Posted on 07/18/2009 7:32:31 AM PDT by Publius
I don't think anyone could make a serious argument that the Anti-Federalists were right on every single point they made and more.
Thanks for all the work. I may not have posted on many of these threads, but I've read every single one.
Whether one loves or hates Rand and her philosophy, one cannot argue that she was indeed prophetic and that we are going to pay a very bloody price for not paying more attention to her from that standpoint.
L
I noticed that. Fewer and fewer people read the threads as we move toward the end.
The ocation-lay is in my ack-bay ard-yay. I'll leave some shovels laying around. Gonna git me that swimming pool dug out yet...
That would be a good tagline.
This reminds me of discussions I've had, where I've been accused of "seeing the world in black and white."
My response has been "All questions can be answered either yes or no, so, the world is definitely black and white. The so-called "gray area" is merely a place where no decision has been made.
People find it somewhat disconcerting when I lay it out like that for them.
When it comes to Atheism and Rand, she sees no rational reason to believe in God.
I try to turn that around and ask what the rational for not believing in God is? As I have on my home page "Lack of evidence that God exists is not proof He does not."
Careful what you wish for... I spend more time working on my pool than in my pool. In fact, when you get the gold hunters to dig, I will take the dirt to fill my pool in ;-)
I’m so excited to find this thread series. I’ve been wanting to get more involved again - and I have several great books to suggest. I haven’t read them yet, but they’re on my reading list for this summer.
“Common Sense” by Glenn Beck, “Liberty and Tyranny” by Mark Levin, “The 5000 Year Leap” by W. Cleon Skousen, or “American Progressivism” by Ronald Pestritto and William Atto.
If we’re going to defeat our enemy (the progressives), first we have to arm ourselves with information about how our enemy operates.
Before you can enter the strongman’s house [the govt], you first have to defeat the strongman.
Pure Randian Objectivism is in conflict with our American Constitutional system, and perhaps with any workable society. We have, built into the system, a certain amount of socialism and a certain amount of force. Our Constitution and system of laws are, in effect, an agreement we have with our government permitting it to force us to do certain things thought to be good (at least when they were enacted), and in return we are presumed to be the beneficiaries of those good acts.
And they are not a matter of pure volition. They are inherent upon us. They can be changed, but the process is not supposed to be easy.
Religion is another matter but not an entirely separate one in the American system. Here it seems the founding fathers tried their best to incorporate the best of classic Judeo-Christian principles into the founding documents, that we might carry forward with a sense of order in the absence of a moral guide such as a state religion.
The trick is and always will be maintaining the balance between individual freedom and collective good. Today we see the consequences of a steady drift away from that balance. Our system is supposed to prevent such a drift, but complacence has allowed a determined run of usurpers to pull us to a tipping point nonetheless.
Rand, in this work, displays either a complete lack of understanding, or no regard for, our system and the sort of government control and collectivism that is designed into it. I don't know how the answer would affect my perception of it, but the question has been on my mind since near the middle of the book, did she abhor our system or just not understand how it is supposed to work?
This seems embarrassingly similar to the modern belief in entitlements. What are the foundations of an individual’s call on society for any of these basics?
I actually don't have a problem with this, as long as it is recognized that the free stuff to which my neighbor is entitled is not anything a man of even slight ambition would want. Should men be denied the essentials of life because of inability? No, this is without empathy and cruel.
Should men be given the opportunity to spend $10,000 on wheels, paint, and sound systems for a car because they're saving $1,000 a month in housing subsidized on my dime? Hell no. Free stuff will be worth what was paid for it.
Oh, I’m changing the theme question of the book.
Who is Jim Thompson? :P
I have contemplated the concept Publius mentioned - the federalist and anti-federalist essays compiled in order, with the appropriate historical context included before and after each group.
It would include, as context, the problems experienced with England and the Articles of Confederation, the thoughts of the founders, and the philosophers they studied. It would also include discussion of which delgates were leaning which way, and how the essays were efforts to reach those men. The politics of it all were a significant factor.
I have been in a lot of the same kind of arguments. People seem to have been conditioned to not understand A is A.
On religion, I'm a believer - a Christian, but certainly not an evangelist. I suppose there is no rational basis to believe there is no God, but there are some beliefs (or versions of God, if you will) that I certainly hope don't exist.
Yes, we do. Rand was a radical individualist, and part of that impelled her to attempt to construct a social contract in which there was very little "social" involved. I find that difficult to fault personally because my own political precepts run along those lines. But in the real world membership in the larger collective that is the nation is not volitional, and what the individual actually cedes to his "representatives" is not the right to make demands, but the right to create new ones, bounded by those restrictions that in the case of the United States, are set by the Constitution. And the only recourse of the individual should that be abused is to turn those representatives out of office, not to directly assent or dissent from the demands themselves. In that sense the social contract is not a model of direct economic transaction but of a derivative one. That's the consequence of having a republic and not a direct democracy. (The latter has its own set of difficulties, primarily in terms of scale but also in terms of public susceptibility to temporary political enthusiasms).
In any case, Rand's model is quite a bit more successful at accounting for a single individual hiring subordinates than it is at a collective hiring an individual as an administrator or a representative, which is, in essence, what an election is all about. That individual has a responsibility not to the individuals who elected/hired him, but to the collective as a whole - like it or not, 0bama is my President as much as he is the President of my liberal neighbors who actually voted for him. What is volitional on my part is my commitment to the system, not to the individual. Rand prefers to dismiss that as "sacrifice," but it isn't actually anything of the sort. It is a deliberate subordination of the individual to the collective, and as you pointed out, it's built into even such a nominally individualistic system as our own.
“Our Constitution and system of laws are, in effect, an agreement we have with our government permitting it to force us to do certain things thought to be good (at least when they were enacted), and in return we are presumed to be the beneficiaries of those good acts.”
Where in the constitution do you find this agreement? The constitution sets out the limits of the national government, it allows for the use of force against outside threats, but I don’t find any clause which allows force against law abiding American citizens.
I invested valuable time in reading Rememberances. I was a third of the way through when I had to ask myself precisely why I was doing it. I read for pleasure, but Rememberances was far from pleasurable to me. Because I was already a third of the way into it, I finished it. I admire my own persistence. I’ve only done that twice. The other book that I slogged through was The Satanic Verses.
I’ve attempted Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment more times than I care to count, but I never managed to get past the first chapter.
I’ve been seduced by Publius’s idea of interleaving the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers since he first posited it on one of Loud Mime’s Founders’ Quotes threads. I really would love that. I’m sure many people on this thread would.
This doesn’t appeal to me. I understand the importance of understanding the precepts, but I just can’t stomach it in this presidency or fraudulence or hallucination or whatever the appropriate term is.
For fiction, I wouldn’t mind going back to one of the idols of my youth - Milan Kundera’s Immortality perhaps? What say ye?
I like those suggestions. I agree that if we’re going to defeat the progressives, first we have to arm ourselves with information about how our enemy operates. To defeat the strongman to enter his house, I would say we should read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It always comes down to first principles. There’s Macchiavelli’s Art of War, too, I suppose.
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