallacy consists of invoking a concept while denying the more fundamental concepts on which it depends. Much like the classical logical fallacy of "assuming what you are supposed to prove", the stolen concept fallacy is a fallacy of "assuming what you overtly deny."<br />
<br />
While many fallacies are mere errors worthy of no ethical attention, any deliberate commission of a rational error, or the deliberate refusal to abide by reason, is called "evasion" &mdash; evasion, that is, of reason. Evasion is considered grossly immoral by Objectivism, as it is a deliberate abdication of the capacities of the human person and a volitional desire to live at a subhuman level.<br />
<br />
== Errors of concept formation ==<br />
<br />
Not all supposed concepts represent genuine knowledge. In order to constitute knowledge, concepts must be formed validly, in accordance with certain non-arbitrary rules which must be adhered to if we wish to reach valid conclusions. These rules include the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and causality, as well as various principles intended to prevent pseudoconceptual groupings of entities that are not genuinely or relevantly similar.<br />
<br />
Apparent concepts that are not formed in accordance with these rules or principles are considered "anti-concepts" and are said to represent failures of integration. A major concern of the Objectivist epistemology is the identification and avoidance of such "anti-concepts", which are regarded as mental monstrosities that do not succeed in referring to any external reality whatsoever. Objectivism also opposes what it calls "floating abstractions", or concepts formed without proper connection to their concrete foundations. In all cases, the application of "Rand's Razor" is warranted; this razor states that all concepts must be resolved into their irreducible primaries.<br />
<br />
It is also an error to identify a concept too fully with one of its referents, i.e., to fail to generalize properly. In the Objectivist view, one who is thus "concrete-bound" (i.e. whose thinking is fixed at the level of concrete entities) is unable to use concepts properly. To be concrete-bound is to fail to achieve a fully conceptual consciousness.<br />
<br />
Objectivism refers to any attempt to apply a concept outside its proper scope as "context-dropping." One form of context-dropping is considered a major and dangerous fallacy: the "fallacy of the stolen concept." The stolen concept fallacy consists of invoking a concept while denying the more fundamental concepts on which it depends. Much like the classical logical fallacy of "assuming what you are supposed to prove", the stolen concept fallacy is a fallacy of "assuming what you overtly deny."<br />
<br />
While many fallacies are mere errors worthy of no ethical attention, any deliberate commission of a rational error, or the deliberate refusal to abide by reason, is called "evasion" &mdash; evasion, that is, of reason. Evasion is considered grossly immoral by Objectivism, as it is a deliberate abdication of the capacities of the human person and a volitional desire to live at a subhuman level.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Epistemology]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Concept_formation&diff=9060Concept formation2009-09-09T00:54:16Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>The first step in [[concept formation]], called ''differentiation,'' is to isolate two or more things as belonging together, as ''units'' of the same class. Where many theories of concept formation hold that such isolation begins by noticing degrees of similarity, [[Objectivist philosophy|Objectivism]] holds that it starts by noticing degrees of differences. At the perceptual level, everything is different; however, somethings are more different from others. The difference between two tables, for instance, is less than the difference between a table and a chair. Because two tables are less different from one another when contrasted against a third object, we group them together as ''units,'' as members of a group of similar objects.<br />
<br />
[[Ayn Rand]] defines similarity as: ''the relationship between two or more existents which possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree.'' Similarity is a matter of [[measurement]]. Going back to the table versus chair example, the difference between tables is a [[quantitative]] one-we can easily ''stretch'' one table into another, so we call them similar. The difference between tables and chairs, on the other hand, is [[qualitative]], so we distinguish between these as belonging to another group. Of course, at a broader level, even the difference between tables and chairs is quantitative-with enough stretching and pulling one could turn a chair into a table as well. However, the point is that the table-to-table stretching is much less than the table-to-chair stretching, so we consider one quantitative and the other qualitative.<br />
<br />
The second step of concept formation, ''integration,'' is based on a process Ayn Rand called ''measurement omission.'' In this step, we combine or integrate the units into a new, single mental unit by [[eliding]] the quantitative differences between the two units. We retain the characteristics of the units, but we elide the particular measurements-on the principle that these measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity. For example, when forming the concept ''table'' we retain the distinguishing characteristics-a flat, level surface and supports-but omit the particular measurements of those features.<br />
<br />
Based on this two step process, Ayn Rand defined concepts as: ''a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristics, with their particular measurements omitted.''<br />
<br />
<br />
== Errors of concept formation ==<br />
Not all supposed concepts represent genuine knowledge. In order to constitute knowledge, concepts must be formed validly, in accordance with certain non-arbitrary rules which must be adhered to if we wish to reach valid conclusions. These rules include the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and causality, as well as various principles intended to prevent pseudoconceptual groupings of entities that are not genuinely or relevantly similar.<br />
<br />
Apparent concepts that are not formed in accordance with these rules or principles are considered "anti-concepts" and are said to represent failures of integration. A major concern of the Objectivist epistemology is the identification and avoidance of such "anti-concepts", which are regarded as mental monstrosities that do not succeed in referring to any external reality whatsoever. Objectivism also opposes what it calls "floating abstractions", or concepts formed without proper connection to their concrete foundations. In all cases, the application of "Rand's Razor" is warranted; this razor states that all concepts must be resolved into their irreducible primaries.<br />
<br />
It is also an error to identify a concept too fully with one of its referents, i.e., to fail to generalize properly. In the Objectivist view, one who is thus "concrete-bound" (i.e. whose thinking is fixed at the level of concrete entities) is unable to use concepts properly. To be concrete-bound is to fail to achieve a fully conceptual consciousness.<br />
<br />
Objectivism refers to any attempt to apply a concept outside its proper scope as "context-dropping." One form of context-dropping is considered a major and dangerous fallacy: the "fallacy of the stolen concept." The stolen concept fallacy consists of invoking a concept while denying the more fundamental concepts on which it depends. Much like the classical logical fallacy of "assuming what you are supposed to prove", the stolen concept fallacy is a fallacy of "assuming what you overtly deny."<br />
<br />
While many fallacies are mere errors worthy of no ethical attention, any deliberate commission of a rational error, or the deliberate refusal to abide by reason, is called "evasion" &mdash; evasion, that is, of reason. Evasion is considered grossly immoral by Objectivism, as it is a deliberate abdication of the capacities of the human person and a volitional desire to live at a subhuman level.<br />
<br />
== Errors of concept formation ==<br />
<br />
Not all supposed concepts represent genuine knowledge. In order to constitute knowledge, concepts must be formed validly, in accordance with certain non-arbitrary rules which must be adhered to if we wish to reach valid conclusions. These rules include the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and causality, as well as various principles intended to prevent pseudoconceptual groupings of entities that are not genuinely or relevantly similar.<br />
<br />
Apparent concepts that are not formed in accordance with these rules or principles are considered "anti-concepts" and are said to represent failures of integration. A major concern of the Objectivist epistemology is the identification and avoidance of such "anti-concepts", which are regarded as mental monstrosities that do not succeed in referring to any external reality whatsoever. Objectivism also opposes what it calls "floating abstractions", or concepts formed without proper connection to their concrete foundations. In all cases, the application of "Rand's Razor" is warranted; this razor states that all concepts must be resolved into their irreducible primaries.<br />
<br />
It is also an error to identify a concept too fully with one of its referents, i.e., to fail to generalize properly. In the Objectivist view, one who is thus "concrete-bound" (i.e. whose thinking is fixed at the level of concrete entities) is unable to use concepts properly. To be concrete-bound is to fail to achieve a fully conceptual consciousness.<br />
<br />
Objectivism refers to any attempt to apply a concept outside its proper scope as "context-dropping." One form of context-dropping is considered a major and dangerous fallacy: the "fallacy of the stolen concept." The stolen concept fallacy consists of invoking a concept while denying the more fundamental concepts on which it depends. Much like the classical logical fallacy of "assuming what you are supposed to prove", the stolen concept fallacy is a fallacy of "assuming what you overtly deny."<br />
<br />
While many fallacies are mere errors worthy of no ethical attention, any deliberate commission of a rational error, or the deliberate refusal to abide by reason, is called "evasion" &mdash; evasion, that is, of reason. Evasion is considered grossly immoral by Objectivism, as it is a deliberate abdication of the capacities of the human person and a volitional desire to live at a subhuman level.<br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Epistemology]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=The_Fountainhead&diff=9058The Fountainhead2009-07-13T18:57:17Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''''The Fountainhead''''' is a [[1943 in literature|1943]] [[novel]] by [[Ayn Rand]] (ISBN 0452283760). The book was Rand's first major success and its [[royalties]] and [[film|movie]] rights made Rand famous and financially secure. The book was rejected by 12 [[publisher]]s before a young editor at the [[Bobbs-Merrill Company]] publishing house wired to the head office, "If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you". ''The Fountainhead'' was made into a [[Hollywood]] film in [[1949 in film|1949]], with [[screenplay]] by Rand herself. <br />
<br />
The book's title is a reference to a quote of Rand's: "Man's [[ego]] is the fountainhead of human progress."<br />
<br />
==The novel==<br />
<br />
==={{Spoiler}}===<br />
<br />
<br />
The hero is Howard Roark, a hard working, aspiring architect whose plans and goals are waylaid at every end by "the hostility of second-hand souls". His pleasure is in the act of creation, and his calm, reserve, and selfishness are woven together into a person Rand means for us to admire and emulate.<br />
<br />
The story is also about Dominique Francon, a woman torn between two loves -- not of men but of power, pleasure, and a self-dominance she grows to understand through her relationship with Roark. Roark and Dominique first see each other while the former is working in a quarry owned by the latter's father. He later comes to her home and rapes her, an event that leaves Dominique filled with a possessiveness for Roark that drives her into the arms of another man.<br />
<br />
Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul who raised himself by the bootstraps from the ghettoes of New York City, believes himself to be the highest of men. He has the power to do anything, command anything. Until, that is, he meets Roark, a man whom he helps to destroy. Wynand, after seeing a naked statue of Dominique sculpted by Steven Mallory, a friend of Roark's for one of his buildings, the Stoddard Temple, falls in love as much with the woman as the artistry of the statue. Dominique and Gail are married.<br />
<br />
There are many other characters like Henry Cameron, Roark's mentor who was destroyed by "the system"; Peter Keating, a colleague and friend of Roark whose only individuality is a direct reflection of others; Ellsworth Toohey, the man whose power is directly proportionate to the number of times he says he is unimportant.<br />
<br />
Cameron is a former architect who, at one time, enjoyed a period of prosperity. However, when his practice of originality becomes rejected in favor of reproducing classic architecture, his firm slowly dies and eventually becomes nonexistent; Cameron and Roark being its last employees. His philosophy in architecture is something that Roark has based his own philosophy on, to an extent, which is why, at the outset of the novel, Roark is so determined to work for him.<br />
<br />
===Major characters===<br />
<br />
====Howard Roark====<br />
<br />
Howard Roark is the hero of the novel, whom Rand portrays as a paragon of [[Objectivist philosophy|Objectivist]] ideals. He is an aspiring [[architect]] with a unique, uncompromising creative vision, which contrasts sharply with the staid and uninspired conventions of the architectural establishment. Roark takes pleasure in the act of creation, but is constantly opposed by "the hostility of second-hand souls" and those unwilling or afraid to recognize his creative ability. Roark serves as the basic mold from which the protagonists of Rand's other great novel, ''[[Atlas Shrugged]]'', are cast.<br />
<br />
====Dominique Francon====<br />
<br />
Dominique Francon is the heroine of the novel, described by Rand as "the woman for a man like Howard Roark". She is the daughter of a highly successful but creatively inhibited architect, and it is only through Roark that her love of power, pleasure, and self-dominance meets a worthy equal.<br />
<br />
====Gail Wynand====<br />
<br />
Gail Wynand is a powerful newspaper mogul who rose from a destitute childhood in the ghettoes of New York City to control the city's print media. While Wynand shares many of the character qualities of Roark, his success is dependent on public opinion, a flaw which eventually leads to his destruction. Rand describes Wynand as "a man who could have been".<br />
<br />
====Peter Keating====<br />
<br />
Peter Keating is also an aspiring architect, but is everything that Roark is not. Keating's creative abilities are miserably inadequate, but his willingness to build what others wish him leads to temporary success. He is subservient to the wills of others - Dominique Francon's father, the architectural establishment, his mother, even Roark himself. Keating is "a man who never could be, but doesn't know it", according to Rand.<br />
<br />
====Ellsworth Toohey====<br />
<br />
Rand describes Toohey as "a man who never could be, and knows it." Toohey is an architectural critic for Wynand's paper who uses his influence over the masses to hinder Howard Roark. Toohey is an unabashed collectivist, who styles himself as representative of the will of the masses. Having no true genius that such innovators as Roark possess, he makes himself excellent by manipulating the masses to believe that mediocrity is excellent. Toohey serves as the primary villain in the novel, and the gravest enemy of Objectivist ideals. Toohey is also the only character in the novel to have political goals. He is attempting to establish a Communist dictatorship in America by altering people's view of excellence; to destroy that which is great and spread the word that altruism is the ultimate ideal. This is put forward in one of his most memorable quotes: "Don't set out to raze all shrines -- you'll frighten man. Enshrine mediocrity, and your shrines are razed." It is in this that makes Ellsworth Toohey Ayn Rand's most evil villain; unlike the characters in ''Atlas Shrugged'', who are really just blindly following Toohey's religion, Toohey knows exactly what he is doing -- and why.<br />
<br />
===Plot synopsis===<br />
<br />
Keating and Roark attend the same prestigious architectural school. Keating graduates at the top of his class (with scornful assistance from Roark) and eventually becomes a prominent partner at the firm of Guy Francon, Dominique's father. Roark, however, is expelled from the school for refusing to allow the curriculum to dictate how he should create. Roark finds refuge with Henry Cameron, an architect who shares Roark's vision but whose career has been destroyed by his own unwillingness to compromise.<br />
<br />
While Keating and Francon find great success for a time reproducing [[classic]] [[architecture]], Roark labors in Cameron's dying firm. Cameron, defeated by society, soon dies, and despite some initial commissions, Roark is unable to sustain his own firm, and takes a job at a granite quarry. It is here that he catches the eye of Dominique Francon, who was impressed with Roark simply by virtue of his appearance and the way he carried himself, illustrating Rand's belief in [[love at first sight]]. Dominique later has Roark come to repair her fireplace (which she purposefully broke) in order to learn more about him. Dominique maneuvers Roark to her house, and allows Roark to [[rape]] her (this scene has been described as "rape by engraved invitation"), beginning their love affair. Roark soon receives an important commission and returns to New York.<br />
<br />
Keating has fallen in love with a plain young woman, but his mother convinces him to submit to Guy Francon's desire for Keating and Dominique to fall in love. Dominique badgers Keating into marrying her rather than the woman he truly loves, as a way of testing Roark. In addition, Dominique embarks on a quest to hinder Roark's professional career, because she feels that the world is unworthy of Roark's creations.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, through the machinations of Ellsworth Toohey, Roark receives a commission to build a temple to the human spirit. Roark creates a building with a nude [[statue]] of Dominique as its centerpiece, aware that he is falling into a trap. Toohey convinces Roark's client that the building is in bad taste and poorly designed, and when Roark refuses to alter the building he is sued for damages. Roark proudly refuses to offer any defense, and the money he loses in the suit is used to destroy the artistic integrity of his building.<br />
<br />
Again through the work of Toohey, Dominique and Gail Wynand meet, and Wynand falls in love with Dominique. Dominique, in an effort to further test Roark and to punish Keating, divorces Keating and marries Wynand. Wynand happens across photographs of the temple in its original form, and is aghast when he learns that his own newspaper played a crucial role in the building's destruction. Eventually, Roark meets Wynand, and the two men become friends, although Wynand is unaware of Roark's relationship with Dominique.<br />
<br />
The climax of the novel is precipated by Keating's desperate request for Roark's help in designing a government major housing project he wished to gain a commision for; Roark agrees to design the project, but on the condition that Keating not allow any changes to the design to take place. Keating makes a valiant effort, but is unable to prevent his associates from altering Roark's design, and the buildings aren't built according to Roark's wishes. Roark, in a calculated move, blows up the buildings. Dominique aided in the plan.<br />
<br />
With Roark soon to stand trial for the crime, Wynand insists that his papers defend Roark to the fullest. However, Toohey's influence prevails, and the popularity of Wynand's papers plunges precipitously. Eventually, Wynand allows his board of directors to override his policy by joining the public opinion that Roark is a criminal, a move he realizes is suicidal for his pride and personal integrity, and his papers regain a portion of their popularity. Shortly after his policy reversal he shuts down the Banner and liquidates a large part of his media empire. Following Wynand's betrayal of Roark, Dominique finally accepts the parameters of her love for Roark, and leaves Wynand.<br />
<br />
Roark, at his trial, expounds at length about why he acted as he did, explaining the role of the first-hander and the mind in achievement, essentially speaking in Rand's voice. Roark is acquitted. The novel ends with Roark accepting a final commission from Wynand to build a skyscraper, as a monument to who Roark is and who Wynand could have been.<br />
<br />
==Architectural theme==<br />
<br />
Ayn Rand dedicated this book to "the noble profession of architecture".<br />
<br />
Rand wrote the characters of Peter Keating and Howard Roark to be fictional analogues to figures in the real fight for modern architecture in the early 20th century. <br />
<br />
Keating builds in an eclectic/neo-classical/historical style and accommodates to changes suggested by others. Roark, however, searches for truth and honesty and tries to express these in his works. He takes an uncompromising stand when changes are suggested in his buildings. This mirrors the trajectory of Modern architecture, with its origins from dissatisfaction with earlier trends, and its emphasis on individual creativity. <br />
<br />
The celebration of Roark's individuality can be seen in parallel with the eulogizing of modern architects as uncompromising and heroic "masters." It is likely that the character of Roark is based on the famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright - though Rand herself denied this.<br />
<br />
If Roark is Wright, then it is reasonable to propose that his nemesis Ellsworth Toohey is a composite of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, although the image of Toohey is a lot more blatantly negative, and it is shown that he is aware of this in a conversation he has with Peter Keating. In an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, Hitchcock and Johnson first lauded Wright as a precursor to what they dubbed the International Style, of the generally politically left-leaning Bauhaus architects. A few years later, they revised their view of Wright, seeing him as a "Romantic individualist".<br />
<br />
==Library of Congress dispute==<br />
<br />
As Ayn Rand's heir, Leonard Peikoff inherited many of Rand's manuscripts. During her lifetime, Rand had apparently made a comment at one point saying that she would donate her manuscripts to the Library of Congress upon her death, a bequeathal she later had reservations about.<br />
<br />
The Library of Congress had no reservations, though. They continued to pester Peikoff about the manuscripts, and even resorted to demanding that he present them to the library. He considered his options, but after a heart attack in July 1991, he decided to turn over the manuscripts as Rand's initial, though reserved, wish had been. He had his assistant box all of the manuscript pages except for two--the first and last pages of ''The Fountainhead''--which he had framed. In their stead, he had the pages photocopied so that the manuscripts would be "complete". An appraiser went through the manuscripts and notified the Library of Congress about the replacement pages, but the Library of Congress replied that it was of no consequence.<br />
<br />
Some years later, Peikoff held an interview in his home with a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, and when asked about the pages (which had been framed and hung on the wall of his office), Peikoff joked about having "stolen" them from the Library of Congress. This apparently went into the article, and not long after that the Library of Congress contacted Peikoff and demanded that he return U. S. Government property.<br />
<br />
After consulting with his lawyer, Peikoff determined that there was not much he could do about his situation. While perhaps he had a right to keep the papers and even though they were legally his (his argument is that he had never donated them to the library, so they had never been property of the U. S. Government), and even though he might win a lawsuit against the government, the process would be long and expensive. So he signed a capitulation agreement, but supplied the condition that the Library of Congress must come and retrieve the pages themselves. This retrieval was videotaped by a friend.<br />
<br />
Peikoff's personal narrative of the story and video of the manuscript pages' retrieval can be found on his website, [http://www.peikoff.com Peikoff.com].<br />
<br />
==Film version==<br />
<br />
The film made in 1949 is based on the book and stars [[Gary Cooper]] as Howard Roark, [[Patricia Neal]] as Dominique Francon, [[Raymond Massey]] as Gail Wynand and [[Kent Smith]] as Peter Keating. The film was directed by [[King Vidor]], with the screenplay written by [[Ayn Rand]].<br />
<br />
==External link==<br />
<br />
*[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/ ''The Fountainhead'' - the movie]<br />
*[http://www.atlassociety.com/membersonly/cox_the_literary_achievement_of_the_fountainhead.asp The Literary Achievement of The Fountainhead]<br />
* [http://jeffcomp.com/faq/parody The Fountainhead starring Skull Force], a parody.<br />
<br />
[[Category:1943 books|Fountainhead]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Axiom_of_Consciousness&diff=9042Axiom of Consciousness2009-03-31T16:06:59Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>The [[Axiom]] of Consciousness states that consciousness exists--in particular, that any assertion pertaining to reality implies the existence of a conscious entity making that assertion. For example, the assertion, "The sun is shining," implies the existence of a conscious entity that is claiming that the sun is shining, thus showing that consciousness exists. (This implication remains valid whether or not the assertion is true or false--in this case, whether or not the sun is actually shining.)<br />
<br />
As with any other axiom, any claim that the Axiom of Consciousness is false is immediately self-defeating: such a claim implies the existence of someone making that claim, which in turn implies that consciousness exists, validating the Axiom. The existence of consciousness is prerequisite to any assertion whatsoever.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Axiom]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Primacy_of_Existence&diff=9041Primacy of Existence2009-03-31T16:06:49Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>The first (primary) [[axiom]] of Objectivism: that [[reality]] is what it is, regardless of [[perception]] or desire (wishing does not make it so). The mind grasps the universe, it does not create it.<br />
<br />
In other words, ''Existence has primacy over consciousness.'' Contrast [[Primacy of Consciousness]].<br />
<br />
It is summed up by the expressions: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed" or "Wishing won't make it so."<br />
<br />
[[Category:Axiom]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar&diff=9033MediaWiki:Sidebar2008-12-21T01:07:08Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Undo revision 9032 by GreedyCapitalist (Talk)</p>
<hr />
<div>* navigation<br />
** mainpage|mainpage<br />
** portal-url|portal<br />
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges<br />
** randompage-url|randompage</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar&diff=9032MediaWiki:Sidebar2008-12-21T01:06:39Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>* navigation<br />
** mainpage|mainpage<br />
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges<br />
** randompage-url|randompage</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar&diff=9031MediaWiki:Sidebar2008-12-21T01:06:14Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: New page: * navigation ** mainpage|mainpage ** portal-url|portal ** recentchanges-url|recentchanges ** randompage-url|randompage ** sitesupport-url|sitesupport</p>
<hr />
<div>* navigation<br />
** mainpage|mainpage<br />
** portal-url|portal<br />
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges<br />
** randompage-url|randompage<br />
** sitesupport-url|sitesupport</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9030Soundbites2008-12-21T00:45:05Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: moved to rationalmind</p>
<hr />
<div>#REDIRECT [http://wiki.rationalmind.net/wiki/Soundbites http://wiki.rationalmind.net/wiki/Soundbites]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9024Soundbites2008-10-07T10:58:06Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Capitalism */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Special Interests ==<br />
<br />
It’s ignorant to blame "special interests" for America’s problems.<br />
<br />
In a populist democracy such as we have now, every group that participates in the political system is a “special interest”, with the incentive and the possibility of using the political system to extract benefits for its members at the expense of other groups. The welfare and regulatory systems are two common means of coercively redistributing property and conferring monopoly benefits to various groups. Everyone in a democracy is constantly on the defensive against the possibility of organized groups extracting benefits from him, and on the offensive attempting to use the coercive power of the state to extract benefits from others.<br />
<br />
The existence of special interests is just a symptom of the disease: the growth of government power to a degree that allows those in power to violate our rights and steal our property for the benefits of their constituents. Populist “maverick” politicians who claim that they will “fight special interests” and “change the culture in Washington” are just attempting to subvert the power of the state to favor their particular constituency. Take away the power of the government, and you will remove both the incentive and the power of the “special interests.” <br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
>“If I am an auto manufacturer and the government has zero regulations on the auto industry and all industry related to the auto industry, why would I stop lobbying for a tax break to maintain jobs in a particular region?”<br />
<br />
By separation of economy and state, I mean a total separation, which means no income taxes. The vast majority of taxation is used to redistribute wealth from one group of individual to another. Take away the loot and you take away the incentive to lobby the state.<br />
<br />
>“Or if I was in the oil industry and I wanted to develop oil fields in a wildlife preserve, how would I go about doing that without a lobby or involving the government?”<br />
<br />
In a free, capitalist society, all property is private. It would be up to the owners of the preserve to decide how their property ought to be used.<br />
<br />
>“If I was Cargill, and I wanted to use my epic size to control the grain market (which they do) to maximize profit. Would government interference in my market manipulation be unwarranted?”<br />
<br />
Yes. Real monopolies have always been sustained with the help of government coercion. <br />
<br />
>“Then they followed up with handing out free copies of Windows anytime an alternate OP entered the market”<br />
<br />
Then they would probably go bankrupt. Do you think free copies of Windows would drive Apple and Linux out of existence? Why hasn’t Microsoft done that? It’s not illegal.<br />
People are not machines that consider a single variable – they consider more than just the short-term price when evaluating a product.<br />
<br />
>“A democracy has the right to control its markets.”<br />
<br />
A society is just a group of individuals. A group cannot posses any “rights” – only individuals have rights. A person does not acquire the right to coerce other people by virtue of declaring himself to be part of a group, no matter how large.<br />
<br />
>“Complete non-intervention of government in business is merely form of economic anarchy.”<br />
<br />
If an institution exists to protect individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) I would not call that anarchy, but a free, voluntary, rights-respecting society.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
As long as the public trusts governments to create regulatory agencies that control corporations for the "public good," the corporations will use that same power to against their competition. If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business. Let the courts decide when a product is or isn't safe, not a hidden lobbyist-beholden bureaucrat.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Fuel Prices ==<br />
<br />
<br />
Best way to lower gas prices is to create a free market for fuel and auto efficiency: <br />
<br />
* Allow new refineries to be built - the environmentalists have blocked them for 30 years.<br />
<br />
* Eliminate gasoline taxes, they are 30+% of the cost.<br />
<br />
* Scrap state-by-state fuel regulations, as they force expensive pipelines and mixtures to be delivered to different states<br />
<br />
* Get rid of odious automotive safety requirements, which add a ton of weight (literally!) to cars, lowering efficiency.<br />
<br />
* Allow the market to decide on the optimal emission filters, as current government-mandated filters dramatically reduce the power output (and thus efficiency) of cars.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== NASA ==<br />
<br />
<br />
If you spend enough money on research, you are bound to come up with something. However, what inventions will we never know about because the money to fund them was stolen from taxpayers? I am certain that private investors would have spent their own money more efficiently than bureaucrats doling it out to crony government contractors. We will never know what a free people could have invented in a free and competitive market.<br />
<br />
== Poverty ==<br />
<br />
Free markets inherently reduce poverty in two ways:<br />
<br />
1) They raise the standard of living for everyone.<br />
<br />
* Living standards in capitalistic Western countries have increased over sixty times since 1820 despite a tripling of the European population in the 18th century.<br />
<br />
* In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one.<br />
<br />
* The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.<br />
<br />
* If poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. However, the "poor" of 100,50, or 30 years ago and are gone in American in terms of living standards.<br />
<br />
<br />
2) The provide the incentive and possibility for the poorest members of society to become the wealthiest.<br />
<br />
* 80 percent of today's American millionaires are first-generation rich. <br />
<br />
* According to Internal Revenue Service tax data, 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile, by 1988.<br />
<br />
* Of the people who were in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988. <br />
<br />
* Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. <br />
<br />
In any case, income inequality is a desirable part of a free, prosperous society, since it indicates that the most productive members of societies have the freedom to succeed. An egalitarian society can only be equal in shared misery.<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Roads ==<br />
<br />
There are many innovations that might exist in a free market for transportation. I would not take even traffic lights for granted. One thing you see in other countries is a timer or progress bar on lights, so you know how many seconds you have until the next light. Perhaps it's preferable to use a traffic circle, more underpasses, or a totally different convention. There is also the opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to predictive traffic monitoring, so cars never get red lights. Adding special roads for computer-driven cars would eliminate lights entirely. All this is off the top of my head - we really have no idea what entrepreneurs could come up with.<br />
<br />
http://www.rationalmind.net/2005/01/05/private-roads/</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Law_of_Identity&diff=9021Law of Identity2008-09-18T08:07:09Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Redirecting to Identity</p>
<hr />
<div>#REDIRECT [[Identity]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9018Soundbites2008-05-26T22:10:57Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Net neutrality */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
>“If I am an auto manufacturer and the government has zero regulations on the auto industry and all industry related to the auto industry, why would I stop lobbying for a tax break to maintain jobs in a particular region?”<br />
<br />
By separation of economy and state, I mean a total separation, which means no income taxes. The vast majority of taxation is used to redistribute wealth from one group of individual to another. Take away the loot and you take away the incentive to lobby the state.<br />
<br />
>“Or if I was in the oil industry and I wanted to develop oil fields in a wildlife preserve, how would I go about doing that without a lobby or involving the government?”<br />
<br />
In a free, capitalist society, all property is private. It would be up to the owners of the preserve to decide how their property ought to be used.<br />
<br />
>“If I was Cargill, and I wanted to use my epic size to control the grain market (which they do) to maximize profit. Would government interference in my market manipulation be unwarranted?”<br />
<br />
Yes. Real monopolies have always been sustained with the help of government coercion. <br />
<br />
>“Then they followed up with handing out free copies of Windows anytime an alternate OP entered the market”<br />
<br />
Then they would probably go bankrupt. Do you think free copies of Windows would drive Apple and Linux out of existence? Why hasn’t Microsoft done that? It’s not illegal.<br />
People are not machines that consider a single variable – they consider more than just the short-term price when evaluating a product.<br />
<br />
>“A democracy has the right to control its markets.”<br />
<br />
A society is just a group of individuals. A group cannot posses any “rights” – only individuals have rights. A person does not acquire the right to coerce other people by virtue of declaring himself to be part of a group, no matter how large.<br />
<br />
>“Complete non-intervention of government in business is merely form of economic anarchy.”<br />
<br />
If an institution exists to protect individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) I would not call that anarchy, but a free, voluntary, rights-respecting society.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
As long as the public trusts governments to create regulatory agencies that control corporations for the "public good," the corporations will use that same power to against their competition. If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business. Let the courts decide when a product is or isn't safe, not a hidden lobbyist-beholden bureaucrat.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Fuel Prices ==<br />
<br />
<br />
Best way to lower gas prices is to create a free market for fuel and auto efficiency: <br />
<br />
* Allow new refineries to be built - the environmentalists have blocked them for 30 years.<br />
<br />
* Eliminate gasoline taxes, they are 30+% of the cost.<br />
<br />
* Scrap state-by-state fuel regulations, as they force expensive pipelines and mixtures to be delivered to different states<br />
<br />
* Get rid of odious automotive safety requirements, which add a ton of weight (literally!) to cars, lowering efficiency.<br />
<br />
* Allow the market to decide on the optimal emission filters, as current government-mandated filters dramatically reduce the power output (and thus efficiency) of cars.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== NASA ==<br />
<br />
<br />
If you spend enough money on research, you are bound to come up with something. However, what inventions will we never know about because the money to fund them was stolen from taxpayers? I am certain that private investors would have spent their own money more efficiently than bureaucrats doling it out to crony government contractors. We will never know what a free people could have invented in a free and competitive market.<br />
<br />
== Poverty ==<br />
<br />
Free markets inherently reduce poverty in two ways:<br />
<br />
1) They raise the standard of living for everyone.<br />
<br />
* Living standards in capitalistic Western countries have increased over sixty times since 1820 despite a tripling of the European population in the 18th century.<br />
<br />
* In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one.<br />
<br />
* The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.<br />
<br />
* If poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. However, the "poor" of 100,50, or 30 years ago and are gone in American in terms of living standards.<br />
<br />
<br />
2) The provide the incentive and possibility for the poorest members of society to become the wealthiest.<br />
<br />
* 80 percent of today's American millionaires are first-generation rich. <br />
<br />
* According to Internal Revenue Service tax data, 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile, by 1988.<br />
<br />
* Of the people who were in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988. <br />
<br />
* Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. <br />
<br />
In any case, income inequality is a desirable part of a free, prosperous society, since it indicates that the most productive members of societies have the freedom to succeed. An egalitarian society can only be equal in shared misery.<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Roads ==<br />
<br />
There are many innovations that might exist in a free market for transportation. I would not take even traffic lights for granted. One thing you see in other countries is a timer or progress bar on lights, so you know how many seconds you have until the next light. Perhaps it's preferable to use a traffic circle, more underpasses, or a totally different convention. There is also the opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to predictive traffic monitoring, so cars never get red lights. Adding special roads for computer-driven cars would eliminate lights entirely. All this is off the top of my head - we really have no idea what entrepreneurs could come up with.<br />
<br />
http://www.rationalmind.net/2005/01/05/private-roads/</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9017Soundbites2008-05-06T01:26:01Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Roads */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
>“If I am an auto manufacturer and the government has zero regulations on the auto industry and all industry related to the auto industry, why would I stop lobbying for a tax break to maintain jobs in a particular region?”<br />
<br />
By separation of economy and state, I mean a total separation, which means no income taxes. The vast majority of taxation is used to redistribute wealth from one group of individual to another. Take away the loot and you take away the incentive to lobby the state.<br />
<br />
>“Or if I was in the oil industry and I wanted to develop oil fields in a wildlife preserve, how would I go about doing that without a lobby or involving the government?”<br />
<br />
In a free, capitalist society, all property is private. It would be up to the owners of the preserve to decide how their property ought to be used.<br />
<br />
>“If I was Cargill, and I wanted to use my epic size to control the grain market (which they do) to maximize profit. Would government interference in my market manipulation be unwarranted?”<br />
<br />
Yes. Real monopolies have always been sustained with the help of government coercion. <br />
<br />
>“Then they followed up with handing out free copies of Windows anytime an alternate OP entered the market”<br />
<br />
Then they would probably go bankrupt. Do you think free copies of Windows would drive Apple and Linux out of existence? Why hasn’t Microsoft done that? It’s not illegal.<br />
People are not machines that consider a single variable – they consider more than just the short-term price when evaluating a product.<br />
<br />
>“A democracy has the right to control its markets.”<br />
<br />
A society is just a group of individuals. A group cannot posses any “rights” – only individuals have rights. A person does not acquire the right to coerce other people by virtue of declaring himself to be part of a group, no matter how large.<br />
<br />
>“Complete non-intervention of government in business is merely form of economic anarchy.”<br />
<br />
If an institution exists to protect individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) I would not call that anarchy, but a free, voluntary, rights-respecting society.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
As long as the public trusts governments to create regulatory agencies that control corporations for the "public good," the corporations will use that same power to against their competition. If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business. Let the courts decide when a product is or isn't safe, not a hidden lobbyist-beholden bureaucrat.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Fuel Prices ==<br />
<br />
<br />
Best way to lower gas prices is to create a free market for fuel and auto efficiency: <br />
<br />
* Allow new refineries to be built - the environmentalists have blocked them for 30 years.<br />
<br />
* Eliminate gasoline taxes, they are 30+% of the cost.<br />
<br />
* Scrap state-by-state fuel regulations, as they force expensive pipelines and mixtures to be delivered to different states<br />
<br />
* Get rid of odious automotive safety requirements, which add a ton of weight (literally!) to cars, lowering efficiency.<br />
<br />
* Allow the market to decide on the optimal emission filters, as current government-mandated filters dramatically reduce the power output (and thus efficiency) of cars.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Poverty ==<br />
<br />
Free markets inherently reduce poverty in two ways:<br />
<br />
1) They raise the standard of living for everyone.<br />
<br />
* Living standards in capitalistic Western countries have increased over sixty times since 1820 despite a tripling of the European population in the 18th century.<br />
<br />
* In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one.<br />
<br />
* The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.<br />
<br />
* If poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. However, the "poor" of 100,50, or 30 years ago and are gone in American in terms of living standards.<br />
<br />
<br />
2) The provide the incentive and possibility for the poorest members of society to become the wealthiest.<br />
<br />
* 80 percent of today's American millionaires are first-generation rich. <br />
<br />
* According to Internal Revenue Service tax data, 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile, by 1988.<br />
<br />
* Of the people who were in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988. <br />
<br />
* Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. <br />
<br />
In any case, income inequality is a desirable part of a free, prosperous society, since it indicates that the most productive members of societies have the freedom to succeed. An egalitarian society can only be equal in shared misery.<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Roads ==<br />
<br />
There are many innovations that might exist in a free market for transportation. I would not take even traffic lights for granted. One thing you see in other countries is a timer or progress bar on lights, so you know how many seconds you have until the next light. Perhaps it's preferable to use a traffic circle, more underpasses, or a totally different convention. There is also the opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to predictive traffic monitoring, so cars never get red lights. Adding special roads for computer-driven cars would eliminate lights entirely. All this is off the top of my head - we really have no idea what entrepreneurs could come up with.<br />
<br />
http://www.rationalmind.net/2005/01/05/private-roads/</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9015Soundbites2008-04-28T17:25:58Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Corporations */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
>“If I am an auto manufacturer and the government has zero regulations on the auto industry and all industry related to the auto industry, why would I stop lobbying for a tax break to maintain jobs in a particular region?”<br />
<br />
By separation of economy and state, I mean a total separation, which means no income taxes. The vast majority of taxation is used to redistribute wealth from one group of individual to another. Take away the loot and you take away the incentive to lobby the state.<br />
<br />
>“Or if I was in the oil industry and I wanted to develop oil fields in a wildlife preserve, how would I go about doing that without a lobby or involving the government?”<br />
<br />
In a free, capitalist society, all property is private. It would be up to the owners of the preserve to decide how their property ought to be used.<br />
<br />
>“If I was Cargill, and I wanted to use my epic size to control the grain market (which they do) to maximize profit. Would government interference in my market manipulation be unwarranted?”<br />
<br />
Yes. Real monopolies have always been sustained with the help of government coercion. <br />
<br />
>“Then they followed up with handing out free copies of Windows anytime an alternate OP entered the market”<br />
<br />
Then they would probably go bankrupt. Do you think free copies of Windows would drive Apple and Linux out of existence? Why hasn’t Microsoft done that? It’s not illegal.<br />
People are not machines that consider a single variable – they consider more than just the short-term price when evaluating a product.<br />
<br />
>“A democracy has the right to control its markets.”<br />
<br />
A society is just a group of individuals. A group cannot posses any “rights” – only individuals have rights. A person does not acquire the right to coerce other people by virtue of declaring himself to be part of a group, no matter how large.<br />
<br />
>“Complete non-intervention of government in business is merely form of economic anarchy.”<br />
<br />
If an institution exists to protect individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) I would not call that anarchy, but a free, voluntary, rights-respecting society.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
As long as the public trusts governments to create regulatory agencies that control corporations for the "public good," the corporations will use that same power to against their competition. If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business. Let the courts decide when a product is or isn't safe, not a hidden lobbyist-beholden bureaucrat.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Fuel Prices ==<br />
<br />
<br />
Best way to lower gas prices is to create a free market for fuel and auto efficiency: <br />
<br />
* Allow new refineries to be built - the environmentalists have blocked them for 30 years.<br />
<br />
* Eliminate gasoline taxes, they are 30+% of the cost.<br />
<br />
* Scrap state-by-state fuel regulations, as they force expensive pipelines and mixtures to be delivered to different states<br />
<br />
* Get rid of odious automotive safety requirements, which add a ton of weight (literally!) to cars, lowering efficiency.<br />
<br />
* Allow the market to decide on the optimal emission filters, as current government-mandated filters dramatically reduce the power output (and thus efficiency) of cars.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Poverty ==<br />
<br />
Free markets inherently reduce poverty in two ways:<br />
<br />
1) They raise the standard of living for everyone.<br />
<br />
* Living standards in capitalistic Western countries have increased over sixty times since 1820 despite a tripling of the European population in the 18th century.<br />
<br />
* In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one.<br />
<br />
* The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.<br />
<br />
* If poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. However, the "poor" of 100,50, or 30 years ago and are gone in American in terms of living standards.<br />
<br />
<br />
2) The provide the incentive and possibility for the poorest members of society to become the wealthiest.<br />
<br />
* 80 percent of today's American millionaires are first-generation rich. <br />
<br />
* According to Internal Revenue Service tax data, 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile, by 1988.<br />
<br />
* Of the people who were in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988. <br />
<br />
* Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. <br />
<br />
In any case, income inequality is a desirable part of a free, prosperous society, since it indicates that the most productive members of societies have the freedom to succeed. An egalitarian society can only be equal in shared misery.<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Roads ==<br />
<br />
There are many innovation that might exist in a free market for transportation. I would not take even traffic lights for granted. One thing you see in other countries is a timer or progress bar on lights, so you know how many seconds you have until the next light. Perhaps it's preferable to use a traffic circle, more underpasses, or a totally different convention. There is also the opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to predictive traffic monitoring, so cars never get red lights. Adding special roads for computer-driven cars would eliminate lights entirely. All this is off the top of my head - we really have no idea what entrepreneurs could come up with.<br />
<br />
http://www.rationalmind.net/2005/01/05/private-roads/</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9011Soundbites2008-04-22T05:19:22Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* RFID */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
>“If I am an auto manufacturer and the government has zero regulations on the auto industry and all industry related to the auto industry, why would I stop lobbying for a tax break to maintain jobs in a particular region?”<br />
<br />
By separation of economy and state, I mean a total separation, which means no income taxes. The vast majority of taxation is used to redistribute wealth from one group of individual to another. Take away the loot and you take away the incentive to lobby the state.<br />
<br />
>“Or if I was in the oil industry and I wanted to develop oil fields in a wildlife preserve, how would I go about doing that without a lobby or involving the government?”<br />
<br />
In a free, capitalist society, all property is private. It would be up to the owners of the preserve to decide how their property ought to be used.<br />
<br />
>“If I was Cargill, and I wanted to use my epic size to control the grain market (which they do) to maximize profit. Would government interference in my market manipulation be unwarranted?”<br />
<br />
Yes. Real monopolies have always been sustained with the help of government coercion. <br />
<br />
>“Then they followed up with handing out free copies of Windows anytime an alternate OP entered the market”<br />
<br />
Then they would probably go bankrupt. Do you think free copies of Windows would drive Apple and Linux out of existence? Why hasn’t Microsoft done that? It’s not illegal.<br />
People are not machines that consider a single variable – they consider more than just the short-term price when evaluating a product.<br />
<br />
>“A democracy has the right to control its markets.”<br />
<br />
A society is just a group of individuals. A group cannot posses any “rights” – only individuals have rights. A person does not acquire the right to coerce other people by virtue of declaring himself to be part of a group, no matter how large.<br />
<br />
>“Complete non-intervention of government in business is merely form of economic anarchy.”<br />
<br />
If an institution exists to protect individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) I would not call that anarchy, but a free, voluntary, rights-respecting society.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Fuel Prices ==<br />
<br />
<br />
Best way to lower gas prices is to create a free market for fuel and auto efficiency: <br />
<br />
* Allow new refineries to be built - the environmentalists have blocked them for 30 years.<br />
<br />
* Eliminate gasoline taxes, they are 30+% of the cost.<br />
<br />
* Scrap state-by-state fuel regulations, as they force expensive pipelines and mixtures to be delivered to different states<br />
<br />
* Get rid of odious automotive safety requirements, which add a ton of weight (literally!) to cars, lowering efficiency.<br />
<br />
* Allow the market to decide on the optimal emission filters, as current government-mandated filters dramatically reduce the power output (and thus efficiency) of cars.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Poverty ==<br />
<br />
Free markets inherently reduce poverty in two ways:<br />
<br />
1) They raise the standard of living for everyone.<br />
<br />
* Living standards in capitalistic Western countries have increased over sixty times since 1820 despite a tripling of the European population in the 18th century.<br />
<br />
* In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one.<br />
<br />
* The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.<br />
<br />
* If poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. However, the "poor" of 100,50, or 30 years ago and are gone in American in terms of living standards.<br />
<br />
<br />
2) The provide the incentive and possibility for the poorest members of society to become the wealthiest.<br />
<br />
* 80 percent of today's American millionaires are first-generation rich. <br />
<br />
* According to Internal Revenue Service tax data, 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile, by 1988.<br />
<br />
* Of the people who were in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988. <br />
<br />
* Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. <br />
<br />
In any case, income inequality is a desirable part of a free, prosperous society, since it indicates that the most productive members of societies have the freedom to succeed. An egalitarian society can only be equal in shared misery.<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Roads ==<br />
<br />
There are many innovation that might exist in a free market for transportation. I would not take even traffic lights for granted. One thing you see in other countries is a timer or progress bar on lights, so you know how many seconds you have until the next light. Perhaps it's preferable to use a traffic circle, more underpasses, or a totally different convention. There is also the opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to predictive traffic monitoring, so cars never get red lights. Adding special roads for computer-driven cars would eliminate lights entirely. All this is off the top of my head - we really have no idea what entrepreneurs could come up with.<br />
<br />
http://www.rationalmind.net/2005/01/05/private-roads/</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9010Soundbites2008-04-22T03:20:55Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* "Corporate Personhood" */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
>“If I am an auto manufacturer and the government has zero regulations on the auto industry and all industry related to the auto industry, why would I stop lobbying for a tax break to maintain jobs in a particular region?”<br />
<br />
By separation of economy and state, I mean a total separation, which means no income taxes. The vast majority of taxation is used to redistribute wealth from one group of individual to another. Take away the loot and you take away the incentive to lobby the state.<br />
<br />
>“Or if I was in the oil industry and I wanted to develop oil fields in a wildlife preserve, how would I go about doing that without a lobby or involving the government?”<br />
<br />
In a free, capitalist society, all property is private. It would be up to the owners of the preserve to decide how their property ought to be used.<br />
<br />
>“If I was Cargill, and I wanted to use my epic size to control the grain market (which they do) to maximize profit. Would government interference in my market manipulation be unwarranted?”<br />
<br />
Yes. Real monopolies have always been sustained with the help of government coercion. <br />
<br />
>“Then they followed up with handing out free copies of Windows anytime an alternate OP entered the market”<br />
<br />
Then they would probably go bankrupt. Do you think free copies of Windows would drive Apple and Linux out of existence? Why hasn’t Microsoft done that? It’s not illegal.<br />
People are not machines that consider a single variable – they consider more than just the short-term price when evaluating a product.<br />
<br />
>“A democracy has the right to control its markets.”<br />
<br />
A society is just a group of individuals. A group cannot posses any “rights” – only individuals have rights. A person does not acquire the right to coerce other people by virtue of declaring himself to be part of a group, no matter how large.<br />
<br />
>“Complete non-intervention of government in business is merely form of economic anarchy.”<br />
<br />
If an institution exists to protect individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) I would not call that anarchy, but a free, voluntary, rights-respecting society.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Fuel Prices ==<br />
<br />
<br />
Best way to lower gas prices is to create a free market for fuel and auto efficiency: <br />
<br />
* Allow new refineries to be built - the environmentalists have blocked them for 30 years.<br />
<br />
* Eliminate gasoline taxes, they are 30+% of the cost.<br />
<br />
* Scrap state-by-state fuel regulations, as they force expensive pipelines and mixtures to be delivered to different states<br />
<br />
* Get rid of odious automotive safety requirements, which add a ton of weight (literally!) to cars, lowering efficiency.<br />
<br />
* Allow the market to decide on the optimal emission filters, as current government-mandated filters dramatically reduce the power output (and thus efficiency) of cars.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Poverty ==<br />
<br />
Free markets inherently reduce poverty in two ways:<br />
<br />
1) They raise the standard of living for everyone.<br />
<br />
* Living standards in capitalistic Western countries have increased over sixty times since 1820 despite a tripling of the European population in the 18th century.<br />
<br />
* In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one.<br />
<br />
* The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.<br />
<br />
* If poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. However, the "poor" of 100,50, or 30 years ago and are gone in American in terms of living standards.<br />
<br />
<br />
2) The provide the incentive and possibility for the poorest members of society to become the wealthiest.<br />
<br />
* 80 percent of today's American millionaires are first-generation rich. <br />
<br />
* According to Internal Revenue Service tax data, 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile, by 1988.<br />
<br />
* Of the people who were in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988. <br />
<br />
* Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. <br />
<br />
In any case, income inequality is a desirable part of a free, prosperous society, since it indicates that the most productive members of societies have the freedom to succeed. An egalitarian society can only be equal in shared misery.<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9009Soundbites2008-04-22T03:12:56Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Net neutrality */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
>“If I am an auto manufacturer and the government has zero regulations on the auto industry and all industry related to the auto industry, why would I stop lobbying for a tax break to maintain jobs in a particular region?”<br />
<br />
By separation of economy and state, I mean a total separation, which means no income taxes. The vast majority of taxation is used to redistribute wealth from one group of individual to another. Take away the loot and you take away the incentive to lobby the state.<br />
<br />
>“Or if I was in the oil industry and I wanted to develop oil fields in a wildlife preserve, how would I go about doing that without a lobby or involving the government?”<br />
<br />
In a free, capitalist society, all property is private. It would be up to the owners of the preserve to decide how their property ought to be used.<br />
<br />
>“If I was Cargill, and I wanted to use my epic size to control the grain market (which they do) to maximize profit. Would government interference in my market manipulation be unwarranted?”<br />
<br />
Yes. Real monopolies have always been sustained with the help of government coercion. <br />
<br />
>“Then they followed up with handing out free copies of Windows anytime an alternate OP entered the market”<br />
<br />
Then they would probably go bankrupt. Do you think free copies of Windows would drive Apple and Linux out of existence? Why hasn’t Microsoft done that? It’s not illegal.<br />
People are not machines that consider a single variable – they consider more than just the short-term price when evaluating a product.<br />
<br />
>“A democracy has the right to control its markets.”<br />
<br />
A society is just a group of individuals. A group cannot posses any “rights” – only individuals have rights. A person does not acquire the right to coerce other people by virtue of declaring himself to be part of a group, no matter how large.<br />
<br />
>“Complete non-intervention of government in business is merely form of economic anarchy.”<br />
<br />
If an institution exists to protect individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) I would not call that anarchy, but a free, voluntary, rights-respecting society.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Poverty ==<br />
<br />
Free markets inherently reduce poverty in two ways:<br />
<br />
1) They raise the standard of living for everyone.<br />
<br />
* Living standards in capitalistic Western countries have increased over sixty times since 1820 despite a tripling of the European population in the 18th century.<br />
<br />
* In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one.<br />
<br />
* The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.<br />
<br />
* If poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. However, the "poor" of 100,50, or 30 years ago and are gone in American in terms of living standards.<br />
<br />
<br />
2) The provide the incentive and possibility for the poorest members of society to become the wealthiest.<br />
<br />
* 80 percent of today's American millionaires are first-generation rich. <br />
<br />
* According to Internal Revenue Service tax data, 85.8 percent of tax filers in the bottom fifth in 1979 had moved on to a higher quintile, and often to the top quintile, by 1988.<br />
<br />
* Of the people who were in the top 1 percent of income earners in 1979, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988. <br />
<br />
* Only five percent of families in the bottom income quintile (lowest 20 percent) in 1975 were still there in 1991. <br />
<br />
In any case, income inequality is a desirable part of a free, prosperous society, since it indicates that the most productive members of societies have the freedom to succeed. An egalitarian society can only be equal in shared misery.<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9008Soundbites2008-04-14T02:10:15Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Capitalism */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
>“If I am an auto manufacturer and the government has zero regulations on the auto industry and all industry related to the auto industry, why would I stop lobbying for a tax break to maintain jobs in a particular region?”<br />
<br />
By separation of economy and state, I mean a total separation, which means no income taxes. The vast majority of taxation is used to redistribute wealth from one group of individual to another. Take away the loot and you take away the incentive to lobby the state.<br />
<br />
>“Or if I was in the oil industry and I wanted to develop oil fields in a wildlife preserve, how would I go about doing that without a lobby or involving the government?”<br />
<br />
In a free, capitalist society, all property is private. It would be up to the owners of the preserve to decide how their property ought to be used.<br />
<br />
>“If I was Cargill, and I wanted to use my epic size to control the grain market (which they do) to maximize profit. Would government interference in my market manipulation be unwarranted?”<br />
<br />
Yes. Real monopolies have always been sustained with the help of government coercion. <br />
<br />
>“Then they followed up with handing out free copies of Windows anytime an alternate OP entered the market”<br />
<br />
Then they would probably go bankrupt. Do you think free copies of Windows would drive Apple and Linux out of existence? Why hasn’t Microsoft done that? It’s not illegal.<br />
People are not machines that consider a single variable – they consider more than just the short-term price when evaluating a product.<br />
<br />
>“A democracy has the right to control its markets.”<br />
<br />
A society is just a group of individuals. A group cannot posses any “rights” – only individuals have rights. A person does not acquire the right to coerce other people by virtue of declaring himself to be part of a group, no matter how large.<br />
<br />
>“Complete non-intervention of government in business is merely form of economic anarchy.”<br />
<br />
If an institution exists to protect individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) I would not call that anarchy, but a free, voluntary, rights-respecting society.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rights&diff=9007Rights2008-03-19T17:18:25Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>Rights are those actions capable of being performed by a human which all other humans are morally bound not to impede. A possible action is considered to be a right when and only when the action is never destructive in any way to the life of any other non-consenting human. A right is said to be "respected" if no human attempts to impede the action considered to be a right. Thus, a human is morally bound to respect the rights of another. The reason for this is because respecting rights is conducive to the lives of all parties involved.<br />
<br />
If one person contravenes the rights of another, it is moral and proper for the victim to defend himself against his attacker, as well as to force the attacker to recompense the victim.<br />
<br />
The notion of freedom is closely allied with the notion of rights. A person is free to do precisely that which he has the right to do. A person is said to be free (in general) if and when all of his rights are respected.<br />
<br />
The most fundamental right is the right to [[life]]. Specific rights which derive from the right to life are:<br />
*Liberty (and the pursuit of happiness)<br />
*Property<br />
*Freedom of association<br />
<br />
There is no such thing as a [[collectivism|collective]] right. There are also several concepts designed to help obliterate the concepts of rights. As examples, Leonard Peikoff cites animal rights and fetal rights, among others.<br />
<br />
== See Also ==<br />
*[[Capitalism]]<br />
*[[Freedom]]<br />
*[[Exploitation]]<br />
*[http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/Individual%20Rights/ The One Minute Case For Individual Rights]<br />
[[Category:politics]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rights&diff=9006Rights2008-03-19T17:14:27Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* See Also */</p>
<hr />
<div>Rights are those actions capable of being performed by a human which all other humans are morally bound not to impede. A possible action is considered to be a right when and only when the action is never destructive in any way to the life of any other non-consenting human. A right is said to be "respected" if no human attempts to impede the action considered to be a right. Thus, a human is morally bound to respect the rights of another. The reason for this is because respecting rights is conducive to the lives of all parties involved.<br />
<br />
If one person contravenes the rights of another, it is moral and proper for the victim to defend himself against his attacker, as well as to force the attacker to recompense the victim.<br />
<br />
The notion of freedom is closely allied with the notion of rights. A person is free to do precisely that which he has the right to do. A person is said to be free (in general) if and when all of his rights are respected.<br />
<br />
The individual rights are:<br />
*[[Life]] <br />
*Liberty<br />
*Property<br />
*The Pursuit of Happiness<br />
<br />
There is no such thing as a [[collectivism|collective]] right. There are also several concepts designed to help obliterate the concepts of rights. As examples, Leonard Peikoff cites animal rights and fetal rights, among others.<br />
<br />
== See Also ==<br />
*[[Capitalism]]<br />
*[[Freedom]]<br />
*[[Exploitation]]<br />
*[http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/Individual%20Rights/ The One Minute Case For Individual Rights]<br />
[[Category:politics]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Technology&diff=9005Technology2008-03-19T17:03:28Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: </p>
<hr />
<div>Technology can be most broadly defined as the material entities created by the application of mental and physical effort to nature in order to achieve some [[value]].<br />
<br />
<br />
== See Also ==<br />
*[http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/Technology The One Minute Case for Technology]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Template:Cleanup&diff=9004Template:Cleanup2008-02-02T05:29:17Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Reverted edits by LividArmon (Talk); changed back to last version by GreedyCapitalist</p>
<hr />
<div><div class="boilerplate metadata" id="cleanup" style="background: #f7fbff; margin: .5em 2.5%; padding: 0 1em; border: 1px solid #79b"><br />
This article needs to be '''cleaned up''' to conform to higher standard of objectivity and article quality. After the article has been cleaned up, you may remove this message. <br />
</div><br />
[[Category:Wikipedia cleanup|{{PAGENAME}}]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9002Soundbites2008-01-22T23:00:28Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Global Warming */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally [http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/Testimony/Senate2001.pdf agree] that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9001Soundbites2008-01-22T22:47:40Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Global Warming */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. <br />
<br />
Even the most alarmists of scientists generally agree that there is little humanity can do to influence the global climate for many decades, even if we wrecked an industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. Our resources would be far better spent creating innovative technology that allows us to make the best of a constantly changing climate than crippling industrial civilization (our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world) in a futile attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=9000Soundbites2008-01-13T10:38:01Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Unions */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. Even if the climate is changing due to human causes, there is virtually nothing we can do about it even if we wreck the industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. <br />
<br />
Technological innovation has allowed human beings have to adapt to enormous environmental changes in the distant and near past and will surely continue to do so in the future. We should not cripple our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world in a futile (even the most alarmist scientist agree in that point) attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.<br />
<br />
<br />
== RFID ==<br />
<br />
I wouldn't apply for any company that required all candidates to get implants, but I'd get one in a heartbeat, for the coolness factor, if nothing else.<br />
<br />
This is just fear-mongering politicking by ignorant politicians. Requiring RFID would never happen in a free market anyway, but banning them just sets a dangerous precedent of regulating future innovations with unknown applications.<br />
<br />
What are they going to ban next?</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8999Soundbites2007-12-24T20:27:26Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Iraq */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. Even if the climate is changing due to human causes, there is virtually nothing we can do about it even if we wreck the industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. <br />
<br />
Technological innovation has allowed human beings have to adapt to enormous environmental changes in the distant and near past and will surely continue to do so in the future. We should not cripple our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world in a futile (even the most alarmist scientist agree in that point) attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Unions ==<br />
Labor unions are just coercive (and often violent) monopolies which use the state to keep unwanted (minority and immigrant) workers from offering competing wages.</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8998Soundbites2007-12-24T12:27:56Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Second Amendment */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. Even if the climate is changing due to human causes, there is virtually nothing we can do about it even if we wreck the industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. <br />
<br />
Technological innovation has allowed human beings have to adapt to enormous environmental changes in the distant and near past and will surely continue to do so in the future. We should not cripple our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world in a futile (even the most alarmist scientist agree in that point) attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry<br />
<br />
<br />
== Iraq ==<br />
The War in Iraq is a failure because it was fought with the altruistic goal of “liberating” Iraq. Iraqis don’t want to be liberated and they don’t want democracy. A moral foreign policy should focus on eliminating legitimate threats, not causing needless American and foreign deaths for a religiously-inspired crusade.</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8997Soundbites2007-12-24T11:47:16Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Drug War */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Prohibition ==<br />
A common refrain, but it must be repeated: why do Americans trust their fellow citizens to raise children, elect legislators and kill the enemy but not to control the content of their own minds?<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. Even if the climate is changing due to human causes, there is virtually nothing we can do about it even if we wreck the industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. <br />
<br />
Technological innovation has allowed human beings have to adapt to enormous environmental changes in the distant and near past and will surely continue to do so in the future. We should not cripple our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world in a futile (even the most alarmist scientist agree in that point) attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8996Soundbites2007-12-24T11:42:28Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Capitalism */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
== Drug War ==<br />
The drug war is a miserable failure at stopping drug use, but a tremendous success for those would like to see America turned into a totalitarian police state. A free society must protect the people’s right to control the content and state of their own minds.<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. Even if the climate is changing due to human causes, there is virtually nothing we can do about it even if we wreck the industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. <br />
<br />
Technological innovation has allowed human beings have to adapt to enormous environmental changes in the distant and near past and will surely continue to do so in the future. We should not cripple our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world in a futile (even the most alarmist scientist agree in that point) attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8995Soundbites2007-12-24T11:37:57Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Global Warming */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. Even if the climate is changing due to human causes, there is virtually nothing we can do about it even if we wreck the industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. <br />
<br />
Technological innovation has allowed human beings have to adapt to enormous environmental changes in the distant and near past and will surely continue to do so in the future. We should not cripple our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world in a futile (even the most alarmist scientist agree in that point) attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8994Soundbites2007-12-24T11:32:29Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Environmentalism */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Global Warming ==<br />
The earth may well be warming, but the earth’s climate is always changing – the idea that there is an “optimal” climate is a myth. Adapting to a warmer climate has many costs, but many benefits as well. Imagine the enormous territories in Siberia and Canada that might finally be open to settlement, and the resources and shipping routes that will become available. Even if the climate is changing due to human causes, there is virtually nothing we can do about it even if we wreck the industrial civilization that has allowed billions of people to leave immeasurably longer and better lives. <br />
Technological innovation has allowed human beings have to adapt to enormous environmental changes in the distant and near past and will surely continue to do so in the future. We should not cripple our best tool for dealing with a constantly changing world in a futile (even the most alarmist scientist agree in that point) attempt to stop climate change.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8993Soundbites2007-12-18T04:18:02Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Corporations */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Media Monopolies ==<br />
This is just a thinly veiled call for censorship of views the left doesn't like.<br />
<br />
Why are you so sure that the state will enforce YOUR agenda when you secede your freedoms?<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8992Soundbites2007-12-05T22:36:12Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* Corporations */</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
<br />
== "Corporate Personhood" ==<br />
<br />
Corporations are obviously not people –they are groups of people who share a common purpose. However an individual does not lose his rights by acting on behalf of a group. The purpose of the group is irrelevant - whether a group exists for the purpose of prayer, or political advocacy, or profit does not change the rights of the people involved.<br />
<br />
The attack on “corporate personhood” is an attempt to deny the rights (primarily the freedom of speech) of people working for certain non-politically correct groups – namely groups with the primary purpose of making a profit. This is just a veiled attack on capitalism and property rights.<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Soundbites&diff=8991Soundbites2007-12-05T20:49:05Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: New page: Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites. == Capitalism == Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to li...</p>
<hr />
<div>Soundbites contains snippets of factoids and arguments for use on other sites.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Capitalism ==<br />
Capitalism is a social system which respects individual rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Corporations ==<br />
If you want business out of politics, get the government out of business.<br />
<br />
As long as governments try to control corporations, corporations will try to control governments. The only solution is to separate government and economy.<br />
<br />
Anything else will only lead to increasingly totalitarian restrictions on speech.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Statism ==<br />
When people spend their own money on themselves, they have an an incentive to maximize both efficiency and quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend their own money on others, they have an incentive to maximize efficiency, but not quality.<br />
<br />
When people spend other people's money on others, they maximize neither efficiency, nor quality, but their budgets.<br />
<br />
<br />
== Net neutrality ==<br />
<br />
Why do “net neutrality” advocates ridicule politicians for comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes,” and then trust them to regulate it?<br />
<br />
The One Minute Case Against “Net Neutrality” http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/net%20neutrality/<br />
<br />
<br />
== Socialized Services ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Healthcare ==<br />
Any government-mandated "plan" can only lead to disaster.<br />
Say no to health socialism! http://oneminute.rationalmind.net/socialized-healthcare/<br />
<br />
http://www.afcm.org/<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
That's the state that most healthcare is in today. Compare that to LASIK services, which are comparatively less socialized.<br />
<br />
Competition for LASIK service has dropped the price to a fraction of the cost a decade ago with considerable improvements in quality. A market for all health care services would have similar results.<br />
<br />
Could the stagnation in medical innovation in these fields have anything to do with massive federal regulations and wealth transfers?<br />
<br />
Imagine if the federal government controlled 50% of spending on computer technology, and had over 100,000 regulations for microprocessor design. How fast do you think your computer would be?<br />
<br />
== Free Trade ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Immigration ==<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
== Environmentalism ==<br />
If you want a clean environment, then push for better protection of your property rights - don't surrender them to the state.<br />
<br />
Why do environmentalists assume that by giving up their freedom to the government, they will guarantee that government will automatically act in their best interest? That's just like assuming that giving up religious freedom to the government will guarantee that the government will force your particular religion on everyone.<br />
<br />
== Unemployment ==<br />
Absolutely. Since graduating college in 2004, I've had four jobs, each time making 25-50% more. Companies were willing to take a risk on me because they could fire me if I oversold my abilities. If I were living in France, I'd be lucky to get one.<br />
<br />
The glaring problem with the socialistic attitude that society can be improved by replacing voluntary economic activity with a coercive regulatory state is that human beings are not cogs in a machine. They do not passively follow new regulations, but proactively respond to incentives. Faced with the practical impossibility of firing unproductive workers, employers would rather not hire them in the first place. They can hardly be blamed for this, for their alternative is to play a game of Russian roulette and risk being bankrupted with unproductive or even counter-productive employees. They must try to find people who are passionate about their jobs because once hired, they will earn a salary whether or not they work for it.<br />
<br />
== Second Amendment ==<br />
<br />
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." - Thomas Jefferson<br />
<br />
"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self-defense?" - Patrick Henry</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ethics&diff=8990Ethics2007-12-02T21:43:35Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Reverted edits by 201.12.178.33 (Talk); changed back to last version by 84.163.36.64</p>
<hr />
<div>{{wikify}}<br />
<br />
"To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling [[value|values]] of his life: [[Reason]], [[Purpose]], [[Self-esteem]]."<br />
<br />
Morality is the recognition of the fact that as mortal beings with a rational, volitional consciousness, we need to adopt and practice certain [[principle|principles]] in order to live. <br />
<br />
Living beings clearly act to achieve particular values by particular means. Their actions are aimed at specific ends " namely, their survival and reproduction. But the question of purpose does not arise for them either because their actions are automatic, determined by instinct. They cannot choose, as men do, to live by one means or another, to be carnivores or herbivores, to live or die. Unlike non-living entities, they have various values, such as food, reproduction, and shelter, but they have no means to choose which values to achieve or which course of action to take to achieve them beyond their immediate environment.<br />
<br />
Like all living organisms, [[Man's Nature|man]] can be distinguished from non-living matter by the fact that in order to remain alive, he must act to attain the values needed for his survival (such as food, water, shelter, clothes.) For animals, which operate entirely on the perceptual level, this guidance comes automatically through their facility of instinct. Man does not have any automatic means of attaining the values needed for his life. He may have urges (hunger, thirst, etc) but he has no automatic means of fulfilling them. Unlike animals, human beings lack any kind of innate ideas or instinct - we learn our values and ideas from your experience of reality. We are the creators of our own mental nature - but we have no power over our metaphysical nature - we can refuse to recognize that we need food to live - but that does not change the fact that we are mortal beings who need food to live. <br />
<br />
As a conceptual being, his survival depends on correctly using [[reason]] to identify and attain the values necessary for his life. As a [[volition|volitional]] being, his thinking is neither automatic nor infallible, but is an active process that requires a constant focus on correctly identifying the facts of reality and applying them to achieve the values needed for his well-being. Unlike the automatic function of animal instinct, man must choose to think, " and his thoughts will determine his actions, his values, his emotions, and his character. The primary choice of every individual " to think or not" corresponds to his primary alternative " to live or not. His own life is the primary moral value of each individual" whether he chooses to accept it or not.<br />
<br />
Rational self-interest, or [[egoism]] is therefore the proper morality each man must adopt if he wishes to live " the application of his reason to achieve the values needed for his survival. A man may choose not to think or to reject his life, but to the extent he does so, he chooses to act towards his death. Egoism is not a virtue by itself - simply knowing that one should act [[egoism|selfishly]] provides no guide to action. One must use [[reason]] to derive [[virtues]], which are specific principles for practicing rationality in all areas of one's life.<br />
<br />
== Imported from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_ethics Wikipedia] ==<br />
<br />
==Meta-ethics==<br />
<br />
The Objectivist ethic begins with a meta-ethical question: why do human beings need a code of values? The Objectivist answer is that humans need such a code in order to survive as human beings.<br />
<br />
Objectivism maintains that, alone among all the species of which we know, human beings do not automatically act to further their own survival. A plant seems to have no awareness of any kind and simply grows automatically; an organism that possesses a faculty of sensation relies on its pleasure-pain mechanism; an animal that operates at the level of perception can use its perceptions to muddle its way through its essentially cyclic life; but a human being, who at least potentially operates at the conceptual level, lives a life that consists of an integrated whole.<br />
<br />
Objectivism recognizes, of course, that biologically a human being can survive in a physical sense without operating at the conceptual level at all. Indeed, Objectivism regards the conceptual level as a volitional achievement that not everyone in fact attains. In speaking of "survival" here, however, Objectivism is speaking of survival as a "human being" — that is, as a being that has realized its cognitive potential and attained the conceptual level. It is at this level, Objectivism says, that a life is the sort of continuous whole proper to a human being.<br />
<br />
Ayn Rand also recognized that in humans, who are conscious organisms, the motivation to pursue life is experienced as the pursuit of a conscious state - the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, in her one-sentence summary of Objectivism, Ayn Rand condensed her ethics into the statement that man properly lives "with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life." According to Objectivist epistemology, however, states of mind, such as happiness, are not primary; they are the consequence of specific facts of existence. Therefore man needs an objective, principled standard, grounded in the facts of reality, to guide him in the pursuit of this purpose. Rand regarded happiness as a biological faculty evolved from the pleasure-pain mechanism of pre-human animals. This faculty functions as an instrument providing a continuous measurement of how successful one is at meeting the challenge of life. As she wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness (23, pb 27)<br />
<br />
Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man's body is an automatic indicator of his body's welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death - so the emotional mechanism of man's consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering.<br />
<br />
That is, the faculty of happiness continuously provides one's consciousness with a current measurement of one's success on the continuum between full life and actual death (by analogy with the barometer, which continuously provides the current measurement of atmospheric pressure.) The measurement provided by the faculty of happiness is experienced as emotion on the continuum between joy and suffering. To achieve happiness (the purpose,) one must recognize, choose, and pursue that which preserves and enhances one's life (the standard.)<br />
<br />
==Values==<br />
<br />
Since operating at the conceptual level remains volitional for the duration of one's life, Objectivism holds, human beings require a code of values — an ethic — in order to guide them in making the choices and taking the actions that will not only keep them biologically alive but preserve their status as fully human beings. For Objectivism, a "human being" who is not operating at the conceptual level is not, in the proper sense of the word, conscious, and indeed is not even properly human: by lapsing from the conceptual level, a human being "can turn himself into a subhuman creature."<br />
<br />
The purpose of Objectivist ethics, then, is to guide human beings in becoming and remaining "fully human" — or, in Rand's language, in promoting their survival as "man qua man". In so doing, it adopts life — the specifically human form of life — as its standard.<br />
<br />
However, the purpose of Objectivist ethics as applied by any particular human being is the preservation of that person's own life (again, as man qua man). In this context, Objectivism seeks to differentiate between the "standard" and the "purpose" of ethics, adopting "life" as its standard and "one's own life" as its purpose.<br />
<br />
"Value", again, is understood as anything which a living organism seeks to gain or keep. Objectivism contends that values make no sense without a single "ultimate value" — and argues that this ultimate value is, for each person, that person's own life.<br />
<br />
Objectivism contends that "value" makes no sense apart from the context of "life". Here the Objectivist trichotomy reappears: Objectivism rejects both "intrinsicism" and "subjectivism" with regard to values just as with regard to universals. On the Objectivist account, value (or the "good") is not "intrinsic" to external reality, but neither is it "subjective" (again meaning "arbitrary"); the term "good" denotes an objective evaluation of some aspect of reality with respect to a goal, namely, the life of the human being with respect to whom the evaluation is made. In making this argument, Rand claimed to have solved David Hume's famous is-ought problem of bridging the gap between empirical facts and moral requirements.<br />
<br />
Objectivism regards the concept of "duty" as one that divorces value from its context in life (and therefore as an "anti-concept"). On its Objectivist definition, a "duty" is a moral obligation rooted in nothing more than obedience to an external authority and independent of one's goals and desires. Such a supposed moral obligation Objectivism sees as particularly destructive; according to Objectivism, one has no obligations other than those one has voluntarily assumed. Even obligations rooted directly in the needs of one's own life count as "voluntary" in this sense, for Objectivism regards the "choice to live" as the fundamental choice from which all other ethical requirements flow.<br />
<br />
==Virtue==<br />
<br />
A "[[virtue]]" is any act by which one gains or keeps a value. It is in this sense of the word that Objectivism speaks of the "virtue of selfishness": the Objectivist view is that adopting one's own life as one's ultimate ethical purpose, and then making the specific choices and taking the specific actions that implement that fundamental choice to live, is an achievement worthy of moral respect. It is in this sense that Rand wrote, "Man is a being of self-made soul."<br />
<br />
In fact, Objectivism does not list "selfishness" among its official virtues. The "values" officially recognized by Objectivism are "reason," "purpose," and "self-esteem," and the "virtues" by which these are achieved are said to be "rationality", "productiveness," and "pride." Objectivism maintains that productiveness — work productive of objective value — is the central purpose of a rational human being's life, reason its precondition, pride its outcome.<br />
<br />
==Rejection of altruism==<br />
<br />
Objectivism rejects as immoral any action taken for some other ultimate purpose. In particular it rejects as immoral any variant of what it calls "altruism" — by which it means, essentially, any ethical doctrine according to which a human being must justify his or her existence by service to others. According to Objectivism, every ethical or moral action has the agent as its primary beneficiary.<br />
<br />
Objectivism especially opposes any ethical demand for sacrifice. Objectivism uses this term in a special sense: a "sacrifice", according to its Objectivist definition, is the giving up of a greater value for a lesser one. (In other worlds of discourse, for example baseball and chess, the term is used to mean the giving up of a lesser or shorter-term value for the sake of a greater or longer-term one. Objectivism does not regard such an exchange as a genuine "sacrifice.")<br />
<br />
Not all superficially self-interested actions count as moral, however. Objectivism espouses an ethic of genuine self-interest — that is, of choices and actions that genuinely do promote one's life qua human being, not merely those that we think or hope may do so. The Objectivist ethic can be called one of "rational self-interest" (rational egoism) on the grounds that human beings must discover, through reason, what genuinely is of value to them.<br />
<br />
=="Conflicts" of interest==<br />
<br />
Objectivism rejects the possibility of a conflict of interest between two rational individuals under normal circumstances (though it may happen in emergencies). Ordinarily, if human beings behave rationally, do not claim what they have not earned, and recognize that rational, productive human beings are of tremendous value to one another as trading partners, no irresolvable conflicts will arise.<br />
<br />
=="Emergency situations"==<br />
<br />
In The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand argues that emergencies should not form the basis, or be a test of one’s moral system, since the purpose of morality is to be a practical guide to life, not deal with improbable scenarios. Actions taken under threat of physical force are considered immune from moral judgment, as they occur in a special type of "emergency situation". A man's actions under initiation of force — for instance, if one man points a gun at another man and instructs that man to kill a third man — are neither moral or immoral, as he is not free to choose his actions. In the words of Ayn Rand,<br />
<br />
:"No rights are applicable in such a case. Don't you see that that is one of the reasons why the use, the initiation of force among men, is morally improper and indefensible? Once the element of force is introduced, the element of morality is out. There is no question of right in such a case."<br />
<br />
This particular emergency situation can only be interpreted literally — as Rand also said,<br />
<br />
:"For instance, you couldn't claim that the men who served in the Gestapo, or the Russian secret police, [...] that they were merely carrying out orders, and that therefore the horrors they committed are not their fault, but are the fault of the chief Nazis. They were not literally under threat of death. They chose that job. Nobody holds a gun on a secret policeman and orders him to function all the time. You could not have enough secret policemen."<br />
<br />
[[Category:Ethics]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=What_is_Objectivism&diff=8989What is Objectivism2007-10-30T23:27:02Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: /* External links */</p>
<hr />
<div>'''Objectivism''' is the name chosen by [[Ayn Rand]] for her [[philosophy]]. Some essentials of Objectivism are that [[reality]] is real (''i.e.,'' [[Identity|Existence]] exists), and that we are conscious of reality ([[Consciousness]] is conscious). <br />
<br />
From this, Objectivism propounds that [[truth|knowledge]] is objective: it is not simply revealed or "obvious", nor is it whimsically [[subjectivism|subjective]]. Knowledge is the result of a consciousness gaining understanding of reality. <br />
<br />
The better we understand reality, the better we can deal with it. Ayn Rand described Objectivism as a philosophy for living on earth -- by which she meant that it was a philosophy grounded in reality with the purpose of enabling its adherents to better deal with reality. A common thread running through all of Objectivism is the sanctity of the individual, rational human being. In Rand's own words:<br />
<br />
'' "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." ''<br />
<br />
[[Ayn Rand]] rejected the idea that men who pursue their own interests must end up in conflict with one another. Objectivism holds [[individual rights]] to be the mechanism by which men can pursue their individual interests without being in conflict with one another. <br />
<br />
Objectivism is a closed system -- it consists of the philosophical writings of Ayn Rand (which she finished for publication) and those philosophical writings of other people which she specifically approved (for example the articles in the Objectivist Newsletter). The statements in this Wiki are not authoritative nor definitional of Objectivism.<br />
<br />
There are philosophical truths which were not incorporated into Objectivism. And you should not assume without proof that everything in Objectivism is true.<br />
<br />
<br />
== See Also ==<br />
*[[Philosophy]]<br />
*[[Ayn Rand]]<br />
<br />
== External links ==<br />
* [http://www.aynrandsociety.org/#Overview Ayn Rand Society: Ayn Rand and Objectivism: An Overview]<br />
*[http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/ The Ayn Rand Lexicon]<br />
*[http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_essentials Essentials of Objectivism (Ayn Rand Institute)]<br />
*[http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=objectivism_pobs The Philosophy of Objectivism: A Brief Summary]<br />
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivist_philosophy Wikipedia article on Objectivism]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Happiness&diff=8988Happiness2007-10-10T23:04:07Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Reverted edits by 193.194.69.155 (Talk); changed back to last version by GreedyCapitalist</p>
<hr />
<div>{{stub}}<br />
<br />
"Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's [[value|values]]." [Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged]<br />
<br />
Objectivism should not be confused with hedonism. It does '''not''' say: "do whatever feels good". Even saying "do whatever makes you happy" can be misleading. Rather: discover what your true values are across the long-range span of your life, and strive to achieve them. In doing so, you will be happy.<br />
==See also==<br />
* [[Self Esteem]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Honesty&diff=8987Honesty2007-10-10T23:02:24Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Reverted edits by 72.232.181.202 (Talk); changed back to last version by 206.180.38.20</p>
<hr />
<div>{{stub}}<br />
<br />
Honesty is the virtue of communicating and acting with a truthful manner, as best one is able. It includes both honesty to others, and to oneself (see: self-deception) and about ones own motives and thought process.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Virtues]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Objectivism_Wiki:Site_support&diff=8986Objectivism Wiki:Site support2007-10-10T23:02:11Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Reverted edits by 74.231.24.2 (Talk); changed back to last version by GreedyCapitalist</p>
<hr />
<div>== $25 Objectivism Wiki Competition ==<br />
<br />
<p>To encourage contributions to the [[http://wiki.objectivismonline.net/ Wiki]], I am running a simple competition: the person who contributes the most to the Objectivism Wiki during the month of May will receive a [[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/gifts/gift-certificates/gc-e-mail-sample.html/ref=cm_gc_email_sample_1/104-1359336-0654320 $25 Amazon.com gift certificate]]. </p><br />
<br />
<p>The winner will be decided by a combination of quantity and quality. I will judge the winner. If no significant contributions are made, the winnings roll over to next month. If the contest is successful, I may put up another $25 next month.</p><br />
<br />
<p>You don't have to write your own content: over a hundred of our members have allowed all their posts to be used, either with or without contribution in the Wiki. To find them, [[http://forum.objectivismonline.net/index.php?act=Members go to the members page]], and click Toggle More Options. Select Public Domain or Must Attribute in the Copyright dropdown.</p></div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=We_The_Living&diff=8985We The Living2007-10-10T23:01:23Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Reverted edits by 203.69.39.251 (Talk); changed back to last version by 67.187.168.171</p>
<hr />
<div>'''''We the Living''''' is [[Ayn Rand]]'s first novel. It was also Rand's first expression against [[communism]]. Published firstly in 1936, it is a poignant story of life in post-revolutionary [[Russia]]. Ayn Rand observes in the foreword to this book that ''We the Living'' was the closest she would ever come to writing an autobiography.<br />
<br />
==The storyline==<br />
<br />
{{spoiler}} <br />
<br />
The story is set in [[1917]], in post-[[Russian Revolution|revolutionary]] [[Russia]]. Kira Argounova, the daughter of a [[bourgeois]] [[capitalist]], returns to [[Petrograd]] along with her family, after a prolonged exile from the assault of the [[Bolshevik|revolutionaries]]. Kira's father had been the owner of a textile factory, which had been seized and [[nationalization|nationalized]]. The family, having given up all hopes of regaining their past possessions after the emphatic victories of the [[Red Army]] in the last four years, is resigned to its fate, as it returns to the city in search of livelihood. It finds to its dismay, that the expansive mansion, that once belonged to them, has been converted to accommodation quarters for several families. Left with nowhere to go, the family moves into Kira's aunt's home. <br />
<br />
The severity of life in the newly [[Socialization|socialized]] Russia, is biting and cruel, especially for the people belonging to the now-stigmatized middle class. Kira's uncle has also lost his family business to the state, and has been forced to sell off his possessions, one at a time, for money (which has lost much of its value owing to steep [[inflation]] rates). Money has ceased to be a major representative of "wealth and power". [[Private sector|Private enterprises]] have been strictly controlled, and [[License]]s to run them allotted only to those "enjoying the trust" of the [[proletariat]]. Food is [[Rationing|ration]]ed. Only labourers of nationalized businesses and students in state-run educational institutions have access to ration cards. The family of five, survives on the ration cards allotted to the two younger members of the family, who are students. <br />
<br />
With more additions to the family, subsistence promises to become phenomenally difficult. With some effort, Kira manages to register with the State and obtain her Labor Book (which permits her to study and work). Kira also manages to enroll herself into the Technological Institute, where she aspires to fulfil her dream of becoming an [[engineer]]. She plans to storm the male bastion of engineers, and show her prowess by building strong structures and powerful machines. Kira's strength of resolve to fulfil her dream, is asserted again and again, at various points in the storyline. Becoming a meritorious engineer would be Kira's answer to carve for herself a niche, in a society that has become characterless and anonymous, and whose prime objective has reduced to subsistence, rather than excellence.<br />
<br />
With phenomenal effort, the family manages to find for itself living quarters. The family also manages to retrieve some small amount of the furniture they left behind years ago, thus managing to salvage some level of living dignity. Kira's father also manages to get a license to open a textile shop, an establishment but a shadow of his old industry. Life is excruciatingly difficult in these times. Rand portrays the bleak scenarios by vivid descriptions of long queues, weary citizens and reduced states of living.<br />
<br />
With such a meek start to her endeavours to rejuvenate the past glory of the family, Kira meets Leo Kovalensky, a man with [[rebel]]lious ideas, on a dark night in a seedy neighbourhood. She finds him mysterious and deep, and he initially takes her to be a prostitute judging by his first impressions. They seem to be charmed by the magnetism of one another, and promise to meet again, after a brief conversation. They are shown to be united by their desperate lives, and their towering ambitions. After a couple of meetings, when they express deep contempt for the state of their lives, the two plan to escape together from the land, on a clandestine mission operated by secret ships. It is quite ironic, that their goals are so intertwined, and they find such harmonious support from each other, that they do not even know each others' names till they are caught by the authorities, in their attempt to escape. Rand seems to suggest that struggle, desperation and quest for [[liberation]] unites people better than simple and frivolous personal knowledge.<br />
<br />
The novel, at this point cascades into a series of catastrophes. Hope slowly crumbles for both these characters. Leo is caught and kept in [[incarceration]], while Kira escapes his fate, by her knowledge of Andrei Taganov, a member of the Communist Party and her co-student at the institute, with whom she has had a few open debates. The two share mutual admiration of each other, in spite of their differing political beliefs, and this saves Kira's skin. She also manages to free Leo with some effort. However, Kira&#8217;s and Leo&#8217;s relationship, passionate and loving in the beginning, begins to deteriorate under the hardships they face and because of their different reactions to these hardships. Kira, who is a [[realist]], keeps her aspirations alive, but decides to go with the system, until she feels powerful enough to challenge it. She continues to attend classes, until she is expelled from the school - her exit instigated by jealous rivals who brand her an "[[Anti-communism|anti-revolutionary]]". <br />
<br />
Kira, (who has moved in with Leo in the meantime), is forced to work at various places, to retain her ration card. Leo, on the other hand, continues to be indifferent, and unwilling to compromise a bit, in his policy not to work for a state-run establishment. This attitude aggravates the state of their financial distress. Eventually, his frustration makes way and he opens a shop, which is but a facade for [[black market]] activities, colluding with a few moles in the Communist Party circle. He is confronted by Andrei, with whom he shares an equal animosity, and is ultimately caught by the power wielded by the latter and thrown into a high security [[prison]]. This act of open [[rebellion]], begins the self destructive process of Leo's character.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Andrei who is always depicted as a man of character, notwithstanding his blind faith in communism and unassailable loyalty to his party in spite of its failings, falls in love with Kira. He progresses rapidly up the ladder of ranks in his party, and Kira finds his influence and wealth, necessities to help herself survive, and in her untiring quest to win Leo back from prison. She begins to take advantage of Andre's love for her, and agrees to play the part of his [[mistress]]. When Leo does manage to get out of prison, she finds him a broken, frustrated man who has taken to drinking, and defeated in purpose. He is also [[diagnosis|diagnosed]] with [[tuberculosis]], and is prescribed a few weeks's stay in a restricted [[spa]] near the [[Balkan Sea]]. Kira's passionate appeals to the authorities to sanction his stay at the spa, is mercilessly rejected because of their consideration of Kira's past, until Andrei intervenes, much to the consternation of his colleagues, who begin to suspect his weakness for Kira. <br />
<br />
The narrative reaches a state of climactic pace, and in their desperation to balance their priorities, Kira and Andrei become more and more frustrated, and ultimately Kira breaks the news of her love for Leo to Andrei. This comes as a rude shock to unsuspecting Andrei, who has come to the verge of sacrificing his political life at her feet. This confession breaks his will at both ends - political and individual, and he begins to fall under his own weight.<br />
<br />
The tragedy of the situation breaks all three people. Leo loses all moral sense in life, and begins to abuse Kira and takes to self-hate and wastes himself away. Andrei, is tender with Kira, though broken-hearted and devoid of his powerful persona. His faith in the communist system, has taken a severe beating, as he slowly wakes up to the dark dealings of the inner circle and those in power. He makes one final heroic attempt at salvaging his lost honour, and having secured [[poetic justice]], commits [[suicide]]. Kira, still equipped with a steely resolve, decides to abandon Leo to his fate, and makes a final attempt to cross the border through perilous territory. When she is almost in sight of freedom and liberation from her hellish life, she is shot dead by a [[sniper]] keeping watch over the snow, who mistakes her for a beast.<br />
<br />
==Critical outlook==<br />
<br />
''We the Living'' is a complex and intriguing narrative that plays on the impressions of human will. The tale of three people - Kira, Andrei and Leo - seems to represent three different attitudes to oppression. Kira represents the ideal resolute who perseveres against all hurdles, while being realistic. Andrei, a man of impeccable character, is nevertheless ruined because of his affiliations to the wrong side of the political fence. Leo, an idealist, loses his energy very early in the struggle due to his uncompromising nature towards life. Ultimately, the author portrays a very dark scene where the role of the individual is diminished to such an extent where morality as a virtue ceases to exist and is replaced by a need for existence and individual assertion.<br />
<br />
''We the Living'' is often seen by critics as a piece where Ayn Rand is at her story-telling best. She renders a powerful and emotional tale, leaving the message (albeit suggesting a strong one) to the reader, unlike her other two novels [[Atlas Shrugged]] and [[The Fountainhead]], where she is seen advancing a political philosophy in thinly veiled direct voice. Also, this novel is seen more as rejection of a particular philosophy, while the other two advance an alternative.<br />
<br />
==Films==<br />
Without Rand's permission, We The Living was made into a pair of films, [[Noi vivi]] and [[Addio, Kira]] in 1942 by Scalara Films, Rome, despite resistance from the Italian government under [[Benito Mussolini]].<br />
Italy was [[Second World War|at war]] with the US at the time.<br />
These films were re-edited into a new version which was approved by Rand and re-released as We the Living in 1986.<br />
<br />
*[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035130/ ''Noi vivi'' - the movie]<br />
<br />
*[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092194/ ''We the Living'' - the movie]<br />
<br />
==Publications==<br />
<br />
We the Living<br />
<br />
*Ayn Rand; New American Library; (January 1996); ISBN 0451187849 <br />
<br />
Ayn Rand - We the Living (1994)<br />
<br />
*Director: Goffredo Allessandrini; A Scalera Films Production<br />
<br />
[[Category:1936 books]]<br />
[[Category:Autobiographical novels]]</div>GreedyCapitalisthttps://wiki.objectivismonline.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ayn_Rand&diff=8984Ayn Rand2007-10-10T23:01:06Z<p>GreedyCapitalist: Reverted edits by 203.69.39.251 (Talk); changed back to last version by 206.180.38.20</p>
<hr />
<div>Ayn Rand was born in Russia on February 2, 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum. She came to America in 1926 at the age of 21. She published her first novel, ''[[We The Living]]'' in 1936. '' [[The Fountainhead]] '' was published in 1943, and her magum opus, '' [[Atlas Shrugged]] '' was published in 1957. Her novels were based on her conception of the heroic man -- whom she described in ''Atlas Shrugged'' as "a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason his only absolute."<br />
<br />
After writing her major novels, Ayn Rand wrote and lectured on her original philosophy, which she named Objectivism, to represent her objective view of reality and a rational and heroic view of man.<br />
<br />
<div style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1ex; width: 222px; text-align: center;"><br />
http://wiki.objectivismonline.net/images/5/58/Ayn_Rand.jpg<br />
[[Image:Ayn_Rand.jpg|Ayn Rand]]<br><br />
<small>''US [[postage stamp]] honoring Rand ([[1999]])''</small><br />
</div><br />
<br />
==Biography==<br />
<br />
Ayn Rand was born to Jewish parents in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She studied [[philosophy]] and history at the University of Petrograd. In late 1925 she was granted a visa to visit with American relatives. She arrived in the U.S. in February 1926, at the age of 21. After a brief stay with them in Chicago, she resolved never to return to the USSR and set out for Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. She then changed her name to Ayn Rand, partly to avoid Soviet retaliation against her family for her anti-socialist views. <br />
<br />
Initially, Rand struggled in Hollywood and took odd jobs to pay her basic expenses. While working as a Hollywood extra on [[Cecil B. DeMille]]'s ''King of Kings'' she bumped into (on purpose) an aspiring young actor, [[Frank O'Connor (actor)|Frank O'Connor]], and married him in 1929.<br />
<br />
Her [[The Early Ayn Rand|first literary success]] came with the sale of her screenplay ''[[Red Pawn]]'' in 1932 to Universal Studios. Rand subsequently wrote the play, ''[[The Night of January 16th]]'' in 1934 and published two novels, ''[[We The Living]]'' [http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-we-the-living.asp] ([[1936]]), and ''[[Anthem (novel)|Anthem]]'' [http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-anthem.asp] ([[1938]]). ''[[Anthem]]'', despite its appearance as a short story, is actually considered by many to be an epic prose poem. ''[[We The Living]]'' was made into a film six years later, in 1942, by the Italian government under Benito Mussolini, although without Rand's knowledge. <br />
<br />
Rand's first major success came with the best-selling novel ''[[The Fountainhead]]'' [http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-fountainhead.asp] (1943). The manuscript for this book was difficult to get into print. It was initially taken from publisher to publisher, collecting rejection slips as it went, before it was picked up by the Bobbs-Merrill Company publishing house. The book was so successful that the royalties and movie rights made Rand famous and financially secure.<br />
<br />
Rand's political views were resolutely pro-individual [[rights]], pro-[[capitalist]] and anti-[[statist]]. Her writings praised the heroic [[American values]] of independence and individuality. Her fiction writings often told stories of educated, successful Americans who found their lives unfairly burdened with the hassles of [[taxation]], [[bureaucracy]] and other forms of heavy-handed government interference. Rand also had a strong dislike for organized [[religion]] and compulsory [[charity]], both of which she believed helped foster a culture of guilt in successful people.<br />
<br />
Rand published the book described as her "magnum opus", ''[[Atlas Shrugged]]'' [http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged.asp] in 1957. This book, as well as ''The Fountainhead'' also became a best seller. According to a joint survey [http://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/booklists.html] conducted in 1991 by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, ''Atlas Shrugged'' is recognized as the "second most influential book for Americans today", after ''The Bible'' by numerous authors. It is also named as one of the "25 books that have most shaped readers lives" in a 1995&ndash;1996 list developed with the theme "Shape Your Future&mdash;READ!"<br />
''[[Atlas Shrugged]]'' is most often seen as Rand's most complete statement of Objectivist philosophy in any of her works of fiction. Along with Branden, Rand launched the Objectivist movement to promote her philosophy, which she termed ''Objectivism''.<br />
<br />
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Rand developed and promoted her Objectivist philosophy through both her fiction [http://www.aynrand.org/books.shtml] and non-fiction [http://www.aynrand.org/books_nonfiction.shtml] works.<br />
<br />
Rand's philosophical alliances were few. She acknowledged an intellectual debt to [[Aristotle]] and occasionally remarked with approval on specific philosophical positions of e.g. Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Aquinas; she seems also to have respected American rationalist Brand Blanshard. However, she regarded most philosophers (throughout history, not only her contemporaries) as at least incompetent and at most positively evil, singling out [[Immanuel Kant]] as the most influential of the latter sort. <br />
<br />
Rand broke with both [[Nathaniel Branden]] and his wife [[Barbara Branden]] in 1968. Ayn Rand described the break to be the result of her finding out about behavior incompatible with the tenets of her Objectivist philosophy. <br />
<br />
Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982 and was interred in the Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.<br />
<br />
==Legacy==<br />
<br />
In 1985, [[Leonard Peikoff]] [http://www.leonardpeikoff.com], Ayn Rand's designated legal and intellectual heir, established the [http://www.aynrand.org/ Ayn Rand Institute]<br />
<br />
== Additional external links ==<br />
<br />
*[http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_ayn_rand_archives_index Ayn Rand Archives]<br />
*[http://www.rationalmind.net/random.php?show_author=Ayn%20Rand Ayn Rand quotes at RationalMind.net].<br />
*[http://quote.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand Ayn Rand quotes at Wikiquote].<br />
* [http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/ Objectivism Reference Center] - valid (10/01/03)<br />
<br />
'''''Biography Pages'''''<br />
*[http://www.aynrand.org/aynrand/ http://www.aynrand.org/aynrand/]<br />
*[http://ellensplace.net/ayn_rand.html http://ellensplace.net/ayn_rand.html]<br />
*[http://www.asenseoflife.com/ http://www.asenseoflife.com/]<br />
'''''Atlas Shrugged'''''<br />
*[http://www.ayn-rand.com/ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged.asp Book Outline] <br />
'''The [[1991]] Library of Congress and Book of the Month Club Joint Survey'''<br />
*[http://www.loc.gov/loc/cfbook/booklists.html Results] <br />
'''Ayn Rand's Fiction'''<br />
*[http://www.aynrand.org/books.shtml Book List] <br />
'''Ayn Rand's Non-Fiction'''<br />
*[http://www.aynrand.org/books.shtml Book List] <br />
'''The Ayn Rand Institute, Center for the Advancement of Objectivism'''<br />
*[http://www.aynrand.org/ Home Page]<br />
<br />
== References (external links as numbered above) ==<br />
#'''''Wikipedia Article'''''<br />
#*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand/ Wikipedia Article on Ayn Rand]<br />
<br />
[[Category:Objectivists|Rand, Ayn]]</div>GreedyCapitalist