Wealthcare | The New Republic - The Diigo Meta page

• 21 Sep 09
  

  Des

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    Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence. Rand’s movement devolved into a corrupt and cruel parody of itself. She herself never won sustained personal influence within mainstream conservatism or the Republican Party. Her ideological purity and her unstable personality prevented her from forming lasting coalitions with anybody who disagreed with any element of her catechism.

  • she derided Christianity, again in a Nietzschean manner, as a religion celebrating victimhood
  • 14 more annotations...
  • • That contribution was to express the opposition to economic redistribution in moral terms, as a moral depravity
    • In this context, the theory of possessive individualism could easily evolve into a complaint against the exploitation of the rich.
    • the ideological pity of the rich for the oppression that they suffer as a class.
    • her revival of the capitalist as a romantic hero, even a superhuman figure, naturally flattered the business elite.
    • Rand tapped into a latent elitism that had fallen into political disrepute but never disappeared from the economic right. Ludwig von Mises once enthused to Rand, "You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior
    • Prior to Rand’s time, two theories undergirded economic conservatism.
    • Social Darwinism
    • relied on the propagation of successful traits from one generation to the next
    • the free market served as the equivalent of natural selection
    • second was neoclassical economics
    • the marketplace as a perfectly self-correcting
      instrument
    • a laissez-faire system that worked to the benefit of all, and warned that intervention would bring harmful consequences
    • She did believe that the rich pulled forward society for the benefit of one and all, but beyond that, she portrayed the act of taxing the rich to aid the poor as a moral offense.
    • the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right
• 15 Sep 09
  

  Eric Hoefler
  • The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.
  • moral defense of the individual will and unrestrained capitalism
  • 14 more annotations...
  • • Both tomes, each a runaway best-seller, portrayed the struggle of a brilliant and ferociously individualistic man punished for his virtues by the weak-minded masses
    • She believed that the principle of trade governed all human relationships--that in a free market one earned money only by creating value for others. Hence, one’s value to society could be measured by his income. History largely consisted of "looters and moochers" stealing from society’s productive elements.
    • In the Marxist analysis, workers produce all value, and capitalists merely leech off their labor. Rand posited the opposite.
    • t’s time we realize--as the Reds do--that spreading our ideas in the form of fiction is a great weapon, because it arouses the public to an emotional, as well as intellectual response to our cause
    • Objectivism was premised on the absolute centrality of logic to all human endeavors. Emotion and taste had no place.
    • Objectivism taught that intellectual parity is the sole legitimate basis for romantic or sexual attraction.
    • Ultimately the Objectivist movement failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence.
    • That contribution was to express the opposition to economic redistribution in moral terms, as a moral depravity.
    • The political scientist C. B. MacPherson called this idea "possessive individualism," or "making the individual the sole proprietor of his own person and capacities, owing nothing to society for them."
    • Rand pioneered this leap of logic--the ideological pity of the rich for the oppression that they suffer as a class.
    • You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.
    • The first was Social Darwinism, the notion that the advancement of the human race, like other natural species, relied on the propagation of successful traits from one generation to the next, and that the free market served as the equivalent of natural selection, in which government interference would retard progress. The second was neoclassical economics, which, in its most simplistic form, described the marketplace as a perfectly self-correcting
      instrument.
    • They may believe the consequentialist arguments against redistribution--that Bill Clinton’s move to render the tax code slightly more progressive would induce economic calamity, or that George W. Bush’s making the tax code somewhat less progressive would usher in a boom; but the utter failure of those predictions to come to pass provoked no re-thinking whatever on the economic right.
    • For it harbored a deeper belief in the immorality of redistribution, a righteous sense that the federal tax code and budget represent a form of organized looting aimed at society’s most virtuous--and this sense, which remains unshakeable, was owed in good measure to Ayn Rand.

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