Posted on 03/14/2009 7:43:42 AM PDT by Publius
I disagree, my FRiend. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and somebody has to say so. ;-)
I so enjoy your threads on this book, and especially your well written summaries. Thank you.
Oh, man, that is good. That is really, really good.
I first heard the term “minarchist” being used at the CATO Institute here in DC. I do not know if it is in the dictionary yet, but it seems a perfect descriptor to me. It is so much more concise than for me to describe myself as a “limited government free market advocate.”
Have you been to the welfare office of a fairly large city? Or to a Food Maxx on food stamp day? I see the MM effect happening in mid to large size cities. Heck, you can see it now in large urban areas. It's happening now in Mexico with the drug cartels.
When you lose a large employer in a small town, you lose not only those jobs, but the surrounding economy suffers as well. In times past, people moved on, found a new ventures, took risks, did what they could to get by. Now we have an entitlement mentality. So when jobs are lost, they are frozen with indecision, unable to shift gears, and call to the government to rescue them. Katrina is a prime example of when a populace expects government to provide all of the means. So if the whole shebang collapses, I can see this happening.
One thing that has helped me in approaching this study is to look at AS as an allegory or parable. I can’t remember if it was in one of these threads or some other thread where the point was made that Rand wrote philosophy books, not easy reading novels. That is true, she was using fiction to illustrate her concepts. Many writers do this. I have a tendency when reading to just accept whatever is written and not get all stressed over the details, for good or for bad.
That part of the book didn't strike me that way. Remember the old axiom: whatever you reward, you get more of. These people are surrounded by a society where ambition is vilified, and increasingly, tangibly punished. Where apathy, mediocrity, and sloth somehow elevate those who display them in the eyes of others. A nation that is like that to an even greater degree than the United States of 2009. If we lived in that nation a lot of us might end up the same way.
Yes, I expect very interesting things from Cherryl. While I'm six or seven chapters ahead at the moment, this is my first time reading AS, so I don't know yet what's going to happen. She idolizes Jim for being all the things he actually is not, but that Dagny, from whom she intends to defend him, is. Presumably if Cherryl's going to play a more major role this will come out and we'll get to watch the resolution unfold.
They have made a movie about it.
They essentially went to the forest and made a mini city.
They had shoemakers, and builders and other skilled labor.
It worked because the people had skills.
If you took 200 random people today and stuck them in the forest only a handful would survive without electricity.
Most people are useless when it comes to survival without modern conveniences...We are so removed from food sources..
Give me a guy that hunts and a guy that knows how to saw and hammer over a stock broker or an insurance guy or a car salesman.
A good portion of folks let their kids run wild now and it's not in collapse...It's because of relativism..
God forbid you tell a kid no, or you can't have it or even worse...earn it.
Well, Publius, you kinda threw me for a loop with that essay about Lily Powers. If I were going to choose a similar character from a novel, it would be Dreiser’s Sister Carrie rather than Rand’s Cherryl Brooks.
There is no way that Jim Taggart would have been taken down by a little guttersnipe from Erie. That would have been contrary to his character. He would recognize the gold digging guttersnipe for what she was. He would bed her and move on. But Cherryl didn’t fit that mold. Taggart recognized that she was different. Unlike most women and men Taggart encountered in his miserable existence, this young lady didn’t have an agenda. She doesn’t want anything from him; she is simply honored to be in the presence of someone she believes is a great man on his night of triumph.
And how intoxicating this is for Jim Taggart! Cherryl fulfills a need of his that no gold-digger would have been capable of doing. As Taggart bathes in her oblivious and honest admiration of him, he is able momentarily to believe his own press releases. The lies become his reality for most of the evening until he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Rather than feeling any remorse, Taggert feels smugly satisfied that he has conned this innocent young thing. And he feels superior.
It is because of Cherryl’s goodness that Taggert is going to pursue her. She doesn’t hide her poverty ridden past. She isn’t ashamed of it or guilty because she has taken steps to escape it. She has a moral sense of values that makes her reject and rise above the sloth of her family. She simply wants to achieve something in her life. She doesn’t affect a phony sense of sophistication with her move to the Big City, but readily admits that she has a lot to learn. She’s eager and excited to face what her new life has to offer.
Poor Cherryl. Little does she realize that she has jumped from the proverbial frying pan into the fire with her chance meeting of Jim Taggart. Little does she realize that he is the kindred spirit of the relatives from whom she fled.
Yes, a lot of people have lost the “art” of survival, which doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be revived through trial and error. Yes, there are lots of looters around now and those that want to be taken care of. I’ve lived in a city where the biggest employer left, I know of no one that turned out the way this story goes. Imagine you’re unemployed and have no prospects of another job. What do you do? That’s the question here. Right now, the way things are going in this country, it isn’t hard to do. Are you already making plans? Do you have a loose outline in your head of those friends/relatives that you could band with? Plans on how you could live? I’m thinking that there would be a barter system. I’m thinking that there would be a black market. I’m thinking that there would be like-minded people that would band together. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it. ;)
Thanks Bill!
Interesting. (I sort of wonder what brought this place to your attention.)
I went to your link and looked at all the pictures. Since I noticed that many were just different views of the same building, I thought to go to Google maps and zoom in to get a sense of how big the place was, and then finally out to see where it is (or was?).
We do have our ghost towns too.
ML/NJ
Correct. Which is why Rand artfully avoided that cliche.
The link is here.
Well worth the read, and germane to our discussion.
Don't try to post it here, you'll get in trouble (I did because of the way I circumvented the posting process to get the link up in an article.)
I agree with you.
The people that are going to survive have preselected themselves...You saw it with Katrina, we just went through it here in Ky with the killer ice storm.
When you sit on your fanny and wait for rescue you are gonna die.
Those folks with sufficient initiative will figure out a way to survive but you don’t have time for trial and error.
I love Whittaker Chambers and think that Witness is the finest piece of Cold War literature ever penned, but in his criticism of AS he committed the cardinal sin of the critic - there is not a single indication in it that he had actually read the book he was criticizing. His was the outrage of the convert at the defiant apostate, I think. But what he found objectionable about the novel is the very least part of it, IMHO.
Of course the left will sneer. It is, after all, what they do best. Declaring a looter like Madoff a capitalist is simply proof that they don't know the very terms of the discussion. But they'd better be concerned about one thing - if even those of us who aren't ubermenschen decide that enough is enough there won't be enough government revenue to support their precious social programs and printing money without it is a freight train to disaster.
One of the things that drives me nuts in the book and in real life is the double speak.
I so want someone to tell the looters that they are spouting a load of bull.
I could have cheered when Hank did it with his Mother over her request to give Phillip a job. Even then he didn’t go far enough.
Double speak was a key element in the novel 1984...
Propaganda, disinformation, double speak is a key element of leftist movements everywhere..we’ve lost the march with confronting this.
Erosion of the language is the first step..It is so entrenched that it requires an all out war but the talking heads lack the guts...Talk radio is confronting it to some degree but the first line of battle is calling a spade a spade in every aspect of your own life.
I’ve already started doing it every opportunity I have.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.